“When you are alone…you can run to Him”
June 12th, 2007
Tomato pickers in Immokalee, Florida are paid roughly 45 cents for every 32 pound bucket they pick. On average, they earn about $10,000 per year. A few miles down the road in Ave Maria, on land once farmed for tomatoes, you can buy a house with a swimming pool for nearly $500,000.
When I ask Pascual, a migrant worker in Immokalee, if he has heard of Ave Maria University, he says “yes,” but all he knows is that it’s being built, and that the church will be enormous (he’s right).
Pascual is from Veracruz, Mexico, and he crossed the border illegally five years ago. When he arrived in Immokalee, he had no friends or family, no money and no work. He found refuge in a local mission that gives migrants a place to stay while they get on their feet.
It was there that Pascual was invited to his first service at the Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Church. Pascual had grown up a Catholic, but when he attended his first service in Immokalee, “la palabra” (the word) resonated more closely with his experience: “When you are alone or sad, you can always run to Him,” he says. He started attending mass twice every weekend.
As Pascual and I talk, a battered green and silver school bus pulls into a vacant parking lot across from us. One by one, workers come down from the bus at the end of a day of working in the nearby orange groves. They are the last of the workers left in Immokalee, Pascual says. Now that the harvest is over, most have headed North to find work picking strawberries and blueberries.
When I ask Pascual if being Catholic carries with it a duty to help the less fortunate, he says that he imagines that if he were in a better place, he would try to help people out. Pascual is not in such a place. But I wonder whether his new neighbors in Ave Maria town, many of whom are devout Catholics, will feel that responsibility?
June 13th, 2007 at 6:23 am
For those of us who live in New York City, as we pass the corner carts filled with beautiful fresh fruit, there is little time to think of where it came from, let alone who harvested the crop. We just think the prices are lower then in the grocery store. So where is the extra money going? Not to the workers, that is for sure.
June 13th, 2007 at 4:38 pm
Great job, Nik. You have a career in journalism if you are masochistic enough to want it….
June 13th, 2007 at 8:52 pm
I think it is important to remember that the Ave Maria people and their development company gave generously to the folks at Imokalee post hurricane when the migrant workers had no income and no food. Also, they have said that there is an interest in involving both the community and the AMU students in Catholic social justice projects benefitting the native Americans and Mexican immigrants in the Imokalee area. If this pans out as they plan, I think this development will not only provide jobs, but teach the students up close and personal of the hardships these folks endure.