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En breve
To highlight abuses of farm workers and identify remedies, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (a community-based farmworker organization) created the Florida Modern-Day Slavery Museum.
In December 2008, farm labour contractors Cesar and Geovanni Navarrete were each sentenced to twelve years in prison for their part in what US Attorney Doug Molloy called “slavery, plain and simple.” According to the Justice Department, the employers “pleaded guilty to beating, threatening, restraining, and locking workers in trucks to force them to work as agricultural labourers. . . . [They] were accused of paying the workers minimal wages and driving the workers into debt, while simultaneously threatening physical harm if the workers left their employment before their debts had been repaid to the Navarrete family.”
Although shocking in its details, the Navarrete case was simply the latest link in a long, unbroken chain of exploitation — including forced labour — in Florida’s fields. It was the seventh farm labour operation to be prosecuted for servitude in the state in the past decade, cases involving well over 1,000 workers and more than a dozen employers in total. The federal government has since initiated two additional prosecutions, bringing the total to nine as of 2011.
Modern-day slavery does not take place in a vacuum, nor is it an inevitable feature of our food system.
Even setting aside forced labour, farm work in the US still offers the worst combination of sub-poverty wages, dangerous, backbreaking working conditions, and lack of fundamental labour protections in the country. In this context of structural poverty and powerlessness, extreme forms of abuse such as forced labour are able to take root and flourish. These cases are reflective of the impunity and exploitation that is rampant throughout the agricultural sector. In other words, modern-day slavery does not take place in a vacuum, nor is it an inevitable feature of our food system.
To highlight these abuses and to identify their causes and solution, in 2010 the Coalition of Immokalee Workers — a community-based farmworker organization — decided to create the Florida Modern-Day Slavery Museum. The mobile museum consists of a cargo truck carefully outfitted as a replica of the trucks involved in the Navarrete case and a collection of displays on the history and evolution of slavery in Florida over the past four hundred years. The multimedia exhibits were developed in consultation with workers who have escaped from forced labour operations, as well as leading academic authorities on slavery and labour history in Florida. The museum booklet, complete with testimonial blurbs from experts, made it clear to both attendees and media that the museum’s content had been independently vetted.
With a team of farmworker and ally docents, the museum toured Florida intensively, visiting churches, schools, universities and community centres for six weeks in the lead-up to the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ three-day Farmworker Freedom March in 2010.
People’s reactions to the museum were so overwhelmingly positive and such a buzz was generated that the CIW later decided to tour outside Florida to cities throughout the southeast and northeast United States, including a stop on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. In March 2011, former President Jimmy Carter visited the museum in Atlanta, Georgia. Approximately 10,000 people have toured the museum since its creation.
Originally published in Beautiful Trouble.
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The museum was not a “work of art” in the conventional sense of the term, but it did transform both the public spaces it inhabited and the people who viewed it. Through a host of different media and creative displays — the highlight of which was the careful re-creation of the Naverrete operation inside the truck itself — the museum was able to reach viewers at a visceral level.
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It is often difficult for people to accept that modern-day slavery is a systemic problem in the United States. The thought that the tomato topping your hamburger or tossed in your salad may have been picked by a slave — and was certainly picked by someone receiving very low wages for very difficult work — can trigger a denial impulse that is difficult to break through. But the museum, by using actual historical artifacts, presented a tight and irrefutable indictment of the status quo that was able to pierce this veil and open people’s minds to dialogue and possibly collective action.
Instead of waiting for people to come to Immokalee to visit the museum, the CIW brought the museum to the people. With the museum as Exhibit A of an old-fashioned speaking tour, the museum crew toured across Florida and the Eastern US, often parking the exhibit right in the centre of town. There’s nothing like a museum on wheels to draw people’s attention, not to mention a museum on wheels that addresses such a pressing and controversial topic as modern-day slavery. It was an effective conversation starter.