Beating and Rising Ethnic Tension Add Danger to Migrant’s U.S. Job

Every week for years, 39-year-old Jose Luis Lopez has left his wife and two small daughters in their dusty Mexicali Valley colonia to work in San Diego County, returning home on weekends with his earnings and a few building supplies to put toward the family home.

But on Oct. 2, Lopez arrived home with a deep gash on his forehead, a bandaged head, and several loose teeth. He couldn’t chew, his right eye was swollen shut and he carried with him a thin file from Grossmont Hospital suggesting that he see a plastic surgeon immediately for a fractured cheekbone.

Lopez, who for years had slept in a creekbed encampment in the eastern San Diego County community of Alpine on weeknights, was one of three Latino migrants beaten by several Anglo men with baseball bats Oct. 1. The attack was meant as retaliation for the alleged rape of an Anglo woman near the encampment a week earlier, law enforcement officials said.

Extra sheriff’s detectives and FBI investigators have been dispatched to Alpine, and both migrant and anti-immigration activist groups have offered $3,000 rewards for information leading to arrests in the baseball bat rampage and the rape, respectively.

But no one was in custody Monday in connection with either the rape or the bat attack--catalyzed by mounting racial tensions over the day laborers’ presence in Alpine.

Lopez, a quiet man who has worked for a Santee motorcycle shop for more than a year, did not even have a chance to run or lift his arms to defend himself from the blows, he said.

“It happened very fast, and at night,” Lopez said from the porch of the small red-trimmed house he has been building for two years, his face still bruised from the beating, and a bandage covering a 17-stitch gash above his right eye.

“We heard that there was a scuffle in the canyon and everyone ran over to see. They came running up from the creek bed, and broke all the windows of (my friend’s) car. Then they broke my head. I just stood there. I’ve never had any problems with anyone. That’s why I didn’t run.”

Two men who were sleeping near the trash-lined creekbed that has served as home for 20 to 60 migrants over the last few years were beaten first. One, a Guatemalan national, suffered a fractured arm and gash on his head. The other, from Mexico City, had his knee shattered, and his head and an arm split open.

The pair had arrived in Alpine the day before in search of work, one said last week.

But the core of men who sleep at the creekbed are like Lopez--workers legalized under the amnesty program who every week leave families behind in the agricultural flatland about 30 miles southeast of Mexicali.

Even in good years, the agricultural wages offered at the local onion, spinach and lettuce farms are not enough, Lopez and his wife of 12 years, Alicia, said in interviews Friday. And this year, the cotton harvest was decimated by a whitefly infestation, leaving the area’s residents even more desperate for work north of the border.

Men like Lopez say they cannot pay the estimated $500 in monthly rent required by U.S. landlords, because that would leave nothing for their families. But the makeshift encampments that dot the county have attracted some undesirable floaters who drink and steal, and have unleashed the ire of local residents. Some San Diego residents have come to associate the camps with crime, public health problems and a decrease in property values.

Tensions boiled over in Alpine one week before the bat attack, when an Anglo woman reported that she was raped by a Latino man near the encampment. Her husband and several friends had threatened the migrants with bats for days before the attack took place, witnesses said.

The violence has left the Lopez family in a bind: While Alicia does not want her husband to go back to the United States, there is no other way for the family to cope economically, she said.

“I’m scared they’re going to come back and hit him again,” said Alicia, 34, who is expecting a baby in December. “But we can’t live on the salaries they pay here.”

While other migrants in Alpine have complained of locals yelling racial slurs and throwing fruit and rocks at them as they wait for work at the curbside, Lopez said he had never been bothered.

“I just want to bring food to my family, and pay for my daughters’ clothes and school. I’m not angry. First of all, I don’t even know who they were,” Lopez said, as he watched his daughters--Marlen, 7, and Lizeth, 9--play checkers nearby with bottle caps and a board fashioned from cardboard.