It is also home to a radio station that the coalition runs and a small general store stocked with the basics of a Hispanic kitchen priced low to dissuade other shopkeepers in town from gouging customers. I met Geraldo Reyes there one afternoon. He had agreed to guide me on a walking tour of the migrants’ side of Immokalee, a part of town few outsiders see.Reyes is a tall, lanky Mexican in his early thirties. His normal demeanor is sleepy eyed and serious, but it can lighten instantly when he breaks into his infectious gap-toothed smile. He came to the United States about fifteen years ago and rented mattress space in a trailer. One of his roommates told a harrowing tale of being held as a slave and how a group called the Coalition of Immokalee Workers had helped set him free. Intrigued, Reyes started attending weekly discussion group meetings organized by the coalition and eventually began working for the group almost full time, although he still puts in a stint as a watermelon picker in North Florida and Georgia each summer.As we set out along a sandy path, he told me that it was wrong to view slavery in Florida’s fields as a series of isolated cases.
