For One California Family, It’s Barely : Christmas

Except for a few small presents her six children will open on the filthy wood floor of their house, Christmas will be just like any other day for Therese Alarcon and her family. Like many rural families dependent on seasonal farm work, traditional holidays aren’t possible for Alarcon’s family.

They live on $9,000 a year, more than $10,000 below the poverty line for a family of eight.

“It seems like the days blend into days,” says Alarcon, 38. “Rich people make a big deal out of Christmas. We can’t. On Christmas, they’ll open their presents and the day will go on.”

Alarcon, who lives with her illegal immigrant common-law husband, says her family barely survives.

They live in a makeshift wood-frame house with cobwebs lining the kitchen ceiling and torn up couches worse than anything given away by the Salvation Army.

To make matters worse for Alarcon, her oven broke two weeks ago, and her phone was disconnected when she couldn’t pay a $600 bill. She owed five monthly payments of $209 on her car when it was repossessed three weeks ago.

Still, the family manages to get by.

A wood-burning stove warms the main room, where the family sleeps during the winter months when evening temperatures can dip into the 20s.

With only two beds for eight people, sleeping isn’t easy.

“Right now we have everyone sleeping everywhere,” she says. “We just kind of all pile on top of each other.”

The family has gotten used to the constant whizzing of traffic along Highway 99 just 10 yards from the house.

The noise seems to ease from 2 to 4 a.m., but Alarcon says her family has a constant ringing in their ears and has suffered permanent damage.

Just as noisy are the sounds of Southern Pacific freight trains rumbling by five times a day.

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The family lives in Traver, an unincorporated rural farming community in Tulare County. Tulare has a child poverty rate of 38 percent, the state’s highest, says Sandy Beals, director of FoodLink, a nonprofit charity food bank.

“Some people really do not have a dollar,” says social worker Jana Mathias. “We take it for granted that we can always find a way to get money for food or clothes.”

Because Traver is such a small community, poor people there often can’t get help from agencies in larger towns that only help their own residents, Mathias says.

Alarcon normally applies for welfare this time of year but won’t now because of the recently passed Proposition 187, which denies benefits to illegal immigrants.

Her common-law husband and father to two of her six children is a Mexican resident and earns $5 an hour during the summer as a farm worker.

He can’t apply for citizenship because he has four drunken driving convictions from seven years ago, Alarcon says.

Alarcon hates her house, but right now it’s all she has.

“We live in Mexico conditions,” she says. “Sometimes I wish it would burn down when I wasn’t here.”