Human Rights in Play,Transnational Solidarity at Work: Creative Playfulness and Subversive Storytelling among the Coalition of Immokalee Workers

Introduction

Attend any Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) ‘action,’ or campaign event, and you will find that ‘human rights’ are in the air. Participants carry tomato-shaped signs bearing slogans like ‘fair wages are a human right.’ They sing chants proclaiming that ‘there’s no excuse for human rights abuses!’ Documentaries featuring the CIW reinforce the discourse. For example, Food Chains (Rawal, 2014) tells the history of agricultural workers struggling across the US and beyond to defend and advance their human rights as workers, and Rape in the Fields (Bergman and Cediel, 2013) showcases the CIW’s human rights triumphs, like freeing women from sexual harassment and assault while at work. When human rights discourse is not explicitly invoked, human rights norms, or consciously localized understandings of them, are embedded within the practices of the CIW. The organization, operation, and tactics of the CIW are a case of a worker-led social movement that is organized around human rights practice.

The CIW uses subversive storytelling and creative playfulness deliberately to build a common worker identity. They tell an alternative history through radical media that creates space for transnational solidarity-building among farmworkers and participants in the movement. Rather than simply traversing nation-state borders (between the US and Mexico), I use the term ‘transnational’ here to refer also to practices, strategies, and identities that seek to cross boundaries distinguishing immigrant laborers from allied communities, and farmworkers from different indigenous communities throughout the Americas. Deliberately mobilizing indigenous communities from different nations through subversive storytelling and creative playfulness to build transnational solidarity sets the CIW apart from other social movement organizations.

Each of the campaigns presented in the article provides support for the claim that the CIW is a transnational human rights organization whose successes are based on the self-conscious use of creative playfulness and subversive storytelling that shapes the relationship between human rights and labor rights. Based on participant observation, content analysis, and an historical review of several of the tactics employed by the CIW and their allies, these useful concepts were identified. They explain some of the ways in which incorporating politico-cultural tactics for organizing aid in leveraging emotions based on play and storytelling work to build transnational solidarity among a diversity of participants. Three specific campaigns are described to illustrate these findings.

The article is organized as follows: First, I situate this study within the theoretical context and methodology. This is followed by a discussion of my use of the concepts ‘creative playfulness’ and ‘subversive storytelling.’ Next I describe the CIW and three of its human rights campaigns, including the different tactical media through which it had deployed creative playfulness and subversive storytelling. Finally, I explain the relationship between the CIW and the ongoing strikes in the tomato fields of Mexico and offer some concluding thoughts on the importance of creative playfulness and subversive storytelling for re-imagining human rights as a social movement. My theoretical orientation toward the study of social movements is similar to that of Jasper (1999), Goodale and Merry (2007), and Smith and Guarnizo (1998). These are all post-cultural turn scholars who consider the role of emotions and culture in movements. They also expand the scope of inquiry beyond that of political process (Tilly, 1977) and resource mobilization (McCarthy and Zald, 1987) approaches. Culture cannot be discounted as unimportant for social movements; the work of the CIW illustrates this. Today’s theory considers culture and emotions but still falls short when examining the role of emotions like joy emerging from play and humor.

Paolucci and Richardson capture just how useful humor and play are for social movements. Their ‘critical role thus lies in poking a hole through often undiscussed but official versions of everyday reality, exposing their contradictions and the arbitrary bases of their social power’ (2006: 334). Movements with richer cultures, more rituals, songs, folktales, and heroes produce greater pleasure for the participants. The culture of the movement itself – its values, symbols, and stories – has an important emotional element often neglected by scholars. The joy, hope, enthusiasm, and attachment to the group are important features for sustaining movements (Goodwin et al., 2001). These ‘structures of feeling’ are what produce group belonging (Yúdice, 1998).

Overwhelmingly, the existing literature on social movements and emotion centers on building a common identity of people who may already have a lot in common. The CIW network is comprised of migrant farmworkers from diverse communities, college students from all over the US, other human rights movement networks outside of the US, and multiple faith communities. Many allies are not part of Latin American cultural diasporas yet cultural elements from this region are employed to create a sense of community. Melucci stresses that in light of constantly changing circumstances people must exercise creativity, flexibility, and adaptability in order to solve problems created by contemporary globalization. Uniquely, the CIW and its allies reinterpret culturally situated materials, like mística theater, son jarocho music, and a community museum. These are all examples of such creativity (Melucci, 1996). Understanding the role of emotions in social movements builds a richer understanding of the work of the CIW network. It is not simply access to material resources or political opportunities that results in participation and sustenance of the movement. Humor, play, and emotions are central to their work.

While these tactics broadly fall under the umbrella of popular education – with its origins in Latin America and the work of Freire (1996) and Boal (1996) – they are all also examples of cultural politics. By this I mean that the CIW employ culture and the ‘use of public space and networks to articulate social inequality as legitimate fields of artistic expression and political change’ (Flynn, 2013: 172). While the CIW employ numerous tactics, the three politico-cultural tactics examined in this article highlight the group’s strategic use of emotion and creativity that stand out from those employed by other movements.

Play and emotion work to build transnational solidarity and offer alternative pathways for agency to its members, participants, and allies. Rather than invoke ‘moral shock’ (Jasper, 1997) or indignation, the CIW has relied on play and creativity to create and sustain momentum in the movement – with a great degree of success. While there has been a resurgence of interest in the study of emotions in the sociological community, there remains too little systematic study of the role of emotions and play in social movements, especially within the human rights movement literature. This study begins to close that gap.

The campaigns discussed in the article were selected based on the author’s participant observation. Each one is an illustration of creative play or subversive storytelling. The ongoing strikes in Mexico were included to demonstrate not only the transnational solidarity building efforts of the CIW but also the promise of human rights framing for agricultural workers movements outside of the US. As this is a recently emerged movement in a markedly different social context, it is yet to be determined whether creative playfulness and subversive storytelling will be employed in a similar manner.

Data were gathered and analyzed using three approaches: participant observation, content analysis, and an historical review of each of the three tactics explored for the article. As a current member of a CIW ally organization, DC Fair Food, I have participated in regional meetings, actions, marches, and vigils. I have also traveled to Florida for the CIW’s annual Encuentro gathering and their recent Concert for Fair Food in 2015. Participant observation is a convenient method for collecting data due to my familiarity with the group. Field notes were taken immediately following periods of observation. This fieldwork provided additional context for interpreting content and historical data.

Secondly, content analysis was utilized to supplement participant observation where relevant information was scant or difficult to obtain, especially as related to the strikes in Mexico. Media materials, such as online newspapers, op-ed pieces written by allies of the CIW, and NGO reports, were reviewed for this analysis. Materials were selected based on keyword searches related to the campaigns addressed in the article, the specific tactics utilized in each, as well as online newspapers and YouTube videos with San Quintin farmworkers.

Finally, an historical analysis of these politico-cultural tactics like mística, son jarocho music, and community museum building was undertaken. Participation in CIW activities supported an organizational awareness of the histories of these techniques. Further study into their histories was warranted for the researcher as a result of their description at CIW events. It was determined that each has a deep history in connection with democratic social movements.

Creative Playfulness and Subversive Storytelling

Creative play appears in both the sociological and anthropological literature but is not clearly defined. Social movements are rife with practical examples of creative playfulness and subversive storytelling, but there has been too little scholarly attention to these in the human rights movement literature. To the extent that sociological approaches to human rights have conceptualized them as a social movement, we might then ask whether it is useful to extend the few insights from social movement research on the use of creative play and subversive storytelling more specifically to work on the human rights movement.

Toward this end, I offer a definition of creative playfulness that represents a synthesis of several compelling works in sociology and anthropology on creative action (Joas, 1997), play (Melucci, 1996; Huizinga, 1971; Caillois, 1979), and the role of play in community organizing (Shepard, 2006, 2008). I define creative playfulness as an action, a mood, and/or an orientation that is not serious but is joyful, agentic, communicative and improvisational. It is also interactional, subversive to social hierarchies, and prefigurative of democratic politics.

The second concept typically appears in legal scholarship. Subversive storytelling is an important medium through which the CIW works toward correcting human rights wrongs. Unlike creative playfulness, subversive storytelling has a generally agreed upon definition that is suitable for analyzing these campaigns. Based on the work of Ewick and Silbey (1995) and Haaken (2010), subversive storytelling is comprised of interpretative narratives that appear in an array of formats recounting particular experiences as in and part of cultural, material, and political worlds that extend beyond the local; they do not aggregate to the general or collect particulars as examples of a common phenomenon or rule; they have the capacity to counter hegemonic silence and decolonize consciousness; and they also serve as the connection between the particular and the general by locating individuals within social organization. After a discussion of the history and organization of the CIW, both creative playfulness and subversive storytelling will be central organizing concepts for a description of three recent campaigns.

Introduction to the CIW

In the early 1990s, after the enactment of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), competition from Mexican tomato imports led to harsher working conditions for agricultural laborers in southwest Florida. Responding to the brutal beating of a farmworker for taking a water break, six workers began a hunger strike. This was followed by a work stoppage and a march on the offending contractor’s home. Structural pressure from NAFTA and physical violence against workers led to laborers from Mexico, Guatemala, and Haiti forming the CIW.

Since its founding, the CIW has resisted merging with the United Farm Workers (UFW) in order to utilize the secondary boycott, a tactic that targets buyers rather than producers of tomatoes to join the Fair Food Program. They have also avoided unionizing to maintain support of faith-based communities, groups who often shy away from working with unionized labor. The CIW is horizontally organized and has no formal leadership structure, but some members are more visible in organizing efforts with students, religious groups, and other allies. There is a small paid staff whose salaries are comparable to those of farmworkers and each is required to spend several weeks a year working in the tomato fields.

The CIW has constructed a human rights organization with a more emancipatory vision for human rights than those of most NGOs, with an emphasis on collective economic and social rights. Scholars like Kurasawa (2007), De Sousa Santos (2002, 2005, 2007a, 2007b), Goodale and Merry (2007), and Unger (2001) would agree that their grassroots, transnational perspective on ‘human rights as practice’ that originate in the Global South are human rights with truly emancipatory potential. The promise of human rights is central to the work of these scholars, whose perspectives decenter culturally monolithic Western liberal democratic understandings. They each centralize grassroots practices, cross-cultural and transnational perspectives on human rights and the role of an active civil society in their work. From their perspective human rights are changing rather than static, understood from the grassroots up instead of top-down, culture-centric, and emerge from a more radical conception of democracy.

The CIW’s conception of human rights is similar to these, but they do not emerge from these scholarly works. Instead, what has emerged from practice is a framework for human rights that is truly democratic and self-conscious, unlike the liberal democratic vision. The CIW does not reference major documents in the human rights cannon; instead, members insist that by virtue of their existence they are rights-bearing subjects. Their right to human rights is not based on citizenship or any other relationship with the state. They exercise those rights by resisting domination through their persistent and effective demands for fair wages and safe working conditions realized by building transnational solidarity with a diversity of allies. Their use of creative playfulness and subversive storytelling result from this agentic understanding of human rights as practice rather than theory.

The CIW works to correct human rights violations through ongoing campaigns to gain support from retailers for the Fair Food Program, the mechanism through which wages are increased and working conditions are improved. Once a retailer agrees to buy tomatoes from participating producers they pay a penny-per-pound wage increase to farmworkers for each pound of tomatoes they pick. This legally-binding agreement serves both the wage and worker protection goals of the organization. The Fair Food Standards Council (FFSC), a non-profit that operates on grants from the Kresge and Kellogg foundations, is responsible for oversight of the agreement and payment of the penny-per-pound wage increase to each farmworker (CIW, 2015).

The CIW is part of a wide network of workers’ movements around the world. They have supported workers in Ecuador protesting the Free Trade of the Americas’ ministerial meetings and Guatemala’s Federacion de Trabajadores Independientes del Campo (FTC), as well as Sinaltrainal workers in Colombia. They also have connections with Brazil’s Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST) and as part of their anti-slavery campaign have built a relationship with Oxfam. One way the CIW maintains this wide network of allies is by hosting an annual three-day gathering of supporters at their headquarters representing a variety of participants from across the CIW community.

It is also important to describe the role of the CIW’s closest allies. Membership in the CIW is open only to farmworkers. Based on the interest of outsiders who wish to support their mission, the CIW has created several organizations for non-farmworkers. They are the Student Farmworker Alliance (SFA) – an organization of university students; Interfaith Action – faith-based community partners; and Just Harvest – people whose support is based primarily on their interest in the sustainable food movement. Each of these allied organizations work under the CIW umbrella and would not exist without the support of the CIW. Due to changing demographics of supporters as well as changing administrative processes, these groups are currently being reorganized under a single banner called the Alliance for Fair Food.

The relationship between the SFA, Interfaith Action, Just Harvest, and the CIW is reciprocal. Campaigns and worker education programs are devised and led by the CIW, based in Immokalee, Florida. Regional partners, like SFA chapters working outside of southwest Florida, undertake individual campaigns in their own local areas. Organizers from the CIW travel frequently and are part of regional event planning; either in person or via phone conferencing. Regional groups also report back to the CIW after actions to discuss both successes and failures. Regional actions put pressure on retailers and food service groups at universities. These actions have impacted retailers’ decisions to join the Fair Food Program. Local actions also are a source of ideas for other chapters. Information is shared via social media and face-to-face at the annual Encuentro gathering. This results in a rather loosely organized network of allies devising actions that are effective in their own communities. Finally, students involved in the SFA frequently become interns in Immokalee for one of the allied groups. Students and other allies influence the work of the CIW but its members direct the organization. Allies work in support of the CIW’s mission, not the other way around.

The CIW receives financial support from a number of foundations but they remain dedicated to a worker-driven model of mobilizing. While NGOs do not play prominently in decision-making, campaigns, or tactics in their work, the CIW has been featured as a success story by several NGOs, for example Oxfam in its 2004 report, Like Machines in the Fields. Church allies, like Rabbis for Human Rights–North America and Florida United Methodists, however, do actively support their activist work. They not only provide material support, such as housing and food during events, but also church leader involvement bolsters their moral legitimacy. For instance, the Fast for Fair Food campaign in 2012 was situated within a framework of spirituality and involved a number of church leaders fasting alongside workers at Publix Supermarket headquarters in Lakeland, Florida.

Encuentro Gathering in Immokalee and Mística Theater

The Encuentro, or ‘gathering’, of farmworkers and their allies in Immokalee, Florida, builds solidarity, creates new campaigns, and allows participants to experience firsthand the local conditions of workers. The CIW intentionally deploys tactics rooted in Latin American struggles to build transnational solidarity among participants, many of whom are not farmworkers. I attended the Encuentro in September 2014 with about 70 other people, mostly students, to learn about the movement and to strategize for the campaign against Wendy’s. CIW actions have a reputation for being performative and boisterous. This year’s Encuentro began no differently. The history of the CIW, its successes, and ongoing campaigns were presented in a silent mística theater performance conducted by veterans to the movement alongside a few of the boldest members of the audience. Mística is but one tactic that demonstrates the creative playfulness and subversive storytelling of the CIW, intended to build transnational solidarity. Before explaining how it is used by the CIW, it is important to turn to scholars like Freire (1996) and Boal (1996) to understand the history and implementation of this radical popular education technique with its origins in Latin America.

With its roots in liberation theology, mística is political theater comprised of ‘short instances of theatre performance laden with the ritualistic use of symbols … normally five to ten minutes long and mute, accompanied only by music’ (Flynn, 2013: 172). Symbols are integral because they ‘materialize the abstract and acquire various meanings and connotations’ (Issa, 2007: 133). Mística incorporates banners, flags, signs and costumes and can be used during marches, protests, and occupations (Flynn, 2013). The basic guidelines are that mística should be brief, simple, solemn, and rehearsed (Issa, 2007), but as we see with the CIW’s use, these guidelines are not strictly adhered to. It often describes a problem for both the participants and the audience to develop their own subjective meanings from (Picher, 2007).

More compelling than the simple technical elements of mística, its basic tenet is that human beings are inherently creators. Theater generates a culture of transformation, is participatory, playful, and improvised based on the participants’ everyday experience. In ‘Praxis of Empowerment’, Daniela Issa describes mística’s ‘cultural contribution as practice that is resisting the homogenization of globalization; it is the Gramscian counterhegemonic alternative. Therefore, in addition to its inspirational element mística empowers members by creating their collective identity and reviving their culture, contributing to its organization’ (2007: 125). Culture, resistance, creativity, individual identity, and politics are all connected in the practice of mística theater.

Mística is not only meant to raise the consciousness of participants and audiences about social problems but to do so by appealing to their emotions through the creation of a playful environment (Picher, 2007). It can be ‘beautiful’ and ‘moving’ and appeal to feelings of love, as authors like Flynn (2013) and Issa (2007) have described with Brazil’s Landless Worker’s Movement – the movement most well-known for employing mística theater. However, the CIW often incorporates caricaturized imagery, emphatic movements and expressions that convey a more satirical and humorous story, often invoking laughter from the audience. That is not to say the meaning is any less powerful – the delivery simply tends toward the comic rather than the solemn.

Contrary to the description by some experts, solemn would not be a good descriptor of the mística performed at the 2014 Encuentro gathering. The performance began with a demonstration of violence, wage theft, and debt peonage of workers before the CIW formed. It was followed by a series of vignettes describing the struggles against each retailer and successful campaigns. It ended with actors performing a skit about the ongoing campaign against Wendy’s. While human rights violations are a serious matter, the message was delivered in a humorous and optimistic way. Participants wore bold costumes and used emphatic gestures to demonstrate how working conditions have improved with every signee to the Fair Food Program. By the end of the performance, a mock march accompanied by son jarocho music resulted in laughs from every corner of the room.

The CIW make regular use of a radical performance technique that is improvisational, participatory, empowering, and accessible to people who may have no formal training in theater. The silence of mística theater enables participants who come from diverse communities to create their own meaning. This collaborative and democratic technique of subversive storytelling that incorporates creative playfulness is but one medium through which we can experience solidarity that defies borders. But there is another tactical medium through which the CIW builds this solidarity, son jarocho music. Although music is part of the annual gathering it is a key feature of marches and will be described as part of the March for Rights, Respect, and Fair Food of 2013.

March for Rights, Respect, and Fair Food and Son Jarocho Music

Each year in the spring, the CIW organizes a major action – a march, a concert, or other protest that brings everyone from the CIW together with all of their allies. It is unlike the regional actions that occur throughout the year where a few CIW organizers work with regional allies in smaller, local campaigns. In 2013, the major action was a 170-mile march across Florida, beginning in Immokalee and ending at Publix Supermarket headquarters in Lakeland. A number of grocery store chains have joined with the CIW to buy tomatoes grown, picked, and distributed by those who agree to abide by the Fair Food Agreement, but despite years of pressure, Publix has refrained from joining the CIW’s Fair Food Program.

Prior to discussing the march itself, it is important to contextualize the purpose of the march as well as the organization it is intended to capture the attention of. Publix is a large grocery store chain currently expanding throughout the southeastern US. It is no accident that Publix has been an ongoing target in the CIW’s campaign for fair wages and working conditions. Not only is their headquarters near Immokalee but they are also the region’s top buyer of tomatoes grown there. The CEO-owner Carol Jenkins Barnett, daughter of founder George Jenkins, is also among the world’s top 1500 richest people listed by Forbes magazine (Dolan and Kroll, 2015). One of the world’s richest people refusing to pay agricultural workers pennies more for picking tomatoes sold at her stores serves a striking symbolic purpose for the movement.

A march that lasted 13 days required not only determination but also diversion. Son jarocho music is played at virtually every CIW event and the 2013 march was no different. Jaraners, or people who play the jarana, a guitar-like instrument, provided not only entertainment but carried the message of the CIW. Lively and improvisational, son jarocho has a notable and important history in struggles in Latin America. Contemporary bands like Los Lobos and Las Cafeteras play recognizable son jarocho music. There are a number of son styles, each originating in a different region of Mexico as early as the mid-1700s. What makes the jarocho style different is its Afro-Mexican history (Sheehy, 1979; Sheehy and Olsen, 2008). Son jarocho originated in Veracruz and has been played in support of many Afro-Mexican political struggles in Mexico. This classical musical style was brought to the US. at the start of the Chicano/a movement in California (Alvarez, 2007).

Son jarocho was censored by the Catholic Church as well as the Mexican government for its provocative lyrics and accompanying dance. Songs and performances were critical of the Church and political leadership in Mexico. It was also associated with organized resistance elsewhere in the Americas. Historically, son jarocho brought together people of color and was therefore perceived as a threat to the colonial social order by the local leaders who prohibited it (Díaz-Sánchez and Hernández, 2013). As it has spread, it has continued to be associated with populist movements.

This style of music is improvisational with common verses altered according to the singer’s desires and context of the performance. La Guacamaya and Café con pan are common songs that are heard at most performances, although the exact lyrics will vary. When son jarocho is played with dancing on a tarimba (low wooden table) in order to narrate struggle, it is called a fandango (Díaz-Sánchez and Hernández, 2013). Historico-political satire combined with sexualized double-entendre lyricism is standard repertoire at fandangos. Díaz-Sánchez and Hernández describe son jarocho as:

a counter-hegemonic method that involves physically overwhelming the coercive system of the state … and [music] performed by people with social grievances is a command for basic human rights … and diverse representation of ensembles that parade the streets of Veracruz is a Guerra de los sonidos, and constitutes a creative demand of recognition from a historically aggrieved community. (2013: 197)

Son jarocho is a creative and playful musical style with a rich history of association with protest and has roots in both Mexico and Africa.

At virtually every CIW gathering there are the jaraneros playing son jarocho. Meetings, marches, and festivities are always accompanied by music. El Centro Cultural de Mexico is an organization in Los Angeles that shared office space with a CIW group in the early days of the movement. They introduced the organization to the musical style (Gouge, 2014). Outside of Florida, son jarocho remains a central feature of actions and festivities. While son jarocho critique was historically directed at the Church and political leadership, the subject of today’s son jarocho improvisation by the CIW are the targets of campaigns for the Fair Food Program; companies like Wendy’s and Publix. At CIW actions traditional songs are played with a biting lyrical humor directed at retailers who continue to tolerate human rights abuses of farmworkers.

This lively musical style is one of the mediums through which creative playfulness and subversive storytelling creates solidarity between participants and allies to the CIW struggle. It is also recognizable by participants from the region. The songs played at the march not only told the story of the CIW but also poked fun at Publix, whose leadership has refused to meet with the CIW for years. At the march, CIW musicians took liberties with lyrics from recognizable songs and set them to energetic music to keep marchers mobilized while walking up to 25 miles a day in the Florida heat to Publix headquarters. This medium is another way the CIW makes deliberate efforts to create solidarity that transcends geographic and cultural boundaries. The last campaign to be discussed is more somber yet incorporates one of the concepts frequently implemented by the CIW, subversive storytelling.

Modern Day Slavery Museum and Subversive Storytelling

The campaigns that I have described above incorporated both creative playfulness and subversive storytelling. The final campaign I will describe is the anti-slavery museum built by the CIW. It serves as an example of the CIW’s use of subversive storytelling in building transnational solidarity for both the participants and targets of their campaign to end modern-day slavery. This mobile museum is housed in the back of a cargo truck. Visitors walk into the back of the truck to view photographs, artifacts, and exhibits that link the working conditions of farmworkers today to the lives of African and African-American slaves in the US. The museum has made appearances at many universities in the United States and on the National Mall in Washington, DC. The CIW owns and operates the museum and displays it on request at festivals and marches.

In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson uses examples from Asia to describe the political and imaginative project of building museums. He says that ‘museums, and the museumizing imagination, are both profoundly political’ (2006: 178) and are generally nationalist projects. The case of the modern-day slavery museum built by the CIW is not one of these projects. It does not present a sanitized and nationalistic version of treatment or working conditions of agricultural workers in the US. To understand how this is an example of subversive storytelling, it is important to understand the history of these museums.

Grassroots community museums are just that, collections of artifacts and narratives created by the communities they represent. They contribute to building a sense of community, create representations of histories for people often excluded from museums curated by professionals, and in some cases, can attract revenue for the communities they represent. In addition to the more material aspects, grassroots community museums also have the power to ‘legitimize and empower its contents … and culture’ (Hoobler, 2006: 443).

The founder of the grassroots community museum movement was George Henry Riviere, who advocated at a UNESCO regional seminar in 1958 for a new role for museums, one that was not built by and for the wealthy or tourists. He said a museum was ‘a mirror in which the local population views itself to discover its own image’, an ‘expression of time’, a ‘laboratory’, a ‘conservation center’, and a ‘school’ (Riviere in Hoobler, 2006: 446). While he was advocating for them in his native France, the idea soon spread to Germany and, in 1972, to Latin America at a UNESCO roundtable in Chile. Like the CIW’s museum of modern-day slavery, grassroots community museums are not limited to geographies or particular peoples.

Unlike traditional museums, artifacts and accompanying narratives placed on display are the result of a collaborative process among those who are represented. For the first time communities have the opportunity to construct public representations of their identities, values, and histories (Healy, 2003). Community museums do not lose their artifacts to distant institutions or destruction by uninterested dominant cultures; they remain in their home communities. To bring this back to subversive storytelling, the items and narratives that may not be valued by the dominant culture become part of a meaningful narrative created by the communities themselves. These grassroots museums have in effect appropriated a Western institution to create a ‘counterdiscourse to hegemonic representations of indigenas’ (Hoobler, 2006: 452).

The CIW’s museum is a deliberate attempt to tell such a story. Simply walking through a museum housed in the same sort of truck that tomato workers were forced to live in for over two years is meant to send a powerful message to the viewer. These workers went on to be the subjects of a successful prosecution for violations of the 13th amendment that resulted in lengthy prison sentences for the perpetrators. Similar to most museums, this one tells a visual story that includes photos and artifacts. The CIW constructed their own narrative that connects the abject working conditions of immigrant laborers today with those of Africans and African-Americans under chattel slavery in the US. Artifacts like a worker’s bloodied shirt after an attack by a crew leader and photographs of a worker’s swollen wrists after being chained inside a truck overnight tell a powerful story that makes the connection come to life. Engaging the social imagination of the visitor is central to making this story ring true (Griffis, 2012).

While the most public purpose of the museum was to gain consumer support for the Fair Food Program, it serves an additional purpose for members of the movement. The museum examines historic violations of basic human rights and draws a direct line to today’s circumstances. This builds solidarity that not only crosses national and cultural borders but also transcends history. The museum also builds connections that empower participants to see the circumstances under which they work as the result of structural forces that have been in place for centuries. Rather than victimizing participants, it empowers them to continue making demands for human rights, like fair wages and safe working conditions. Telling this subversive story attracts new supporters of the CIW’s fight for farmworkers’ human rights and builds a transnational solidarity among participants that goes beyond nation or regional cultures, while also extending to a time when slavery was legal in the US. Thanks to the work of the CIW, involuntary servitude like that of the pre-Civil War era in the US has been virtually eradicated in Florida’s agricultural sector, but conditions in the tomato industry in Mexico continue to be brutal. It was not until recently that workers in Mexico mounted sustained pressure on growers and buyers in the tomato industry to improve wages and working conditions.

Recent Strikes in Mexico and Their Links to the CIW

Early in 2015 agricultural workers began striking for fair wages and safe working conditions, making demands and using tactics that are strikingly similar to those of the CIW. What follows here is a brief description of the context of agricultural workers in Mexico and an account of sustained resistance in the tomato industry. Grassroots human rights movement organizations of agricultural workers resisting low wages and brutal working conditions are a newly emerging phenomenon in Mexico. The current strikes have been influenced by the model of the CIW. This movement is new and is found in a more repressive context for striking workers; creative playfulness and subversive storytelling similar to that of the CIW have not yet appeared as tactics, but as communication continues across organizations, attention to the implementation and development of new tactics is necessary for development of theory and practice within the transnational human rights movement.

It is important to describe the recent historical context of agricultural workers in the tomato industry in Mexico. In July of 2013, a massive slavery operation was uncovered in the state of Jalisco. Almost 300 people were found living in conditions of forced servitude (CIW, 2015). Since then, the CIW has repeatedly expressed sympathy and the need for a similar program to improve the working conditions of tomato workers in Mexico. It was not until December of 2014 that an official position regarding the implementation of a model similar to theirs was expressed by the CIW (Marquis, 2014). It was around that time the LA Times published a four-part series on the involvement of US corporations in the tomato industry in Mexico (Marosi, 2014). The CIW lauded the exposé but the official position was that widespread government corruption in Mexico prevented a worker-led social responsibility program like theirs from being put into place. Nonetheless, they expressed hopeful sentiment that one day a model like theirs might improve the conditions of tomato workers across the border.

In March 2015, farmworkers in San Quintin, Mexico, organized massive protests and work stoppages that crippled the year’s tomato harvest. Strikers also organized long-distance marches and road blockades. Their demands included: raising the daily minimum wage to the equivalent of about US$20; reducing the average workday from 12 to eight hours; payment of overtime for work on Sundays; the right to organize outside of unions; and an end to sexual abuse of women in the fields (Young, 2015). It is no accident these demands are remarkably similar to those of the CIW. One prominent organizer, Fidel Sanchez, spent several years actively organizing with the CIW in Immokalee in the late 1990s (Marosi, 2015).

In early April 2015, a commission representing 80,000 farmworkers marched from San Quintin to Mexico City to meet with government officials to discuss their demands (Conn, 2015). Workers have crippled not only tomato exports but also berries and onions. The CIW has reported on these strikes and has continued to express solidarity with farmworkers in Mexico. While they have reported no change in their official position with respect to a CIW model being ready for implementation in Mexico, they have been vocal in their support for the strikes and are hopeful they will result in reforms (CIW, 2015).

Mische’s (2011) social network theory that considers of the role of communication as a conduit of culture is a useful frame for analyzing the back-and-forth flow of ideas between transnational social movement organizations. One key organizer in Mexico, Fidel Sanchez, has credited his organizing skills to the CIW and his time working in Florida with them (Marosi, 2015). He returned to Mexico as a seasoned organizer and continues to be visible and influential in molding a new era of resistance. Within a social network framework, Sanchez demonstrates Michael Peter Smith’s ‘globalized grassroots politics’ (1994), where transnational information sharing and political work, in this case organizing, follow the same routes as migrants themselves.

What is the role of creative playfulness and subversive storytelling in the tomato fields of Mexico? Do they play a role in building a similar sort of transnational solidarity? Is there a place for tactics such as those employed by the CIW in this context? While the available information, like interviews with striking workers, news reports, and social media, suggests the strikers are not employing creative playfulness and subversive storytelling in a manner similar to that of the CIW, the agricultural workers’ sustained resistance in Mexico is relatively new. The CIW has been organizing for over 20 years while the strikes in the tomato industry in Mexico are quite recent. Despite this, they have already placed sustained pressure on the agricultural industry with significant economic consequences; estimations have been made of well into the millions in lost profit for US retailers (Conn, 2015). In the face of violent police and military repression the strikes have continued. While tentative agreements have been reached, promises made by the Mexican government have not been fulfilled and, as of July 2015, the strikes continue.

It is important to consider the repressive national context in which these strikers are organizing, especially in light of the recent disappearance of the 43 student activists in Guerrero. Organizing in the US can result in harassment and intimidation, but repression of dissent elsewhere is more dangerous. That is not to say that retailers who buy produce outside of the Fair Food Program or abroad should turn a blind eye to the working conditions of laborers in their supply chain. Companies like Driscoll, one target of the boycott in Mexico, could refuse to buy products from growers who violate the rights of their workers. They could, in fact, leverage their own market power to support reforms in Mexico until worker-driven programs like that of the CIW could gain traction. But it is too early to tell how the ongoing strikes will end, and whether or not a worker-led program like the one created by the CIW will be implemented in the tomato industry of Mexico.

For now, it also remains unknown what role creative playfulness and subversive storytelling – at least those that resemble the techniques used by the CIW – may play in the movement as it moves forward. Perhaps these will be useful techniques as the workers in Mexico build allies, or as the movement grows in strength. This movement will be important for both scholars and activists to watch for development of resistance techniques as well as the building of stronger transnational ties among workers. What is certain is that solidarity with the CIW has influenced these strikes, especially the framing of labor rights as human rights in the ongoing struggle for justice in the tomato fields of Mexico.

Conclusion

The self-conscious and deliberate use of creative playfulness and subversive storytelling in both their campaigns for human rights and in building solidarity has contributed to many of the CIW’s successes. This transnational organization has cooperatively built a diverse network of allies and techniques to target corporations for contributing to low wages and unsafe working conditions. Several different techniques through which these concepts were deployed have been presented alongside three successful campaigns: son jarocho music played during a grueling march; mística theater that showed rather than told the CIW’s history to conference attendees; and a grassroots community museum connecting workers across time and space. All of these campaigns demonstrate the different modes through which the CIW constructs transnational solidarity based on democratic human rights practices.

This study, implementing several methodologies to explore three tactics employed by the CIW, has demonstrated that both creative playfulness and subversive storytelling are explanatory concepts for understanding how the group and their allies leverage emotions and tell alternative stories that aid in building solidarity among diverse participants. The recent strikes in Mexico have emerged as an example of transnational solidarity worth watching, in particular their tactics and potential for continued growth of the transnational human rights movement.

Tactics such as these, with radical and democratic histories employed by the CIW, contribute to overcoming challenges of building transnational solidarity among participants, inclusive of farmworkers from diverse indigenous communities, students, faith-based communities, and other allies. The CIW has impacted the recent strikes in the tomato industry in Mexico. This serves as a potent example of transnational solidarity in action.

Creative playfulness and subversive storytelling have the potential to ‘transform the dominant discourse’ (Yúdice, 1998: 378) by incorporating improvisation, joy, and making connections between individual experience and structural processes. For example, in tomato agriculture in Florida, workers now have the right to rest, shade, and water. Growers who once refused these now attract the most competitive workers based on the improved conditions in their fields and as a result have seen increased profits. These same growers now express concerns about the health of workers to Fair Food Standards Council inspectors (Gouge, 2014). Both the practice and discourse in the tomato fields of Florida has changed as a result of the CIW’s campaigns. Creative playfulness and subversive storytelling tap into emotions like joy that build lasting solidarity that is essential to sustaining the movement (Goodwin et al., 2001; Jasper, 1997).

There are a number of opportunities identified by this work for future research on this topic. For a richer understanding of social movement organizations, further study is needed on the role of emotions, like joy, and the use of humor and play. In part, this could be accomplished with continued development of concepts like creative playfulness and subversive storytelling. Specifically it would be helpful to conduct comparative studies of other organizations to refine these concepts as well as their potential usefulness in scholarly social movement research. Further research is also needed on how grassroots human rights organizations influence one another both within and outside of the US context, especially burgeoning workers’ movements like the one in Mexico.

Perhaps a study of the CIW as a transnational human rights organization from a social movement unionism perspective (Scipes, 2014; Nissen, 2003; Moody, 1997) would shed light on the expansion of these movements into the US. As recently as 2014, social movement unionism scholar Scipes asserted that there were no such groups currently operating in the US. A review of his criteria suggests otherwise. For instance, the CIW collectively organize on their own behalf; workers have democratic control of the decision-making process; their work is intended to challenge the existing social order; and importantly, they are building an international network in the US, Mexico, and Brazil (Moody, 1997). Workers organizing in the blueberry industry in Maine, tomato industry workers in Mexico, and dairy workers in Vermont alongside the CIW would make an ideal case study of this phenomenon. A systematic study of contemporary human rights movement groups organizing across borders and their tactics, successes, and orientation toward social change would benefit scholars and practitioners alike.

The CIW build campaigns against corporate targets for improved wages and working conditions of migrant farmworkers that incorporate creative playfulness and subversive storytelling. These have resulted in building transnational solidarity within a diverse organization, an expansive group of allies, and among human rights movement organizations in the US and elsewhere – solidarity that is key to their multiple successes. They have not only received numerous human rights awards but in practice they have influenced similar movements elsewhere. Their democratic vision of human rights as practice employed in their campaigns continues to be lauded as a model for implementation elsewhere and in other industries.