Victimized Workers Are Lured by County’s Crops : Agriculture: A legal aid firm has started an outreach group for the exploited Mixtec laborers from Oaxaca, Mexico.

The south Oxnard motel gets few road-weary travelers any more, but draws its customers instead from a pool of itinerant workers weary from a journey of a different kind.

The Mixtec Indians of Mexico fill the rooms here at the peak of the local straw berry season, cramming six or more into tiny units better suited for families of three.

These Indian peasants from the state of Oaxaca--victimized by racial discrimination on both sides of the border--make up a growing share of the laborers who gather Ventura County’s harvest.

Many are like Marco Flores, a 17-year-old Mixtec renting a room in the rundown motel with five family members.

For Marco and his relatives, the strawberry fields around Oxnard represented the first leg of a journey in a migrant stream that eventually flows up to Oregon for another strawberry harvest, down to the San Joaquin Valley for table grapes and back to his ancestral village in southern Mexico.

“Life here is hard for farm workers, but it is doubly hard for the Mixtec people,” he said, brewing a simple dinner of peppers and beans on a hot plate in his motel room.

“There is much discrimination against us. It is like we are all alone.”

Ventura County is becoming an increasingly important destination for the Mixtec Indians of Oaxaca.

From the row crops around Camarillo to the fields of the Santa Rosa Valley, they are becoming a vital part of the county’s strawberry and vegetable crops. Labor advocates say there are also pockets of Mixtecs in Moorpark and Thousand Oaks who do landscaping, day labor and other menial work.

The Mixtecs are a poorer population than other Mexican-born field hands, studies show, and hold the least-desirable, lowest-paying farm jobs. They are also often victims of racial discrimination, especially at the hands of their fellow impoverished immigrants.

“This is the new migrant stream,” said Claudia Smith, regional counsel for California Rural Legal Assistance, a poverty law firm that has launched a statewide outreach program for the Mixtecs.

“They don’t have the network to get into the other crops, so they get relegated to the scut work,” she said. “They are a community ripe for exploitation.”

According to a report published by the California Institute for Rural Studies, Ventura County is one of four distinct destinations for Mixtec farm workers along the California coast.

In fact, the county’s citrus orchards were among the earliest-documented points of migration for the Mixtecs when they started fleeing their poverty-choked villages in earnest about 1980.

“They had been migrating heavily for a number of years in Mexico, and their network finally penetrated across the border,” said Michael Kearney, a UC Riverside professor who has done some of the most extensive studies on Mixtec migration.

“I realized that what we were seeing was another ethnic group being recruited into California farm labor,” he said.

As economic conditions have worsened, Mixtec migration has intensified.

In turn, labor advocates say, the Indians from the Mixteca region of Oaxaca have become a work force in great demand, one especially targeted by dishonest growers and labor contractors who cheat them out of wages and expose them to wretched working conditions.

The Mixtecs and another Indian group from Oaxaca, known as the Zapotecs, made up the majority of laborers recruited to work at the Somis flower ranch of Edwin M. Ives during the late 1980s.

Ives gained notoriety in 1990 when prosecutors charged him in what they described as the most far-reaching slavery case in the United States.

Although the slavery charge was dropped, Ives eventually pleaded guilty to corporate racketeering, and labor and immigration violations for smuggling illegal immigrants to his Somis compound and paying them sub-minimum wages.

Ives has paid $1.5 million to more than 200 former workers, the largest fine ever levied in a U. S. immigration case.

“That was my first acquaintance with the indigenous groups from Oaxaca,” said Lee Pliscou, directing attorney for CRLA in Oxnard, which won the civil suit against Ives. “Until then, this office hadn’t had a relationship with the Mixtec community.”

That relationship has been strengthened by a CRLA campaign to reach out to Mixtec workers across the state.

In a raspberry field near Oxnard, CRLA community workers Emanuel Benitez and Rufino Dominguez, a Mixtec, found dozens of Mixtec laborers pulling the small berries from the vines.

“Nothing but Mixtecs,” said the Oxnard-based Benitez, amazed at the sight. “I knew there were Mixtecs out here, but I never knew there were this many.”

In one section of the field, Benitez and Dominguez found that Mixtec workers had been supplied a portable bathroom with no toilet paper, no hand towels and no soap.

As the community workers snapped photos of the apparent labor law violations, a crew boss rushed over with the necessary supplies.

“Because many of the Mixtecs don’t know the law and don’t know their rights, labor contractors and others often end up treating them badly,” Benitez would later say. “That’s part of what this outreach project is about, to let them know their rights.”

As part of that effort, CRLA hired Dominguez and another Mixtec farm worker, Arturo Gonzalez, to roam the state in search of labor law violations in crops where indigenous field hands are concentrated.

At the rundown south Oxnard motel, Dominguez went door-to-door searching for Mixtecs like himself, farm workers who sink to the bottom of California’s farm labor pool.

At one door, he was told to come back later. At another, he was told to go away.

The Mixtecs are a wary people, Dominguez explained, a quality that has helped them survive centuries of ethnic oppression in their homeland and helps them survive similar treatment north of the border. But Dominguez won’t give up.

“We need to help each other, to educate ourselves as we adjust to this country,” he said. “It is time that we learned how to defend ourselves.”

* MAIN STORY: A1