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A new radio station went on the air in Florida on
December 7, 2003,
operated by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers.
It was built in a weekend,
after a low-power FM radio barnraising organized
by the Prometheus Radio
Project. The Hudson Mohawk Independent Media
Center was there!Several
weeks ago, on a (mostly) balmy winter weekend in
southwesternFlorida, scores of community media
activists descended on the small
farming town of Immokalee to build a radio
station. Not just any radio
station—a radio station owned and operated by
farm workers.
Almost everywhere in the United States, radio is
a medium obsessed with
delivering ears to advertisers (or underwriters).
This story is not about
radio as we have come to know it. It’s about a
station devoted to
educating and organizing farm workers.
It’s peak growing season in Immokalee, Florida
right now. Every day,
workers assemble before dawn at the labor pool
downtown… ready to hire
themselves out to the crew bosses who provide
contract labor to the major
growers. If they work hard all day, picking
tomatoes at the rate of $.40
per basket, they’ll make about $50—and will have
handled two tons of
produce each. They are being paid about what they
made in 1980.
A quick stroll through the compact downtown
reveals Immokalee’s political
economy. Most of the businesses are there to
service a migrant farm worker
community. You can wire money to Mexico, Haiti,
El Salvador, Guatemala,
Honduras. You can find an immigration lawyer. And
you can get a bail bond.
Not much else.
The storefront signs bear silent testimony to a
dream—to earn some money
and send it home. The reality is somewhat
different. With low wages and
high expenses (a bed in a shared room in a dingy
trailer runs $200 a month
or more), farm workers in Immokalee make barely
enough to survive.
Changing this situation is tough. Most of the
workers don’t speak English,
and the immigration status for many of them is
shaky. They’re hesitant to
speak out—even in the face of modern-day slavery
conditions that made the
front page of the Miami Herald as recently as
last month. That’s where the
new radio station fits in. The plan is to
broadcast in Spanish, Creole,
and various indigenous languages—no English. The
goal is to provide a
channel of communication to bring a disparate
workforce together to
workfor change.
The effort to organize workers in Immokalee is
the local component of a
two pronged strategy: the other is to bring the
struggle to the outside
world.
Even with snow piling up outside grocery stores
across the Northeast,
shoppers expect to find ripe, red tomatoes
inside—at a good price. Few
consumers trouble themselves with the details of
how this minor miracle
takes place on a daily basis.
The Coalition of Immokalee Workers wants us to
know. This Florida-based
group of immigrant farm workers from Mexico,
Central America and the
Caribbean has been organizing since 1993 to raise
the standard of living
for people on the bottom rung of the food
production chain—the pickers.
Two years ago the Coalition of Immokalee Workers
approached Yum! Brands, a
purveyor of fast food around the world, for
guarantees of basic human
rights and a $.01 per pound wage increase for
tomato pickers—to no avail.
In response, the CIW initiated a boycott of their
Taco Bell restaurant
chain, one of the largest purchasers of tomatoes
in the United States.
More than a dozen colleges have thrown Taco Bell
franchises off campus as
interfaith endorsements of the boycott mount.
(Check www.ciw-online.org
for more information on the CIW and their Taco
Bell boycott, and a moving
photo essay on working conditions in the tomato
fields.)
The CIW’s sophisticated analysis of the labor
environment in which their
members exist has led them to come out strongly
against both NAFTA and the
proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas. This
political stance made them
ideal partners for an alliance with the community
media movement, which
has served as the communications wing of the
anti-corporate globalization
struggle. Grassroots radio, used world-wide to
reach low-income
populations with limited literacy, is
particularly well-suited to the
CIW’s local organizing effort.
And so it was that on the weekend of December
5-7, 2003, nearly 100 media
activists from around the United States, Canada
and Puerto Rico gathered
in a sprawling, vacant office building to help
the Coalition of Immokalee
Workers build a low-power FM radio station.
Billed as a “radio
barnraising” by the Prometheus Radio Project (a
Philadelphia-based LPFM
advocacy group that organized the event in
cooperation with the CIW), the
weekend of skill-sharing drew a disparate crew:
self-proclaimed
engineering “geeks” to guide tower construction,
oversee installation of
the antenna and transmitter as well as coordinate
wiring of a full
broadcasting studio, along with production,
fundraising and administrative
types to run a full slate of informational
workshops geared to the
knowledge needed to run a radio station staffed
and managed by volunteers.
On Sunday night at 7 PM, Radio Consciencia began
broadcasting!
There’s a beautiful gallery of photos from the
weekend at
www.jjtiziou.net/morepictures/200312xx_radio/ if
you’d like to see what
happened. You might also want to visit
www.prometheusradio.org for more
information about the radio barnraising, and the
phenomenon of low-power
FM. And don’t forget your local outposts in the
global movement for media
democracy: WRPI 91.5 FM and the Hudson Mohawk
Independent Media
Center(www.hm.indymedia.org)!
See also:
http://www.ciw-online.org
http://www.prometheusradio.org
