Immokalee

Fresh from the Vine in Immokalee - January 2009

I will never look at a Tomato the same. 

More specifically, I will never look at a Tomato without first imagining the hands that picked it and the life connected to them.

The tomatoes you seen in the grocery store and on your fast food sandwiches at this time of the year (if they are grown domestically) likely were grown in and around the town of Immokalee, Florida - an impoverished region of the sunshine state just 45 minutes inland from the wealthy snowbirds who roost in coastal cities like Ft. Meyers and Naples. Each was picked by hand to preserve its beauty and visual appeal in the hopes of attracting and pleasing a consumer further up the food chain. Machines simply aren't up to the delicate task, although they are used to harvest tomatoes used in sauces and salsas. To harvest the tomatoes, the food industry employs thousands of migrant farmworkers annually. To use the phrase farmworker though sounds cold and mechanical - in fact they are often treated as little more than a means to a profitable end. 

Used and discarded, these are fellow men [young men mostly] and women created lovingly in the imago dei. They arrived in Immokalee and other farming communities across the American Southeast after traversing thousands of miles of dangerous highways, landscapes, and seas in order to find a way to better support their loved ones that they left behind in Mexico, Haiti, Guatemala, and countless places in between. 

Here the lucky ones vie for work daily in the parking lot of La Tienda Fiesta #3 at 5am - hoping to be selected for a day of work in the fields where they fill, haul, lift, and empty  34 lb buckets of tomatoes in the hot Florida sun. At 45-cents per bucket, they must pick 125 or more buckets to make perhaps $50. That is 4000 lbs of tomatoes per worker per day. After literally picking 2 tons of tomatoes these young men return to a series of ramshackle trailers and doublewides near the parking lot  for which they pay upwards of $1000 a month in rent. To afford this, the workers cram into these tin shanties by the dozens. Some might call it supply and demand . . . others might call it despicable.

Those are the lucky ones. The unlucky ones fall victim modern day slave masters who take advantage of the workers condition of being strangers [some legal, some not] in a strange land. Human trafficking and enslavement are alive and well just a couple hours south of Disney World and the Magical Kingdom. In the last decade, there have been seven cases involving well over 1000 workers prosecuted.  

Driving past a former slave site three minutes away from binocular wielding tourists in the Audobon Society's Corkscrew Swamp (where just a few years ago 30+ workers were effectively held captive in a trailer) I had to keep reminding myself that this is all too real and happening in my own country. In many respects it felt like being in the middle of some forgotten place in the developing world.

While the campaign of humanitarian shock and awe I witnessed was incredible, what I found even more striking was hope, resiliency, and courage demonstrated by the workers themselves. They have come together and organized themselves to form the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. As such, they have been pursuing (and winning) actions against some of the largest buyers of tomatoes in the country - the fast food companies and supermarkets. By mobilizing hundreds of thousands of their allies across the country they are building momentum and power as they fight to ensure that migrant workers across the country are treated fairly. The issue here is about basic human rights for individual farm workers - regardless of their immigration status.

The next time you  pick up a tomato at the store, bite into it on a sub, or scrape it off your burger consider not only the hands the grew it but also the power that is in your own. What we do with them, where and how we choose to spend the money that is in them is an exercise in power. Thinking of the workers in Immokalee and elsewhere, how can I not act?