Available From UC Press

Gardens are immobile, literally rooted in the earth, but they are also shaped by migration and by the transnational movement of ideas, practices, plants, and seeds. In Paradise Transplanted, Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo reveals how successive conquests and diverse migrations have made Southern California gardens, and in turn how gardens influence social inequality, work, leisure, status, and our experiences of nature and community. Drawing on historical archival research, ethnography, and over one hundred interviews with a wide range of people including suburban homeowners, paid Mexican immigrant gardeners, professionals at the most elite botanical garden in the West, and immigrant community gardeners in the poorest neighborhoods of inner-city Los Angeles, this book offers insights into the ways that diverse global migrations and garden landscapes shape our social world.

Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo is Professor of Sociology at the University of Southern California and the author of Gendered Transitions, God’s Heart Has No Borders, and Domestica. 

"Hondagneu-Sotelo offers us an entirely new way of understanding, quite literally, the landscape of immigration. And in so doing she also shows us how this is the landscape of Los Angeles. Paradise Transplanted is a highly original book that is beautifully written and brings together sociology, geography, history, and urban planning in new and compelling ways. It will forever change how you 'see' Los Angeles."—Laura Pulido is the author of Black, Brown, Yellow And Left: Radical Activism In Los Angeles, as well as co-author of A People's Guide To Los Angeles.

"In her usual unique and creative way, Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo does it again by taking us through an unexpected window to explore social processes we think we already know. The link between migrating people and migrating seeds provides fresh insights into immigration, the changing landscape, inequality, and our understanding of place. A beautiful and rewarding read, chock-full of satisfying surprises."—Peggy Levitt, Wellesley College and Harvard University

"This is a fascinating book! Its powerful narrative conveys the functional and symbolic importance of gardens for immigrants -- as settings for healing and self-expression, but also their possible dark side -- as sites of oppression and exclusion. Through her captivating ethnography at three different Southern California sites, the author tells us a story that is not only simply about gardens but also about power relations, cultural and environmental sustainability, and social justice."—Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, Professor, UCLA Department of Urban Planning

"In humanizing nature through their gardening, Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo reveals how immigrants have created communities of meaning, hierarchies of pleasure and power, and landscapes of beauty. Paradise Transplanted is a labor of love, projecting a brilliant light onto the social structure of Southern California—from the intense work of inner-city neighborhoods to the manicured world of middle class suburbs, to the aristocratic display of trans-continental elites. Public sociology at its best."—Michael Burawoy, University of California, Berkeley.

"Paradise Transplanted is a passionate book about an important and influential region. Hondagneu-Sotelo investigates Southern California gardens to challenge both our understanding of the region's past, especially its founding myth as an Eden in the wilderness, and its future as a crossroads of migration."—Sharon Zukin, author of Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places