Pascuala Sanchez and her three children (four counting the unborn fetus she carried) were among ten farmworkers who lived in a trailer much like the one occupied by Dominguez and paid a similar rent. To thwart would-be burglars, the trailer’s occupants had nailed wire mesh over the windows, a common crime-prevention practice in Immokalee. At about 2:30 one Sunday morning in March 2007, fire broke out in the crowded dwelling. In less than one minute, the entire structure was ablaze. Firefighters who responded were unable to get inside because of the mesh; occupants could not escape through the windows for the same reason. Sanchez and two of her children, twelve-year-old daughter Luciana and six-year-old son Rodrigo, along with two other occupants, Emiliano Figaroa and Adelmo Ramos, died. The five survivors were all hospitalized with serious injuries. For a time, neighbors thought that Sanchez’s eldest child, Wilder, had also perished. It took more than two weeks for authorities to determine that he was at a hospital in Tampa being treated for third-degree burns to his back, chest, and arms.
In most other communities, a disaster of that magnitude would have sparked demands for immediate improvements in zoning laws. But it changed absolutely nothing in Immokalee, where one-quarter of the residences are substandard, according to county housing officials. After touring Immokalee in 2008, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) described the housing conditions there as “deplorable” and said that the shacks and trailers would never have passed a safety inspection in Burlington, the small Vermont city where he had once been mayor. To give them credit, community leaders who want to improve housing in Immokalee find themselves in a catch-22. Field workers need places to live. The sort of aggressive enforcement of building codes needed to bring the housing in Immokalee up to standard would dump hundreds of workers on the streets. With fewer spaces available, slumlords could then charge even more inflated rents for those that remained, and a highly profitable racket would become even more lucrative. The easy money to be made renting shacks to migrant workers at Manhattan prices exacerbates a problem government housing departments and charitable groups face in acquiring land on which to build decent, affordable housing in the area. Owners demand outrageously high prices to sell the land, based on the returns they are earning—a dozen trailers on a single city lot can generate annual revenues of more than $200,000, most of it profit, making that lot worth well over $1 million as an investment. County officials did attempt to shutter a thirty-four-unit trailer park owned by Jerry and Kimberlee Blocker, members of an extended family that controls many rental properties in Immokalee, because it deemed the structures uninhabitable. The couple promptly sued. They maintained that the dwellings were completely habitable and that in any case, the park dated back to the 1940s, long before the county’s zoning laws were enacted. Their lawyer, Margaret Cooper, said that her clients wanted the court to declare that the trailer park was grandfathered. “They have vested rights under the prior laws,” she said.
One of the reasons that rents are so high in Immokalee is that many workers lack vehicles and must live within walking distance of the downtown pick-up areas where crew leaders’ buses stop each morning and evening. The busiest of these is a football-field-size parking lot in front of La Fiesta, a sprawling building housing a supermarket, taqueria, deli, and check-cashing outfit. I arrived there a little before five o’clock in the morning, which would have made me a slacker among tomato workers. The place was already bustling. A dozen amateurishly repainted school buses with hand lettering on their sides saying “Montano Harvesting” or “A. and J. Field Services” sat in the yellowish glare of the streetlights. Several women stood beside the opened backs of SUVs selling tacos and tamales to workers, who appeared out of the shadows along a web of sandy paths leading from the trailers. The scene was eerily quiet, except when the local population of roosters erupted in vigorous crowing contests. I stopped at a group of about ten guys sitting on top of a picnic table. One of them told me that they waited there every day for a crew leader who had hired them for the season. As regular members of a crew, these workers represented the highest social class in that predawn gathering. But hundreds of other men with no certain prospects had lined up. Their only hope for work was if a crew was shorthanded or a farmer was in desperate need of a group of temporary pickers. This group was the lowest of the low—the bottom of the bottom of the American labor force. By seven o’clock, the sky began to lighten. The number of buses coming and going slowed, and then stopped. Several dozen men still milled around the lot, hoping that a crew leader might have been delayed or would be summoned at the last moment to harvest a field. But it soon became apparent that there would be no more buses that morning. The men straggled off toward the trailers, thermoses and plastic grocery bags full of lunch slung over their slumped shoulders, shuffling their feet even more wearily than the workers who got off the buses that evening after a full day in the fields.
Later that same morning, I saw a few of the men who had gone away without work when I volunteered to put in a shift at the Guadalupe Center soup kitchen. The Guadalupe Center is a charitable organization whose mission is to “serve the migrant and rural poor of Immokalee.” It operates a clothing room, where donated garments, toys, and small appliances are sold at a rate of one dollar per full shopping bag—a fee put in place when the organization found that paying a dollar allowed customers to maintain their pride and increased use of the room. It also runs a shower program, providing fresh towels, clean clothes, and toiletries so that workers without access to plumbing can maintain their hygiene as well as their dignity. It gives out five hundred pairs of new shoes to area children each August just before the beginning of the school year. And it runs a daycare and preschool program. The center was started in the early 1980s when some volunteers and clergy members remodeled a building owned by the Catholic church of Immokalee for use as a soup kitchen, which, by the time I tied on an apron, had served more than one million free hot lunches.
Tricia Yeggy, a high-energy young blond woman who was then the director of the kitchen, explained that the place runs on two straightforward rules: People can eat as much as they want, and no one is turned away hungry. That meant serving around three hundred meals a day in seatings of forty-five diners each that began at eleven o’clock and ran until there was no one else waiting. Yeggy pointed me toward a collection of jugs filled with orange juice and told me to hurry along and put two on each table. My fellow volunteers that morning were all retirees from a Naples church group and veterans of the soup kitchen. Everyone knew the drill. They bustled about, cutting bread, setting tables, putting out bottles of hot sauce. When the first sitting of “guests,” as the kitchen’s clients are called, came in, we loaded up trays with bowls of turkey and rice soup, thick with summer squash, corn, and a vigorous sprinkle of cumin. It was both hearty and tasty. If a guest finished one bowl and wanted another, he would raise his empty bowl overhead, and one of the volunteers would rush over with a full replacement. The dining room was decorated with white lace curtains and plastic tablecloths bearing colorful floral designs or images of Campbell’s soup cans à la Andy Warhol. Walls were painted in bright shades of pink, purple, and orange. The volunteers were cheerful, the guests uniformly grateful, smiling shyly, saying, “Gracias.” At shift’s end, I almost forgot the underlying irony: Workers who pick the food we eat cannot afford to feed themselves.
Large picture windows of the coalition building overlook La Fiesta’s parking lot from across the street. The highly visible location was chosen to provide easy access to workers and, I suspect, to serve as a constant reminder to crew bosses that someone may be watching. One morning, I encountered Lucas Benitez, sitting alone at his desk in the building. Benitez, who had driven the get-away car to free the workers held by the Ramos family, is a paunchy man in his early forties who wears a severe flat-top hairdo and a trim goatee. The main spokesman of the coalition, he was one of six children in a family from the southwestern Mexican state of Guerrero. He came to the United States at seventeen to help support
his parents and siblings. One day early on in his work in the fields, he was driving stakes to support tomato plants. Fit and young, he soon got well ahead of other members of his crew and stopped briefly while they caught up. A boss started yelling at him and when that had no effect got out of his pickup truck, saying he was going to beat Benitez. The other crew members turned their backs, or looked down. Benitez realized that he was alone in the middle of thousands of acres of fields. Nonetheless, he brandished a tomato stake and faced the boss down—that day. He soon began meeting with a small group of workers during the evenings in a room offered by Immokalee’s Catholic church. They discussed their poverty and the brutal conditions they worked under and decided that if they worked together, no longer looking down or turning away from abuse, they could improve their conditions. That group became the Coalition of Immokalee Workers.
I asked about the organization’s early activism. Benitez didn’t answer. Instead he went over to a stack of filing cabinets and opened and closed one after another until he found what looked to me like a crumpled rag. He sat back down and gingerly unfolded it on the desk in front of me. It was a faded blue-and-white-striped shirt made of a coarse, canvaslike material. It bore the telltale black stains of “tomato tar” but was also covered in brownish splotches —dried blood. “This is Edgar’s shirt,” Benitez said.
Edgar was a sixteen-year-old Guatemalan boy who staggered into the coalition’s office one afternoon seeking medical help. He was covered in blood and told a story of becoming thirsty while out in the fields. When he asked for water, his boss told him to shut up and keep picking. Overcome, the boy stopped long enough for a drink. His crew leader bludgeoned him until Edgar managed to get away and run for his life. A few members of the coalition confronted the boss later that afternoon, but he snorted in derision, knowing damn well that there wasn’t anything they could do.
Later that night, nearly two hundred workers attended a meeting in the coalition’s offices. They decided to march to the boss’s house. As they proceeded, others came out of the work camps and trailer parks, swelling the throng to more than six hundred by the time they arrived at their destination. Twenty-eight police vehicles and a brigade of cops in full riot gear were waiting. The leaders of the march brandished the bloody shirt, chanting, “This shirt is Edgar’s. It might be mine next. When you beat one of us, you beat us all.” The next morning, when the crew boss who had beaten Edgar pulled up to the parking lot in his bus, not a soul would get aboard. Other crew leaders took note. That happened in 1996. “It was the last report we got of a worker being beaten by his boss in the field,” Benitez said.
Equally important, it marked a turning point. Workers saw that by organizing, they could effect change. The shirt, now framed and hanging in the Florida Modern-Day Slavery Museum, is kept by the coalition as an unofficial flag, a reminder that by banding together, they can make progress. In some cases, “progress” means helping individuals. Romeo Ramirez was the same age as Edgar when he first reached out to the coalition. His boss had shorted his paycheck. Noticing that his employer was preparing to leave town for the annual journey north, Ramirez asked some acquaintances what he should do. “Maybe the coalition can help you,” they said. The coalition arranged for twenty-four workers to get into two vans and pay a visit to the boss. Just the sight of them was all the encouragement he needed to pull out his checkbook and settle up with Ramirez, who now works for the coalition. “They helped me,” he said. “It seemed right for me to stay and help the next guy.” It was Ramirez who risked his life two years later by going undercover to infiltrate the Ramos slavery gang, freeing several hundred fellow migrant workers.
In the early days, progress was stop-and-go. Six coalition members staged a month-long hunger strike that began in December 1997, after ten major growers ignored a request signed by nearly two thousand area farmworkers to meet with the coalition to discuss wages, which had fallen from fifty cents a bucket to forty cents over the previous two decades. As the New Year started, the hunger strikers began to weaken. One required hospitalization. Prominent clergymen came to visit them on the cots where they lay, taking only water and juice. Governor Lawton Chiles urged the growers to “begin a meaningful dialogue with representatives of these workers.” Even that did not move the farm owners. When one of them was asked why he refused to listen to the worker’s requests, he replied, “I’ll put it to you this way. The tractor doesn’t tell the farmer how to farm.” In an early flash of the savvy public relations stunts that have become key to the coalition’s success, the next time the workers held a demonstration, they wore white headbands with the words Yo no soy tractor (“I am not a tractor”) printed on them in red.
Ultimately, one grower sat down with the coalition and agreed to give his workers a ten-cent-a-bucket raise. Others followed. For all their efforts, the coalition had managed to bring pay rates back only to what they had been in the 1970s, not factoring in inflation. But at least the decline had stopped. When pressed for more money, the growers cried poverty. They faced competition from Mexican farmers, who paid even lower wages. The huge fast food companies that were some of their biggest customers would simply go south of the border for cheaper tomatoes. At one of the coalition’s regular weekly meetings, a member—nobody recalls exactly who—came up with what amounted to an end run around the farmers’ arguments. If the farmers say they can’t pay us more, why not take our case directly to their fast food customers? It was a masterful public relations gambit. In the eyes of consumers, the tomatoes on their hamburgers or in their tacos are a faceless commodity. Nobody knows the name of the corporate farm that grew and packed them, so the growers could ignore public opinion. But fast food companies that spend millions of dollars cultivating a wholesome, family-loving reputation with smiling clowns, cute red-haired girls with pigtails, and grandfatherly old gents in white suits could not afford to have their brands linked to images of abused farmworkers. The coalition devised what they called the Campaign for Fair Food. In another coup, the workers’ request would center on something every consumer could relate to: Guarantee us a few basic rights and give us one penny more per pound for the tomatoes we pick. A penny per pound would be a pittance to a fast food behemoth like McDonald’s, which has annual revenues of over $22 billion. But when you are picking a ton of tomatoes a day, as a worker typically does, that’s a raise from fifty dollars a day to seventy, the difference between below-poverty existence and a livable, if paltry, wage. The coalition singled out its first target: Taco Bell, a company that had built its brand on television advertisements starring a sombrero-wearing, Mexican-accented Chihuahua named Gidget. The advertisements had already offended many Hispanics and other politically sensitive viewers who saw them as a crass (albeit hugely successful) attempt to perpetrate and commercialize a racist stereotype of Mexican culture. The members soon found out that taking on the world’s largest fast food empire (Taco Bell is owned by Yum! Brands, a 35,000-restaurant chain that also controls Pizza Hut, KFC, A&W, and Long John Silver’s) was going to require a much more sophisticated effort than staging a protest march or rounding up a couple of dozen members to pay a collection call on a recalcitrant crew boss.
How was a grassroots organization with a limited budget, based in a poor backwater in South Florida, whose members could barely afford dietary basics, going to convince corporate executives in suburban Los Angeles to forgo profits by volunteering to pay a penny per pound more for the tomatoes that went into their salsa and salads? The answer was to hit them where it hurt the most—in the bottom line. In 2001, tearing a page from the successful grape boycotts mounted by Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers in the second half of the 1960s, the coalition launched a boycott of Taco Bell.
From the outset, the coalition knew it would need all the allies it could get. One obvious place to look was the nation’s college and university campuses. Taco Bell’s core consumer target group was eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds, whom the company cynically called the “New Hedonism
Generation.” But the coalition saw entirely different traits in young people. They believed that the college students had shown that they felt deeply about social justice and would take action to bring it about, whether it meant refusing to purchase logo-emblazoned clothing produced in Asian sweatshops, supporting unionization efforts of blue-collar campus workers, or battling administrators intent on cutting back academic budgets while padding their own salaries and enlarging their staffs. Activist groups were already in place on most campuses and, better yet, were adept at communicating through the Internet and other new media. The coalition’s Web site became a crucial new tool in its battle for fair food.
In 2000 the coalition decided to sponsor a 230-mile protest march that culminated at the Florida governor’s mansion in Tallahassee. A couple of dozen college students accompanied the marchers to collect signatures on a petition that would be delivered to then Governor Jeb Bush. After the demonstration, the students formed the Student/Farmworker Alliance to put an end to what they called “sweatshops in the fields.” In mid-2001, when the Taco Bell boycott was announced, the alliance had branches at three Florida universities, but through the Internet, had established relationships with student groups at every major post-secondary institution in the state. Within a few years, that number grew to more than three hundred colleges and universities in all parts of the country, including the University of California Los Angeles, the University of Chicago, and the University of Notre Dame. The alliance also established ties with activist groups in fifty high schools. In 2004 hundreds of those students went on hunger strikes to “Boot the Bell” off their campuses, and in twenty-two cases, the schools did just that. Taco Bell managers learned the hard way that ignoring the rag-tag workers coalition would carry a price tag, but they still stubbornly refused to accede to the coalition’s demands.
Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit Page 13