Mobile Exhibit on Cases of Modern Slavery Stops at Saint Leo
March 09, 2010
Students, faculty, and staff at the main
campus experienced for a short time on Monday what it would be like
to be a migrant farm worker locked in the back of a truck at night
by a boss who turned out to be a kidnapper.
The Florida Modern-Day Slavery Museum is a mobile exhibit that
replicates the truck used in an actual criminal case. It is
complemented by didactic panels and other exhibit items that
introduce visitors to some of the real-life abuses endured by
migrant workers who have come to Florida seeking work harvesting
citrus fruits and tomatoes. Some, but not all of the workers, are
from Mexico or other Central American countries. They are recruited
by business people, or crew chiefs, who hire enough individual
laborers to create a crew for harvesting jobs on big farms. The
growers typically pay the person who assembles and oversees the
crew, and that person, in turn, is supposed to pay the
workers.
But sometimes crew operators have failed to pay the laborers at
all, or enough, or manage to lure the workers into indebtedness to
the crew operator for shelter, meals, and drugs or alcohol, so that
the workers can’t earn enough to leave. In the worst cases,
including one that went to federal court in 2008, workers have been
beaten and locked up at night to keep them from escaping. Such
abuses have been a recurring problem.
A laborers’ group, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, created
this exhibit to travel around the state and to bring awareness to
the issue. (Immokalee is in South Florida and one of the state’s
agricultural centers.) Randall Woodard, assistant professor of
theology and religion, jumped at the chance to get the exhibit to
visit Saint Leo, with underwriting from the Department of Academic
Affairs. The exhibit’s visit fits with the university’s efforts to
infuse teachings about social justice issues into a range of
academic courses, he noted. The exhibit was displayed on the
lakeside patio of the university’s dining hall, where the daytime
population of the campus would see have the opportunity to see it,
walk in, and speak with curators.
Woodard also brought a class studying introductory theology and
Christianity to see the exhibit. A common reaction was surprise:
students thought slavery and associated crimes had been eradicated
in the United States. One student wrote: “No one deserves to live
and feel like that.”
English Instructor Allyson Marino also visited with an upper-level
class whose students are reading recent Latino literature. The
mobile museum was good foundation for a book coming up in the
course syllabus. In another week and a half, she wrote, “we will
begin a novel by a Mexican-American author about a family of
migrant farm workers in California––a contemporary answer to The Grapes of Wrath.”
