If you want peace, work for justice:

Joining Hearts & Hands: Peace River Presbytery supports new migrant ministry at Immokalee

July 2006

All eyes were on the modest young man at the front of the bus.

Clad in a simple T-shirt bearing the logo of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), Romeo Ramirez gave the simultaneous appearance of exhaustion and empowerment as he began to share his own story through the voice of a translator.

Although slight of build and stature, the quiet passion in Romeo's voice and the fire in his eyes seized the attention of his listeners as the bus jostled up and down, motoring slowly past fields he characterized as sites where great injustices had taken place

Romeo Ramirez, a Guatemalan farmworker, has been working in such fields along the East Coast since he was 15 years old. 

A dozen or so concerned Presbyterians composed his audience that day, all aboard a rented bus to tour Immokalee – a small city in Southwest Florida and the state’s largest farmworker community – at the invitation of the leadership team of the Joining Hearts & Hands: Peace River Presbytery campaign.

One of the stated priorities of the presbytery’s $6.4 million fundraising effort for Joining Hearts & Hands is the establishment of a new migrant ministry at Immokalee through the Beth-El Mission based in Wimauma, Fla. 

“We are very thankful that Peace River Presbytery has joined this initiative,” said Dave Moore, executive director of Beth-El Farmworker Ministry, who joined the group on its mission tour.  “By expanding to Immokalee, we will offer Hispanic farmworkers their only opportunity to worship in the Reformed tradition in their native language.”

Ramirez was one of three members of the CIW – a community-based worker organization – to be honored in 2003 with the prestigious Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award.  He and fellow farmworkers, Julia Gabriel and Lucas Benitez, have become leaders in the fight to end slave labor, human trafficking, and exploitation in agricultural fields across the United States.

“Farmworkers have stories both happy and sad,” Ramirez said through his interpreter.  Pointing out the window to a site adjacent to the parking lot of Corkscrew Swamp, a Naples, Florida, tourist attraction, he said, “This is one of those sad places, where people were being held against their will, threatened, and physically abused to work the tomato fields.”

Ramirez continues to play a critical role in the CIW's Anti-Slavery Campaign, a worker-based approach to eliminating modern-day slavery in the agricultural industry.  According to the organization’s website, “the CIW helps fight this crime by uncovering, investigating, and assisting in the federal prosecution of slavery rings preying on hundreds of farmworkers.”

Ramirez said that another key focus of the CIW is on community education and consciousness raising. 

As Ramirez and others struggle to gain a fair wage, cheaper housing, and the most basic of human rights for the farmworkers at Immokalee, they have begun to transform that community into a nearer translation of the city’s name from the original Seminole, “my home.”

And soon, a Reformed presence will be an integral part of that home.

Or as the painted wall outside of the CIW offices expresses best – in a palette of hopeful color – the message that is deep at the heart of both church and society, “Si quieres paz, lucha por la justicia…If you want peace, work for justice.”