Minority Migrants : Growing Number of Guatemalans in North County Complicates a Thorny Issue

Life in the United States has not been exactly as Julio Campos expected, Campos offered as he sat atop his Encinitas “apartment”--an unused concrete drainage pipe in which he sleeps. “It stays dry inside,” he explained.

“One hears so much about this country--it’s very famous--that people think things are a lot better here,” Campos said as he finished his dinner of bean soup purchased at an area taco shop. “But I’ve learned that one has to work very hard here. And then there are people who don’t like us. I’ve found a lot of negative things.”

Campos and his countrymen, who reside in a city-owned strip of land behind an Encinitas shopping center, are trailblazers of a sort. They are citizens from the Central American nation of Guatemala who have settled in an area--northern San Diego County--whose migrant population is overwhelmingly composed of Mexican nationals.

The growing presence of the Guatemalans--now numbering perhaps up to a thousand or more at various sites throughout the area, although no one has any real fix on the figure--has further complicated the already thorny issue of the migrant presence in North County.

It is a region where thousands of homeless day laborers, overwhelmingly from Mexico, reside in some of the crudest conditions found anywhere in the United States, usually in makeshift hovels or holes in the ground. Solutions have long eluded policy-makers concerned about the attendant problems of housing, sanitation and image.

Small groups of Guatemalans, El Salvadorans and other Central Americans have long sought work in the region. And San Diego for years has been a major corridor for tens of thousands of Central Americans and others who have traveled to the U.S.-Mexico border region en route to Los Angeles and the U.S. interior. However, officials and others say that in recent months--a period that coincides with an upsurge in political violence in Guatemala--there has been a large influx of Guatemalans who have settled in northern San Diego County.

In San Diego, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service says that Guatemalans living in North County account for a recent sharp increase in applications for political asylum, a residence status granted to refugees who can demonstrate a “well-founded” fear of persecution if they were to be returned to their homelands. Such filings jumped from about 40 a month to up to 200 a month last summer, said Randell Romine, deputy assistant INS district director for examinations in San Diego.

The Guatemalans’ presence here, in fact, may represent a national trend: Asylum applications from Guatemalans almost tripled through August, contrasted with the same period last year, according to the INS.

Just why that is so remains a question of great dispute. The Guatemalans and their advocates say it is because of resurgent political repression in Guatemala, Central America’s most populous nation, which has long been one of the most tumultuous in the Western hemisphere.

Since civil conflict erupted three decades ago, human rights groups say, at least 150,000 Guatemalans have been killed and another 40,000 “disappeared” in the nation of 8 million. There has been a violent upsurge in political killings and disappearances since an attempted coup in Guatemala City in May, activists say.

INS officials, however, say that economic, not political, motivations propel the Guatemalans north. Consequently, the agency has routinely approved less than 5% of Guatemalan asylum requests.

Whatever the reasons for their departure, the Guatemalans’ rising visibility indicates that the area’s migrant predicament is expanding and becoming ever more complicated.

“The problem is getting worse,” said Gloria Carranza, who was hired last year as “transients issues coordinator” for the city of Encinitas.

On any given day, groups of Guatemalan men can be seen waiting in groups along Encinitas Boulevard in Encinitas, walking along El Camino Real in Carlsbad and driving their bicycles along Pomerado Road in Poway. The growing visibility of all migrants alarms area merchants and officials.

In a shopping center housing a Big Bear supermarket along Encinitas Boulevard, the men shop alongside upscale young homeowners and also scavenge the trash bins for edible produce. Store owners have complained that the men hurt business. A Guatemalan security guard has been hired to discourage their presence in the complex.

The city of Encinitas, meanwhile, has hired a cleanup firm to maintain a vacant 18-acre parcel of eucalyptus, bamboo and thick brush behind the shopping center; many of the men sleep on the land. Others, such as Julio Campos, sleep in the large drainage pipes stored nearby. Like Mexican migrants, they cannot afford the area’s rents. The men complain that the city-hired cleanup crews gather up their belongings and throw them away. City officials are unapologetic.

“Any material taken was illegally on private property,” said Carranza, the transient coordinator.

Some see that reaction as cold, indicative of the prevalent resentment of a vulnerable population that is only seeking work.

“The community obviously needs their labor, but doesn’t want to see them hanging around,” said Ricardo Garcia, executive director of Centro de Asuntos Migratorios, a Chula Vista-based office that provides legal advice to Central Americans and other immigrants.

In Poway, Saint Bartholomew’s, a Presbyterian church that had allowed a dozen or so Guatemalan men to sleep on the church patio for several months, attempted to evict the men last week, drawing criticism from other church groups.

“We don’t solve what is basically a human situation by calling it a problem and saying we want to get rid of it,” said the Rev. Jeffrey E. Frantz, pastor of The Community Church of Poway, who intervened in a successful effort to delay the eviction of the Guatemalans.

“You solve it by realizing that to some extent we are all responsible for this, and we all have to work to solve it,” said Frantz, who also sits as president of the Interfaith Task Force on Central America, which is working with Central Americans throughout the area.

At Saint Bartholomew’s, parish officials said they had done all they could and were forced into the eviction action. They say they fear liability if something happens to one of the men. (One of the Guatemalans, a 17-year-old, was killed earlier this month when he was struck by a vehicle while riding his bicycle in the area.)

“We’re being cast as the bad guys,” said Pete Henson, parish administrator. “But no other churches have offered to help. We can’t be expected to care for this problem by ourselves.”

Many of the Guatemalans are in the process of applying for political asylum. The applications give them a kind of quasi-legal status in the United States in that federal authorities say they will not deport them while the cases are pending; the process can drag on for a year or more. However, many Guatemalans are caught in a Catch-22: While the INS allows them to remain in the United States, the agency has ruled that their applications appear “frivolous” and, therefore, they are not authorized to be employed here.

“What good does this paper do for me if I can’t work?” asked Miguel Zacarias, 18, a resident of the brush behind Encinitas Boulevard, who showed a reporter an asylum paper on which had been written in red in English: “NOT AUTHORIZED TO WORK.”

Instead, he and others in similar predicaments must work illegally. Their employers risk being fined. The men say employers attempt to take advantage of their status by paying less. Even the men who are authorized to work say they can often find employment only a few days a week, thanks to the area’s glut of Latin American day laborers.

The rise in the Guatemalan population in the area is perhaps not all that surprising, considering the ongoing exodus of people from violence-torn Guatemala and the kind of migrants usually attracted to northern San Diego County.

Because of its proximity to the border and the availability of field work and other cheap labor, the area has served in the past decade or so as a kind of first-stop region for rural Mexican migrants who are without established family networks in the Los Angeles area or other immigrant enclaves. Thus, many of the Mexican migrants in the area are indigenous peoples from the southern state of Oaxaca, one of the nation’s poorest. Oaxaca, unlike Mexican states such as Jalisco and Michoacan, does not have a continuous, generations-long history of immigration to the United States.

Most of the Guatemalan migrants in North County appear to be Konjobal Indians from the northwestern state of Huehuetenango, which borders Mexico and, like Oaxaca, is largely composed of hardscrabble campesino farms . Many speak Spanish only haltingly.

But the Guatemalans probably face more hurdles than their Mexican counterparts. The Mexican migrants in North County generally have fairly developed social networks of relatives, friends and neighbors upon whom they can rely for support. In addition, many received legal status under the amnesty law, allowing them to leave the area and find better jobs and improved housing elsewhere. And, for those who remain undocumented, capture by U.S. immigration authorities usually means only a quick trip to Tijuana before they return to the United States.

Undocumented Guatemalans, by contrast, can be held for weeks or months if they cannot afford to post bonds. And many fear reprisals if deported to Guatemala. For the same reason, many are hesitant to talk about conditions back home.

“If I say something, I’m afraid that my family may suffer,” said a 38-year-old Guatemalan man who gave his name only as Antonio Francisco. The father of two said he arrived in San Diego about four months ago. He is among those sleeping on the church patio in Poway.

His reason for leaving his homeland: He feared further service in the so-called “civil patrols,” a civilian force that works under the direction of the Guatemalan military in seeking “subversives.” While service in the patrols is ostensibly voluntary, human rights activists say that Guatemalan armed units often force the male populations of entire villages to join, in effect kidnaping them from their farms.

“I didn’t want to be in the patrol,” said Antonio Francisco, who spoke Spanish with the clipped accent of his native Konjobal tongue as he sat on the back patio of Saint Bartholomew’s. “I’m not political. But if the guerrillas see you with the patrols, they kill you. And if you refuse to serve, the Army kills you. So what does one do?”

Word of San Diego has traveled back to the villages of northwestern Guatemala, migrants said, prompting others to come north. More are likely to follow. The migrant paths work like underground railroads; those already established help the newcomers.

Most Guatemalans make the long trek to the border overland through Mexico, where they are often shaken down by extortion-minded officials. Once in San Diego County, the Guatemalans tend to remain together; many express open distrust of the Mexican migrants who frequently live alongside them.

Fearing violence, many Guatemalans have resettled their wives and children in Mexico while they work in San Diego; a significant number of Guatemalans who reside in San Diego have their families in Ensenada. (Overall, tens of thousands of Guatemalan refugees live in Mexico, fearful of returning.)

“There are too many problems in Guatemala,” said Francisco Pascual, 58, who was found outside the Big Bear store on Encinitas Boulevard, walking with his son Alberto, 12.

His wife and a daughter live in Ensenada, he said. Recently, he brought Alberto north to go to school in the United States. The two are relatively better off than other Guatemalans who live outdoors: They reside in the family van, purchased several years ago while they worked in Colorado.

“I always thought there were nice houses in the United States,” said a buoyant Alberto, still bemused and fascinated by life in his new country. “It was a surprise that we live like this. But I like it here.”