Sky for a Roof : Capistrano Beach Seeks Solution to Workers Who Have No Place to Live

Cesario Bautista and his friend, Ampelio Bautista (no relation), awakened in Capistrano Beach Thursday morning on the cold ground of a wooded field inhabited by snakes, insects and coyotes.

The Mexican immigrants had arrived in Capistrano Beach just two days earlier and managed to find jobs paying $4.25 an hour in a local ceramics factory. But since payday is not until Friday and they came here with only a few dollars to their names, the two men said they have had to sleep under the stars--within view of $250-a-night rooms at the Dana Point Resort.

“We could not sleep at night because there were so many insects,” Cesario Bautista, 31, said in Spanish. “And it was very cold. We slept under one blanket.”

The two men, both originally from Guadalajara, join anywhere from three dozen to 100 Latin American immigrants who sleep each night under bridges, in fields and even in drainage pipes surrounding the Capistrano Beach business district where they go to look for work each day.

Although some transients have for years been bedding down for the night in the brushier areas of Capistrano Beach, local residents say the numbers have increased dramatically since Orange County officials in January shut down, for health and safety reasons, a complex of about a dozen run-down houses on Doheny Park Road in the central business district. Complaints from both residents and local merchants have escalated, and both the office of the local congressman and the Immigration and Naturalization Service now say they will take action to clean up what county officials have described as the bleakest living situation for immigrants in Orange County.

Since the cheap, run-down houses were placed off-limits, immigrants arriving in Capistrano Beach looking for work have had difficulty finding affordable places to live, according to Salvador Gonzalez, 39, a documented immigrant and longtime local resident. As a result, Gonzalez said, they either move on to the larger Latino communities in Santa Ana and north Orange County, or, like the Bautistas, set up camp wherever they can.

Cesario Bautista and his friend have been camping on property owned by the Capistrano Beach Sanitary District. It is an area of bamboo and dense undergrowth, where old mattresses can be seen stashed in the weeds. On Wednesday evening, the two men prepared to bed down for the night under a cluster of bushes near an abandoned riding stable.

“We arrived here yesterday,” Cesario Bautista said. “We walked for three hours trying to find a place to sleep, up and down the river. But we could not find one. By accident, we found this. It (the stable) had a roof, so it was good.”

The men said that when they arrived in the United States a week ago, they knew only that there was work to be found in Capistrano Beach. They said they left their wives and young children behind in Mexico after a prolonged drought robbed them of their jobs working in cornfields. They journeyed here to work, they said, and to send the money back home.

Cesario Bautista said he and his friend were in such a hurry to leave Carlsbad--where they had first gone to plant tomatoes but found there was no work left--that they forgot their jackets. They had with them only one tattered blanket and the clothes on their back.

The men bedded down Wednesday night on an old foam mattress, covering themselves with the blanket as night-time temperatures fell into the upper 50s. Cesario said they finally managed to fall asleep despite the buzzing insects and scavenging rodents.

“But it started to rain and we had to move inside the house,” he said, pointing to the crumbling stable, where the walls had fallen down and the roof was pockmarked with holes.

On Thursday morning, the two men rose with the sun at 6 a.m. and happily proclaimed that the night had gotten better because the cold had apparently quieted the insect and animal activity.

“But it was very dark,” Cesario said with a tired smile.

The two men then proceeded to walk to their work--about a mile away--in the same clothes they had slept in. They said they would get food and water in town and wash up a little in the restroom where they work. As they strode away through the waist-high weeds, other men could be seen emerging from camps in a wooded field on the opposite side of San Juan Creek, hurrying to work.

The fact that men camp out within a stone’s throw of residential and commercial neighborhoods worries local officials, who say they are concerned that the fires the men build for warmth will spread to nearby buildings.

In just the past month, the Orange County Fire Department has been called out to three fires on property owned by the sanitary district. The district’s property, where officials say up to two dozen immigrants per night take refuge in pipes and under trees, runs along the south bank of the San Juan Creek flood control channel. One of the fires burned three-quarters of an acre, according to district general manager Dennis Erdman. All were believed started by campfires, he said.

Immigrants are also suspected by local officials of setting mattresses afire within the fenced-off housing tenements, where boards have been pried off windows and doors. Broken beer bottles and empty containers of food have also been found inside the compound.

Capistrano Beach residents say they are also concerned about the daytime presence of the men--the ever-growing concentration of immigrants looking for work on the town’s street corners. The numbers of dayworkers here have swollen from roughly two dozen a year ago to more than 100--in large part, the dayworkers say, because other communities like Orange and Santa Ana have succeeded in forcing them out. Most of the workers arrive in Capistrano Beach in buses from their homes in other parts of the county, joining the workers who camp out.

The workers congregate in a two-block area along Doheny Park Road in the Capistrano Beach business district, where they wait for employers to drive up and offer a day’s work. Merchants have complained that some of the men leer at passers-by and surround motor vehicles for a chance to work. The presence of the dayworkers, they say, has frightened away many of their customers.

“They’ve almost ruined my business,” Tod Klein, owner of Coastal Janitorial Supplies, complained one chilly morning this week as dozens of dayworkers milled on the street outside his store, rushing to the cars and trucks of potential employers. “I’ve almost decided to cut out and move somewhere else.”

“My morning business is down to nothing,” added Hanna Kureh, owner of John’s Liquor. “All the women customers have quit coming.”

The dayworkers deny that they are causing problems by standing on street corners.

“We are only waiting for work,” said Alfredo Madrez, 22, a Mexican national who came here four years ago in search of work after a warehouse that he managed in Guadalajara went bankrupt and closed down.

“I can’t work in Mexico,” added Jeronimo Aguilar, 45, of San Luis Potosi, Mexico. “I have to wait for the peso to rise. But I don’t think that will happen soon.”

Klein said that he and the 20 or so other merchants in the affected area have tried to resolve the problems affecting their businesses by shooing the workers away from their property. But Klein said they just ignore him.

The merchants in recent months have taken their complaints to the Capistrano Beach Chamber of Commerce. Neighborhood residents also started complaining to the chamber, protesting that immigrants were sleeping in abandoned cars and begging for food and money, according to Leo Chade, a real estate broker and local business leader.

At first, the chamber asked county officials to intervene when complaints began pouring in last year about crowded, unsafe living conditions in the complex of tenement buildings known locally as “the barrio,” said Bud Campbell, a member of the chamber’s board of directors.

But after the immigrant problem escalated this year, Campbell said, the chamber decided to seek federal intervention, since immigration laws are enforced by the federal government.

As a result, Campbell said, the chamber arranged a meeting last week between the irate merchants and a staff aide to U.S. Rep. Ron Packard (R-Carlsbad), whose district includes southern Orange County. The aide, Mike Eggers, is also a councilman-elect of the new city of Dana Point, which will include Capistrano Beach within its boundaries when its incorporation becomes effective Jan. 1.

Eggers told the merchants that he plans to meet with both the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Orange County Sheriff’s Department in upcoming weeks to press for more enforcement of immigration and criminal violations, which he said are caused by a small number of the immigrants. Eggers said he especially wants stepped-up INS enforcement of a new federal law making it illegal for employers to knowingly hire undocumented aliens.

INS spokesman Ron Rogers pledged Thursday that his agency would conduct a crackdown against employers if complaints were lodged, since his agency’s recent emphasis has been on enforcing the employer-sanctions provision of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act.

Rogers added that the problem of immigrants living outdoors is not widespread in Southern California because most who do not find work quickly return home and the rest find housing. County officials said they knew of no other living situation for immigrants in Orange County as bleak as that of Capistrano Beach’s, although in northern San Diego County there have been reports of immigrants living in caves. State highway officials said that they do receive reports regularly of homeless people living under freeways throughout the county, but that the reports involve mostly non-immigrant transients.

Eggers said he wants to work with local property owners to clear out fields and remove pipes and other debris in and under which immigrants are taking cover to sleep. The California Department of Transportation has been working to clear brush from under one overpass, where immigrants are living in pipes and cardboard boxes.

“The ones living in pipes are the lucky ones because they are insulated,” Eggers said.