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Coalition of Immokalee Workers:
Graffics and Theater, An Interview with Lucas Benitez.
website: http://www.ciw-online.org/
"The majority of workers that went to Miami had this analysis that they took from the popular education. They took with them two things, their experience and their analysis. The reporter was standing there with her mouth open because here was a farmworker saying, “Look, I’m here because I was a farmer in Mexico, NAFTA totally screwed me, and I don’t want this to happen to my compañeros that are farmworkers in Guatemala, Panama, Central and South America. That’s not what we want. What we want is Fair Trade, not Free Trade." -Lucas Benitez
Lucas Benitez works with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a community-based organization that fights for farmworker rights in Florida and beyond. Here, Lucas explains the value of graphics and theater as popular education tools . He also discusses the role that popular education has played in creating a foundation of consciousness amongst members that has fed initiatives like Root Cause— an unprecedented global justice march against the FTAA in Miami in November 2003, organized and led by local people of color.
Can you explain some of these drawings that CIW has used to get conversations rolling about issues that are hot in the community?
We used this when the sheriff here became the first sherriff in the country to propose that all police have the power of the INS, all 40,000 police in Florida. We called it ‘Polimigra’. We used this drawing so that our folks would understand that when you say that the police are going to have the power of the INS, that they’ll respond by saying, ‘Yeah, that scares us’. It’s so that our folks understand that it isn’t just a policeman, but instead half police and half INS. So, what happens if someone robs you? The policeman is going to say, ‘What a shame that you’ve been robbed, let me help you,’ but on the other side he’s telling you ‘Give me your papers.’ So, when our folks saw this, they understood that it was a complete threat to us, and that we weren’t going to just let it happen. With this drawing we were able to mobilize three thousand people in front of the office of the sheriff in Naples. And this was just tremendous. What happened with this mobilization is that it brought national attention. We received calls from Chicago, the Associated Press put out a bulletin, it brought a lot of attention to the problem. We not only stopped this proposal, but we also stopped another practice where when they stop you they take your license if you don’t have your social security. They won’t arrest you, they’ll just take your license.
Can you describe the process that you used from the popular education through to the demonstration?
First was to think up the image, then to put it out into the whole community so that people understood it well, and then to discuss it in the community. After the people had seen it for a week, and knew what was happening, what we were confronting, the question was, what do we do? The same people can say, ‘Look, we can do a march, we can do a demonstration, we can do this and that.’ A lot of ideas came out, and the question was which one is best. It was to do a demonstration outside of the sheriff’s office. Great, but how are we going to do it? With just us, just who we’ve got here? No. So, we all had to work to do it, on the radio, door to door, talking about it with other friends. There were people there that do landscaping that live here in Immokalee, and they knew that the protest was at 10 in the morning, there were people that came from their construction jobs, there were painters in their dirty clothes, that stopped work to come. It was really incredible. And when we made the sheriff come out, he didn’t know how to respond. And all of this wouldn’t have happened without all the consciousness-building, without the commitment that the people made.