A majority of the narrators in Seedfolks are immigrants. Many hail from Central America or the Caribbean, while many more came to the U.S. from Asia. No matter where the novel’s characters come from, though, almost all find their new lives in Cleveland, Ohio, to be challenging because of their immigrant status. By presenting such a variety of immigrant stories, Seedfolks shows that immigrants all experience a difficult transition from their home country to their new country for various reasons, including not being able to speak English or experiencing instances of racism. Seedfolks makes the case that the best way to smooth that transition from one country to another is through fostering pride, purpose, and a sense of belonging in a person’s new home.
Seedfolks shows that Cleveland has been a destination for immigrants for more than a century. Ana, an elderly woman who immigrated to Cleveland from Eastern Europe in 1919 when she was four years old, gives readers an overview of Cleveland’s history as it pertains to immigration. She explains how, when she was a child, Romanians inhabited the neighborhood surrounding Gibb Street. But as time went on, the neighborhood changed—the Romanians left, making way for Black people from the American South during the Great Migration and eventually, in the novel’s present of the mid-1990s, immigrants from Central America and Asia. Ana describes the neighborhood as a “cheap hotel” that immigrants pass through on their way to someplace better. Rather than it being a permanent home for a tight-knit community, the neighborhood is a revolving door with immigrants constantly coming and going.
Seedfolks suggests that being an immigrant means feeling like—and sometimes being treated like—an alien in a foreign land. This most often shows up in instances when narrators either don’t speak English or have family members who speak little or no English. Not being able to speak the country’s dominant language, Seedfolks suggests, is profoundly alienating. For Gonzalo’s great-uncle, Tío Juan, this language barrier essentially turns him into a “little baby,” unable to do anything for himself or understand what’s going on around him. Other narrators suggest that not being able to communicate makes it hard to connect with neighbors when people speak so many languages. Without a common language binding the neighbor’s residents, it’s difficult to feel supported, safe, or at home. More sinister, however, are the various instances of racism that all the novel’s characters, especially immigrant characters, experience. Sae Young, a Korean immigrant, details her traumatic experience of being robbed at gunpoint and beaten, and an Indian man named Amir shares that a customer in his fabric shop—an Italian immigrant herself—accused him of giving her the wrong change and called him a “dirty foreigner.” Instances like these make it impossible for immigrants to feel welcome—or even safe—in Cleveland.
The remedy for this, Seedfolks suggests, is to first foster community and belonging. Over the course of the community garden’s first summer, the neighborhood’s residents eventually find that they’re not so different from each other. They may hail from different parts of the globe and speak different languages, but they have things in common, too—many want to grow traditional crops from their countries of origin, and many take solace in digging in the dirt alongside others. The garden, in other words, makes the novel’s various characters feel like they’re a part of something bigger, which in turn makes them feel like they’re valued, essential members of the neighborhood. The garden, in this sense, helps immigrants move away from the feeling that they’re just passing through by “planting” them in the garden and the neighborhood.
Seedfolks suggests that it’s also essential for immigrants to find purpose and something to feel proud of in their new home. Tío Juan, for instance, undergoes a major transformation as he and Gonzalo work to cultivate a plot in the garden. It takes only a few days for Tío Juan, who was a farmer in Guatemala, to stand out as a gardening expert. In addition to growing his own garden, Tío Juan makes a point to help other novice gardeners successfully cultivate plants of their choosing. This helps Tío Juan, who speaks no English or Spanish, overcome the language barrier and connect with others by showing them how to stake tomatoes, for instance, or properly water tiny lettuce seeds without washing them away. And being helpful and part of the community like this gives Tío Juan something to feel proud of. For the first time since he came to Cleveland, he has a purpose—to help others discover a love of gardening and nature.
Seedfolks makes it clear that being an immigrant in a foreign country is profoundly lonely, isolating, and difficult. Immigrating to a new country can deprive someone of their sense of self-worth and their ability to connect with others. And because of this, being able to find a sense of purpose, pride, and connection can be immensely stabilizing—and provide comfort and community in a place that may otherwise seem dangerously different.
Related Themes from Other Texts
The Immigrant Experience ThemeTracker
The Immigrant Experience Quotes in Seedfolks
I never had children of my own, but I’ve seen enough in that lot to know she was mixed up in something she shouldn’t be. And after twenty years typing for the Parole department, I just about knew what she’d buried. Drugs most likely, or money, or a gun.
“What are they?” she asked.
“Some kind of beans.” I grew up on a little farm in Kentucky. “But she planted ‘em way too early. She’s lucky those seeds even came up.”
“But they did,” said Ana. And it’s up to us to save them.”
He’d been a farmer, but here he couldn’t work. He couldn’t sit out in the plaza and talk—there aren’t any plazas here, and if you sit out in public some gang driving by might use you for target practice. He couldn’t understand TV. So he wandered around the apartment all day, in and out of rooms, talking to himself, just like a kid in diapers.
Watching him carefully sprinkling [the seeds] into the troughs he’d made, I realized that I didn’t know anything about growing food and that he knew everything. I stared at his busy fingers, then his eyes. They were focused, not faraway or confused. He’d changed from a baby back into a man.
Six and a half hours later I found out the lot was owned by the city. But the people running Cleveland don’t usually come down here, unless they take a wrong turn on the freeway. You can’t measure the distance between my block and City Hall in miles.
Sometimes I think I’ve actually had more effect on the world since I retired. What do I do? I smile at people, especially black people and the ones from different countries. I get ‘em looking up at me instead of down or off to the side. I start up conversations in lines and on the bus and with cashiers. People see I’m friendly, no matter what they’ve heard about whites or Jews. If I’m lucky, I get ‘em talking to each other. Sewing up the rips in the neighborhood.
The week after that someone built a board fence. Then came the first KEEP OUT sign. Then, the crowing achievement—barbed wire.
God, who made Eden, also wrecked the Tower of Babel, by dividing people. From Paradise, the garden was turning back into Cleveland.
Vietnamese girl was working there, picking beautiful lima beans. A man and a woman on other side, talking over row of corn. Hear man say his wife give him hoe for birthday. I want to be with people again. Next day I go back and dig small garden. Nobody talk to me that day. But just to be near people, nice people, feel good, like next to fire in winter.
That day I see man use my funnel. Then woman. Then many people. Feel very glad inside. Feel part of garden. Almost like family.
I got into it. Every day something new. The first flower bud. Then those first yellow flowers. Then the tomatoes growing right behind ‘em. This old man with no teeth and a straw hat showed me how to tie the plants up to stakes.
When I heard her words, I realized how useless was all that I’d heard about Poles, how much richness it hid, like the worthless shell around an almond. I still do not know, or care, whether she cooks cabbage.
She’d gotten quite angry and called me—despite her own accent—a dirty foreigner. Now that we were so friendly with each other I dared to remind her of this. Her eyes became huge. She apologized to me over and over again. She kept saying, “Back then, I didn’t know it was you...”
It was a little Oriental girl, with a trowel and a plastic bag of lima beans. I didn’t recognize her. It didn’t matter. I felt as happy inside as if I’d just seen the first swallow of spring. Then I looked up. There was the man in the rocker.
We waved and waved to each other.
