Home Is Where the Heart Is in Baja California

On a dusty hillside nine miles from the U.S.-Mexico border, Maria Luisa Roldan watched in fascination as a storm of about 300 norteamericanos came down on Colonia Cumbres.

They parked their fancy cars and trucks on the dirt street and then offered Roldan, her children and the community a small milagro. “These are good people,” Roldan said, moved to tears.

The norteamericanos, as they are called by the locals, belong to an Orange County-based group that offers help to people like Roldan, whose sense of hope has been snatched away by circumstance and who, indeed, need a miracle.

The group, called Corazon, Spanish for heart, has been helping people in Baja California for 20 years and has built 275 homes in some of the poorest areas from Tijuana to Ensenada. For Roldan, a single mother raising two children on $13 a week, the group built a new 16-foot by 16-foot wooden home.

Roldan’s family was one of eight who recently received houses during the organization’s first Super Build Saturday.

The group, which started small, is made up of volunteers from Orange and Los Angeles counties, and some travel from the San Francisco Bay Area and Washington state, said John Torrence, 37, a former computer analyst who operates an embroidery business in Orange and serves as Corazon’s president.

Corazon also offers scholarships, provides health clinics, and distributes food and clothing. A child-care center created with volunteers from Santa Margarita High School in south Orange County has spun off into a separate project.

“In the early days, we always had the same people going down to Mexico, and we averaged about eight to 12 houses a year,” Torrence said. “Now, we build about 65 houses a year and have thousands of volunteers.”

Volunteers come from churches, schools, civic groups and private businesses.

Typically, the workers leave Orange County before dawn and meet at a Chula Vista shopping mall before driving across the border. Facing them are 16-hour days of building and painting.

Once across the border, the group caravans through Tijuana’s paved roads and then onto a dirt road that snakes past numerous communities before reaching Colonia Cumbres, a community of about 5,000 people living in small shanties. The residents are immigrants in their own country, people who were struggling in southern Mexico because of the nation’s severe economic problems and who traveled north in search of jobs. In their new region, it is still a daily struggle to find enough food.

“These are the folks who simply put up homes out of old wood and stuff, anything they can find and put a plastic tarp over their heads to protect them from the rain,” Torrence said.

But they are not squatters. Roldan and her neighbors have spent their life savings as down payments to the city for parcels of land that sell for about $1,000. In return, the city cuts dirt roads, provides police protection, staffs an elementary school and collects trash. Potable water is trucked in and sold for $3 for a 50-gallon barrel. For some of the lucky ones, there is electricity. There is no sewage system.

Roldan, 40, and her husband moved to Tijuana from Guadalajara two years ago. At the time, they had dreams of finding good jobs--her husband as an electrician, and she in a maquiladora, or foreign-owned factory.

They never found those jobs, settling for day labor and selling trinkets on the streets. Then the couple broke up. After Roldan’s husband left in December, she was forced to move from an apartment with her daughters, Maria Luisa, 1 1/2, and Roxana, 9, into Cumbres, which is Spanish for summit.

There she spent one of the most miserable winters of her life beneath a plastic tarp roof that leaked and a dirt floor that quickly turned into a carpet of mud.

“Every time I saw rain clouds, or heard thunder, I got scared,” Roldan said. “I knew it meant that we were going to get wet again.”

Roldan suffers from a nagging stomach pain that saps her energy at times and that has gone undiagnosed because she can’t afford medical treatment. Now a housecleaner, she earns barely enough to feed her family.

On the day the group was due to build her house, she arose at dawn, put on jeans and a sweatshirt, and dismantled her shanty. Later, she shoveled dirt and rocks into a bucket, carried it up a steep grade and dumped it. She could have stopped and let a young volunteer do the hard work, but she didn’t.

She said it was her house they were building and she needed to help.

Cement slabs for the new homes were laid a week before the volunteers arrived. The volunteers quickly started to work, cutting two-by-fours, hammering out walls and putting in windows.

The design of the homes is simple, and the houses have evolved architecturally as the group has grown. In the beginning, Torrence said, they had a box-like look, with a flat roof and no windows, and sometimes were rejected by potential recipients.

“It was a horrible looking thing,” Torrence admitted. But the group had few resources.

Now, the homes have a gabled roof and are divided into two rooms with a loft for sleeping quarters. They may have as many as four windows, a kitchen cabinet and a shelf for a four-burner stove. The materials to build them cost $4,000.

With time, the group became more sensitive to families and their needs, Torrence said.

He said he can remember when volunteers became too excited and muscled people out of homes they had built with their own hands to raze the shanties and start building new houses.

Now, the group has a researcher in Oceanside who visits the colonias before the trips and selects families based on need.

On a recent Saturday, the volunteer builders included teenagers, grandparents, business executives and elected officials such as Lakewood City Council members Joseph Esquivel and Wayne Piercy and Buena Park City Council member Donald L. Bone.

For younger volunteers, the day was an eye-opener.

“When we first saw Tijuana I said, ‘Oh, my gosh, is this like where they live?’ ” said Carol Piper, 17, of Placentia. “And that was the good part of Tijuana. I didn’t see them living in cardboard houses until we got [to Cumbres].”

Working alongside the volunteers was Cornelia Morelos Montiel, a single parent whose daughters played tag and other games while she helped hammer. A recipient of a Corazon house in June 1995, Morelos, who lives in Cumbres, said she always helps the volunteers as a way of expressing her appreciation.

“These people could be at a beach or out in the country, somewhere enjoying themselves,” Morelos said. “But no, they’re over here offering support and help. The only thing they ask is, ‘Who needs help?’ ”

Roldan said she felt the same way toward the norteamericanos who “blessed me” with a new house. As the last nail was hammered and with the paint barely dry, Roldan picked up her youngest daughter and stepped proudly into her finished house.

“I plan to look up into the sky for the next rain clouds and I won’t be afraid this time,” she said. “I’m going to look them right in the eye.”