Breaking Camps : Migrants: As soon as Encinitas shuts down one illegal settlement, another springs up.

Juana Carrillo cuddled her 2-month-old son, Samuel, as she rested in a concrete drainage canal down a steep slope from Interstate 5 in Encinitas, the tumult of the freeway providing a noisy accompaniment. Her family’s arduous trip from Central America had landed them in this unlikely spot, facing a commercial center crowned at night by a giant red Big Bear electric sign and frequented by upscale, beachwear-clad shoppers driving shiny new Jeeps.

Most improbably, in this Southern California suburb-scape, Carrillo and her family were residing amid a thriving community of rural Guatemalans, many of whom prefer to communicate in clipped Indian dialects.

“It’s difficult now, but I feel things will improve,” said Vicente Ramos, Juana’s 28-year-old husband, who was seated along the ditch with his wife and son.

Here along Encinitas Boulevard, up the road from San Diego and just a few blocks from Moonlight Beach--now largely populated by frolicking students and surfers on spring break--the Third World is converging with the region’s version of late 20th-Century American affluence. The mix is not a smooth one.

For reasons that are logical to some but incomprehensible to others, several scores of migrants from rural Guatemala have in recent years set down roots around the Big Bear shopping center. Unable to afford area housing, many had settled, at least temporarily, in the 18- acre parcel of swampy brush behind the supermarket, until they were kicked out last week. Most relocated to nearby areas.

Every morning, they venture from that lot and other patches of vacant land and post themselves on street corners, soliciting minimum-wage labor from passing motorists.

It is a scene that has become familiar throughout northern San Diego County and elsewhere in Southern California, but nowhere else do the laborers appear to have inflamed the passions as in Encinitas, a beachside community of 50,000 or so people about 25 miles from downtown San Diego. And the Big Bear market, with the large population of Guatemalan migrants it draws, has become a flashpoint of tensions, amid charges of racism and unseemly intolerance by the area’s mostly non-Latino residents.

“This has nothing to do with race or ethnic backgrounds,” said Encinitas Councilwoman Marjorie Gaines, who has led the effort to oust the day laborers and their families from behind the Big Bear market, accusing them of a range of crimes, from murder to robbery to polluting city property. “We can’t accept a subculture that doesn’t recognize our laws. . . . This situation is out of control. What we have is little lawless enclaves.”

So concerned are city officials that last week an Encinitas-employed security firm began patroling the property. Its job is to keep the migrants off the land, which is owned by the city’s sanitary district.

The laborers and their supporters say the negative characterizations by Gaines and others amount to baseless exaggerations, and that the migrants are more often victims--not perpetrators--of attacks by area thugs and ripoffs by unscrupulous employers.

“We don’t come here to rob anyone,” said Leon Ramos, a 27-year-old Guatemalan who was found on a recent evening along a fence behind the Big Bear market. “We’re here to work.”

Despite their daily roadside efforts to solicit work, the migrants say that jobs have been hard to come by. Most say they find employment only one or two days a week. Still, they say, the minium-wage pay is better than anything that they could hope to earn back home. And, as unstable as their lives may be, the migrants do not face the civil strife that many say prompted them to leave Guatemala.

Apart from the charges that the migrants commit crimes, residents have repeatedly accused them of less grievous but perhaps more troubling offenses, such as defecating on lawns and urinating on street corners and spreading diseases. A drainage stream in the property behind the Big Bear market carries the migrants’ “fecal matter” down to Moonlight Beach, charges Councilwoman Gaines. The migrants, most of whom are young men, are also widely accused of harassing women.

The migrants and their defenders have rejected such characterizations as racist stereotypes. But such comments, repeated over and over, have projected a harshly negative image of the immigrant community, weighing the debate against them.

“So much of this is perception,” said Ozvaldo Venzor, an Encinitas salesman who is a longtime migrant advocate. “No one here really goes around defecating on anyone’s lawn, but that’s the kind of talk that you hear all the time. . . . You’ve got to understand that this is an upper-middle-class white community. People like to drive nice cars. And they don’t like to see these little dark guys walking around.”

The Guatemalans are hard to miss in the vicinity of the Big Bear market. Many still sport the wide-brimmed, straw-colored hats common in Mexico and Central America. Their legal status is mixed: Many are undocumented, but some have legal U.S. residence via the amnesty and political asylum programs.

The arrival of the security firm doesn’t appear to have changed the situation, beyond forcing the settlers to shift locations. Last week, most had deserted the encampments behind the market and moved to the adjoining strip of property between the freeway and the shopping center.

Among those gathered along the highway was Lorenzo Paulo Mejia, a 23-year-old from the northern Guatemalan province of Quiche.

He said he and two other men arrived six months ago from Mexico, where they, like many other Guatemalans, had spent time working. Many complain of brutal treatment by Mexican authorities, who are notorious for extorting bribes from Central American migrants en route through Mexico, where they are illegal aliens. (The Guatemalans learn to deny their nationality to bribe-seeking Mexican police, telling them that they are Indians from southern Mexico.) Why did Mejia leave Guatemala?

“I didn’t want to join the guerrillas,” said Mejia, adding that anti-government insurgents regularly conducted forced-recruitment drives in his village near Nebaj, which has long been the site of conflict. About 30 years of civil strife in Guatemala have cost more than 150,000 lives, most of them at the hands of the military, according to human rights groups.

“If I’m lucky, maybe I’ll find enough work to pay for an apartment,” said Mejia, who sported headphones from a radio he had purchased secondhand at a swap meet. “All of us would prefer to live in homes, but the rent is a problem.”

The Guatemalans in Encinitas represent many ethnic groups from various states throughout the Central American nation. However, the greatest number appear to come from hamlets in the northwestern province of Huehuetenango, where guerrilla activity and brutal military counterinsurgency campaigns have long been a way of life. Among the Indian groups most prevalent are the Mam and the Kanjobal.

It is no coincidence, experts say, that the Guatemalans have settled initially in northern San Diego County, despite the fact that living conditions for immigrant laborers have long been considered among the most primitive in the nation. The booming, fast-growing area, only a half-hour ride from the U.S.-Mexico border, has long been a first stop for relatively newer migrants such as the Guatemalans, who usually can find day labor in the fields, nurseries, homes or construction sites.

Migrant laborers from Mexico and Central America reside in crude campsites that proliferate in the brush throughout the area.

Coyotes, or smugglers, often drop the migrants off in Encinitas and in nearby communities after picking them up in the U.S. border community of San Ysidro. Many stay only long enough to earn enough money to head elsewhere in California, or to Oregon and Florida, where there are also large Guatemalan migrant communities.

“In my home, the men always referred to America as tierra santa (holy land),” said Juan Chavez, one of two Guatemalan brothers who spoke from their campsite behind Big Bear market. “The truth is, when I don’t find work, I don’t believe that it is so holy,” Chavez said, laughing.

The Guatemalan Indians, along with Mixtec Indians from Mexico’s Oaxaca state, are at the bottom rung of the immigrant-laborer community in Southern California. Whereas Mexican immigrants from states such as Jalisco, Michoacan and Zacatecas have long been established in the United States, the Guatemalan and Mixtec Indians are more recent arrivals and don’t have the extensive social networks and contacts of the older Mexican communities, thus limiting their mobility. Seldom do migrants settle in areas where they know no one, researchers say.

Although the Guatemalans first began attracting public attention last year, they have been coming to Encinitas since at least the early 1980s. Raul Tomas, a Kanjobal Indian and native of the village of San Rafael Independencia, in Huehuetenango province, said that fellow Guatemalans were living behind a nearby Alpha Beta supermarket when he first arrived in December, 1982.

The migrants settle near markets for an obvious reason: Food and other supplies are readily available.

Two weeks after arriving in Encinitas, Tomas says, he left for Oregon, where he picked strawberries and other crops. He returned to Encinitas in 1984, when he found his countrymen living behind the Big Bear, apparently having been thrown off the Alpha Beta site. He himself camped there for a time.

Ironically, Tomas, now 26, is now employed as a security guard for the Big Bear market. One of his tasks is chasing Guatemalan loiterers. The job has earned him the enmity of some of his compatriots, who view him as a traitor. Tomas, who gained legal residence through the farm-worker amnesty program, has gained a degree of prosperity. He drives a 1990 red Ford pickup that he purchased with his savings. He recently visited his family in Guatemala for the first time since he left.

“Some of us do better than others,” Tomas explained recently as he patrolled the parking lot of the commercial center.

The number of people camped behind the Big Bear appears to have peaked last spring, when officials say more than 100 lived there. Since then, sweeps by city-employed security guards and cleanup crews have prompted many to settle elsewhere. About 35 migrants were said to be residing behind the market last week when the city hired a full-time security firm to roust the squatters, prompting many to shift to the land adjoining the freeway.

“This little piece of land over there is not worth worrying about,” said the voluble Pedro Juan, a 30-year-old native of Huehuetenango who has also worked in Florida. “If they think I want to be buried there, they’re quite mistaken.”

Vicente Ramos and his family, wary of the security guards and the bilingual “No Trespassing” signs posted behind Big Bear market, also took refuge recently along the freeway. He said he had arrived four days earlier from Guatemala, after a long journey through Mexico. He was concerned, he said, because his 2-month old son had suffered from a persistent cold that was likely worsened by sleeping outdoors. Ramos said he brought his wife and the child along because he didn’t want her to be alone while he worked in the north. An older child was left behind.

“A woman suffers a lot by herself,” Ramos said as he relaxed along the drainage canal. “I wanted us to be together here.”

A few moments later, he and his wife and child and a cousin began walking south along the freeway, looking for a quiet place to spend the evening. They were careful to remain on the east side of the fence demarking the Big Bear property and the lot behind it.