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Replanting the dream

A labor advocate wants farm workers to be inspired by King's passion for economic justice.

By TAMARA LUSH
Published January 17, 2005

[Times photo: Willie Allen Jr.] Francisco Domingo, 30, plants watermelon seedlings to replace decaying tomato plants in Immokalee.

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Related 10 News video: Martin Luther King Day honors the slain civil rights leader

IMMOKALEE - The farm workers had spent a long day in the fields, picking tomatoes and planting watermelon.

They are from Mexico and Guatemala, Haiti and Honduras. Most have so little education they can't read or write.

But on this night they are sitting on cardboard boxes and folding chairs getting a lesson in American history. The subject is Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Most of the farm workers have never heard of him.

If King were alive today, says Lucas Benitez, an organizer for the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, he would be fighting for the rights of the people who toil in the Immokalee fields.

For most Americans, King is remembered for bus boycotts and lunch-counter protests and his long fight for racial equality. Often forgotten is that in the last years of his life, he broadened his focus to economic justice - decent wages, health care, quality housing.

And organizing farm workers.

Benitez, 29, knows more than a little about organizing. He got involved after seeing one too many crew bosses beat their workers senseless for requesting a water break.

In 1993, he co-founded the coalition and, among other things, helped federal prosecutors in several agricultural slavery cases. For this, he and other members of the group won the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Human Rights Award in 2003. The group's current fight is against Taco Bell, whose parent company, they say, refuses to pay more for tomatoes, which would mean better pay for farm workers.

Benitez and the coalition work from a cramped two-room office in downtown Immokalee, and it serves as a general store and gathering point for the farm workers. Benitez, who still works the fields, invites workers to a Wednesday night meeting. Each week, they flow inside, 50, 100, 200 strong. And every week, Benitez teaches them something new.

"Does anyone know anything about Martin Luther King?" Benitez asks in Spanish. The men shift silently. One of the oldest in the group, 49-year-old Jose Garcia, says softly, "He was a pastor in a church."

Benitez nods, then gives a brief biography. In the 1950s and '60s, he explains, King fought to give African-Americans in the South the same rights as whites, he said.

But he did more than that, Benitez explains. He fought for the rights of all poor people. The day he was assassinated, he explains, King was in Memphis to take part in a fight to raise the pay of sanitation workers by 10 cents an hour.

That gets their attention. Ten cents is something they understand, since most get only 45 cents to pick a bucket of tomatoes. On a good day, they pick 150 buckets.

"In your countries, you thought the United States was the promised land, didn't you?" Benitez asks.

Everyone nods.

"Is this the promised land?" he says.

No, chimes a chorus of voices, and everyone laughs.

"Why?" asks Benitez. The answers come in rapid-fire Spanish.

" "Esclavitud, " one man says. Slavery.

" "Salarios bajos ," another says. Low wages.

" "Horarios trabajos ," says someone else. Working hours.

Benitez explains that King fought to improve all of these things more than 30 years ago, and that they need to keep fighting for them so they can help turn the United States into a promised land for all.

"It's our sweat and our work," he said. "It's our dignity."

Benitez invites the men to Immokalee's first celebration of King's life over the weekend. There will be a community dinner and a church service, he said.

There will also be a tour of Immokalee, organized for outsiders attending the celebration. It's a grim walk: where the men gather at 4 a.m. to find work, where they send money home, where they buy phone cards to call their parents.

What usually shocks outsiders, though, is the labor camps. They mostly are decrepit trailer parks. Some homes are mere travel trailers; others are gray concrete-block dorms. Roosters and chickens peck in the dirt, and at the end of a 12-hour day, men stack their boots outside the door. The smell of rice and tortillas wafts through the humid air.

Inside, seats pulled from vans serve as couches, the Virgin of Guadalupe the only wall art. The furniture is a TV and a few cracked, plastic chairs.

There are no phones.

Inside one trailer, 12 people share three bedrooms, Benitez explains to a reporter. They pool their money together to pay $350 a week in rent. In a good month, the men make less than $1,000 each.

Immokalee was the dusty town Edward R. Murrow chose to expose the plight of migrant farm workers in the landmark 1960 CBS documentary Harvest of Shame. If King were alive today, Benitez wonders how he would react to modern-day Immokalee. He laughs bitterly and answers his own question.

" "Con verguenza, " he said.

With shame.

--Tamara Lush can be reached at 727893-8612 or at lush@sptimes.com

[Last modified January 17, 2005, 01:06:09]