Ties That Bind : Cabrillo Village: Tightly knit community is vexed and blessed by closeness as it struggles to deal with crime from outside and within.

They are talking about building a brick wall around Cabrillo Village.

The residents of this community--mostly Latino, entirely poor--say the barrier could have blocked the bullets that rang out in recent years, felling sons and fathers and breaking the hearts of those left behind. Like the presence of Ventura police officers on Cabrillo streets--which began seven months ago when the city annexed the former migrant labor camp--the wall will make them safer, they say.

It will keep the bad people out, and the good people in.

But the problems plaguing this 1,000-resident community on the southern tip of Ventura come from within its homes as well as outside its borders, police and some residents say.

In essence, Cabrillo Village is a neighborhood both blessed and vexed by a closeness rarely seen today.

Together, these neighbors won their land nearly 20 years ago, standing hand-in-hand to turn away bulldozers after health officials condemned their homes.

But the cohesion that binds neighbor to neighbor also discourages residents from speaking out against the increasingly violent behavior of some of the neighborhood youth.

“Before, it was like one big, happy family,” said Virginia Martinez, who has lived with her husband and children on U Street for 27 years. “I had never heard of shootings and killings until recently.”

Martinez’s son Rolando died in a neighborhood drive-by in 1991. The Saticoy man convicted of the murder admitted in his trial that he meant to scare Cabrillo Village gang members who had harassed him. Martinez was not a gang member.

But like many of her neighbors, Virginia Martinez is reluctant to say whether local youths bear any responsibility for escalating acts of violence, including a random shooting that killed a father last fall.

“People say that’s probably the reason, but I don’t know,” Martinez said. “Probably, they are not so bad, but they just need some help from grown-ups.”

The gang members put the situation more bluntly.

“At night, the streets are all ours,” exulted Gerardo Oseguera, 17, who said he is a member of the Campos, the local gang. Gerardo and his friends explained how they turn up their music, drink, get stoned, and shoot guns across the riverbed on the village’s south side.

“Yeah, the adults, they call each other on the phones at night--’Oh look out, they’re coming this way,”’ he said, mimicking a woman’s high-pitched voice. “But they know where we live, and we know where they live. So they can’t rat on us.”

Indeed, such machismo has wrenched the adults into an uneasy silence, leaving them to whisper among themselves and peek through their curtains at nighttime carousers.

One man who will talk about the neighborhood’s troubles is J.J. Vaivao, a former gang member from Lynwood who married a local girl, settled in Cabrillo Village and now works for the county.

Since the 1991 shootings, Vaivao has devoted much time to providing activities for neighborhood youth.

“My goal is to get hold of these kids before it gets any worse,” he said. “You see, there are only a few bad apples here. Ninety-five percent are good apples.

“But the other 5% rule everybody.”

Ventura Annexation

The neighborhood that Gerardo and his friends claim as their own lies at the south end of Saticoy Avenue, in a sparsely populated corner of suburban east Ventura.

Cabrillo Village spent most of its existence under county control. The residents sent their children to Ventura schools and wrote out checks to the city for water, sewer and trash services. But when someone called 911, the county fire and Sheriff’s Department responded.

That changed last spring. Ventura annexed the community, and city police started patrolling the streets. Where sheriff’s deputies visited the village only occasionally, the police show up every day as part of their regular patrol route.

The police also set up a temporary storefront in the neighborhood earlier this year, as an introduction to the community.

It only remained two weeks. Many of the older residents wish it would have lasted longer.

“I felt more safe and secure when the police were here,” said Victoria Anguino, 46.

Anguino came to Cabrillo Village in 1963, following a brother who lived in the neighborhood and worked the fields.

She and her husband reared six children in their home on the corner of Cinco de Mayo and U streets. For 10 years she has lovingly tended her rose garden, starting some mornings around 11 a.m. and only stopping when the setting sun reminds her to go inside and make dinner.

Anguino says she has the kind of neighbors who care when she is sick and stop by to see what they can do to help. The neighborhood reminds her of the country where she was born.

“I feel like it’s being home in Mexico,” she said. “The people are so generous. And everybody speaks Spanish.”

Not only does everybody speak Spanish--many people speak nothing but, relying on their American-born children to translate the English-speaking world for them. Vendors wheeling carts roam the village’s narrow streets. For a dollar, a customer can buy a steaming ear of corn, soaked in margarine and smothered in lime juice, salt and chili powder.

The carts share the roads with children, racing in mad scrambles from home to home, and mothers pushing baby strollers. Long, narrow speed bumps, laid out in pairs, punctuate the streets at short intervals.

The community consists of small, one-story homes--descendants of the original migrant labor camp shacks--and peach-colored apartment complexes constructed with grant money after the camp became a housing cooperative 19 years ago.

The village also has a cluttered general store and a church, tended by the women of the community.

All Cabrillo Village residents qualify as “very low income,” defined in Ventura as a family of four earning $26,700 a year or less. Some earn far less.

In this community of 150 dwellings, homes rent for $200 to $240 a month and newer townhouses rent for $300 to $450 a month.

Where three or four families will move out of the apartments each year, residents seldom vacate their homes. Those who do leave usually turn over their lease to a child or another relative, ensuring that strangers do not reap the benefits they fought so hard to obtain.

Quiet Beginnings

Ventura’s only housing cooperative began 60 years ago as a migrant labor camp erected by local farmers to lodge their workers.

The shacks originally housed single men, but over time their families moved in as well. Eventually, the makeshift settlement became a permanent community.

When the Mesa family came in the mid-1960s, Cabrillo Village was filled with Spanish-speakers such as themselves. At least half the families on their block today lived in the same houses back then, the Mesas say.

“There used to be walnut trees over there, strawberry fields over there,” said Ysidro Mesa, now 87, pointing with his forefinger at paved streets and land crowded with houses. “There was a lemon camp here and I was out there picking lemons, too.”

Arriving from Texas on the rumor of steady work, the Mesas found a house with no kitchen, no bathtub--hardly any rooms to speak of actually, except the small main room and a bedroom off to the side.

Still, they were satisfied.

“I was very happy when we arrived here because there was a lot of work,” said Maria Mesa, 74.

But the steady pace of labor camp life was upended in 1975, when the workers’ labor contract expired and a health inspector condemned the housing project. Faced with eviction, the 80 families fought back.

On the day bulldozers arrived to raze the houses, the residents met them at the entrance--mothers, fathers and children, linked hand-to-hand in a human chain. After a few minutes, the drivers turned off their machines.

Together, the villagers raised $80,000 to purchase their land--$1,000 from each of the families--and formed a cooperative that today owns the entire community.

State grants soon helped the families refurbish their homes.

The Mesas were one of the first to do so. In 1976, builders added a kitchen, a bedroom and a full bathroom with a bathtub, plus a heater in place of the rickety old radiator.

“It felt great,” Maria Mesa said. “We weren’t cold anymore, and everything was looking great. I even bought a stove and refrigerator.”

The Mesas have now retired from farm work. Their three children are grown and gone. A daughter is married and living in Chicago. The eldest son works for the federal government in Washington, D.C. The younger boy is a supervisor in a Santa Paula warehouse. For older residents, the Mesas’ children are the rule rather than the exception.

As a village, these onetime and current farm workers raised a generation of successful young people from the humblest of roots.

Virginia Martinez’s oldest surviving son attends law school at Loyola. Another, Jose, goes to Ventura College and dreams of becoming an architect.

Ralph Martinez--of a different clan than Virginia’s family--grew up in the village and now is an officer with the Ventura Police Department.

Troubled Youth

Like any neighborhood, Cabrillo Village has also known its share of troubled youth. But some of today’s youngsters, adults say, are more menacing than their predecessors.

All male, nearly all teen-agers, they travel the village in packs. Their hair so short it leaves just a shadow of color on their heads, their clothes loose and billowy, they brag of their toughness in giggles that betray the uncertainty of youth.

“It’s mostly like all friends,” said Marty, 20, a self-proclaimed member of the Campos who refused to give his last name. “We’re naturally friends--more, really, like brothers. We don’t go out and make trouble, but if you come here looking for trouble, you’re going to find it.”

Actually, police say, that is only partly true. The boys do defend their own turf--but the reason they have to, officers say, is because they wander onto others’.

“The kids go out there and stir up the pot,” Ventura Police Sgt. George Morris said.

The problems in the community began slowly, increasing almost imperceptibly, residents say. Hints of tragedy to come were apparent when Vaivao arrived at the village one evening in 1986 to court the woman who is now his wife.

“My first day here, and I heard a gunshot,” he said. “It rang out and people ran in every direction, looking for cover. I heard a lady say out of the darkness, ‘Oh my God, one day, somebody here is going to get hurt. Somebody is going to get killed.”’

That day was Sunday, April 7, 1991, when Rolando Martinez and Javier Ramirez died in a drive-by shooting, slain as they left a baptismal party with friends just after midnight.

Though police called the shooting gang-related, the victims themselves were not gang members. Ramirez, 19, had been talking of marrying his high school sweetheart. Martinez, 20, planned to attend U.C. Davis in the spring.

The shootings shattered some of the community spirit, residents say. Nothing has been the same since.

People in Cabrillo still remember the Las Posadas festivities--night after night of feasting and celebrating during Advent that used to draw revelers from Oxnard to Santa Paula.

But after the shooting, the crowds slowly thinned out. Today, the festival is history. “People got scared to bring their little kids,” said Maribel Ramirez, 19, Rolando’s sister.

“When I was small, I liked this season,” she said with a sigh.

Calamity struck again in the village this October, when Jose Guadalupe Gutierrez died on a Saturday evening of a single bullet to the heart.

The 37-year-old Gutierrez had been leading an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting that night in a small room next to the general store. He stopped to talk to friends afterward, pausing in the darkness outside the building when a stray bullet struck him in the chest.

Police said the shooting was gang-related and that Gutierrez, a father of four, was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

And still the violence continues. Six weeks ago, it turned inward, police say, when a group of youths beat up a man because one of the boys did not like the way he drove down the road. Police say the teen-agers ambushed the man at the soccer field, then followed him home and in their fury ripped off his screen door and wrecked his garage door.

Some neighbors do not want to discuss what happened in the village that day.

But Jesus Luna, 47, the president of the village’s board of directors, said he heard the incident was not so one-sided as the police claim.

“Other people say the man provoked (the boys),” he said.

The urge to explain the incident away is strong, some residents say. Admitting the youths attacked a neighbor is tantamount to acknowledging that some of the community’s problems come from among its own children.

And that, Ventura police officers say, is something few Cabrillo residents want to do. “There are a group of families and individuals out there that don’t need to be out there,” Sgt. Morris said. “For some reason, the neighborhood just drags their feet.”

Some Improvements

Morris has at least one ally in Vaivao. The villager-by-marriage wins praise from police, the cooperative management and his neighbors for his efforts to improve the community.

Residents marveled for weeks over the daylong soccer tournament he helped organize. His boys and girls club thrives with weekly meetings and trips to movies and pizza parlors.

His latest project is karate lessons for the children, which he managed to secure at cut rates from his own karate instructor.

But Vaivao gets frustrated with his adopted hometown, complaining that he alone cannot solve the gang problem.

“I only have two hands, you know what I mean?” he said. “(Residents) are afraid of these kids. But these are our kids. They need to do something about it.”

Luna, for one, rejects such criticism. The cooperative’s directors are meeting with the parents, meeting with the children, he says. Besides, he adds, many of Cabrillo’s problems arise from outside his neighborhood--a situation that may be remedied with one simple solution.

A brick wall encircling the entire community would cost about $100,000, says Hal Slade, the cooperative manager. Residents, who are hoping to find grants to pay for the project, say they may have to settle initially for just a north side barrier.

At least, they say, it will prevent bullets from spraying out across the no-man’s land by the tracks.

The idea seems to have wide support around the village. Mesa, the retired lemon picker, calls it a “wall of protection.” He hopes the board finds the funding for it soon.

“Like all the other communities, we would be a little more private,” he said.

“Yes,” his wife, Maria, added. “And safer.”