Clinic Aids a Surging Mixtec Population

Catalina Navarette knows how hard it is for the Mixtec Indians to get to the south 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.

But 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 speak only 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 targets for abuse.

Until a couple of years ago, Navarette was just like them, having fled the poverty of her Oaxacan village in 1986 to scratch out a new life in 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 do the same.

“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 to the region’s rapidly growing Mixtec population.

Las Islas is the county’s busiest public health clinic, a bustling place where more than 50,000 patients, mostly poor and Latino, show up each year to receive everything from flu shots to prenatal screenings.

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

“I remember how hard it was for me when I first came to this country,” Navarette said. “Now I want to do what I can to help them get ahead.”

Of the millions of immigrant workers added to the mix in the U.S. over the last decade, farm worker advocates say the Mixtec Indians most often find themselves at the shallow end of the labor pool.

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

Experts say the state’s farm labor force, once dominated by immigrants from northern and central Mexico, now contains a significant share of Indian peasants 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 show.

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.

Mixtecs and another Indian group from Oaxaca, known as the Zapotecs, made up the majority of laborers recruited to work in the late 1980s at a Somis flower ranch, entangled in what federal prosecutors described as the most far-reaching slavery case ever filed by the U.S. government.

“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 launched 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.”

More Mixtecs Coming to Oxnard

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 arrived in Oxnard during the last decade, drawn primarily by the region’s rapidly expanding strawberry industry, the second largest in the nation.

Mixtecs will soon be arriving by the thousands as the strawberry harvest goes into full swing.

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, many of them young men, and women with babies, the journey started 3,000 miles away.

Many had been subsistence farmers, living off the corn or beans they coaxed 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 strawberry picker Ernesto Ramirez, 30, who came to the U.S. six months ago with his wife, Carolina.

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 said he decided to move to California’s farm belt, and Oxnard was the first stop.

Picking strawberries or chili peppers, he sometimes earns as much in a week as he did in an entire month patrolling his village. But without family or friends, he said he quickly discovered the numbing 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 started with a meal of soup and Mexican sweet bread.

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

“We are here together, American and Mexicans, so that you know the help that is available to you,” Young told the group, as Navarette echoed her words in her Indian dialect.

More than 70 men, women and children filled the room, and their heads nodded in agreement.

“We want to help you become part of the community,” Young said. “And we want you to be able to extend a hand to those arriving behind you.”

The program runs on a shoestring. Aside from Navarette’s pay, there are few other costs. The county clinic donates space for monthly meetings and both Young and Guizar donate their time. They beg and borrow used clothes and other items necessary to keep the program afloat.

Diapers purchased by Young were handed out as the Mixtecs left the meeting, taking with them second-hand blue jeans, used sweatshirts and worn sneakers.

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 Mixtec traditions of creating self-help committees to provide education and protection.

Variety of Support Groups Across State

“We must be able to help one another,” said Aureliano Gonzalez, 36, a former schoolteacher from the highland village of San Martin Peras, now stooping in 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.”

In farm towns across California, efforts are underway to help the Mixtecs make their way.

From Santa Rosa to San Diego, many have banded to form committees dedicated to educating their own on issues of civil rights and labor law, while ensuring the preservation of their culture on this side of the border.

The Fresno-based Oaxacan Indigenous Binational Front, for example, helps Mixtecs and other Indian groups connect with schools, hospitals and other public facilities by providing translation and other services.

Oaxacan leaders say such support networks have become increasingly important as newcomers have settled here.

Those efforts have been aided by California Rural Legal Assistance, which launched its outreach project in late 1993. The poverty law group hires former Mixtec field hands to educate their countrymen about labor law and other matters.

The law firm also led efforts last year to ensure that Mixtec Indians were not overlooked during the U.S. Census Bureau’s recent count.

In CRLA’s Oxnard office, Antonio Flores, a Mixtec Indian himself, has been hired to reach the marginalized farm worker population.

And when Sandy Young and Elvia Guizar wanted to launch the Mixtec organizing project at the clinic, Flores was the first one they turned to.

“Many in the community don’t know how to defend themselves. They don’t know how to look after their rights,” Flores said. “I see this new group at the clinic as very important. They are trying one way or another to help this community.”

At Las Islas, Catalina Navarette is trying to do her part.

Up until two years ago, the mother of five was harvesting strawberries near Oxnard, where back-to-back growing seasons provided nearly year-round employment.

There were fewer Mixtecs in the fields then, she said. But now, the many newcomers need assistance, just as she did.

“They come to improve their lives, to help their children advance,” she said. “But there is so much abuse and so much discrimination against them, this kind of program is necessary to help them. That is why we are working so hard to do this.”