Farmworkers’ Papier-Mache Statue of Liberty, 2000

Farmworkers from Immokalee, Florida carried this papier-mache statue in a two-week “March for Dignity, Dialogue, and a Fair Wage,” in the spring of 2000. Tomato pickers and their supporters traveled 234 miles by foot from Ft. Myers to Orlando. They hoped to be heard by the powerful growers who employed them and by a larger public concerned with human rights and the dignity of labor. Largely composed of Mexican, Haitian, Mayan, and Guatemalan immigrants, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), brought attention to unsafe working conditions, poverty-level wages, and other abuses. The figure of a tomato-picking statue of liberty, carried along the highways on a truck flatbed—and at times on workers’ shoulders--dramatized the workers’ claims to the American promise of opportunity and a decent life. To clarify the message, the statue traveled with a sign that read “I, too, am America,” a quote from Langston Hughes’s powerful poem of 1926, entitled “I Too.” That sign reminded onlookers of the vital contribution of the often invisible farmworker in the U.S.

The concept of a symbolic statue of liberty based on the famous statue in New York Harbor came from farmworkers themselves; the statue was made by an intern at CIW, artist Kat Rodriguez. Constructed on a base made of materials from a hardware store, the statue uses a large swath of painter’s cloth to create the draped gown of the iconic original. She holds an actual bucket used in the tomato harvest, filled with papier-mache tomatoes with felt leaves attached. Green paint evokes the patina of the statue in New York harbor; brown-toned skin and dark hair reflect the identities of the majority of CIW members.

In the museum collections, the CIW statue of liberty joins other forms of public art, politics, and cultural expression that have celebrated the contributions of immigrant labor and voiced grievances toward unregulated employers through the course of US history. It is one of many works of art and manufacture In Smithsonian Collections that adopt and adapt the famous female figure of “Liberty.”