Tucked away on a hill in the Chinatown International District, the Danny Woo Community Garden will be bustling later this week. Beginning Friday evening, volunteers will gather at the garden to turn a whole suckling pig over a spit until its skin turns a crisp golden brown. The roasted pig is known as “lechon” in the Philippines and is traditionally prepared for special occasions.
On Friday and Saturday, neighborhood nonprofit InterIm CDA is inviting the public to celebrate its 47th annual pig roast and feast at the Danny Woo Community Garden. KaeLi Deng, the garden manager, plans to stay through the night to oversee prep for the feast. The event is a time for visitors and community members of all ages to celebrate the harvest and reconnect.
“It’s like a birthday celebration [for the garden],” Deng said.
The annual tradition also honors the garden’s late founder, civil rights and Filipino Native American activist Bob Santos, who was also known to many neighbors as Uncle Bob. Known to some as the unofficial mayor of the CID, Santos was a beloved community activist who fought to build affordable housing, fight displacement and create community programming in the neighborhood. Santos, who hosted the inaugural pig roast in his South Seattle backyard, died in 2016.
Today, the annual pig roast is a space where community members can rejoice over a meal, meet their neighbors and share memories that uplift Santos’ history of advocacy and love for the CID.
“It’s a ritual that allows the story to continue,” said Jeff Hou, a professor of landscape architecture at the University of Washington. Hou said a 16-hour pig roast “provides an opportunity for people to be together, bond over that process and also allows the story to be retold.”
In 1975, Santos entered an agreement with local property owner and community leader Danny Woo to rent the garden for $1 per year. The garden serves as a hub for low-income Asian American and Pacific Islander elders to socialize, exercise and cultivate fresh vegetables that reflect their culture. A year later, the pig roast moved from Santos’ backyard to the garden.
Bob Santos’ wife, state Rep. Sharon Tomiko Santos, D-Seattle, said the garden helped activists forge intergenerational and multicultural relationships while also underscoring the cultural value of family.
“Language is a barrier for many younger activists, but food, of course, is a universal language,” the legislator said. “Bob retained a lifelong love of the garden. For Bob, the garden was symbolic of his entire life’s work of what he was trying to help preserve, create and protect in [Chinatown] International District.”
Today, the annual roast is a two-day affair that begins on Friday afternoon when volunteers bring the pig to the garden, cut it open and place a pillowcase filled with aromatic veggies inside its belly. Then, team members sew up the pig and wrap it tightly in chicken wire to keep the animal’s skin from falling off during the cooking process.
The next day, hundreds of residents pack the green space for a community potluck to feast on the savory lechon alongside other traditional foods from the Asian diaspora such as Chinese mugwort mochi and Chinese tea eggs.
Unlike a banquet where guests sit, eat dinner and then leave, Sharon Tomiko Santos said the roast “has a life of its own” because it requires volunteers to participate in the tradition.
“The process of inducting new people to the community often involves signing them up for a shift to roast the pig,” she said. “Those are all intimate bonding moments for people to get to know the district.”
Preserving the CID
The garden’s annual pig roast builds on Bob Santos’ long history of activism in the Chinatown International District. The neighborhood has long faced threats to its vibrancy and Santos fought fiercely to protect it.
In the 1970s, he mounted a campaign to stop the construction of the Kingdome, a since-demolished sports arena that some residents in the CID opposed due to traffic and overcrowding in the area, along with displacement of residents and businesses. During that time, Santos served as the executive director of InterIm CDA, a nonprofit organization that provides culturally competent housing and community building services, and today hosts the pig roast. He was also part of the city’s renowned Gang of Four, a group of racially diverse organizers that included Larry Gossett, Roberto Maestas and Bernie Whitebear.
The leaders represented four different communities: Santos led coalitions of Asian American populations in the CID to stop the building of the Kingdome; Gossett organized a Black Student Union at the University of Washington; Maestas led a takeover of an abandoned school in Beacon Hill, which later became El Centro de la Raza; and Whitebear led the occupation of Fort Lawton in Seattle to create the Daybreak Star Indian Cultural Center in Discovery Park. The activists collectively led a series of actions to provide services to residents of color and push the city on issues of gentrification, poverty and development.
Around the same time in the 1970s, Santos began hosting a pig roast in the backyard of his South Seattle home.
Frank Irigon, 76, of Newcastle, recalls gathering with a small group of friends in Santos’ yard for the first pig roast. The gathering and meal not only reaffirmed and celebrated their Asian heritage, but gave the group time to talk about their lives outside of activism.
“It was a learning process for us city guys,” Irigon said. “This was a way of getting us all together and enjoying our cultural roots and history.”
Maxine Chan, another attendee of Santos’ first roast, said the event fostered mentorship and solidarity.
“It was getting to know Bob as a person and as a friend,” Chan said. “‘It was a moment to know everyone on a social level and to know the heart — what they felt and what they believed.”
The roast was a time for them to reset from the grueling demands of advocacy, which Irigon said can often take a toll on personal relationships. However, picking out the pig, mopping it with saltwater and mounting it onto a spit were all moments that strengthened the friend group’s commitment to one another outside of their work.
“Although we took the movement seriously, we really didn’t take ourselves so seriously,” Irigon said. “What bonded us wasn’t any ideology, but our love for one another, our love for our community and families.”
A legacy that lives on
Today, the Danny Woo Community Garden remains the largest green space in the Chinatown International District, with a 1.5-acre space that has nearly 100 plots for 65 gardeners. The garden is equipped with a seed bank, chicken coop, outdoor kitchen and fruit tree orchard.
Volunteers grow foods that are common in various Asian cuisines, but often hard to find in Seattle grocery stores. Across the garden plots: chrysanthemum leaves, purple sugar peas, goji berries and common purslane, a leafy vegetable that is eaten stir-fried or put into salads.
Retiree Deng Xia Tang, 81, said without the garden she would not have a space to bask in the sunlight, breathe in the fresh air and share healthful and familiar foods with her neighbors.
“We go to have fun,” said Tang, who tends to a vibrant plot of stem lettuce. “It’s our habit.”
Sharon Tomiko Santos said her late husband cherished what the garden had become through years of hard work from neighborhood activists, leaders and volunteers.
“He really felt good about what he saw there. It was like planting a stake in the ground,” the lawmaker said. “He would remember the delight on the face of the old-timers who would come down and claim their little plot … so they could grow something green and enjoy it. To him, it was the epitome of the living legacy he was hoping to create.”
Sharon Tomiko Santos, who plans to attend this weekend’s pig roast, said she is also curious to see “who are the recruits that are going to become the new legacy-keepers of the pig roast in the [Chinatown] International District?”
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