An In-Depth Look at the Coalition of Immokalee Workers

Abstract

First paragraph:

If you ask the average person what they know about the people who labor on farms in the United States, you are likely to find that they have never given it much thought, or that if they have, they answer based on their notions of the agrarian ideal. Maybe, just maybe, you would find that they have some basic sense of the atrocities that most of the over two million farmworkers who harvest our food face. If they heard of these issues recently, they may have learned about them through the campaigns of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW). Whether through its community organizing efforts on college campuses; its work boycotting of some of the nation’s largest fast food chains; through the documentary Food Chains (Longoria, Schlosser, & Rawal, 2014); or its other educational, outreach, and campaign work, the CIW and its other entities have become a recognized name in farmworker justice. In I Am Not a Tractor! How Florida Farmworkers Took on the Fast Food Giants and Won, Susan L. Marquis details the history of CIW and of its Fair Food Program (FFP), as well as its possibilities for the future. I approached this book as someone who has been working with various farmworker and farmer justice groups for the past decade in my own teaching and research; although I have never worked directly with CIW in these or any other capacities, I was certainly familiar with their work.