Latino Community Organizing Takes One More Step in Red Wing Minnesota

Posted by Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin on February 9, 2009

Over 100 people packed the chapel room on the back of the main church at Saint Joseph Catholic Church in Red Wing last night to continue an organizing process that started towards the end of 2008 at the first community-wide meeting organized by the Goodhue County Hispanic Outreach. Although the organizing process was just started last November, the community has shown interest and leadership. The Rural Enterprise Center has provided the organizing model and training for the local leadership to follow a process of engagement that focuses on previously identified opportunities, specifically issues of economic development that are at the center of the motivation of these families struggling to get out of poverty and find ways to more fully participate in their new hometowns.

From the participants last night, 18 signed up to engage in food production enterprises. With a free range poultry model already under implementation, these families can be integrated into the regional farming network and matched with the many farmers that are coming forward offering to mentor these newcomers and also provide access to land under a variety of partnership arrangements.

Last Friday, a group of farmers from the area meet at the initiative of Clarence Bishop, a regional food systems organizer and farmer working on the Red Wing farmers market and the Riverbend Food Cooperative. The Rural Enterprise Center’s model for incorporating Latino families into the regional food system was the purpose of the meeting. The combined land available from all of the participants already exceeds 500 acres and some of the farmers have already met with Latino families in preparation for possible work to be done during the growing season in 2009.

Though not al of these acreage is being made available, as our model gains momentum and the contacts with regional farmers grow, more land will be made available so that these new immigrant families can add new faces to the regional food and agriculture landscape together with new ways of producing food, in the pursuit of a more sustainable local and regional food system and healthier communities and economies.

As new immigrants in this community, Latino families have many questions about other issues, so legal resources were brought in to help them with basic immigrant rights and emergency preparedness. It is every family’s responsibility to be ready in case of any disruption of the community by natural or other kind of situation where families are separated and children put at risk.

Many more meetings like this will continue to happen throughout the region as we prepare a larger regional agenda for bringing all of these community’s leadership together to tackle important economic development opportunities and their larger role as integral part of the population growth of these rural small towns.

Smaller but more frequent meetings allow for continued organizing that will result in the launch of more food, agriculture an manufacturing enterprises. Specialized training of key individuals that show potential to take larger scale leadership roles in the civic and economic life of their communities will grow the future generation of leaders in these communities.

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