Naples Daily News

January 17, 2005

Weekend symposium aims to help farmworkers

By JANINE A. ZEITLIN

Dark heads whip to eye the gray-haired grandmothers in sweatsuits strolling by.

A line of Hispanic men near a pinata store on Immokalee's Main Street watch the white faces sporting comfortable shoes with cameras tugging their necks with the scrutiny of a curvaceous Latina.

Scores of the town's economy vehicles (i.e. bikes) begin arriving on 3rd Street to inspect the 200-some spiritually inclined from as far as California, New York and Minnesota who ended there Saturday night to worship.

"What's with all the white people?" asks one worker nodding at the gueros gathering.

He shoots the question at Monique Ortiz, a 41-year-old California seminary student surrounded by 15 men.

"All those people over there are fighting very hard for you guys," says Ortiz in Spanish. Her mane of dark curls also likely contributed to the fast-growing circle.

Men nod suspiciously.

Religious leaders, social justice advocates and students trekked to Immokalee for a human rights symposium Saturday and Sunday for Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday. The weekend was spearheaded by The Coalition of Immokalee Workers and a dozen-plus faith-based groups and social justice groups.

The Coalition's Taco Bell boycott to improve conditions for tomato pickers has chucked Immokalee onto the plates of national activists. It counts 3,000 members, many of whom are Mexican, Guatemalan and Haitian.

Farmworkers complain to Ortiz about the steep rent they pay — $50 a week — and the five bucks an hour they make.

"Keep moving forward. You can do it," says Ortiz, clutching her heart.

"I'm coming back," she promises moving toward the tent for service where an estimated 300 farmworkers will later join the out-of-towners.

'Worse than Minnesota'

These are the troopers. The hearty, the heavy-lidded. One can deduce the 5 o'clock hour by the rings around their eyes. An orange haze in the morning black reflects the cap of Collier County's rural fringe: Immokalee.

The farming community is 45 miles from Naples' heart. Major development is slowly creeping its way toward the community with 20,000 residents per the last U.S. Census.

Of those, 13,000 don't speak English at home and more than 7,500 people eke out a poverty-level existence.

Romeo Ramirez, a Coalition staff member, unlocks the group's rented 3rd Street headquarters splashed with a colorful mural with a ferocious eye rub.

Six people trickle in by 5:15 and stare at a woman sipping a Styrofoam cup of caffeine jealously. A 22-year-old a farmworker organizer hailing from Minnesota fishes a roll of film from a Ziplock bag to ready his camera. He's shot seven already.

Conditions are worse here than in Minnesota. He can't fathom why housing codes aren't better enforced.

"If you can push them to the letter of the law that helps a whole lot," says Ernesto Bustos.

Ramirez urges the group out the chill of a 3rd Street parking lot where 60 workers mill. It's usually like a Greyhound terminal, he tells the circle on the unconventional tour. Think hundreds of people, he says, attributing the slimmer crowd to the weekend.

Crowing roosters — the town's natural alarm clocks — compete with the hacking transmissions and rumbling mufflers of station wagons and vans turning into the lot to pick up workers.

"How many do you need?" a man trio calls out in Spanish as 15 workers rush a green van. A door swings open and men swarm to it. Only three are taken. The door slams. The rest return to the picnic tables.

Bustos' camera flashes the action.

Ramirez leads them through labor camps rustling awake up to 9th Street.

Two young men pull on work boots on a porch they pass by. They're not guaranteed work today. But they'll try, they say. Ramirez wishes them luck.

Those in the small group dodge puddles and marvel at Immokalee on their way back to the Coalition's building.

"I get angry. My parents work but they don't work as hard as these people. Just because they work in an office doesn't make them any better," said Charlene Obernauer, a 16-year-old high school student leading a boycott in Long Island, N.Y.

"It's so expensive...I could see if it was like Beverly Hills."

By 6:30 a.m., the sleepy-eyed return to the lot where workers gaze at them through the windows of a painted school bus preparing to leave for the fields. Some then go hunt for coffee while waiting for the sun and the late-wakers to arrive for the day's workshops.

Pledging to follow through

People pore over a book shot by a photographer who hitched across the United States during the 1970s and landed in Immokalee while waiting for rice and beans at a hall at Our lady of Guadalupe Church on Saturday afternoon.

A Pittsburgh folk singer brought it to share.

"I stayed with a white tomato grower who told me that he made almost a million dollars a year on the labor of these migrant workers," the books reads. "Many will never get out of this slave camp."

In one shot, a worker is sleeping wedged against a Coke machine and others are curled in the fetal positions in the dirt.

"It hasn't changed a bit," said Charles Hasselbach, paging through the photos.

"It's almost a tragedy amongst the wealth. You don't have to go to Mexico City. We are so close to total poverty. It's kind an awakening for me," says the 61-year-old from Fort Lauderdale on his first trip to Immokalee.

People grab folding chairs to hear Lucas Benitez, the Coalition's leader who arrived after three hours of shut-eye. He was in Atlanta speaking at a Martin Luther King Jr. event the Friday night before, where he happily reports the Coalition won the support of actor Martin Sheen.

Ortiz capped Saturday afternoon reading King's "I Have a Dream" speech.

Eyes close to listen.

"Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred."

"No podemos permitirnos en tomar la copa del odio y resentimiento para satisfacer nuestra sed por la libertad."

Attendees leave the hall for a walking tour after they stomp, clap and sing "we are marching in the light of God," on their way out.

Video cameras click on as they make their way to the Coalition's new home on 2nd Street. It's not quite ready. A college student translates for Benitez on a megaphone.

Benitez tells of their plans for the new 4,000-square-foot building they will own.

"The dream is becoming a reality," he says.

He envisions a spot to watch movies in the theater-less town; computers so workers can shoot e-mails to their families worlds away; a spot to pipe the Coalition's radio station to farmworkers as they collect to search for work.

Hundreds of people maneuver through the building with hanging wires and walls yet to go up. The group hopes to open it within a few months.

Smiles melt away when the tour passes by a flophouse and bodegas with bars on the windows. Jaws start to drop. Christmas lights adorn shoddy, sheet-metal trailers with bowed roofs smeared with dirt or mold. Whispering begins.

"What in the world happened to these places?"

"The county has to give them some place to go?"

"I just don't know a landlord can charge rent."

Benitez climbs to a porch to explain where they are — a labor camp where about 150 workers live 12 to 16 to three-to-four bedroom trailer. He asks a handful of workers living there how much they get charged.

"$350 a week for each," Benitez drops the news to the group gathered below.

Shock.

And there's no AC.

Gasp.

Cases of Bud Light sit outside the Dumpsters. Shards from broken bottles make dirt roads sparkle.

"It needs a woman's touch around here," says Eileen O'Connor, a 62-year-old visiting from Hollywood, Fla., to her friend, appalled by the litter pinned to fences.

The group trudges back to the yellow and white tent for the Saturday service in drizzle. Benitez tries to lure the workers to the front rows out of the mist: "Don't worry they don't bite," he chuckles.

Swarms of men peer through the links of fence, wary to move farther. Francisco Herrera Reyes, 47, is one of them. He, like several other farmworkers, said they didn't mind having the out-of-towners around if it means help.

Quiet spreads through the murmuring crowd for Benitez's introduction.

"This faith can move mountains. It can break the isolation from other communities like Naples," he says. "Another world is possible in Immokalee."

The Rev. Noelle Damico, a lead organizer for the event with the Presbyterian Church U.S.A., leads a refrain in Spanish, English and Creole from Psalm 133.

She pledges the hundreds there this weekend will follow through. Boycotting Taco Bell is a powerful and simple way to do it, she said.

"It's not as if we come in and say, 'Here's how we do it,'" she said after the service. "We're not here to play farmworker or something. We're here to listen and to see their analysis and say, 'OK, how could we be good partners?'"

The crowd is getting antsy for wrapped Cuban sandwiches nearby. Small candles are lit together for the service's end.

Jose Luis Perez plays with his dancing flame.

The 14-year-old still too young to bring a razor to his face arrived in Immokalee from Chiapas, Mexico, last Saturday — nine days ago. He started work the next day.

He quit school and made the trip alone to join his father who started working in Immokalee four months ago to funnel money back to their family.

"I was so happy when I got here. It was always one of my dreams to come. Back there, you can't earn anything," he says. "Yeah, it's hard work but my family's proud of me and I feel proud because here I have my work."

The 400 sandwiches ordered were wiped clean. Dozens of attendees rushed to catch the tour bus home to the east coast. Headlights shoot the way out of Immokalee.