Migrant Family Leaves Shack for Apartment : San Diego: Rancho de los Diablos camp was the only place they could afford. Community service group found them a new home, but their luck could run out in ‘96, when the grant money ends.

Juana Diaz misses her lush vegetable garden and washing her family’s laundry by hand.

“Clothes don’t get as clean in a machine,” Diaz said, shaking her head as she sat on her children’s bed in their two-bedroom apartment.

They have wall-to-wall carpeting, a bathroom with running water and a refrigerator that keeps food cold. Compared to life in the migrant camp, their lifestyle is luxurious.

“We’re better here,” Diaz said.

They moved in October from El Rancho de los Diablos, the largest migrant camp in San Diego County. Residents, many illegal immigrants from rural Mexico, lived in cardboard shacks without running water and electricity until the camp was razed by the city. Landowners wanted their property back and officials were concerned about unsanitary living conditions.

Like other camps scattered throughout California, Rancho de los Diablos was the only place immigrants earning minimum wage or less could afford. To earn their salaries--a portion of which usually goes back home to relatives in Mexico--they pick strawberries, haul cement at construction sites and wash dishes in restaurants.

Because many are in the United States illegally, they cannot pass the credit checks nor afford the hefty deposits that moving into a rental often requires.

“They just need help getting started,” said Jennifer LeSar, director of Esperanza, a community service group that coordinated last fall’s relocation of camp residents.

The Diaz family escaped the camp thanks to a $518,000 grant from the city of San Diego. At one time, 700 men, women and children lived in the rugged settlement.

“They have done remarkably well making the transition from camp living to urban apartment living,” said the Rev. Rafael Martinez, who has worked closely with the migrant camp residents.

“Most of these people never lived in an apartment,” Martinez said. “They might have lived in a private house, but they were not in an urban area.”

Like many Mexicans in the United States, Juana and her husband, Rogelio Diaz Torrez, came in search of work. Rogelio, 25, is a legal resident; Juana, 27, has applied for residency.

They and their two children, Maribel, 2, and Rogelio Jr., 4, share their apartment with Juana’s mother, Concepcion Alarcon, 56. Their low-income neighborhood was once home to Vietnamese refugees who relocated to the United States after the Vietnam War.

Many lived in blue-gray, military-like structures dotting the Linda Vista neighborhood, but they have since moved to other parts of the city. Now, the buildings house escapees from the migrant camp.

Concepcion says she prefers the apartment to the blue buildings.

“There’s no cockroaches here,” she said, her deft fingers crocheting a decorative pillow cover.

Her bedroom, which she shares with her grandchildren, looks out on a green canyon where coyotes roam and cactus grows wild. But a preponderance of gophers makes it impossible for Juana to reprise the prized vegetable garden that she lovingly tended at El Rancho de los Diablos.

At the camp, they could hear crickets chirping and roosters crowing in the distance. Now, it’s the ring of a telephone that cuts the silence.

Juana used to wash her family’s clothes with a bar of soap under an open sky. Now, she and her mother go to a Laundromat.

The Diazes pay half the $700 monthly rent on their apartment and the Esperanza group pays the remainder. The families are required to pitch in a growing percentage of the rent each month until they are self-sufficient. The program is scheduled to end in early 1996.

Martinez worries about what will happen once the grant money runs out. He would have preferred using it to buy housing that could then be rented to the migrants at a reduced rate.

“Their main problem seems to be that while they were moved from the camp, their economic situation did not necessarily change,” he said. “As long as the subsidy . . . is in place, they can afford to pay for housing. The problem is, as the period ends, there’s no way the families can pay $600 to $700 rent.”

Juana and Rogelio have the same concerns. Rogelio earns $6 an hour packing frozen lasagna and pizza. Juana is unemployed but looking for work. As insurance against homelessness, they recently bought a used motor home that they could live in if their affordable housing search comes up empty.

Said Juana: “We’d rather live in a smaller apartment, but if we can’t find what we’re looking for, that’s our last alternative.”