Florida's fighting grandma.

• Author: Chepesiuk, Ron
• Position: Mary Ellen Beaver, advocate for migrant workers

In March 1991, Mary Ellen Beaver lost her patience. For weeks she had been trying to visit the 2,000 sugarcane cutters at the Okeelanta Sugar Company, near South Bay, Florida, but the company insisted that she couldn't set foot on its property. As an advocate for migrants, Beaver wanted to talk to migrant workers to be sure they understood their rights and were working under adequate conditions.

"It was getting near the end of cutting season and I had to do something," Beaver says. "Finally, I just decided to go."

Arriving at the plant, she began talking to workers, but five company officials cornered Beaver and tried to intimidate her. "They said to me, |You can't be here. This is company property.' I said, |Like hell I can't. The workers live here.' I wasn't scared. What could they do? Kill me in front of all those workers?"

To keep Beaver off its property, Okeelanta sued her employer, Florida Rural Legal Services. But the agency counter-sued and won.

It was another victory for Beaver. Each year since 1989, the sixty-two-year-old grandmother has logged more than 40,000 miles in her Plymouth Colt to reach out to workers in Florida and South Carolina.

"Her energy is enormous," says Greg Shell, Beaver's supervisor at Florida Rural Legal Services. "Mary Ellen inspires me whenever I get down on the job. She is working at a very tough job at an age when most people are getting ready to retire."

Beaver, a devoted Roman Catholic, gives a simple answer when asked why she has dedicated her life to the welfare of migrant workers: "I do it because I believe defrauding a laborer of wages is a great sin."

In 1969, Beaver was nearly forty and the mother of seven children when she became interested in migrant-worker conditions. She couldn't ignore the shabbily dressed black men and women who passed by her rural Pennsylvania farm in dilapidated buses on their way to the tomato fields. Beaver took clothing to the workers and helped organize local Catholic churches to provide social services to the tomato pickers. An ironing board and a kitchen table served as her office.

"I was outraged," Beaver recalls. "They...