Tomatoland (17 page)

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.

The struggle for
workers’ rights can make for strange bedfellows, and while the students’ campaign was gaining momentum, the coalition reached out to religious leaders through a group called
Interfaith Action of Southwest Florida. Eventually it gained the support of the
Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and the
National Council of Churches, which speaks for forty-five million parishioners in more than 100,000 local congregations in the United States. With lodging and logistical assistance from the church groups, the coalition was able to mount a cross-country Taco Bell Truth Tour in 2004 that culminated in a massive demonstration and a ten-day
hunger strike outside Taco Bell headquarters in Irvine, California.

While the students and farmworkers continued their highly visible campaign against Taco Bell in the streets and media, religious folks exerted pressure more quietly but no less effectively in the rarified atmosphere of the boardroom.
At a 2003 shareholders’ meeting
of
Yum! Brands, Taco Bell’s parent company, a representative of
Oxfam America presented a resolution calling for Yum! to undertake a transparent review of its policies related to social and economic sustainability throughout its supply chains. The resolution was clearly aimed at the conglomerate’s failure to respond to the Immokalee workers’ requests. Such resolutions are frequently put forward at annual meetings of major corporations. Typically, they get less than 10 percent of the votes and managers shrug them off as the feeble cries of extremists and kooks. The Oxfam resolution won the support of more than 35 percent of the shareholders. There was no way the executives could ignore that result. By early 2005, Yum! had agreed to the coalition’s requests, not only for its Taco Bell restaurants but for every restaurant in the conglomerate.