Thursday, September 7, 2017

Civil Rights Activist Silvia Giagnoni and her book FIELDS OF RESISTANCE: THE STRUGGLE OF FLORIDA'S FARMWORKERS FOR JUSTICE "America's Tomato Picker"

Chris Rice Cooper 
https://www.facebook.com/christalann.ricecooper


*The images in this specific piece are granted copyright privilege by:  Public Domain, CCSAL, GNU Free Documentation Licenses, Fair Use Under The United States Copyright Law, or given copyright privilege by the copyright holder which is identified beneath the individual photo.

*Portions highlighted in this color are excerpts from Fields of Resistance The Struggle of Florida’s Farmworkers For Justice




Silvia Giagnoni’s Fields of Resistance
The Struggle of Florida’s Farmworkers For Justice.
“America’s Tomato Picker”


Los tomates de Immokalee nacieron verdes
Los hombres al piscar se ponen verdes
Y el comprador nunca pierde

Immokalee’s tomatoes were born green
The men at the time of picking turn green
But the buyer never loses anything

      
Silvia Giagnoni always remembers seeing a farmworker or migrant worker in her home country of Prato, Italy because it was part of her every day life.
In Italy today, people are from China, Eastern Europe and all over Africa come to look for work.  Most tomato pickers who harvest the fields of Southern Italy are African.  The living and working conditions of these migrants are not dissimilar to the ones of those who are held captive somewhere in the fields of Immokalee.


After she received her Master’s Degree in Mass Communi   
cations from La Sapienza University Rome, Italy she moved to Florida, the fourth state with the most immigrants (California has the most) in 2003.  She settled in Boca Raton, Florida where she attended Florida Atlantic University and received her Ph.D. in Comparative Studies.
While she worked as an adjunct instructor at Florida Atlantic University she wrote about the migrant farmworkers of Immokalee, Florida in the book Fields of Resistance The Struggle of Florida’s Farmworkers For Justice published by Haymarket Books
       Fields of Resistance:  The Struggle of Florida’s Farmworkers for Justice chronicles a seven-month period (between November 2007 to May 2008), the length of the harvest in this part of the country, during which I regularly visited Immokalee and which coincided with crucial moments of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ Burger King Campaign.

        We’ve all been to Taco Bell, McDonalds, Burger King, or even drank Coca Cola (owner of Minute Maid) and as a result we all somehow have benefited from paying poverty wages to farmworkers.  Giagnoni insists that it doesn’t matter the legal status of the farmworker; what matters is the American dream – getting a fair wage for his or her work.
 
Regardless of their status, whether they are American citizens or seasonal workers on H-2A visas or undocumented immigrants Florida farmworkers still earn sub-poverty wages and have no right to overtime compensation health insurance,
or paid vacation.    To begin with, they are asking for fairer wages.  In essence, they are asking the American people to consider who harvests the food that ends up on their tables.
Giagnoni reveals that as of 2011 farmworkers in Immokalee, Florida handpick 90% of the tomatoes consumed in the entire United States.  It is these Immokalee tomatoes that restaurants such as Burger King, McDonalds, and Taco Bell prefer more than any other tomato.

These companies prefer to buy tomatoes grown in Florida, whose consistency makes them easier to slice and, therefore, perfectly for hamburgers.  Although both the United States and Canada import tomatoes from Mexico, where the harvest never stops during the year, those fruits are actually too juicy, and often are ruined by the time they reach their destination.

 Most of the farmworkers in Immokalee are undocumented workers, which makes them prime targets for exploitation by rich farmers and restaurant CEOs due to the fact that there is no federally funded legal services to protect these individuals.

It is these individuals that Giagnoni (far left) spent her time with; getting to know their families, their churches, their soup kitchens, their schools, and more importantly their fight for the farmworker to gain a fair and legal wage.

The narrative unfolds as I meet and interview farmworkers and their families, activists, religious people and social workers.  The book provides a personal account of these encounters, the “everyday life” moments I shared with the people of Immokalee, but also attempts to provide historical and social background to better situate the events.  

       The Immokalee’s Guadalupe Center is a saving presence in these farm workers’ lives.  It offers free clothing, free preschool, and is a free soup kitchen serving hot soup every day for lunch – the only hot meal most of these farm workers will consume in a 24-hour period.  The Guadalupe Center’s main mission is to free the farmworkers from poverty through education. 
Paco “Paquito” Gonzales is an example of this and now works at the Guadalupe Center.  He has been assigned to be Giagnoni’s guide and takes her to one of the rundown mobile homes most of the farmworkers inhabit. 

       Multiple trailers often share the same bathroom. The sewage system is inadequate and very old.  Paco pauses.  Up to fifteen people live in one trailer. They often sleep on the floor without even a mattress, “stuck next to each other like sardines,” as Paco puts it.  To have this space and live in these conditions, some workers pay as much as $300 per month.

       These farmworkers will get up as early as five in the morning to catch the bus to go to the many fields (sometimes three hours distance). 

       Once in the fields, the workers must wait for the dew to dry; picking when the plants are still wet would ruin the tomatoes.  The farmworkers are paid by piece rate and they need to be fast:  in order to earn $50 a day, they must pick four thousand pounds of tomatoes.


The average pay for a tomato picker in 2008 was $400 a week which is about a 14 hour work day – six days a week – which equals to about  $4.64 hour.   And these same migrant workers who earn $4.64 per hour are huge contributors to a global economy of thirteen billion dollars a year.  In 2008, when Giagnoni was in the process of researching this book, the Florida minimum wage was $6.79 an hour.

       Many of these farmworkers are working not only to feed themselves but to also send money back to their loved ones in their home country. Giagnoni met farmworker Jorge who has a wife and three children in Hidalgo, Mexico.  Jorge spends $12 for every five hundred dollars or $15 for every one hundred dollars he sends to his wife via Western Union
It’s a guarantee that the Western Union workers on the other end are getting paid at least minimum wage and are working in a safe and clean environment.  Just like the rich farm owners and rich CEOs of Goldman Sachs.

       After the liberalization of the North American market with NAFTA, U.S. growers have coped with rising operating costs (i.e., gas for transportation) and increased competition from Mexican farmers (by keeping workers’ wages low).  On the other hand, fast food chains’ demands for cheap tomatoes has put additional pressure on the growers.  Thus the idea of paying more for labor, even one cent more per pound, seems like blasphemy.  It’s “Un-American,” according to Reggie Brown (above), vice president of the FTGE.  The arrangement, however, would result in almost doubling the workers’ wages: from 45 to 77 cents per bucket of tomatoes.
      
“Why would (growers) allow anyone other than their own management to set wage rates?”  Brown added.  Perhaps because the bonuses of top executives of Goldman Sachs, the primary bank holding company subsidizing Burger King, exceeded $200 million in 2006. Twice as much as the amount ten thousand tomato pickers collectively earned in South Florida during the same year.
       The irony is that the famous one cent per pound is not even coming out of the farmers’ pocket; the world’s largest fast food restaurant company Yum! Brands – which controls Taco Bell and McDonalds are paying for the
increase.

       In May of 2008 Giagnoni details the victory of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers http://www.ciw-online.org:  Burger King agrees to give the farmworkers a 71% raise – from 45 cents to 77 cents per bucket of tomatoes.   They still do not get sick leave, vacation leave, or health insurance (even though they are exposed to harmful pesticides) but it is still a victory.





       In the epilogue Giagnoni gives the readers an update of all the people she had contact with and where they are now.  She also describes Immokalee as a place that gave her purpose and the needed drive to carry on. 

       Immokalee became the place where I would go to regenerate, where I returned to look for the core of things.  It was almost as if I were striving to recuperate a sense of authenticity that I felt missing in coastal Florida.

Giagnoni pleas for all American citizens to have the courage to make themselves no longer invisible – and to become visible on behalf of the migrant farmworker and for the sake of justice.

This remoteness, this invisibility, contributes to a generalized sense of disconnection (from the land and those who work it) that is also a form of alienation, and it ultimately hides the fundamental injustice on which Western societies like ours are based upon.  So when farmworkers stage protests in the streets, and the invisible becomes visible again:  choosing to not see then means to living in denial.  And it makes us all complicit, whether we like it or not.



*Silvia Giagnoni is now an American citizen and resides in Montgomery, Alabama where she is Associate Professor of Communications and Theater at Auburn University of Montgomery.  
She maintains a blog at http://anitalian
onmontgomery.
blogspot.com 
and can be contacted via Facebook at  https://
www.facebook.
com/silvia.giagnoni.7





Friday, September 1, 2017

The Character Driven Thriller Crime Novel Will Guarantee Readers the Shock of a Lifetime . . . .

 Chris Rice Cooper 


*The images in this specific piece are granted copyright privilege by:  Public Domain, CCSAL, GNU Free Documentation Licenses, Fair Use Under The United States Copyright Law, or given copyright privilege by the copyright holder which is identified beneath the individual photo.

**Some of the links will have to be copies and then posted in your search engine in order to pull up properly



1.  Chris Rice Cooper’s analysis of M.V. Ghiorghi’s Blood Matter
“A Shock to the Reader!”

2.  M.V. Ghiorghi:  How I Got The Idea to Write Blood Matter

3.  Blood Matter:  Excerpts


1.  Chris Rice Cooper’s analysis of M.V. Ghiorghi’s Blood Matter
“A Shock to the Reader!”

On November 20, 2015 Divertir Publishing http://divertirpublishing.com/books/bm.html
published Blood Matter by M.V. Ghiorghi 
https://www.facebook
The Prologue of Blood Matter begins with the execution of an unrepentant and violent death row inmate.  It ends with a mentally unstable mother who abandons her newborn baby on the railroad tracks.




Unknowingly, these two events of the Prologue have lasting affects on FBI Agent Joe Vasquez.  Vasquez is already haunted by many sorrows: his father’s murder; the death of his beloved mother Isabella; the death of six-month-old son Alberto from sudden infant death syndrome; and the painful divorce from wife Lane.
These demons of sorrow have left Vasquez feeling empty and full of void. He can no longer sleep in the master bedroom he shared with his wife and he refuses to remove anything from Alberto’s room including his baby blanket and crib.  All he has left is his career in law enforcement and the memories of his dead loved ones.
Then his life takes a twisted turn when he encounters two serial killers: Doll-maker and Viper.  The mysterious Viper sadistically tortures and kills men who are on death row or serving life terms for murder.  How does Viper manage to kill these men?  Is it someone from the prison – perhaps another inmate?  But then Viper somehow manages to get out of prison into the outside world and in the process fatally shoots Joe’s partner Steve. (image attributed to Frederik Ruysch)
Joe is even more wounded and memories of his dead partner Steve and his dead loved ones continue to haunt him with more intensity.  At first appearance it seems that Joe is out for revenge – to catch a serial killer who killed his partner.  But it is more than that – Joe is a complicated figure who places all of his energy into this case because literally he has nothing left.  It is his only chance of redemption.  Maybe if he solves this case his demons will go away and his wounded spirit will begin to heal? 
Joe learns that forensic psychiatrist Dr. Gabrielle Lubovich at one time interviewed Viper’s victims.  Dr. Lubovich is a charismatic, youthful, beautiful woman with a past of her own.  Soon he learns of her connections with Congressman Damien Sheppard who was at one time a full time Professor of Psychiatry at the Dallas Graduate Institute, the same institute Gabrielle attended. Joe’s intuition is now telling him that Gabrielle has something to hide and he finds himself attracted to her physical beauty and her mysterious nature.
He then learns information that leads him to believe that Gabrielle is on the death list of both the Doll-maker and the Viper.   He then realizes that there is still love in his heart for someone else:  he is in love with Gabrielle.


Every word in Blood Matter matters – excuse the pun.  It matters to the point where the reader will want to go back and reread certain sections, especially the Prologue, and only then realize the connections. (Image attributed to Teodors Oders)
Blood Matter is a character driven crime novel full of authentic colorful characters (some are not even mentioned in this piece due to spoiler alerts).  Yet Blood Matter also has the characteristics of a crime noir novel: suspense, gun battles, car chases, chases on a moving train, fights, sex, mystery, blackmail, and plenty of eye-opening surprises. 
It is also a well-researched book and reveals realistic descriptive scenes on the FBI, Law Enforcement, forensics, the happenings on death row, and the dark forces of DNA.
      


2.  M.V. Ghiorghi’s Explains Where She Got The Idea for Blood Matter
M.V. Ghiorghi grew up in Russian Caucasus. When the simmering war flared up in the turbulent region, the author’s parents were persuaded to let their Georgian/Jewish mutt offspring seek a future in the U.S. The author arrived with a one-way ticket, $400, and a suitcase filled with manuscripts in Russian written during school breaks. 
After a few years, the author became proficient in and fell in love with the English language. Blood Matter is this aspiring actor and filmmaker’s first novel.  Below she explains how the idea of Blood Matter first came to her and her experience of writing the novel.
Years back, in Caucasus, my father had a childhood friend (Alex) who dabbed in black magic when they were kids. More precisely, my dad was a kid, and Alex was an older teenager in love with my aunt, and for this reason befriended my father, her little brother, and let him tag along.
In his magical training, Alex followed an old, prerevolutionary Russian book. The training included tricks like digging up graves, killing black cats to dissect them at a cemetery at night, in order to extract a certain bone, etc. Pretty much, a training to foster a psychopath.
These ‘tests of the will’ prepared one to perform psychic following of test subjects (one lay in bed at night and imagined coming up the stairs of the test-subject’s house, entering the bedroom, and strangling him, for example), causing them night terrors, tripping people while they walked by. All that amounted to a sort of hypnosis from the distance.  Later, as an adult, Alex became a psychiatric professor in Leningrad- and made quite a name for himself as a hypnotizer. He was unusual- he did not need the subject’s permission to hypnotize them, which is considered ‘impossible.’ (Hypnotic Seance by Richard Bergin)
So naturally, growing up, I was fascinated by my father’s stories about this man’s ability.
Much later, as a student, while in Moscow, I tried to write to him. His response discouraged any further contact- probably because by then my sister managed to visit Leningrad- and to spurn his son (a somewhat crazy young psychiatrist to be), just as my aunt spurned Alex in their youth, and so Alex had a very scant contact with my dad and our family. (Photo of author as a little girl with her father).
And so the theme percolated and percolated- and different pieces were coming together for years.
Meanwhile, I came to the US after graduation from Moscow University, (on left) learned English, and started to write my stories down- as screenplays (my English wasn’t ripe for novels.)
Then, I got divorced and went to a private graduate school in Oregon (because I couldn’t find a job at the time to support myself and my son, and their PHD research-assistantship paid 20,000 a year.) I ended up programming (which I hated) for near 70 hours a week. I had to continue writing somehow to keep sane, so I would write at my computer at school when I was supposed to study or be developing mathematical models, and managed, being a student, a researcher, and a mom to a young boy, to complete only 2 screenplay in those 2 years, one of them ‘Blood Matter’ (I called ‘Evil Blood’ at the time.)
Naturally, they booted me out of the program after 2 years with a non-thesis Master, instead of a PHD after 4.
I tried to pitch ‘Evil Blood at a Willamette writers’ conference in Portland around that time, and even sent the script to a few minor producers I met there- with no response whatsoever.
And then the show Dexter came out- and I got scared since there were so many similarities with my story, and didn’t show or talk about the script with anyone for years.
About 5 years ago, as I felt more confident about my English, I decided to turn that script into a novel. (By then, I was married again- to a very supportive man.)
The novel writing is much more slow and deliberate than writing screenplays- and all the inconsistences and plot holes, etc. that are not obvious in a script/film format, become apparent. So I wrote the novel and then rewrote it about 4 or 5 times, which taught me a lot about writing fiction.
My process 
combines inspiration and ‘seeing scenes’ in my head, as well as a methodical, tedious planning. Before I write the script, I would come up with
ideas, disjoined scenes, characters, dialogs, etc., and just jot them down on a piece of paper, and drop it in a bag or a (physical) file. And when the bag is pretty full, and the story somewhat developed, I sort through all the notes, assign them to a time in the story, and glue them onto corresponding pages of my planning notebook.
I think, being trained as a scientist helps greatly in the planning and disciplining my imagination. 
The second novel I’m finishing now also started as a script. I think, I’ll stick with this pattern. That beginning screenplay is like a loose skeleton on which you grow flesh, but then you start changing and improving parts, and by the time the book is finished, the story is perfected, and can make an even better script.




I did a lot of research on serial killers while writing BM- and had even a bit of a rift with my husband who was disgusted with my new ‘hobby’, and at finding printed out articles about ‘all that crap’ in the house. The research desensitized me a bit, which made the writing ‘grosser parts’ of the novel easier.
I wrote a Blood Matter the screenplay little by little (while working on other things as well) over the course of a year. Then I didn’t touch it for a few years. Then it took me about a year to turn it into a novel (that coincided with the beginning of my second marriage), and about a year to do all the revisions.  I wrote Blood Matter in In various places- on my lap on a stealth, on my work/school computers, in bed, in a bedroom I used as an office (my son took over that room and desk since.) Right now, I write in a corner of my bedroom. Maybe, one day I’ll have a proper study, all my own.
The most compelling portion of the book for me to write was the first/intro chapter, and the last one, before the postscript. The first chapter was longer initially- I made Sam’s execution botched at first, but of course, that was self-indulgent. I couldn’t spend so much time with a character who doesn’t reappear later in the book. Sam interested me a lot, which is why, of course, I enjoyed developing the character of his offspring. (‘Blood Matter’ means also a ‘matter of blood’, as in genetics.) And the last chapter played like a film in my head- it was challenging and exciting to write pure action and give a reader the right ‘visual’ experience.
After I wrote Blood Matter, I thought all I had to do was to find an agent. I managed to interest 2 people, and one of them won me over. She seemed so passionate about the book. She was also a new agent- which all the articles on finding literary agents say is a good thing for a new writer. Unfortunately, after a couple of publishers rejected the book, she suddenly lost all confidence in it and wanted me to completely rewrite the novel. (she since stopped representing fiction altogether.) At which point, I started to contact small indie publishers myself- and found Divertir Publishing. They didn’t have much to offer in terms of promotion, but Kenneth Tupper, the publisher, was also an excellent editor, and pointed out a few things I, and all my beta readers missed. He helped to polish and prepare the manuscript so professionally that I will never be embarrassed for it in the future.




3.  Blood 
Matter: 
Excerpts

Joe stepped inside the room and quietly closed the door. He waited until he heard only his own breathing. His eyes acclimated and made out the outlines of the crib. For a few moments, he thought he could feel his boy’s presence.
Then a beam of light from a passing car broke through the sheer curtains. In one devastating moment, it illuminated the smoothness of the baby blanket inside. A cold hand in Joe’s chest woke up and squeezed. His son was gone for eight months, his tiny body rotted in the bleak dirt hole next to the four year old grave of Joe’s mother. Alberto would have been walking by now, talking a little, calling his father something silly. Joe’s imagination rehearsed these over and over, without mercy.
The room was a mausoleum to Joe’s fatherhood. He wouldn’t let Lana, Alberto’s mother and Joe’s soon-to-be ex-wife, touch anything here. The baby clothes still filled the drawers, the tricycle Alberto never grew up enough to ride still stood in the corner, and his baby toys still overflowed the big basket next to it. Soon after their son’s funeral, Lana wanted to donate all his things to her church. Joe would not let her. The toys, the clothes, and the crib remained. Lana, on the other hand, had moved out, and the arrangement sat well with him.
--Chapter 4, Excerpt

He pressed her old dress to his face, inhaling the lingering smell of rose oil she used in place of perfume, and then put it on the floor with the rest of her clothes. He found her reading glasses, some of his school papers she had saved, a tattered notebook of recipes in her Spanish handwriting, and a robe he bought her for her birthday with his first paycheck when he was eighteen, bundled around something…
Joe unwrapped it and took out, one by one, a framed photo of his parent’s wedding…a stack of letters held with a rubber band addressed in Spanish to his mother from his father and posted with Guatemalan stamps…his father’s old family album…Joe paused, holding the last object—Rafa’s flannel pajama shirt, complete with a bullet hole and rusty spots of long-dried blood.
Joe stared at his findings. While growing up, he believed that Isabel had gotten rid of these objects. Their absence had sealed the silent pact between them, never to mention the man that Joe had struggled his entire childhood not to miss. Yet here they were, keepsakes of the dead, preserved lovingly for Joe one day to chance upon.
--Chapter 4, Excerpt


Joe kneeled by his friend’s side but didn’t dare lift him. Unable to think, he pressed his hand over Steve’s neck below the chin where the bullet entered, as if he could arrest the spurting blood. It quickly soaked the front of his shirt. Steve’s eyes bore into his. The big guy was trying to say something.
“Shhh…,” Joe said. “Lay still. It’s gonna be alright.” Tears streamed down his cheeks.
In Steve’s last willful effort, words came. “Pale eyes…like silver fish…” Then the face of Joe’s friend slackened, his eyes staring past Joe and absorbing the blue of the sky.
       --Chapter 2, Excerpt


       
 A slender young woman with dark, intense eyes walked down the second floor corridor of the Dallas FBI Headquarters. A gym hoodie and designer suit pants clung snug to her hard body. Her Italian shoes were sensible but elegant, and a roomy, sturdy, overpriced purse hung from her strong shoulder. While not much above average height, her confident posture made her appear taller. On a scale of horses, Gabrielle Lubovich was an Arabian.
--Chapter 8, Excerpt


           As she climbed the stairs, Gabrielle checked her phone and saw a new text message from Tom. Running a little late sorry. She reached the top landing, unlocked her door, and stepped inside the apartment. “Ranger!” she called as she turned on the hall light.     
          “You still here, puppy?”
           No usual, ecstatic bark greeted her. Gabrielle froze, the phone still in her hand. Calmly, she lifted the gadget to her ear, waited a bit, and said into the dead receiver, “Hey Tom, thank you for picking up Ranger. I owe you one. See you tomorrow.” Her voice was light, pneumatic. She pretended to hang up and whistled to the tune of the Puccini’s Toreador while noisily dropping off her shoes. Her feverish, shiny eyes didn’t as much as flick toward the watchful aperture of the living room entrance as she moved past it and down the hall.
            One step, two…nothing.
            The bathroom door swung open with a whine. The whistling stopped, and the echo of the shower came. Then the door shut, dulling the sound.
--Chapter 23, Excerpt


The man hiding in the living room quietly stepped into the hall. He wore his jogging suit and the ski mask, but the gun he held was different, a Berretta in place of the Bone Collector he lost to Gabrielle. He crept to the bathroom door. His hand, gloved in latex, touched the knob.
He imagined her naked under the running water, unaware and helpless. He imagined her shock, her fear, her blood filling the tub. Not as satisfying as bleeding a boy, but oh-so fitting. He remembered her narrow body and the hard grip of her hand wrestling the gun from his own. Why, she might do just as nicely as a boy! His light eyes darted to the alcove on his right, noting the short ladder and the outline of the flap above, high enough to require an athletic male’s strength to pull up to from the top rung.
He opened the door.
The small space was full of steam and the sound of running water. He aimed his gun at the opaque curtain and ripped the fabric aside.
   --Chapter 23, Excerpt


Gabrielle stood naked in front of him, her pale body streamlined and seemingly glowing, her bottomless eyes drowning his.
Joe dropped the cup into the sink, stepped to her, and took her into his arms. She pressed her face to his chest.
“Make me forget,” she whispered.
He picked her up and carried her to the bedroom.
   --Chapter 24, Excerpt