Survival Tactics : Ingenuity Turns Discarded Materials Into Homes for Migrant Laborers

Along the banks of the San Luis Rey River, migrant laborers craft makeshift dwellings with bamboo plucked from the shoreline, timber culled from trees and dumps, and plastic sheeting scavenged from nearby strawberry farms--bound together not with nails, but with strips of agricultural string and hoses.

A few miles away, in Vista, immigrants scoop out bunker-like holes on a brush-covered hillside, concealing their homesteads with branches--the better to evade detection from a nearby road and $300,000 homes.

The lack of affordable immigrant housing in northern San Diego County has generated a thriving, endlessly inventive network of immigrant home builders, whose ingenuity is evidenced by their creative use of whatever material may be available to fashion a temporary shelter.

The squatters represent the largest concentration of homeless immigrant field hands and day laborers anywhere in California if not in the nation, experts say.

They arrive daily by the hundreds in anticipation of spring work at farms, nurseries, construction sites, private gardens, homes or elsewhere. Camp residents say they are acutely aware of the widespread community opposition to their presence in the hills and canyons, but they say prohibitive housing costs leave them little choice.

Learning from others, they quickly make use of abandoned vehicles, shipping crates, cardboard, felled timber, discarded signs and a wide range of material, much of it cast off by homeowners, growers and contractors. They live in tree houses, two-story dwellings erected with timber, holes and plastic tents staked below the groves.

“This is Mexican science,” jokes Victor Francisco Rodriguez Torres, pointing to a friend’s scrap-wood canton , which is wedged against some camouflaging brush almost atop a Vista hillside. “This is the architecture we use here,” explains Rodriguez, a native of the Mexican state of San Luis Potosi, as he and a friend, Felipe Arriega, play cards on a carpet placed on the ground outside the home.

The imaginative techniques extend beyond housing. Residents also fashion brooms and other implements from the brush and use everything from old bird cages to 55-gallon drums to construct open-fire cooking hearths and grills.

They slice aluminum cans into candle-holders, arrange strings of metal into makeshift alarms, construct musical instruments from bamboo and string, and carve branches into slingshots for hunting rabbits.

Central to the camps’ existence is the presence of food-catering trucks--known as fayucas, a word more commonly associated with junk and contraband in the Mexican interior--that stop along roadsides accessible to the squatters. Many purchase all food and other necessities from the vehicles’ Spanish-speaking crews, despite inflated prices and less-than-nutritious array of prefabricated sandwiches, canned beans, potato chips and the like. Many residents receive mail at stores that cater to their business.

Haphazard as the camps may seem to outsiders, most are purposely situated close to job sites or street-corner hiring areas or bus routes. Dwellings are built according to physical and strategic concerns: availability of wood and other building materials; need for concealment and protection; access to water, roads and central paths.

Although the migrant dwellings are so varied it is difficult to generalize, Felipe Arriega’s home is in many ways a North County prototype. Roughly six-feet long, six-feet wide and four-feet high, it was built, Arriega says, mostly from discarded timber and plastic. Like most, his dwelling was constructed in less than a day, although he constantly adds to it--a chimney (to vent smoke) and a crafty heating system that involved running a 6-foot length of pipe underground from the campfire to a spot inside his shack.

The residence, like many others, is made of plastic sheets draped over a frame of wood posts, reinforced with metal and plastic tubes. Agricultural string and tubing, tied in knots, bind the plastic sheets to the superstructure and lash together the many beams. Arriega used a discarded shovel to dig a rough foundation.

Inside, junked gold-color carpets cover the floor. Books, a writing tablet and letters hang from the rafters. An old mattress, found in a dump, serves as a bed for him and his roommate.

“We use everything we can find,” explains Arriega, 20, a native of the central Mexican city of Cuernavaca. “North Americans throw a lot of things away.”

He and other nearby squatters obtain water from an agricultural faucet, lugging plastic buckets to the site every time they need to fill up. Residents inevitably relieve themselves in the brush, although some camps have portable toilets nearby.

Arriega’s front entrance faces the main road, about 500 yards downhill. This configuration, he explains, is partly aesthetic, but mainly practical: The wind and rain tend to blow from the hills to the rear. More important, he has a good view of trouble approaching from the roadway below.

“If I see la migra, I’m up in the hills right away,” Arriega says, using the common term for U.S. immigration authorities.

To facilitate rapid flight, Arriega and his roommate have constructed an emergency rear exit, used only when the delicacy of the moment dictates.

Nimble departures, he says, are also helpful in evading las gangas, an adulterated form of the English word gangs. Thugs routinely rob camp residents, migrants say.

Amid clumps of California lilac, pungent sage, sumac, oak saplings and wild grasses, the area surrounding Arriega’s dwelling provides a glimpse of a cross section of migrant housing techniques. Indeed, trudging about the hillsides and arroyos is somewhat akin to visiting an archeological site. The caved-in vestiges of hooches and bunkers are almost everywhere, often alongside inhabited sites.

Perhaps 200 meters downhill, a group of four young men from the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca live in what outsiders call a “spider hole”--an in-ground dwelling, its roof covered with boards and plastic and topped with concealing branches.

“We came here and saw the way others built their homes, so we just did the same,” says Carlos Avendano, 18. He and the others sit around the campfire outside the home’s entrance, listening to a battery-operated radio-cassette player--a seemingly indispensable item. Later, they planned an excursion to a nearby swap meet that is a familiar Sunday gathering spot for homeless immigrants seeking inexpensive building materials, clothing and other necessities.

The four, all from the rural town of Ejutla de Crespo in Oaxaca, say they left home Dec. 26 and arrived in San Diego in early January. “The older men told us there was work here, but we haven’t found much,” says Avendano, voicing an all-too-frequent complaint.

They opted for an in-ground dwelling, they say, because it seemed the best-concealed and easiest to construct.

Using their hands and a shovel, they dug a hole about 10 feet long by 12 feet wide into the side of the hill. From three to four feet high inside, it slopes downhill to divert rain; they also excavated a small perimeter ditch to channel the runoff.

“It’s not too cold inside at night,” says Adrian Gonzalez, 20. “We have lots of blankets,” he continues, noting that the earthen walls insulate the place. The men sleep on several mattresses that, like the blankets, have been spirited from waste bins and dumps.

Half a mile away, along a creek hidden beneath a stand of eucalyptus and oak, home for Carlos Perez is the graffiti-glazed shell of a late-model Dodge van. It’s lodged into the muddy soil of the waterway’s bank, both sides pocked with bullet holes--the legacy of its former use.

“It’s just a place God gave us to live in,” Perez says with a smile. The 23-year-old native of the northern Mexican state of Sinaloa inherited the unusual home from friends who have moved farther north.

“If I had papers, of course I wouldn’t live like this,” says Perez, an undocumented immigrant. He shows the van’s interior, where he has placed a mattress and several candles. (Despite the hazard, candles are the almost-universal source of indoor camp lighting. Several immigrant laborers in the San Diego area have died in candle-related fires in recent years.)

Displaying a philosophical bent often found among camp residents, Perez says he’s “heard of some people who have lived outdoors like this for 10 years.” His seven-month stint, though, may be close to his personal limit, he adds. “Maybe with this free trade agreement, things will be better in Mexico and we won’t have to come here anymore. What do you think?”

On this evening, he and friends share a communal meal of goat stew, beans and tortillas, cooked on an open fire. They pool their money for food; fortunate ones who have found work help those who haven’t.

Near the campsite, several men live in a tattered, upside-down plastic tent scavenged from a trash bin. They explain that it seems to work better “in reverse.”

A few yards away, Jesus Alvarez arranges items inside the hollowed-out trunk of an oak tree. Camp residents have constructed a makeshift shrine to the Virgin of Guadalupe, the much-revered patroness of Mexico and Latin America. The shrine holds flowers, a greeting card, a Christmas garland, a child’s toy and a horseshoe, among other tokens.

People pray at the shrine for protection from the U.S. Border Patrol and area thieves, Alvarez says, adding: “Some pray that they’ll find work.”

A few miles north, one of the region’s largest encampments has sprung up alongside the San Luis Rey River in rural Bonsall, providing a sylvan shelter for perhaps 200 residents.

“The rain has made things difficult,” says Mario Suarez, a father of six from Oaxaca, as he labors to place a plastic cover over an eating area he shares with other men from his hometown of Silacayoapan.

Here, where wood is plentiful, most homes are framed with chopped willow stakes and bamboo, bound together with agricultural string and hosing. Many have also built small sleeping cubicles of scrap timber. For foundations, some use crushed soda cans, placed below the posts. Metal signs--one advertises “Fresh Fruits and Vegetables”--serve as walls. Plastic fertilizer bags dot the roofs. Clotheslines crisscross a common wash area.

In many cases, former neighbors from Mexico have encircled their common compounds with bamboo walls, threaded together with string. The compounds include eating and cooking areas.

“We built our place big, because we’re expecting more of our friends from home in Mexico,” says Roberto Correo, 22, who shares a spacious shack with four others from his hometown in Mexico’s Puebla state.

His neighbors have constructed a volleyball net of wood and metal posts and agricultural string. Outside, another resident, seeking dry kindling, uses a 15-foot bamboo pole to down dead branches from willows.

One entrepreneur has set up an outdoor barber shop, with a car seat as his stand. Several women serve meals.

In another area of the camp, Gonzalo Lopez busily constructs a small hut where firewood can be stored beneath plastic sheets. The enterprising youth has also built a basketball hoop of bamboo stalks, agricultural string and tubing. He and nine others--including his infant cousin--share a crude, tent-like structure beneath the trees. They sleep on scrap mattresses placed on old carpet.

“The river rose and washed us all out last night,” says Gonzalo’s 28-year-old mother, Alejandra Lopez.

But, she adds, “We try to make do with what we have.”