Ariana Avila

ARIANA AVILA, then a graduate student and University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, was awarded a grant in October 2022 to aid research on “Food Care and Farmworker Communities: Addressing Food Apartheid in Immokalee, Florida,” supervised by Dr. Angela Stuesse. Known as the tomato capital of the nation, Immokalee’s (Florida) farmworker population encounters food insecurity in their own households. Mainly migrating from Guatemala, Haiti, and Mexico, farmworkers in Immokalee face multiple barriers to accessing food such as transportation, cost, housing, and language differences. However, this research examines the ways in which Immokalee’s multicultural farmworker population care for one another by practicing food sharing as a strategy to make life livable amid food apartheid. By collaborating with the Cultivate Abundance community garden, a local organization addressing food insecurity in Immokalee, the research poses the following questions: 1) In what ways does food apartheid exist and affect people who work in the fields and packinghouses in Immokalee? 2) How do people who work in Immokalee’s fields and packinghouses enact food sharing relationships as care? and 3) How are gardens created for and by im/migrant communities situated within food sovereignty? Results show the importance of social relationships in nurturing networks for food sharing and community around gardening culturally-recognized foods. This project offers an opportunity to expand on existing literature on sharing foods from work, pantries, and gardens as a practice of care amid food apartheid and rural precarity.