New Camp Small Respite From Bleak Migrant Housing Picture

This spring, unexpected good fortune has visited Cirilio Zafra, a Mexican field hand long accustomed to living in crude dwellings constructed amid the brush, like so many who work the fertile fields of northern San Diego County.

Now, Zafra sleeps on a crisply made bed, purchases fresh and reasonably priced hot food at a clean cafeteria, views a big-screen television on idle evenings, has access to modern toilet facilities and avails himself of the heretofore unimaginable luxury of hot showers.

“Life is much more tranquil,” said Zafra, 59, a father of eight and native of the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca. He has picked and planted tomatoes in San Diego, lettuce in the Central Valley, and apples and berries in Washington state during three decades of job-seeking wanderings in the West.

But a few hundred yards down the hill from the modern dormitory where Zafra and dozens of his co-workers reside, life is not so comfortable for Pedro Guzman and another 200 or so field hands. They live in a coarse encampment of dirt-floor shacks fashioned from scrap wood, bamboo and plastic--a mini-village situated amid a willow thicket flanking the San Luis Rey River, now swollen and muddy from recent rains.

Most buy food at inflated prices from catering trucks, heating it later on open fires. The bushes serve as restrooms. Candles, flashlights and campfires provide light.

“We live like this only out of necessity,” Guzman explained as he rinsed clothes in a communal washing area, water provided by a hose tapped into a line meant for an adjacent cucumber field. “There is no choice for us.”

As tens of thousands of agricultural laborers return to California for the upcoming spring farm cycle, the tale of the two juxtaposed home sites says much about the desperate state of migrant housing in northern San Diego County, where--despite a labor-intensive, almost $800-million a year agricultural industry--decent and affordable accommodation is available for relatively few.

Here, virtually in the shadow of upscale shopping centers and $250,000 homes, thousands of otherwise homeless farm workers and day laborers--perhaps as many as 10,000 (no one knows for sure), reside in illegal, makeshift camps that experts say constitute the largest, and most dramatic, concentration of substandard, unhealthy farm worker living conditions found anywhere in California.

“Amid this extraordinary vision of wealth, which San Diego represents for the nation, you have this shocking situation of people living in a Third World-like setting,” noted Don Villarejo, executive director of the California Institute for Rural Studies, a Davis-based nonprofit research and education organization that has studied the state’s almost $18-billion a year farm economy.

While scattered settlements of homeless farm laborers can be found in fields, canyons, caves and beneath roadways and bridges throughout California’s farm belts, experts say that a number of factors unique to San Diego--among them the area’s high housing prices, its rugged topography that offers secluded cubbyholes, and its proximity to the U.S.-Mexico border--have meant that nowhere else have such primitive accommodations evolved as the norm.

“Although pockets of farm worker misery can be found throughout California’s farmlands, North County’s situation is incomparable in terms of sheer numbers,” Claudia E. Smith, regional counsel in Oceanside for California Rural Legal Assistance, noted in a recent paper.

Largely because of the region’s nearness to the border, in the midst of one of the world’s busiest migratory corridors, the farm worker population of the San Diego area is distinct--and exceptionally poor, even by the generally low standards of the entire California and U.S. agricultural work force, experts say.

Also, most growers in northern San Diego County run fairly small operations. Many growers in the Central Valley are larger, by comparison, and are better able to offer some benefits, such as improved housing, to their workers.

In the Central Valley and elsewhere in the state, experts note, farm laborers typically cram into homes, apartments and garages, as well as into unlicensed agricultural camps, packinghouses and storage sheds that double as housing. Most pay some kind of rent for housing that is generally cheaper than comparable quarters found in San Diego County. A fortunate minority do manage to gain entry into the state’s relatively small volume of legal camps and publicly funded housing, where rents are controlled, said Smith.

Much of Imperial Valley’s work force lives in Mexico and commutes daily, but the 35- to 75-mile distance between the border and much of North County makes that solution impractical there.

Only in the San Diego area do so many live in such overwhelmingly bleak conditions, noted Smith.

In the midst of such a stark tableau, Zafra’s newfound tranquility stems from a propitious circumstance: He works for a major Oceanside-based grower, Harry Singh & Sons, which last year opened a novel, $2.5-million farm worker housing development that features dormitory-type accommodations for some 325 field hands. Zafra moved in this spring.

Singh workers pay $16.50 a week for a bed and $6.40 a day for three hot meals. A farm worker’s wages are so meager that even these cut-rate prices represent the lion’s share of their earnings.

Still, the Singh development is a veritable poor man’s palace, the largest such project believed ever constructed in the San Diego area--and among the most ambitious farm worker housing tracts built lately anywhere in California.

But, as part of the development agreement, the facility is only available to Singh workers--and only to legal U.S. residents.

Guzman and his neighbors down the hill are employed by other area growers who provide no housing--the typical scenario here. Many camp dwellers are illegal immigrants.

Much of the North County’s agricultural work force lives in more than 200 illicit encampments, which range in size from small clearings with a few campsites to sprawling mini-communities (such as Guzman’s) that provide shelter to hundreds, experts say.

“They live . . . in fields, hillsides, canyons, ravines and riverbeds, often on the edge of their employer’s property,” noted a report released last month by the countywide Regional Task Force on the Homeless, a study group headed by San Diego Mayor Maureen O’Connor. “They have suffered from years of widespread neglect.”

Because such squatter camps are largely illegal, they are not typically subjected to government scrutiny. If they were, most would be shut down for violating health and safety laws.

The long-awaited Singh farm project offers a respite for a small segment of the farm labor community, but officials and activists note that no other large-scale alternatives to the crude camps are being planned.

Said Ramon Bobadilla, a Catholic Charities social worker who often visits camp sites along the San Luis Rey River Valley: “Sure, everyone agrees that Harry Singh (& Sons) did a great thing, but it’s not even a drop in the bucket. The need is just so great. It’s a humongous problem.”

At the moment, Smith and other advocates say, things are particularly desperate for San Diego-area field hands, with unemployment and underemployment high.

Moreover, even in the best of times, most immigrants, who typically earn the state minium of $4.25 an hour, are unable to afford the high rents that are prevalent in one of the nation’s wealthiest and fastest-growing urban-suburban corridors.

“If we had to pay rent, we wouldn’t be able to buy food, much less send money back to our families (in Mexico),” said Guzman, a father of six, who explained that he and others living in the makeshift camp were working, on average, three days a week, six hours a day.

Last week, as rain pounded the fields of North County, greatly reducing job opportunities, Singh workers had the luxury of a sheltered place to pass time, reading, writing letters home, or playing pool and pinball in the company cafeteria. When the downpours abated, young men went out and played basketball and volleyball on company-built courts.

Down the hillside, residents of the settlement by the San Luis Rey River saw their camp transformed into a quagmire. They labored to repair leaky roofs and to channel the torrents of runoff away from their shanties. Residents huddled near campfires for heat in the near-frost.

“No one wants to live like this,” said a disgusted Agustin Valdez, a 42-year-old from the Mexican state of Oaxca who spoke outside his box-like dwelling of scrap wood.

“We’re tired of this,” Valdez added, “but there is no place else for us.”