Farm Worker Family Waits for New Home : Oxnard: The City Council is expected to apply for a state grant to help replace mobile residences beyond repair.

Raul and Maria Solano had lost hope. Eighteen months ago they were told that they qualified for a loan from the city of Oxnard to replace their dilapidated mobile home, but months went by and nothing happened.

When the March rains came and flooded their bedroom, a tiny wood hut attached to their trailer, the Solanos had to go from sleeping on their mattress to sleeping on the floor.

When water poured in through the trailer’s rotted metal roof and onto 4-month-old Rosario Solano’s cradle, the baby had to be moved with the older children into the family’s only bed.

Maria Estrella Solano, 5, who shared the family bed with Rosario and brother Raul Jr., 6, asked day after day, “When are they going to bring us the new house? This one is falling apart.” Her mother never knew what to answer.

The Solanos soon may get the help they desperately need. The Oxnard City Council is expected to apply today for a $50,000 state grant to help farm worker families replace mobile homes that are beyond repair.

The city has already earmarked $50,000 worth of matching funds from the redevelopment budget, so four families will have their homes replaced by this fall if the state funds come through.

The redevelopment money, part of a federal grant, cannot be used for removal of the old mobile homes. Oxnard officials say they can’t afford to pay for those costs with other city funds, so unless the city receives the state grant, the Solanos will have to keep waiting.

But if the grant does come through, they are first on the list. And they won’t have to pay back the loan until they move out and sell their mobile home.

“It’s a sweetheart deal, but the families are needy, so we’re happy to do it,” said Ernie Whitaker, Oxnard’s housing rehabilitation program manager.

For the Solanos, the new house would only add to the gifts that they have received from the government since they immigrated to the United States, fleeing poverty and unemployment in Mexico.

Maria, 40, arrived in 1972 from the poor, rural state of Michoacan. Raul, 48, arrived in 1983 from a village in Oaxaca, another of Mexico’s poorest states.

He lived with five roommates in a crowded south Oxnard apartment; she shared a trailer with her mother. They were married a year after meeting in a strawberry field where they both worked.

With help from her brothers, who picked peaches and grapes in Stockton, the newlyweds put together the $7,000 that they needed for a trailer in Pleasant Valley Mobile Home Park. It took them five years to repay the loan they received from their wealthier Stockton relatives.

“There’s nothing I miss about Mexico,” Raul said in Spanish. “Down there, it’s much harder to get by.

“Here we have everything we need to subsist. When there’s no work, I get unemployment, and that helps. Sometimes I get food stamps, and that’s plenty enough for food. And they give us Medi-Cal,” he said.

“In Mexico, there’s none of that. I would surely miss my family, but my relatives are all in the States now. So there’s nothing in Mexico for me, nothing I miss.”

He is grateful for the subsidies. “The government helps you sometimes, and that’s all you need to be happy.”

The Solanos don’t speak English and they don’t need to, but their children are learning it in school. Corn tortillas, chilies, rice and beans are still the mainstays of the family diet.

In November, 1989, the Solanos heard that city officials were at Plaza Park advertising a program of $7,500 low-income loans for mobile-home upgrades.

“They looked around, they measured, they asked questions and then they told us our home was too old to qualify for the program,” said Raul, who still toils in a strawberry field in Camarillo and lives off unemployment benefits for six months every year, while Maria stays home with the children.

Instead, “they told us that they would get us a new home, and I was very happy,” Maria said.

“I told the kids they were going to have a new house, and they were happy too. But the months went by and nobody called us. We lost hope. We thought it would never happen.”