Joint Effort to Save Migrant Camp Fails

Despite an unusual effort to keep it open, a migrant camp that came to represent the presence of an alien culture in North County has been shut down.

Scores of migrant laborers and their families were looking Thursday for new shelter to replace the squatters’ camp they had erected in a wooded field near busy El Camino Real in county territory outside Encinitas.

In the weeks before the camp was closed, Encinitas and county health officials had negotiated to allow the settlement to remain open until more suitable housing could be found for its residents.

But that effort finally stalled in a disagreement with the property owner over legal liability.

Earlier this week, clean-up crews moved in to tear down several crude wooden structures that served as homes for entire families after the property owners decided they would not assume the liability to keep the camp open.

Local officials say their unsuccessful effort to keep the camp open temporarily still offers hope that, if a willing landowner is found, a sanctioned permanent encampment might be established, ending the cat-and-mouse game of dismantling migrant camps only to see them spring up again nearby.

Gloria Carranza, transients issues coordinator for the city of Encinitas, said the city has been receptive to having a permanent camp, and a city homeless task force might recommend such a camp to the City Council.

“There’s a new atmosphere in this city that we can make something like this work,” she said. “We’ve got two new City Council members who are open to all solutions. In the past, with one former politician in particular, we knew it was difficult to touch this topic and not find confrontation.”

For Alex Solsa, however, a solution did not come soon enough. On Wednesday afternoon, he and three other workers returned to the abandoned site to look for belongings after being flushed out by cleanup crews two days before.

Solsa, 23, a Tijuana native who has worked in North County for several years, surveyed the dismantled clapboard structures, the old furniture strewn about the former camp, situated near the Encinitas migrant hiring hall, canopied by a stretch of overhanging trees.

“We had hoped it would be different this time,” he said as two companions cut up vegetables on a table to throw into a vat of chicken soup they cooked nearby, casting the smell of cilantro about the deserted area. “There used to be whole families here. Little children ran around. We were a community.”

The camp, he said, once housed about 20 people. County officials put the number at 60 to 80.

“But now everyone is gone,” Solsa said. “They’ve been forced to go to other camps where they have friends who will take them in.”

Solsa, however, said he is used to such experiences in North County. The recently closed camp sat within sight of the old Green Valley camp--a sprawling site that was once home to hundreds of migrant workers until it was shut down by the county in 1988.

That controversial closing, which came just as workers returned from visiting families in Mexico for the Christmas holidays, signaled tense times ahead for migrant workers and their middle-class Anglo neighbors.

Since then, Solsa has moved between several camps in Encinitas and Carlsbad. “I am tired of moving,” he said.

But migrant workers aren’t the only ones tired of the moving routine, said Bob Graham, operating chief of Target Services, a Vista company hired to clean up the encampment.

“When I first saw the place, I was disgusted by all the filth,” he said. “But, on a gut level, I was also tired of pushing these people around from hillside to hillside, knocking down one house here just to have it rebuilt over there.”

Last month, Graham had been hired by property owners of the 4-acre parcel to clean out the workers after county officials had cited the area as a health hazard following complaints by neighbors.

Before he began his work, however, Graham called Gloria Carranza to propose a different solution: update the camp to meet county sanitation codes and allow workers to remain there temporarily while more permanent housing could be found.

That set off a flurry of contacts between various officials and the property owners, said Carranza, explaining that the city became involved in recent negotiations because the camp was within its sphere of influence.

“There was nothing the city could do by itself,” she said. “The camp was on county property. It was in the hands of county health officials.”

Steve Escoboza, assistant director for the county health department, said officials were willing to be flexible on the abatement order as long as health and safety problems were resolved by the introduction of dumpsters, toilets and portable water.

“We all recognize that the problem of migrants being moved about is a larger social dilemma,” he said. “There’s no easy answers. So we decided to work for a temporary solution until a more permanent (one) could be found.”

In the end, the effort failed over the issue of who would be legally responsible if harm came to the families allowed to remain on the property.

Kenneth Hinsvark, a Palm Springs resident who owns the property with two other partners, said his lawyers advised him not to take the risk.

“The group led by Target Services wanted to lease the property for a dollar a year,” he said. “I told them that was fine. But, if we were going to be held liable for what went on there, I wasn’t interested.”

Graham said he even went looking on his own for insurance but could not find a company to even quote him a price on such a venture. “Apparently it’s uncharted territory,” he said.

Meanwhile, city and county officials say the solution lies in locating permanent housing for workers that would make the often-squalid camps a problem of the past.

Until then, however, sanctioned camps may be the temporary answer to help workers make a transition into a better way of life.

Carranza said, “It’s a reality we’d all like to see.”