Fields of Change : Santa Clarita Valley: With vegetable farms vanishing, migrant workers sow new dreams for their children to harvest.

The vegetable fields that lured the Palafox family to the Santa Clarita Valley nearly 15 years ago are gone now.

Townhomes, office buildings and a shopping mall have sprouted where onions, radishes, carrots and parsley once stretched from foothill to foothill, forcing the farms west to Ventura County and north toward Bakersfield, displacing migrant workers.

But Moises Palafox and his family remain in the valley and he, like other migrant workers, has mixed feelings about the disappearance of the fields. He regrets the loss of a source of income but realizes that he doesn’t want those farms in his children’s future anyway.

“You go to school,” he told his six daughters. “When I’m old, you help me. Better you go to college now than work in the fields like me.”

The Palafox family rents a two-bedroom house in rural Val Verde. Inside, family pictures and mementos crowd the small living room that spills over into the kitchen, which features a battered white electric stove and a slightly off-balance metal dining table.

Laundry hangs from the line on the other side of the house (there are no Laundromats in Val Verde), and the family dog, a German shepherd mix named Cerrullo, barks lazily at visitors.

Rosa Palafox is shy about showing visitors the rest of the home they’ve rented for as long as they’ve been in the valley.

“Even if I didn’t like it,” Rosa Palafox said, smiling, “I have no choice but to live here.”

The Palafoxes consider themselves fortunate. Beside the house a black television satellite dish stands on their mostly dirt lawn. And they have been able to remain in the Santa Clarita Valley, the place they call home, while others were forced to follow the crops or return to their native countries.

“I didn’t leave with the fields because my family was here, and we have settled here,” said Moises Palafox, 47, who got a job as a mechanic on a ranch in nearby Fillmore. “This is our home, so we stayed.”

Asked if the urbanization that has taken away the farms may eventually force him to move as well, Palafox shrugs in resigned acknowledgment that that is not only a possibility but a likelihood.

“I don’t really want to think of that,” said Palafox, who came to the United States from Mexico 26 years ago. “If it comes to that, I will move.”

With the plowing under of the vegetable fields, county officials said, migrant families don’t come to the Santa Clarita Valley anymore. The transitory workers are now mostly single men who line the streets of east Newhall looking for day labor jobs.

Alfredo Vasquez, director of the Los Angeles County service center in east Newhall, shakes his head when he talks about the day six years ago when Boskovich Farms, the largest agricultural interest in the area, abruptly left.

On Dec. 31, 1986, Boskovich Farms gave the last checks to its more than 300 field workers. Their only warning of the layoff had been a telephone call the night before telling them that the onion fields were to be plowed under.

“It was shocking,” Vasquez said. “The workers would come to our office and ask what they could do. They thought of picketing or striking, but it was useless because they were non-union and it was too late to organize.”

Boskovich Farms at one time had planted 1,200 acres of green onions in the Santa Clarita Valley, and it gradually moved its operations to Ventura County in the late 1980s. Other farms in the area didn’t last that long, many of them having plowed their fields under in the late 1970s.

At one time, a cornucopia of fruits and vegetables grew in the fertile Santa Clarita Valley, originally the Rancho San Francisco Spanish land grant. Potatoes, sugar beets and watermelons grew there, along with pumpkins, radishes, alfalfa, walnuts, corn, carrots, parsley, strawberries, leeks, watercress, squash, peppers and three types of onions.

Magic Mountain, the county administration buildings, Santa Clarita City Hall and the new Valencia Town Center shopping mall were all agricultural fields at one time.

In 1982, about $23 million in crops were grown in the Santa Clarita Valley, according to the Los Angeles County agricultural commissioner. By last year, that figure had dwindled to $523,000, in 1982 dollars.

The departure of those farms will soon make Carol Ramnarine’s job obsolete. A program specialist for the county Office of Education, Ramnarine has seen enrollment in the valley’s migrant education program decline from about 275 two years ago to just over 200 today. She estimates that there will be slightly more than 100 migrant education students by the end of next year.

“We’re going to be out of a job . . . but that’s good,” Ramnarine said. “For children whose families no longer migrate from field to field, they have a sense of stability where they can count on some consistent things in their lives.”

More than 80% of those enrolled in the migrant education program in the Santa Clarita Valley no longer have parents who work in the fields, Ramnarine said. The program can serve those children for up to six years after their families have left agriculture.

The migrant education program recently sponsored a workshop for Palafox and other parents on how to further their children’s education. It was the first conference aimed specifically at migrant families in the Santa Clarita Valley.

Martha Martinez, 20, still remembers what it was like picking onions with her family on the Boskovich Farms in what is now part of Valencia.

“It was like a big family,” said Martinez, an east Newhall resident who started in the fields when she was 10. “Everyone in the field knew each other, knew each others’ kids, and it was kind of a gossipy place.”

As a child, she said, she had a chance to play, running up and down the rows of green onions with the other children. But as she grew older, being in the fields became work.

“There were times when it was raining really hard or it got really hot and everything smelled of onions,” said Martinez, who helped her mother for four years in the fields.

After the fieldwork ended, her father started a landscaping business, she said. Theirs is one of numerous gardening operations run by former farm workers in the Santa Clarita Valley.

“To a lot of people, it just seemed to be the easiest thing to do,” Martinez said. She and her four siblings help out in the business, translating, issuing bills and taking care of paperwork and bookkeeping.

Although her father has long stressed the importance of schooling, they have sacrificed their education for the family.

One younger sister, for example, passed up the opportunity to go straight to a University of California school in order to stay home and help with the family business.

“She felt loyal to the family,” said Martinez. “The family situation is that we all work together.” But Martinez attends junior college and, like her sister, still plans to attend a four-year school eventually.

To her, the fields are only a memory, and their disappearance means little as she prepares for a professional career.

“A lot of people in the fields got abused,” Martinez said. “There was no insurance, no medical plan or anything like that, and when the fields were closed they were plain out of jobs.

“As I grew older, I saw that we weren’t going to get ahead by picking onions . . . that’s not what I wanted.”