Migrants’ New Roots Transform Rural Life

Every year the routine was the same. Maricela Leon’s father would leave their small Mexican town and head north to pull oranges from the squat citrus trees of the San Joaquin Valley. The man who would become her husband did the same thing, shuttling back and forth across the border.

No more.

Now they live among the sculpted grapevines and manicured fruit orchards of Tulare County, immigrants rather than migrants, their lives no longer torn in binational halves.

They have settled in rural California, along with great numbers of other Mexican agricultural workers who are transforming the small towns and dusty hamlets of the state’s rich farming valleys.

The standard image of postwar rural America--the withering farm town--has been turned on its head in speck-on-the-map burgs with population growth and birthrates reminiscent of prewar years.

Grape- and olive-picking dollars are making down payments on paint-thirsty houses. Towns long dominated by whites are electing their first Latino officials. The leisurely twang of the Okies who came here from the Dust Bowl has all but disappeared from many Main Streets, replaced by rapid-fire Spanish.

There are still plenty of Mexican migrants who chase harvests around the state. But for a variety of reasons, more and more farm workers have sunk roots near the fields they labor in.

The 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act legalized 1.1 million agricultural workers, two-thirds of them in California. In the last decade, many of them have brought their families across the border, both legally and illegally.

Crop plantings have become more diverse and labor-intensive. New varieties have extended harvest seasons, in some areas providing field work nearly year-round. Farmers have responded to tougher regulation of migrant housing by offering less of it.

And the border crackdown of recent years has had the unanticipated effect of discouraging undocumented workers from making the increasingly risky trip back to Mexico--locking many of them in rather than out.

“What’s happened is that many people who used to go back and forth to Mexico have settled in California with their families,” observed Philip Martin, a UC Davis agricultural economics professor.

As a result, “there’s a revival of rural communities that was just completely unexpected,” said anthropologist Juan-Vicente Palerm, the director of the UC Institute for Mexico and the United States. “We have a new kind of rural society taking shape in California. . . . It’s not a fluke. It’s not a transitional thing.”

But the towns are also among the most poverty-stricken in the state, raising concerns that farm worker settlement has moved poor people and their problems from Mexican villages to California communities ill-equipped to handle them.

“While there may be an undeniable vibrancy about some of these communities, they are strikingly poor, have limited tax bases and offer relatively few services,” stated a 1997 Urban Institute report, which concluded that many California farm towns now resemble overgrown labor camps, with swiftly expanding, impoverished populations that have little chance of upward mobility.

Dirt-Poor in California

Leon’s father left the fields three years ago to work in a local meat market, but her mother and husband still pick. A decade after Leon, 28, and her husband moved from Mexico to Tulare County, they remain dirt-poor.

He makes $6,000 or $7,000 a year harvesting citrus, and they live in a two-bedroom, $325 a-month rental in Porterville. She takes care of their three young children and sometimes helps him in the groves. For now she receives welfare for the children, who were born here.

Still, Leon said softly in Spanish as her brightly dressed 2-year-old clung to her, “We’re better off here. There’s no work in Mexico. We still manage here.”

Candelario de la Torre, 47, lives nearby in the village of Poplar. He brought his wife and seven children up to Tulare County from Mexico in 1995 after years of working in a Los Angeles chrome-plating plant and sending money back home. He has applied for residency under the 1986 law, but his family is undocumented.

He prunes, picks kiwis, and during the grape harvest rises at 4 a.m. to drive south to Arvin. For his dusty days of reaching and stooping he earns about $6,500 a year, a sum supplemented with money from his grown children, who also work in the fields.

Like Leon, he’d rather be poor here than in Mexico. Even in poverty, you can eat better than some of the well-to-do there, he said.

Anyway, he added, Poplar seems almost like his native town. It is full of people from his home state of Colima.

Many little farm communities “have become basically Mexican towns where anywhere from 70% to 90% of the population are Mexican immigrants or children of Mexican immigrants,” said Palerm, who has studied the demographic changes in some 200 small farm towns across the state.

Much of the towns’ metamorphosis is a function of Latino immigration and higher birthrates. But whites have also departed, often for larger cities in the region, such as Visalia and Fresno.

“All the white kids I went to school with aren’t here,” said Manuel Jimenez, a UC Extension farm advisor who grew up and still lives in Woodlake, a scruffy little community of 6,200 to which his Mexican farm worker father immigrated in the late 1940s. The near total Latinization of some towns actually saddens him. “You want that diversity of community,” he mused.

As farm communities have evolved, so has the traditional resentment of newcomers. Now, fault lines sometimes develop within the Latino community, with residents viewing migrants and newly arriving settlers as competitors for field work.

In the Santa Barbara County town of Guadalupe, which has grown nearly 80% with farm worker settlement in the last two decades, “people who come into the community without any ties are now received with an enormous amount of hostility,” Palerm said.

In the early 1990s, when the community of about 6,450 was trying to clean up its commercial district, it bulldozed shanties that had been rented to migrant workers, forcing them to go to nearby Santa Maria for housing. “This was done under strong Latino pressure,” Palerm added.

He agrees that the farm towns are struggling--indeed, he contends that California is home to the fastest-growing concentration of rural poor in the nation. But he argues that is the result of low agricultural wages, not of importing poor people.

He also insists there are reasons for hope.

The farm worker towns “are not the basket cases they are often portrayed to be,” Palerm maintained. “There is an economic ladder. It’s not very big, but it’s there”--in the form of home ownership and new, albeit struggling, mom-and-pop businesses and services for the burgeoning populations.

Porterville real estate agent John Contreras estimates that 70% of the starter homes he sells are bought by farm laborers. The houses are usually small fixer-ups in the $50,000 to $65,000 range, within reach of families making $12,000 to 15,000 a year if they qualify for federal housing loans or low down payments.

“You think they don’t have that much money, but they do,” said Contreras. “I had one the other day. I said, ‘$10,000 down,’ and they said, ‘No problem.’ ”

Brothers Antonio and Armando Vicencio both own their homes, Antonio in a new subdivision in Farmersville and Armando in Tulare. Working year-round on an Exeter fruit farm, they have climbed the labor ladder to where Armando makes $30,000 a year as a foreman and Antonio $25,000 as a farmhand.

They first made the trip to Tulare County as teenagers in the late 1970s, when they crossed the Mexican border each year to pick fruit. In 1980, they decided to stay put after they were hired by a Tulare County grower. Armando married another picker. The couple now have three children, and his wife is a cashier at a Wal-Mart.

Antonio married a woman he met on one of his trips home to Zacatecas and brought her north. In 1988, they returned to Mexico, but after four years of trying to scratch out a living, they came back for good to this land of arrow-straight fields and two-lane avenues running up to the Sierra foothills.

His three children “needed school and needed to learn English,” said Antonio, who like his brother has applied for citizenship.

Regional Poverty Runs Deep

The issues of farm worker settlement are those of immigration writ large.

“If you’re optimistic that integration is going to work, you say ‘What’s the issue?’ ” said Martin, one of the authors of the Urban Institute report. “If you’re pessimistic, you say ‘There’s a real problem here.’ ”

The counties to which the farm laborers are attracted have job ladders that are skinny and short and poverty rates that are among the highest in the state.

In Tulare County, 28% of the population was living in poverty in 1995, up more than 5% since 1990, according to U.S. Census data. In both Tulare and Fresno counties, officials say one in four is receiving some sort of public assistance.

The statistics are reflected in everything from shabby, overcrowded housing to the situation the Farmersville football team found itself in.

When the fast-growing community of 7,450 recently opened its own high school, the “Home of the Aztecs,” at the edge of the fields, so many members of the team lacked health insurance that the town had to raise money for the policy premiums.

Most students in the district qualify for free or discounted breakfasts and lunches. Children come to school in the winter without jackets. Many don’t have the eyeglasses they need.

Growing Pains Split Community

Farmersville was built by Dust Bowl refugees, and as Latinos have become the majority, there has been friction. Seven years ago, Latino residents took to the streets for a rock-throwing protest after the white police chief allowed the Border Patrol to raid local homes.

Latino political power has been slow to emerge in the farm towns, hampered because there are large numbers of noncitizens and the undocumented. That is beginning to change as more swear allegiance to their new home and become voters.

Roberto de la Rosa, executive director of a Tulare County community group that helps farm workers, said people stood in line in near-freezing temperatures for a recent citizenship workshop. At the Fresno office of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, 1,900 people a month are applying for citizenship.

In Lindsay, about 10 miles southeast of Farmersville, the town’s first elected Latino councilman spends part of his Sunday afternoons preparing farm workers for their naturalization exams.

“It really is the world turned upside-down,” said Valeriano Saucedo, a Stanford-educated son of Texas migrants who has been mayor for the last six years. “When I was in high school the Hispanic population was 15% to 20% [and whites the majority]. Now, it’s the opposite.”

That reversal is evident in any number of ways, he said. The high school soccer team, which didn’t exist when he was a student in the 1960s, is stronger than the football team. At the annual orange blossom festival this spring, the choral pieces were sung in Spanish. The town is interested in creating a Mexican-style town square, where businesses would ring a plaza.

One of the reasons the farm communities have swelled with settlers is because the fields have changed, demanding more labor for more months.

In Tulare County, cotton acreage has plunged to its lowest levels since the 1930s, giving way to more profitable--and often more labor-intensive--plantings of fruit, nuts and grapevines.

Development of new varieties of fruit and vegetables has stretched the picking season.

Table grapes used to be harvested from mid-July to September. Now, in Fresno County, the harvest runs from June to early November. The navel orange season used to start in November and end in mid-March. Now it extends from late September to mid-June.

Delfina Lara doesn’t care how long the seasons are. Like most children of farm workers, she wants no part of picking.

“It’s no good. It’s hard,” said Lara, 18.

Her father has toiled for nearly four decades in Tulare County’s citrus groves, first as a migrant shuttling back and forth to his family in Mexico and now as a Woodlake resident.

None of his seven children are following in his footsteps. Delfina, the mother of a toddler, is finishing high school. Two of her older brothers work in manufacturing plants in the county, another in a print shop. A sister has a scholarship to Fresno State.

Asked if they are happy here, Lara’s parents shrug as if it’s a silly question. Why wouldn’t they be? The family is all together.