About ten miles outside of Fort Myers, Florida, where strip malls and outlets give way to perfectly symmetrical lines of orange trees, the traffic on the two-lane highway slows to a crawl. I am stuck behind a citrus truck whose caged bay is overflowing with oranges, and they bounce up and down with bumps in the road. I’m on my way to Immokalee, a small town in central Florida that is the source of most of the United States’ winter tomato and orange crops. You may not have heard of Immokalee, but you’ve eaten food that’s grown and picked there. It also happens to be only eight miles away from the future site of Ave Maria University.

I’m traveling to Immokalee to see how the Catholic parish there compares to the community moving in down the road. Ave Maria is being built on fields that were once planted with tomatoes, and will be home to predominantly wealthier families who come from across the US. Immokalee is home to thousands of farmworkers, nearly all of them illegal migrants, who come from Mexico and Central America in search of better wages. Most of them the indocumentados are Catholic. If Ave Maria’s mission is to isolate itself from the world, and restore an ideal community drawn from the social mores of the past, Immokalee is very much of the world, as it is in 2007, a place where globalization, migration, commerce and culture come together.

At first, Immokalee seems like any other small town in Florida, with a thin line of one-story shops lining the road. But many of the store signs are in Spanish – and they all seem to be advertising calling cards to Mexico. Then I start to notice the workers. They walk along the side of the road, carrying small plastic bags packed with tortillas or a change of clothes. Others ride bikes, sometimes with a friend on the back. In the sparse shade afforded by the rooftops of buildings, they crouch in small groups, so nearly motionless that it takes a moment to see them. A block away from the road, I notice the collections of dilapidated trailers, where, I will later see, workers live eight or ten men to a trailer.

Father Ettore Rubin, the priest of Our Lady of Guadalupe Church, Immokalee’s Catholic parish, tells me that more than 70 percent of his congregants are undocumented workers. The Saturday evening service I attend there is performed entirely in Spanish, and the pews are packed, or at least it seems so to me. Father Rubin ends his sermon alluding to the workers who have migrated to other parts of the U.S., following the harvest: “I see there are less of us today than usual. It seems many have left for the North. But that’s ok. God is in the North too. He’s also in the South, in the east, and in the west too. He’s in the center of all of us.”

Tomorrow, I’ll be attending two masses at Our Lady of Guadalupe – one in Haitian Creole and one in Spanish.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 10th, 2007 at 6:15 am and is filed under Ave Maria, Florida. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.