NAPLES (Florida) DAILY NEWS

March 4, 2010

Farmworker slavery exhibit shocks many during stops in Naples

By TRACY X. MIGUEL

NAPLES — The thought of slavery in the fields of Immokalee shocked many of the visitors to a traveling museum documenting the injustices.

“I cannot believe it,” Barbara LaCourse said, gasping while scanning pictures of farmworkers. “My gosh.”

LaCourse, 62, who is visiting Naples from Minnesota, joined about 100 people who went Wednesday to see the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ Florida Modern-Day Slavery Museum -- a mobile educational vehicle with multimedia displays on the history of slavery in the state, including its roots, the reasons it continues today and its solutions.

The museum kicked off a six-week tour Sunday and stopped in Naples from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. Wednesday at First Christian Church, 1789 Mandarin Road, and from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. at North Naples United Methodist Church, 6000 Goodlette-Frank Road.

It will visit First Christian Church from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. Thursday. The museum is open and free to the public.

“Today, we are bringing this message because perhaps they’re people who don’t know that this continues to happen within agriculture,” coalition member Leonel Perez, 23, said in Spanish.

Perez invited everyone to visit the museum to help eliminate slavery.

“Slavery’s roots are the poverty and the powerlessness that continue to prevail in the industry,” said Perez, a farmworker in Immokalee for four years.

Perez added that farmworkers standing up for their rights in the farms are at risk of losing their job.

A rainy day caused the museum to move inside the First Christian Church. Visitors roamed around the church, carefully reading information about how slavery was possible in the 21st century. The information spread across four 8-feet-tall by 4-feet-wide panels.

“It’s more than surprising. It’s kind of shocking that the situation that we are dealing with here is an issue today in the year 2010,” said LaCourse’s husband, Warren, 63. “When you go into a supermarket to buy produce, you don’t think that it’s coming from this kind of labor, this misuse of labor.”

He questioned where else slavery could be found in the nation.

The LaCourse couple found the displays interesting and important.

Several visitors attempted to pick up a 32-pound bucket filled with tomatoes.

Florida tomato pickers earn about 40 to 45 cents per 32-pound bucket. A farmworker has to pick 125 tomato buckets, representing about 2 tons of tomatoes, to earn $50, Perez said.

Outside, people walked inside through a cargo truck similar to the truck that workers were enslaved by crews for two Immokalee growers in 2007. They read information about seven forced labor conviction cases in Florida agriculture in recent years.

In the latest case of human slavery in Southwest Florida, Cesar and Geovanni Navarrete padlocked their workers in trucks and charged them $5 to bathe in the backyard with a garden hose, according to court documents.

Often, Perez said growers had no consequences and contractors went back to work after serving their sentence.

Visitors learned how farmworkers were able to escape by punching a hole into the roof of the truck.

The Navarrete brothers each received a 12-year sentence in federal prison for enslaving undocumented farmworkers from Mexico and Guatemala.

Mary Peterson, 74, a Naples seasonal resident from Connecticut, said the displays of slavery were scary and hard to believe that in this day and age of civil rights, people still disregard the human rights of people.

“I hope we learn a lesson sometime soon,” Peterson said.

Meanwhile, an ongoing demand from the coalition is for the Publix grocery store chain to adopt a code of conduct that would include a zero tolerance on slavery and for the grocery chain to engage in a conversation directly with the coalition.

“That’s the only way that we as farmworkers can achieve dignity,” Perez said.

Currently, Publix is buying from two companies involved in the 2008 slavery case, referring to slavery victims that were taken to work on farms owned by Six L’s and Pacific Tomato Growers, Perez said.

The coalition has successfully reached agreements to improve wages and working conditions for workers who pick tomatoes: Whole Foods, Subway, McDonald’s, Burger King and Yum! Brands.

The museum tour will culminate as the cargo truck leads the coalition’s Farmworker Freedom March from April 16-18, when hundreds of farmworkers and their allies are expected to march from Tampa to Lakeland, headquarters of the Publix supermarket chain.

Coalition officials invited the public to join the march.

“This isn’t a campaign that is just for farmworkers,” Perez said. “It’s a campaign for consumers as well.”