Tomatoland (25 page)

And that is the key to the success of Mainster’s association, which provides free or low-cost child care and early education to the children of migrant farmworkers and other rural, low-income families. The organization began in 1965, when a group of
Mennonite Church volunteers decided to provide daycare for the children of
workers who lived in two migrant camps in Redlands, an agricultural district about twenty miles southwest of Miami. The goal was to keep the kids safe and out of the fields.

Initially, it seemed that the Mennonites’ plan was fated to be just another well-intentioned charitable effort that fizzled. The founders opened the centers, but no one came. The immigrant mothers were not comfortable leaving their tiny children with white Americans who spoke no Spanish or Haitian Creole and had little understanding of the parents’ cultures. Only when the association began hiring from the migrant community itself did the centers begin to fill.

Daycare for the children of immigrants provides a double-edged benefit. Kids who might otherwise be hauled out into the fields or warehoused by the dozen in filthy trailers supervised by the uneducated wife of a crew boss are given a clean, safe environment and acquire the basic skills necessary to enter the American school system. The women who care for them are able to leave the fields to work in comfortable, secure surroundings. They are encouraged to continue their education and earn living wages, creating pockets of upward mobility in the migrant communities.

When Mainster, who has been executive director since 1988, joined the association in 1972, it had three centers in one county, with an enrollment of seventy-five kids. Today, thanks to her single-minded drive, which has not diminished an iota over nearly four decades during which she raised four of her own children (three of them adopted), the association has more than eighty centers and charter schools in twenty-one counties. It serves eight thousand children, making it one of the largest nonprofit
child-care programs in the United States, and employs fifteen hundred caregivers, most of them Latinas. Redlands kids get a hot breakfast, a hot lunch, and an afternoon snack and learn enough English to enter the American school system.

Mainster and I strolled into a shaded courtyard that houses three separate age-appropriate playgrounds with plastic tunnels, slides, tricycles, swings, a playhouse, and a pretend gas station and café, all
painted in riotous primary colors. The space, located in the former Sunday school of a Baptist church, now provides care for 180 children. An additional 220 first- to sixth-grade students attend a charter school run by the association on an adjacent piece of property. “We want to keep them with us as long as possible,” said Mainster.

Mainster credits much of the success of Redlands to her philosophy that there are good people and bad people in every profession, including Florida agriculture. Mainster works closely with major growers—Michael Stuart, chief executive officer of the Florida Fruit and Vegetable Association, a trade group, was president of the Redlands board of directors. “Agriculture is a very important, well-connected force in this state, and they can lobby very effectively for funding and other things we need,” she said.

A sign in Mainster’s office reads “We don’t believe in miracles. We rely on them.”
In truth government grants
through programs such as
Head Start and federal child care grants cover 85 percent of the association’s $56-million annual budget. Donations and charter school fees make up most of the rest, with only 2 percent coming from parent fees. Despite being called the Redlands Christian Migrant Association, the group is completely secular. “I don’t know why we stick with the name,” Mainster said. “We are no longer based in Redlands. We are not affiliated with any religion. We work with nonmigrants as well as migrants. And we are a nonprofit organization, not an association.”

Ultimately, Redlands’ goal, according to Mainster, is to level the playing field for the children under their care. A child of English-speaking native-born American parents has a vocabulary of about three thousand words at age three, she explained. The child of an uneducated, non–English speaking mother has only five hundred. Some Redlands students in the sixth grade, she said, have never been out of Immokalee, except on school field trips. “They start out at a huge disadvantage.”

A dozen years ago, a Guatemalan boy who came to one of their centers at about age two certainly faced more than his share
of challenges. His mother was illiterate and spoke only her native Amerindian language and some fragmentary Spanish. The child was completely nonverbal. Mainster arranged for him to be tested for hearing loss and mental disabilities. He had none. Caregivers continued to work with him, and slowly he began to speak. By third grade, he was not only fluent in Spanish and English but was reading at levels deemed age-appropriate by the state. In sixth grade, he asked to speak to a guidance counselor and came into her office carrying a thick envelope from the
Florida Board of Education written in English and aimed at educated American parents. Consulting a document, he said, “It says here that it’s time that I do a little career exploration.”

“This kid would have been considered gifted in an upper-middle-class school setting,” Mainster said. The boy is in high school now, and Mainster intends to make sure that Redlands gets him scholarship money and anything else he needs to attend college and, who knows, maybe get a fair shot at the piece of the American dream denied to his parents.

THE BUILDER

Hurricane Andrew made landfall near
Homestead, Florida, at about five o’clock in the morning on August 24, 1992. The powerful storm’s 150-mile-per hour winds ripped into the coastal area just south of Miami, slamming into a dilapidated, county-owned trailer park that for two decades had served as a “temporary” labor camp for the migrants who picked citrus, tomatoes, and other crops grown in
Dade County’s gravely soil. Miraculously, no one who lived in the park was injured. At that time of year, most migrant workers are in northern states. However, all but two of the four hundred trailers were demolished, reduced to heaps of splintered two-by-fours, twisted aluminum siding, and ripped-apart furniture. Andrew left the 154 families who lived in the camp at the time homeless. That
hurricane turned out to be one of the best things ever to happen to Florida’s farmworkers.

In the aftermath of Andrew, South Florida found itself awash in offers of federal disaster relief funding. Farmers desperately needed shelter for the workers that would soon be arriving to pick the winter’s harvest. The board of the
Everglades Community Association, which managed worker housing in the county,
hired Steven Kirk to oversee reconstruction
. It was a classic case of the right person for the right job. Kirk, who had studied public policy at Duke University, became a passionate advocate for farmworker
justice after spending a summer in the mid 1970s interviewing vegetable pickers in North Carolina under the supervision of the oral historian and author
Robert Coles. One day he stumbled across a couple of African American men running down an unpaved road. They told him that their boss had tied them to a tree to prevent their escaping. Kirk rented them rooms in a motel until authorities came.

Kirk spent the early part of his career knocking around Washington, DC, working for various farm laborers’ groups and other antipoverty organizations, gaining insight into how to manipulate levers of power and loosen purse strings in the nation’s capital. Upon arriving in Florida, he saw two courses of action for the Everglades Community Association. They could simply replicate the ugly, crime-ridden old camp by acquiring a few hundred replacement trailers and slapping them down in straight barrackslike rows on cement pads, or they could do something no one else had attempted: build a functioning farmworkers’ community.

Today,
Everglades Farmworker Village, as the one hundred and twenty acre development that sprang up on the ground occupied by that old trailer park is called, is one of the country’s largest farmworker housing projects. In one of the electric golf carts that provide the primary mode of transportation for village maintenance people and other employees, Kirk gave me a tour. Short, wearing jeans, with mussed, thinning hair, Kirk is in his mid-fifties. As we purred through a pleasant
network of curving streets bordered by palm trees, he told me that the community is home to nearly two thousand mostly Hispanic workers whose average family income is between $16,000 and $18,000. The 493 housing units, pastel stucco over cement block, are either stand-alone single-family structures, side-by-side duplexes, or two-story townhouses. A couple of dormitory-style buildings provide accommodations for 144
single men. The streets have curbs and gutters, and the landscaping is immaculate. The community has its own ten-acre park and soccer fields. A small grocery store, a branch of a larger Hispanic supermarket in Homestead, provides a wide range of traditional products at reasonable prices. A
Community Development Credit Union maintains an office here, and workers can get fairly priced loans, open bank accounts, and make other financial transactions so they are not gouged by check-cashing companies and costly wire transfers.

Kirk made a deal with Mainster’s Redlands organization to run three
day care centers at Everglades serving three hundred preschoolers. An additional 250 older kids participate in organized after-school activities. The community has a space for religious services, a community hall for wedding receptions and
quinceañeras
(celebrations of a Latina girl’s fifteenth birthday), a computer lab, two self-service laundries, and a health clinic. “There are a lot of people involved with low-income housing whose attitude is, they are just going to tear the places apart, why make them nice,” Kirk said. He takes the opposite view, believing that if you have high expectations of tenants and give them quality accommodations, they will respect them. “And that has proved to be true,” he said.

In the world of migrant housing, the lowest of the low are single men. They are typically the ones relegated to sleeping ten or twelve to a trailer in places like Immokalee—if they have any place to stay at all. The backcountry of Florida is pocked with makeshift encampments of single workers who cannot find shelter. Even farmworkers with families shun their single brethren, associating them with loud music, drunken rowdiness, and unwanted interest in teenage
daughters. But Kirk was determined to make a place for single men in Everglades Farmworker Village.

He stopped the golf cart and opened a gate that led into a shady courtyard surrounded by a U-shaped building whose facade was regularly interrupted by doors, giving the effect of a motel that had turned inward on itself. Gazebos and clusters of benches, chairs, and tables filled the courtyard. The principle, Kirk said, was to provide the men with a space to mingle and socialize outdoors that would also contain their activities and provide a measure of control over who entered the compound. Kirk opened the door to a unit, exposing us to a puff of air-conditioned air. The living room consisted of a heavy wooden table with benches set on a spotless linoleum floor. Off that room was a kitchen with a stove and two refrigerators. “Eight guys share this space, we want them to have room to store their food,” Kirk explained. Four bedrooms extended off the main living area, each with two built-in twin beds. Toilets and showers were in separate rooms.

The quarters reminded me of the on-campus apartment where my college-age daughter lived with four friends, only the workers’ was more spacious and cleaner. At $175 per person a month including all utilities, the bachelor accommodations were a steal compared to the trailers I’d seen in Immokalee. And no one complained about the single guys. “We get more complaints about teenaged kids of married couples,” Kirk said.

When designing the village, Kirk sat down with prospective residents and asked them what features they wanted to see in their dwellings. Women wanted to have hook-ups for washers and dryers, plenty of storage space, and large kitchen windows so they could keep an eye on their kids playing in the yard while they prepared meals. Men wanted parking places installed tight up in front of the houses to deter anyone who might want to vandalize or steal their vehicles—in many cases the only asset the family possessed. Everyone wanted to save money on electricity bills, so houses included fans in every room and specially designed windows to ventilate homes, limiting the need
to run expensive air conditioners. A gated entrance and night-time security were also on the workers’ wish list.

In return, Kirk and the board, which included residents, had a few demands of their own. “We practice tough love,” he said. Some might say it’s paternalistic or downright authoritarian. But it works, Kirk insists. Quiet must prevail after 11:00 in the evening. Single men can have no overnight guests. Vehicles must be parked in designated places. No pets are allowed. No do-it-yourself paint jobs or landscaping projects are permitted. There are no clotheslines, a rule Kirk explained by saying that aesthetics are as important as any other issue to maintaining a sense of pride in the community. The final rule is you have to pay your rent, which is capped at one-third of a family’s income. Government subsidies make up the rest, if necessary. “We don’t evict people who are unable to pay. We evict them for refusal to pay,” said Kirk. “If rent is affordable to people, it becomes a priority for them.”

Early on, Kirk faced some competition for funding from farmers who wanted to build housing for their workers on their own land. Recalling incidents of being run off property by county sheriffs back in his student days when he was trying to interview the children of North Carolina farmworkers, Kirk adamantly opposed employer-built housing. “I don’t want them in control,” he said. “If you live down some dirt road where there’s an armed security guard to keep people out, problems can develop. Here, if Greg Schell’s paralegal wants to come down and meet with you, there’s an office set aside. The opportunity for involuntary servitude in this community is pretty slim. There is always someone to reach out to.”