Only in Immokalee

Describing Immokalee to friends and family has been interesting, to say the least. Though I have only been here for about five weeks, I can confidently say that Immokalee is like no other place I have been. While elements of the town remind me of certain places, Immokalee as a whole exists in a world of its own. Sometimes I feel like I am in a rural Central American village; Other times I could be in any small town in the United States.

It is commonplace in the volunteer house to start a sentence with “Only in Immokalee…” Some endings of these sentences include: “do chickens walk down Main Street,” “are the three languages spoken most English, Spanish and Haitian Creole,” “are there more Mexican grocery stores than McDonalds,” “do five white girls from the Midwest teach three Guatemalans to do the Macarena,” “can you buy a week’s worth of produce for under ten dollars at the farmer’s market” and “are your beer selections at the local bar Budweiser or Modelo.”

Having studied anthropology for the past four years, Immokalee is nothing short of fascinating to me. The crossroads of culture and feeling of being “betwixt and between” is precisely what Victor Turner means by his concept of “liminality.” Immokalee is a sort of limbo, “neither here nor there” in terms of customs or conventions. The town is made up primarily of Mexican, Guatemalan, and Haitian immigrants, which manifests itself in a truly unique town dynamic.

Immokalee is the perfect location for my year of service. Like the town itself, I am in between stages in my own life, from college student to member of the “real world.” While Immokalee may at times seem misplaced, its existence is based on the existence of several social factors, including the issues of U.S. imperialism in Latin America and the limitations of immigration law. Because of the role reversals associated with liminal places, there is much potential for progressive change here as compared to other places in the U.S. In Immokalee, farmworkers stand up for their rights by organizing through the Coalition of Immokalee workers. While a grassroots, farmworker-led organization may not seem like it would be successful, Immokalee community members have seen great successes in the advancement of their demands for fair working conditions.

Immokalee is not an average place. There are complexities that I have not even begun to understand. However, it is clear to me the great potential for learning and discovering the intricacies of doing social work among a population eager to be treated fairly and to make changes that will create justice for people across the country.

In solidarity,

Julie

(picture credit: http://ciw-online.org/news.html)