Global// Marching with Lady Liberty.
By Maya Hernandez
15 October 2020
On the 4ᵗʰ March 2000, a crowd of farmworkers and activists took to the streets of Fort Myers and embarked on a 235-mile march to Florida’s Fruit and Vegetable Association in Orlando. The March for Dignity, Dialogue, and a Fair Wage was organized by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. This trek was a protest against the abuse, low pay, and gruelling conditions suffered by agricultural workers in major food corporations in Orlando. Protestors who participated in the march carried with them a giant papier-mache replica of The Statue of Liberty (The Nation). This one-of-a-kind rendition of Lady Liberty hoisting up a bright red tomato was created by the artist Kat Rodriguez for the CIW’s march. It was later given by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers as a gift to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History for their exhibit entitled ‘Many Voices, One Nation’, which opened in 2017 (Many Voices). This exhibit was intended to capture the people who make up the American population and show how, as that population grew, these people managed to find ways to ‘negotiate…what it meant to be American’ (Many Voices). It was here where I came into contact with this magnificent object of American protest culture. Today the CIW’s Lady Liberty still stands in the exhibit as a symbol of the struggles and hopes of farmworkers across America, along with the power of protest art.
The CIW statue is twelve feet tall and made mostly of papier-mache, with the dress made from a tarp-like fabric that was painted green (Papier-Mache). Initially, Lady Liberty was tied atop the trunk of a car and was meant to be driven alongside protesters. However, police did not allow cars to drive down certain boulevards in Orlando during the demonstration. The marchers, having realized the power of such an image to their protest, resolved to carrying the statue (Klein 98). The statue originally had a wooden pedestal that is not on display, but was used to carry the statue during the march. On the pedestal is a quote from poet Langston Hughes that reads, ‘I, too, am America’ (Many Voices). This quote represents the entire theme of the exhibit, as it displays the many different cultures and races of the people who make up our nation. Due to this fact, it makes sense that Lady Liberty resides in a glass case within the center of the exhibit. The use of these light, papier-mache materials aided the statue to be carried by protestors for many miles during their two-week march. Despite being in good condition, papier-mache is not the most durable material and will not last forever, like a ceramic sculpture would, hence why she is kept inside a glass case in order to prolong her preservation.
Unlike most pieces of material culture that have arisen from protests such as this one, Lady Liberty was not a shirt, pin, button, or sticker that could be distributed to the masses and kept by participants of the march. Lady Liberty is the only one of her kind and is no ordinary replica of the French made 1886 Statue of Liberty, standing in the New York Harbor. From afar, it might have been easy for spectators to dismiss Lady Liberty as a regular Statue of Liberty, but Kat Rodriguez customized the statue with specific tweaks, turning it into a true piece of protest art. She designed the statue to be darker in complexion in order to resemble the farm workers whose voices and rights were being oppressed. Rodriguez says, ‘…I made her dark like me. I went and matched the paint to my skin color, so she has black hair and my skin color and a wide nose and cheeks’ (Buss 137). She replaced the statue’s iconic tablet with a bucket full of tomatoes and the flaming torch with a single tomato raised to the sky. These dramatic changes were meant to highlight how the real Statue of Liberty and the freedom that she represents, does not extend to all people within this country and most definitely overlooks the struggles of agricultural immigrant workers. As a result of this, the workers had to create their own version of Lady Liberty; one that understands their hardships and is not done fighting for their freedom. In this sense, Lady Liberty represents not only the hypocrisy of the values upon which this nation was built, but also resembles a sense of hope for farm workers by showing that someone is ready to fight for their rights.
Kat Rodriguez never created Lady Liberty to be put in a glass display for the world to see. All she did was respond to a call for help from her people. They asked for some artwork or a poster, anything to help their cause, but what she made for them was so much more than that. She created a symbol, a champion for immigrant worker’s rights. Despite her intentions, her work of art had such a tremendous visual impact on the CIW protest that it is now being displayed in the largest museum in the world. This emphasizes the importance of art inpolitics and the lasting effect of material culture of protest.
This picture was taken the day of the march and I included it for a sense of scale.
Works Cited
“Activism and Social Movements: ‘A Brown Statue of Liberty.’” Memory, Meaning, and Resistance: Reflecting on Oral History and Women at the Margins, by Fran Leeper Buss, University of Michigan Press, 2017, pp. 123–146.
Klein, Shana. “Lady Liberty with A Tomato: A Dialogue On Art and Activism with Kat Rodriguez and The Coalition Of Immokalee Farmworkers.” Taylor and Francis Online, 2018, www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21502552.2018.1430291.
“Many Voices, One Nation.” National Museum of American History, 21 June 2018, americanhistory.si.edu/many-voices-exhibition.
“Papier-Mache Statue of Liberty.” National Museum of American History, americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_1255703.
“The Nation We Build Together.” National Museum of American History, 30 June 2017, americanhistory.si.edu/topics/nation-build-together.
Maya is a 20-year-old Mexian-American woman. She is originally from Los Angeles, but currently lives in Amelia Island, FL. She is a first generation college student, studying global politics and environmental studies at Washington & Lee University. She is passionate about intersectional environmentalism, which advocates for justice and protection of both the planet and its people. She hopes to study environmental law after she graduates and pursue a lifelong journey of using her voice to speak up for the people and places who aren’t being heard.