Cold Snap Means Few Jobs for Fieldworkers : Agriculture: Hundreds of migrants crowd street corners in Oxnard’s La Colonia neighborhood. Some have gone weeks without paychecks.

Every February, Artemio Rodriguez comes to Ventura County from Michoacan, Mexico, to harvest strawberries. In June, he goes to Fresno to harvest grapes and peaches and returns to Ventura in September to harvest chilies.

But this year when the 34-year-old Rodriguez arrived, there was no work at the Camarillo farm that had always hired him. The December freeze, aggravated by a five-year drought, has pushed the strawberry harvest behind schedule by at least a month, Rodriguez was told.

“They tell me 22 more days,” Rodriguez said last week as he waited for a job offer on an Oxnard street corner, after going 11 days without work. “I’m counting every one of them.”

Hundreds of unemployed migrant workers crowd the street corners of the La Colonia neighborhood in Oxnard these days, hoping to land jobs with a handful of labor contractors in the county’s lettuce, celery and broccoli fields.

But few jobs are available, and some workers go weeks without a paycheck. “Things are tough, especially now that we have all the strawberry pickers here,” said Silverio Ambriz, 25, a contractor’s foreman who was counting heads at 4:30 a.m. on the corner of Roosevelt Avenue and Cooper Road.

“Last year we were hiring between 200 and 300 workers a day,” Ambriz said. “Now we take only 40. People come here after spending Christmas in Mexico and they have no idea that there’s no work.”

It’s a daily ritual: The workers walk around a 10-block radius in the heart of La Colonia before daybreak, carrying their lunches in plastic bags, hoping to be called on for a day’s work.

The foremen hold court on the street corners, chatting with prospects before deciding who will be hired at $4.50 an hour.

Each corner belongs to a different contractor. The workers, who never meet the contractors, only know them by their last name: “Molina” foremen hire on one corner. “Cuevas” is a block away.

Foremen say they usually hire the same people every day because they have proven themselves on the field. But workers who don’t get chosen say other factors come into play.

“Over here, everything is based on favoritism,” said Mariano Gonzales, 52, unemployed for three weeks. “They hire their nephews, their in-laws or the people from their hometowns. For me, all that is left is to go home and wait for the morning.”

Gonzales, like many immigrants, shares a rented room in La Colonia with other workers during the season. Others live in converted garages.

For some workers, the difference between work and unemployment hinges on an early morning phone call.

“Anybody have a quarter?” West Valley Packing foreman Martin Caballero, 27, asked half a dozen workers leaning on a pickup truck. A young man flipped him the coin.

As the foreman headed for the phone booth, the workers exchanged nervous glances. Adam Montoya, 20, stepped on a cigarette butt and said: “That little phone call will decide our day.”

Caballero returned 30 seconds later with the verdict: “Sorry, guys, the fields are wet. We won’t be working today.”

The workers’ cash shortages in turn have slowed the lively mini-economy that caters to them.

Sales are down about 50% at Mexican restaurants and taco stands that open at 4 a.m. to pack burrito lunches and sell the coffee that warms workers before the sun comes up.

“If there’s no work, there’s no sales,” said Larry Martinez, owner of the Esperanza restaurant on Cooper Avenue, one recent morning as he stirred a pot of spicy meat, still half-full after the early morning rush hour. “People come and ask for credit, but how can I give them any when I’m making half the money I was making last year? I have to reinvest every cent just to keep the business going.”

Across the street, Sam Gonzales opens his barbershop every morning at 5 a.m. so workers can get a quick trim before going off to the fields.

“I’ve been cutting hair here for 45 years, and it’s never been worse,” he said. “When there’s work, they get their hair cut every two or three weeks. Now you never see them more than once a month.

“A lot of the workers come to me when they first arrive from Mexico and ask me to cut their hair, promising to pay later. I say, ‘Sure, pay me when you have a chance,’ but nobody pays, and they stop coming because they are embarrassed. Others come here and ask me for change so they can get something to eat. I give it to them, but I never get it back. What can I do? I know they want to pay me back, but they can’t.”

Also affected by the recession are the raiteros, who charge $2 to $3 to give workers raites, slang for rides, to the fields in their vans and station wagons.

In years past, raiteros always found work, said Cervando Uribe as seven workers jumped into his white Ford Bronco, ready to be taxied to the fields. But things have changed this year, he said.

Pointing to a string of vehicles parked across the street, he said, “See that? They’re all raiteros. And they won’t get any raites today.”

As a result of the slump in the farm economy, Oxnard’s unemployment office is busier than ever, said Avelina Villalobos, manager of the Ventura-Oxnard Employment Development Department.

“In January, the big employers from the strawberry fields usually call us asking for workers, but this year they haven’t called yet because the plants are frozen and there’s very little work.”

Villalobos said according to the latest statistics, just over 25,000 people applied for unemployment in December, 1990, a 33% increase from December, 1989.

“By January, most folks come off unemployment and go back to work, but this year it seems like nobody’s going back,” Villalobos said.

Under the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, farm workers who are not U.S. citizens are eligible for unemployment checks of up to $220 a week but cannot receive food stamps, Medicare or general relief for dependent children.

Villalobos said the recession has increased interest among farm workers for out-of-state jobs. Every two to three months for the past year, Villalobos said, representatives from meatpacking companies in Nebraska and Iowa have come to Oxnard to recruit unemployed workers.

“Usually they hire 50 or so people, but their last recruitment trip in January was very successful--more than 100 workers were hired,” she said.

Marco Abarca, an attorney at the Oxnard office of the California Rural Legal Assistance, predicts that the migrant workers’ situation will worsen in upcoming months as the full effects of the five-year drought and the December freeze sink in.

“Very soon, you will begin to see the problems created by these twin ecological disasters,” he said.

Migrant workers usually follow the harvest up the coast, starting with the strawberries here and around San Diego and ending with the apple harvest in Oregon and Washington before returning to Southern California or Mexico when the season’s over, Abarca said.

But with almost half the avocado, orange and lemon harvest wiped out in Ventura County--and comparable losses throughout the state--migrant workers will have to look elsewhere for jobs, Abarca said.

“The migrant stream has been interrupted. Instead of going up the coast, workers will have to go east, to Colorado and Texas, and all over the country, looking for jobs,” Abarca said.

The loss of migrant worker jobs will have a ripple effect on the economy that depends on them, Abarca said. “The tractor drivers, the fruit packers, the people who have found permanent jobs after years of following the harvest--they will all have to leave.”