A Helping Hand for Mixtecs

Catalina Navarette knows how hard it is for the Mixtec Indians to get to the Oxnard clinic, drawn by little more than the promise of a free bowl of soup, bags of second-hand clothes and some help making their way in this country.

She also knows why so many are coming, traveling miles on foot or by bus from the trailer parks, low-rent motels and converted garages where they live during the picking season.

Once a month, dozens of peasant Indians from dusty villages in the Mexican state of Oaxaca jam the lobby at Las Islas Family Clinic, bound together by ties to their homeland and the troubles that come with being among the newest and most exploited immigrants to labor in California’s fields.

Many can’t read or write and are unable to speak any language other than their Indian dialect, Mixteco. As a result, they often find themselves victims of racial discrimination, even by other impoverished immigrants, and stuck in some of the toughest, lowest-paying farm jobs, where they are ready targets for abuse.

Until a few years ago, Navarette was like them, having fled the poverty of her Oaxacan village in 1986 for the United States. Today, at the helm of a monthly meeting aimed at connecting Mixtecs to a range of social services, she is helping others find their way.

“This was my life. I know the suffering they endure and how hard they work,” said Navarette, 36, a former farm worker hired by Ventura County in April to provide translation and other help at Las Islas clinic.

It is the county’s busiest public health clinic, where each year more than 50,000 patients, mostly poor and Latino, receive everything from flu shots to prenatal screenings.

In recent years, an increasing number of Mixtec Indians have found their way to the clinic. Now, through Navarette, they have someone who speaks their language and knows their plight.

Spurred by recession in their homeland, as many as 80,000 Indians from the highland villages of Oaxaca are now thought to work in California’s fields.

In fact, experts say the state’s farm labor force, once dominated by immigrants from northern and central Mexico, increasingly consists of Indians from regions to the south.

These new arrivals are generally younger and poorer than other Mexican-born field hands and more likely to be in the country illegally, studies have shown.

And as the most recent and vulnerable workers, they have become easy prey for dishonest growers and labor contractors, who cheat them out of wages and expose them to the worst working conditions.

“I think overall, the picture is still fairly grim,” said Santos Gomez, directing attorney for the Oxnard office of California Rural Legal Assistance, which several years ago began a statewide campaign to support the Mixtecs.

“Most people don’t know that the farm worker community in Ventura County is very different than it has ever been,” he said. “And that’s important to understand because of the vulnerability of this population and the needs that it has.”

The local effort was launched at the start of the year by Ventura County nurses Sandy Young and Elvia Guizar. They saw a large number of patients arriving at Las Islas who spoke neither English nor Spanish and had no clue how to negotiate the county’s social services system.

While Mixtec Indians have long had a presence in other California farm towns, an increasing number have made their way to Oxnard over the last decade, drawn primarily by the region’s rapidly expanding strawberry industry, the second-largest in the nation.

In fact, the Mixtecs soon will arrive by the thousands, as the strawberry harvest goes into full swing.

In working with the new arrivals, Young and Guizar say they’ve discovered a population plagued by extreme poverty, cut off even from other Mexican immigrants by differences in language and culture that have shoved them to the bottom of the social order here and at home.

“The need was so great, and no one was doing anything about it,” said Young, a former emergency room nurse who has been at Las Islas for five years.

For many of the Mixtec Indians packed into Las Islas’ lobby on a recent Saturday evening, mostly young men and women with babies, the journey started 3,000 miles away, in villages where people head north as soon as they can, leaving behind only the very young and very old.

Many had been subsistence farmers, living on the corn or beans they managed to coax from the ground. But the tide of migration also has swept up artists, teachers and other professionals.

“The majority of us in Oaxaca are very poor, so more and more of us are coming all the time,” said 30-year-old strawberry picker Ernesto Ramirez, who arrived six months ago with his wife.

Ramirez said he earned about $200 a month as a policeman in his coastal village of Pinotera, hardly enough to live on. With a baby on the way, he decided to take his chances and move north.

Picking strawberries or chili peppers, he sometimes earns as much in a week as he did in a month. But without family or friends, he said, he quickly discovered the isolation felt by many Mixtecs.

“It can be very hard,” he said. “But we are lucky they have support for us here.”

At the monthly meeting of the Mixteco Community Organizing Project, support starts with a simple meal of soup and Mexican sweet bread.

Talk then turns to such issues as health care, pesticide exposure and obtaining legal documentation. The Mixtecs are told of the taxi vouchers available to those who need rides to the hospital and of plans to launch basic literacy courses.

“We are here together, American and Mexicans, so that you know the help that is available to you,” Young told more than 70 people in the room, as Navarette translated.

The program runs on a shoestring. Aside from Navarette’s pay, there are few other costs. The county clinic donates space for the meetings, and both Young and Guizar volunteer. They gather clothes and other things necessary to keep the program afloat.

County health workers have applied for grants to help pay for the program. And there is hope that one day the Mixtecs will take charge of the project themselves, drawing on a Mixtec tradition of creating self-help committees to provide education and protection.

“We must be able to help one another,” said Aureliano Gonzalez, 36, a former schoolteacher from the highland village of San Martin Peras, who now stoops in the fields alongside the others. “We are all here for the same reason: to seek a better life. But that’s very hard to do when you don’t know your way around.”