Beyond the Fields: Solidarity Narratives and Coalition Building in the Fair Food Movement

This paper extends scholarship on emerging sources of worker power in the 21st century through an examination of the solidarity activism of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), an agricultural worker-led human rights organisation that advocates for Fair Food policies. The successes of the CIW are unexpected, since Florida’s migrant workers lack the traditional sources of worker power that bolstered the labour struggles of the 20th century. Through in-depth interviews and a survey of student-farmworker activists, we extend scholarship rooted in the power resources approach to analyse the societal forms of power – both discursive and coalitional – that the CIW has developed in their efforts to harness broad social support from actors beyond the fields. We demonstrate how CIW coalitions are sustained through solidarity narratives that clarify the stakes for student allies and the discursive frames that motivate their activism.