The Progressive

Radio Consciencia is On the Air!

Workers in Immokalee, Florida launch a radio station that carries news shows in indigenous languages such as Zapotec and Quiche.

BY STEVE PIERCE
December 14th, 2003

IMMOKALEE -- Several weeks ago, on a (mostly) balmy winter weekend in southwestern Florida, scores of community media activists from around the country 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 is 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, theyíll 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 work for 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 http://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 http://www.jjtiziou.net/morepictures/200312xx_radio/ if you'd like to see what happened. You might also want to visit http://oldsite.prometheusradio.org for more information about the radio barnraising, and the phenomenon of low-power FM. Don't miss the next one!