Cultivating Land-Based Literacies and Rhetorics

This is an image of a large yellow banner with red lettering that reads "justicia." I took it during a ralley for the CIW's Fair Food Campaign
CIW Campaign For Fair Food Rally, 2012

This article, published in Literacy in Composition Studies’ (LiCS) Special Issue on the New Activism, offers a situated account of farm worker organizing  in Orlando, FL. I turn to the Coalition of Immokalee Farm Workers (CIW),  to illustrate how the focus on land in farm worker activism contributes to place-based studies in environmental rhetorics. I find that farm workers build a theory of social change through what I call land-based literacies and rhetorics. These literacies (acts of interpretation and communication) and rhetorics (organizational and community-building practices) ultimately build a theory that 1) recognizes the ways in which land can produce relations and 2) recognizes the value of embodied ways of knowing.