When Guzman first visited her family farm in Mexico as a nine-year-old girl, she arrived during the harvest. Over the course of her childhood in the Central Valley, Guzman had learned what to expect from harvest time. Long hours apart from her parents. The exhaustion on their faces when they came home, struggling to marshal the energy to play with her. That godawful smell of rotting vegetables on their clothes. But the harvest in El Pedregal was completely different. Whole families participated together, helping one another and their neighbors in a somewhat raucous ritual that made the long hours feel more like a party than a slog of a workday. Physical labor was interspersed with food, laughter, conversation, and music, as well as profound expressions of gratitude for the bounty of the earth-in which all those involved would share.

This, Guzman realized, is what farming looked like when it wasn't wage work for an oppressed few but an entire community's way of life.

— Healing Grounds by Liz Carlisle (Page 122)