Migrant Housing, or Even Campsites, Often an Elusive Dream

ROYAL CITY, Wash. — The shabby migrant tent camps of the 1930s described in John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath” would look inviting to Roberto Pena and his 26 compatriots on this scorched summer afternoon.

Pena and his fellow cherry pickers speak no English, but the body language of the public health official tells these migrant workers they’re in trouble.

They’re about to be evicted from their rude encampment of scrap wood, blue plastic tarps and dirty blankets here on the rolling plains of eastern Washington.

“Es necesario?” Pena implores the state health official, Natalie Gonzalez.

“Si,” she answers gently in Spanish. It is necessary.

The Mexicans’ camp, on the edge of farmer N. Singh Khela’s little cherry orchard, is illegal, Gonzalez says. That’s why the workers are getting this unexpected visit from state and county health and safety officials. Khela is getting a citation for operating an illegal camp near this central Washington town, about 150 miles east of Seattle on Washington 26.

The dusty camp, under a grove of trees, doesn’t meet health or safety codes. The young men heating their lunch of tortillas and carne on campfires will have to find someplace else to stay after the long, hot days picking cherries.

The state will help, Gonzalez says, even paying for motel rooms for a few days in Ephrata or Moses Lake, both more than an hour’s drive north by car.

Pena, a big man and the group’s leader, shrugs with disappointment.

He knows that it will be hard to find another place to camp. And he knows that the long commute to a motel in their battered jalopies will mean less sleep if the workers are to start picking Khela’s cherries at first light.

It also will eat up money for gas, money that could be sent home to their families in the south-central Mexican state of Michoacan.

In the end, the workers accept the motel. They have no choice. But it is only a temporary solution, as Gonzalez says. It’s anybody’s guess where they will end up before the growing season is over.

Times are always hard for Washington’s Mexican migrant workers, whose backbreaking work--which generates an average annual income of just $7,000--keeps fruit and vegetables cheap and plentiful in America’s supermarkets.

But these days are especially hard for the mostly male work force that travels to El Norte in hopes of earning enough to lift their families out of grinding poverty back home.

A fierce political struggle among growers, state regulators, labor unions and politicians is producing precisely the opposite of what each claims as a priority: a decent place for migrant workers to clean up, cook their meals and lay their heads at day’s end.

They agree on just one point. None can recall a time when it was more difficult for a migrant worker just to find a spot to build a campfire and roll out his blankets--much less a permanent structure with running water and toilets.

The story is similar in other states where migrants pick crops.

“A place for the workers to stay often just doesn’t exist,” says Jocelyn Sherman, a spokeswoman for the United Farm Workers in California. “We see 10 workers to a room in a hotel. They sleep in cars, in parking lots.”

California and Texas, the nation’s first- and second-largest fruit and vegetable producers, are losing migrant housing as regulators squeeze farmers to meet modern health and safety codes, officials say.

“It’s ironic. We try to make the camps better and they [growers] respond by shutting them down, and they make the problem even worse,” says Jim Harrington, an advocate for Texas migrant workers.

In Washington, the state Health Department figures that more than half the migrant workers--37,700 of the 62,300 who pick cherries, apples and other crops each year on about 1,000 farms--are without suitable shelter.

Most sleep in their cars or in squatter camps along riverbanks, ready to move out when the authorities move in to roust them, the department concluded in a study earlier this year.

On a recent summer afternoon, several dozen squatters camped along the Columbia River near Mattawa, about an hour from here by car. They were on land owned by a public utility district, which recently gave up trying to keep them out and installed portable toilets.

Judy Esser, Mattawa’s mayor, retells the story--well known locally--of the Mexican minister recently found to be renting the crawl space under his tiny house for $50 a worker per week. State health and safety officials ended that.

“As far as housing is concerned, our Mexican migrants have never had it so bad,” says state Sen. Margarita Prentice of Seattle, a Mexican American and vocal advocate for farm workers.

“Things are getting worse and worse,” agrees Guadalupe Gamboa, the head of the United Farm Workers of Washington, based in Sunnyside near Yakima in south-central Washington. “I have pictures of housing back in the ‘40s that was a lot better than it is now.”

Growers know that.

“Some of us can provide housing, but the little guys--and there are a lot of them--can’t afford it,” says Terry Dorsing, whose family owns cherry orchards near here.

But although the parties agree on the scope of the problem, they disagree on its cause and blame each other for the way things are.

Growers say the problem is excessive state regulation. They say meeting state requirements--for well-constructed shelters with access to drinking water as well as sanitary and cooking facilities--is too expensive for most farmers.

And growers are no longer willing to risk fines and lawsuits that can result from failing to meet the requirements, so fewer migrant workers find shelter on the land where they work.

“I do know that while we have had some brave souls building housing for employees, the trend has been for housing to be closed down because of the financial investment required,” says Mike Gempler, executive director of the Yakima-based Washington Growers League.

Khela learned the hard way that letting workers camp on his land can be costly. He plans to appeal the citation he was issued, a citation that could mean several thousand dollars in fines.

“My workers need a place to stay. I gave them a place,” he says.

The United Farm Workers blames growers such as Khela for the problem, saying they have a moral and financial obligation to provide suitable housing for migrants.

State regulators and politicians such as Prentice blame the union and the public-interest lawyers who take up its causes.

Specifically, they contend that the union is unwilling to compromise with growers on living facilities that would fall short of current regulations but would still be far better than what is now available.

Gamboa says there can be no compromise when it comes to guaranteeing migrant workers the same protections enjoyed by everyone else.

“Why should they get less?” he asks. “Why should they continue to be second-class citizens?”

Just such a compromise, in a bill approved earlier this year by the Republican-controlled Legislature, was vetoed by Democratic Gov. Gary Locke at the urging of the UFW and other unions.

Under the bill, growers could have built pared-down housing structures to be used only during the summer, when most of the migrant work force’s labor is done. Such housing--exempted from state building codes--would include large tents with solid floors, cargo containers modified into living space, and structures made of straw bales and concrete.

The measure would have reduced the cost of housing from $100 per square foot to about $22, says Timothy Nogler, managing director for the state Building Code Council, which helped develop the proposed codes.

Locke says he vetoed the measure because migrant workers themselves opposed it, but in a dozen interviews of migrants conducted by Associated Press through an interpreter, not one had heard about the bill.

None of that means anything to Marta Lisa Rosales, a woman camped by the river. She tends her ill sister, who is lying in a tent, and tries to cope with the loneliness as her husband works in a cherry orchard an hour away by car.

“No me gusta aqui. Hay mucho aire,” she says.

“I don’t like it here. Too windy.”