Opinion: Migrants Must Stay on Board

When Carmen Rivera gets to work every morning, she checks her office for messages and then starts walking. She’s a social worker who goes door-to-door at the Everglades farmworker camp, which houses about 400 families, visiting residents and identifying needs. She rarely has time to sit down in her sparsely furnished office. But when the…

It’s been a month since the family moved from Michigan, said Andrea’s mother, Heather Rodriguez, and they’re still settling into their new lives in Florida. It’s been an adjustment, she said, but a welcome one. “We’ve never lived in such a pretty place,” Rodriguez, 29, said of the new two-bedroom, two-bathroom town home the family…

Metro Commissioner Larry Hawkins wants to block the purchase of a South Dade trailer park that is  a key part of a permanent housing plan for farmworkers in South Dade. The housing plan developed  by the Everglades Community Association was unanimously approved three months ago by the  Metro-Dade Commission. It hinges on the county buying…

Metro commissioners have agreed to turn the reins of the financially troubled Everglades Migrant Labor Camp over to a 15- member nonprofit corporation controlled by farmworkers. The management plan accepted last week was a blend of proposals forwarded by rival camp factions who recently have smoothed out their differences. Read the article Nonprofit Group to…

Juanita Mainster’s own life motivates her to rewrite the usual script for children of migrant and seasonal farmworkers. The 42-year-old can easily recall being rounded up by the Border Patrol in fields north of Brownsville, Texas, and deported to Mexico — even though she was a U.S. citizen. “My parents were undocumented, so I got…