Little by Little, a Small City Shows a Big Heart in Its Quake Recovery

Undaunted by the destruction that the Oct. 17 quake dealt it--and with the help of some Southern California groups--the small agricultural town of Watsonville is shaking off the dust and climbing to its feet.

It has been rough for the 29,500 people of Watsonville--one person was killed, about 80 were hospitalized and 195 homes were destroyed. But this working-class community includes some stout-hearted people.

I should know. From the age of 5 until I left for college 13 years later, I attended school, shopped, went to Mass, worked and laughed with these people. Watsonville was my stomping ground. Even today, when Los Angeles gets me down and I feel the need to escape, I return to my hometown, where almost every street and face recalls warm memories.

Watsonville--a city known for its frozen-food processing plants--is nestled between the hills of Mt. Madonna and the Pacific Ocean, about 16 miles south of Santa Cruz. Its population is about 50% Anglo, 40% Latino; the rest are Asians, blacks and American Indians.

When I returned home a week after the 7.1 earthquake, I found that it had dealt Watsonville a tremendous blow.

About 850 people, mostly poor Latino laborers, slept in tents that the city and the National Guard pitched in parks throughout the city. St. Patrick’s Catholic Church, an enormous red-brick structure built in 1903, was heavily damaged, and church officials said it will ultimately be demolished. Some residents whose homes were severely damaged set up house in tents on their front yards and cooked meals on portable barbecue pits.

Most of the Latinos displaced by the quake had been living in aging apartments and run-down houses on the south side of town. Many of them had little to lose, but lost what little they had.

Roberto Ramirez, who was forced out of his two-room apartment, just shrugged as he watched two children run around in the mud in a vacant lot across the street where he and his family had pitched a tent for shelter.

“It’s what God commands,” he told me in Spanish.

But within weeks after the destructive quake, Watsonville began to show signs of recovery and--in some cases--the return of some normalcy. The number of people sleeping in tents in local parks and in three shelters began to diminish.

Colleen McQuillan, a Red Cross spokeswoman in Watsonville, said the agency placed some people in hotel rooms until they could find other shelter. She said the Federal Emergency Management Agency also provided about 100 trailers that people could use on a semi-permanent basis.

A group of Latino activists in Watsonville provided counseling for Spanish-speaking residents at a clinic called Salud Para La Gente, McQuillan said. Some of the people who sought help at the clinic lived through the 1985 Mexico City earthquake and retained horrible memories of the experience, she said.

“We have been coordinating mental health workers to let people talk about their fears and anxiety,” she said.

Less than a month after the quake, almost everybody had returned to work, she said, and school buses had been rerouted to include stops at the shelters and makeshift tent cities.

What overwhelmed most people, she said, were the donations and gestures of support for those living in tents and shelters.

“It was just amazing how many people were concerned about the kids in the shelter,” McQuillan said.

Among those making contributions to Watsonville’s recovery were a group of music students from Cal State Dominguez Hills in Carson, who raised money by selling cassette tapes of original music they recorded.

The nine-song cassette, titled “Answering the Call,” included funk, Christian-oriented and progressive rock music. Students at the university expected to raise about $1,000.

One campus official said the university chose to assist Watsonville because “Dominguez Hills is one of the smaller campuses in the (Cal State) system, and we decided to adopt one of the smaller cities damaged by the quake.”

Assemblyman Richard Polanco (D-Los Angeles) and some other Latinos helped collect about $1,000 in donations and filled a 60-foot-long truck with everything from pots and pans to blankets and baby food.

Keith Malone, a spokesman for Polanco, said that “obviously there is a common heritage here” and added that the goal of the relief drive was for “Latinos to help Latinos.”

For many, the quake drew a heavy emotional toll.

My dad--a strawberry farmer who came to this country as a day laborer almost 30 years ago--said that many Mexican workers who were displaced by the quake had become frustrated trying to find a permanent house and returned to Mexico.

But he said tractors and other heavy equipment had begun the process of tearing down the most heavily damaged buildings in the city’s downtown commercial strip--much of which was built in the early 1900s--to make way for their replacements.

“Little by little,” he said, “the city is getting better.”