No Place Like Home--Anyplace : Migrants Tear Down Huts as Eviction Nears

Rafael Martinez hurried to sell his home of three years Tuesday, quickly agreeing to the buyer’s price--20 cents a kilo for the wood and scrap metal and $3 each for the two mattresses inside.

In all, Martinez earned a tidy $230 from the sale of his home, one of almost a hundred plywood hooches in this migrant’s camp in the coastal town of Encinitas.

“This is enough to get me back to Tijuana and take care of me for a couple of weeks,” Martinez said. “I’ve had it. I could deal with the Border Patrol. But how did the health department do this to us?”

Indeed, the about 125 remaining inhabitants of the Valle Verde squatters’ camp are asking the same question. The camp’s residents include migrants from Mexico and several other Latin American countries, many of whom have qualified for the Immigration and Naturalization Service’s year-old amnesty program.

Valle Verde was founded more than a decade ago, when the first residents erected plywood shanties and camouflaged them on the chaparral-covered hillsides across the road from affluent La Costa. The camp sits on El Camino Real, near Olivenhain Road, sprawled across a couple of hundred acres of prime coastal property, less than a mile from Carlsbad State Beach and the Pacific.

Before development began to encroach, Valle Verde was one of many migrant worker camps spread across San Diego County’s isolated northern area, close to the nurseries and agricultural fields where thousands of aliens have been traditionally employed. Over the years, the workers have lived through frequent raids by Border Patrol agents, who were seen as more of a nuisance than a threat.

Complaints by Residents

But the San Diego County Health Services Department has accomplished in the last six months what the Border Patrol had been unable to do in years. Last summer, reacting to many complaints from area residents of trash, noise and the growth of the primitive camp, county health officials declared Valle Verde a health hazard and ordered the property owners--the wealthy Texas Hunt brothers--to abate the site.

Earlier this month, after the abatement plan was approved by the California Coastal Commission, the property owners posted notices in Spanish and English throughout the camp telling the migrants that they had until Feb. 1 to leave. The cleanup was left to the supervision of the leaseholder of the property, Frank Wright & Sons, a construction company.

Daryl (Ben) Benstead, who is overseeing the cleanup for the leaseholder, and Wright came up with a plan to pay the migrants for razing the camp. The men are paying 20 cents a kilo (equivalent to 2.2 pounds) for wood and scrap metal, $3 per mattress and 50 cents for each plastic bag filled with trash.

Benstead tried to stop the evictions, apologized to the migrants in a letter and called them “good neighbors.” He does not try to hide his bitterness over the eviction. “I have no faith in human nature anymore. . . . I’m kind of emotionally spent over this,” said Benstead.

By Tuesday afternoon, the second day of the program, migrants had been paid more than $1,000 for the scrap. The debris brought down from the hills by the migrants had filled two 40-cubic-yard trash bins. Silvino Ruiz, one of Benstead’s helpers, was towing a portable scale around, weighing and recording the loads.

‘Where Do We Go?’

Although county officials have succeeded in uprooting the migrants, they have failed in attempts to find them housing. In a much-publicized move, county officials announced in November that attempts would be made to find subsidized housing for the about 12 families with children who live at Valle Verde. As of Wednesday, none of the families had found housing.

Several migrants said that they will simply move to another camp farther north, near Palomar Airport. A large number said they will wait until Feb. 1, when the leaseholder will stop paying for scrap and trash and begin tearing down the camp, and then decide where to go. Others, emboldened by their legal status, talked about mounting a protest.

But the question heard over and over in the camp was, “Where do we go from here?”

“Why are the authorities doing this to us? We have no place to go. Most of us will just find another hillside or canyon to live,” said a man called Tiburon. “I don’t understand gringos. In 1985, when I almost drowned at Carlsbad Beach, they used a helicopter to save me. Now they’re telling me to get out of the only house I have. Why did they save me?”