Laborer-Intensive Lawyer : Legal aid: Attorney Eileen McCarthy joins the local office of a nonprofit group that helps farm workers. She calls herself a ‘product of the ‘60s.’

Eileen McCarthy isn’t fluent in Spanish. And she never has earned a dollar stooped over a row of strawberries or lettuce or celery.

Nevertheless, the 38-year-old public interest lawyer feels deeply connected to the laborers who work Ventura County’s corduroy farmland and who squeeze out a living in the area’s packinghouses.

“My background is Irish, Catholic working class,” she says with conviction. “My parents grew up in the Depression and they were very class-conscious. I grew up learning that virtue is helping your fellow man.”

McCarthy is the new counsel at the local office of California Rural Legal Assistance, a statewide nonprofit group that provides free legal help to farm workers.

She took over for Marco Antonio Abarca, a popular, publicity-savvy attorney who helped open the Oxnard office in 1989 and resigned late last year to help run his family’s food manufacturing business in Denver.

“She and Marco are more or less the same,” says Luis Teran, a disabled celery picker who heads the tenants’ association for a run-down trailer park in Oxnard. “Their attitudes are the same, they both want to help us all they can.”

McCarthy steers clear of publicity.

After 10- to 12-hour workdays, the former aerobics instructor prefers retreating to her small Meiners Oaks apartment where she indulges in a steady supply of self-help books and New Age music.

She has never owned a television and never plans to.

McCarthy earns less than $50,000 a year; her boss says she could earn much more than that in private practice.

“I am a product of the ‘60s,” she explains. “I saw injustices in the system and in the country that needed to be addressed and that’s what I set out to do.”

McCarthy was born on a San Bernardino Air Force base, the youngest daughter of a career military man. Despite her father’s military background, she was baptized, with her parents’ blessing, in the counterculture revolution of the 1960s.

“My dad was an enlisted man,” she emphasizes. “He chose not to be an officer.”

So while her father served a tour of duty in Vietnam, she says, her older sisters protested the war. And the youngest daughter--the one who was taught that materialism was bad and helping others was good--decided at 13 that she wanted to be a lawyer.

She graduated in 1972 from an all-girls Catholic school in San Bernardino and attended San Bernardino Valley College for a couple of years before transferring to UC Riverside to complete her undergraduate work in economics.

She attended law school at UC Berkeley and after passing the State Bar exam in 1981, started working with women’s groups in the Bay Area.

“I’m a feminist and I’m a radical and it was a natural,” she said.

She first joined CRLA in the tiny Riverside County city of Coachella in 1986, left in 1991 to work with a legal aid group in Redding and was recruited back to CRLA late last year when Abarca announced that he was leaving.

“A lot of thought was given to what type of person we would need to continue the work the office has been doing,” says Lee Pliscou, directing attorney of the Oxnard office. “With just two attorneys in the office, we needed to bring someone into the office who could just plop down in the chair and go.”

That’s what McCarthy has been doing, picking up cases where Abarca left off.

Since opening the Oxnard office three years ago, CRLA attorneys have provided aggressive legal representation to the poor and underserved.

CRLA attorneys exposed the abuse of dozens of Mexican laborers at a flower ranch in Somis, a case that federal attorneys described as the most far-reaching slavery prosecution ever filed in the United States.

They continue efforts to help farm workers who have been cheated out of wages or who have suffered discrimination.

And in one of the biggest challenges facing McCarthy, the struggle continues to spur city officials to approve construction of a new mobile home park for residents of the 140-unit Oxnard Mobilehome Lodge where Luis Teran lives.

“I think that cities and counties can be made more accountable for the housing they are instrumental in providing,” McCarthy says. “My job here is to make the system more responsive to a group that traditionally has been shut out.”

Now that she is working with farm workers again, she vows to take night classes to learn Spanish.

And she says she will always remember that her clients are the boss, and she’s privileged to work for them.

“I really like the work I do,” she says. “It’s right there in your face. When you see what people have to live on, when you see where families of six or eight or 10 are forced to live, you can’t stand back and do nothing about it.”