Law Firm Aiding Farm Workers Fills Lead Attorney Post

Longtime legal aid lawyer Eileen McCarthy started work on Halloween six years ago at an Oxnard office providing free legal help to farm laborers.

And now comes Santos Gomez, new directing attorney for California Rural Legal Assistance, whose first day on the job earlier this week happened to fall on the Day of the Dead.

While the supernatural starting dates are purely coincidental, Gomez’s arrival in the local office joining McCarthy is strictly by design.

Gomez, the 32-year-old son of immigrant laborers, fills a position held open for more than three years as the statewide poverty law firm grappled with budget cuts.

As such, he represents a renewed effort to beef up legal services provided by the local CRLA office while expanding its focus to a host of environmental issues affecting farm workers and their families along the Central Coast.

“Even two attorneys are not enough when it comes to rendering services to the farm worker population in Ventura County,” said Gomez, a former field hand born in the Mexican state of Jalisco.

“I have a lot of learning to do about this area,” said Gomez, whose salary will be in the mid-$30,000 range. “But I think this demonstrates CRLA’s commitment to providing legal assistance to farm workers and making sure their rights are upheld.”

Since the Oxnard office opened eight years ago, CRLA attorneys have provided aggressive legal representation to the poor and underserved. CRLA is a nonprofit organization funded through federal funds and other grants.

It was local CRLA lawyers who exposed the abuse of dozens of Mexican laborers at a flower ranch in Somis, a case that federal attorneys described at the time as the most far-reaching slavery prosecution ever filed in the United States.

They helped save the homes of more than 200 poor Latino families in Oxnard’s La Colonia community after a landlord announced he was leaving a government subsidy program and was doubling or tripling rents.

At the same time, CRLA has provided legal help to farm workers who have been cheated out of wages or suffered discrimination.

Most recently, CRLA joined environmental and public health advocates in launching the Central Coast Environmental Health Project. That effort seeks to document health risks from agricultural pesticides in Ventura, Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo, Monterey, Santa Cruz and San Benito counties.

It was Gomez’s extensive experience on environmental issues that made him a good choice to fill the job of directing attorney in Oxnard, said Jose R. Padilla, CRLA’s statewide director.

“Mr. Gomez comes to CRLA with incredible public policy experience in issues that are very critical to many parts of rural California,” Padilla said. “I’m looking forward to having him help CRLA develop strategies that allow rural poor communities to understand the nature of environmental issues affecting them in Ventura County and along the Central Coast.”

Rob Roy, who heads a Ventura County agricultural association that has clashed with CRLA on various issues over the years, said he hopes to forge a solid working relationship with the new directing attorney.

“I don’t appreciate always being at odds with them,” said Roy, president of the Ventura County Agricultural Assn. “I think we both have goals of making sure farm workers are protected.”

A 1993 graduate of the King Hall School of Law at UC Davis, Gomez said his interest in working with farm worker communities came in 1991 when he served as a law clerk at a CRLA office in Salinas.

Although he came from a farm worker family--he worked the fields himself after his family immigrated from Mexico in 1976 and settled near Watsonville--Gomez said he was unaware of the depth of poverty that plagues many farm worker communities.

“Even though we worked in the fields, we were among the better-off farm worker families,” said Gomez, who has held a series of public policy jobs, including his most recent stint as senior research assistant for the Oakland-based Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and Security.

“We lived in crowded conditions but we had a house. There was enough food to eat, enough money to pay the rent,” he said. “It wasn’t until 1991, when I was at the Salinas office, that I really started to recognize how serious the need was. It opened my eyes to many things I was not that aware of.”

As it stands, Gomez’s eyes remain wide open as he takes on new responsibilities in Oxnard.

He started Monday and plans to spend his first few weeks getting to know community leaders and touring the county’s vast agricultural fields as well as the hiring sites where laborers show up each morning to search for a day’s work.

His wife, Michelle Anderson, is working on her doctorate in jurisprudence and social policy at UC Berkeley and plans to join him in Oxnard when she is done.

In the meantime, he figures he has plenty to keep him busy.

“It hasn’t been this [CRLA] office alone that has endured hard times,” Gomez said.

“But I think CRLA is coming out of those hard times a little more re-energized, hopefully streamlined and a bit more focused,” he said. “I think it has forced us to think about other ways to provide services to our clients. In that way, I think CRLA has become a model in providing legal services to populations that most people like to ignore.”