Duroville debate: haven or peril

Merejildo Ortiz towed his sagging 30-year-old mobile home into Duroville in 2000, when the infamous desert slum was just beginning to take shape on the Torres Martinez Reservation near the Salton Sea.

The trailer park wasn’t pretty. The infrastructure threadbare and shoddy, but the $430 monthly rent made it possible for Ortiz, his wife and three children to finally afford a home.

Now that home is under serious threat. On Thursday, Ortiz, a farmworker and member of Mexico’s indigenous Purepecha people, found himself on the witness stand face to face with the federal judge who will decide whether Duroville closes.

“If the park were to close in 30 days, what would you do?” asked Arturo Rodriguez, an attorney representing the tenants.

Ortiz, wearing a blocky wooden cross, listened as the question was translated into Spanish.

“If it were just me, I would go back to where I came from in Michoacan,” he replied in Spanish. “But because my children are American citizens, I wouldn’t want to take them back there.”

Ortiz and other tenants testified in the final phase of the trial that will decide the fate of Duroville, a 40-acre park that is home to up to 5,000 mostly low-wage farmworkers. U.S. District Judge Stephen Larson said he would make his decision Thursday.

The government wants the park closed, saying it is poorly built and a danger to tenants.

On the other side are lawyers, Catholic Church officials and social workers who say that would result in a humanitarian disaster, rendering thousands of the state’s poorest people homeless.

Ortiz, 34, works in the grape, citrus and vegetable farms around Thermal and Mecca, along with many other tenants.

He is president of the park’s Purepecha Council and last year earned about $14,000.

“When a tragedy happens, we help each other spiritually and financially,” he told Larson.

“When the time comes for our children to go to college, we will have some capital to offer to them so they will not go through what we are going through now.”

Ortiz said his children refuse to live in Michoacan. They love their school in Thermal. They have their lives in this country, he said.

He said he has looked for alternative housing nearby but has found nothing affordable.

And if the park closes, he said, his beat-up trailer will probably not make the move.

Tenants also testified to being cheated by Duroville management.

Alejandro Amezcua, 43, another Purepecha, testified in a near-whisper. He said he earned $18,000 last year picking lemons. Amezcua said he had prepaid three months’ rent before leaving to pick grapes in Bakersfield.

When he returned, Mary Lou Barbers, who did the books and collected rent at Duroville, charged him for the three months even though he had receipts from her showing he had already paid, he said.

“Mary Lou told me they were fake, that maybe I made them somewhere else,” he said through an interpreter. “She told me, ‘If you don’t want to pay, get your trailer and get out.’ I paid again just to end the argument.”

Barbers has since been charged with embezzlement, according to court records.

Park owner Harvey Duro, who was stripped of his control of Duroville by Larson, told the court that the Bureau of Indian Affairs issued him a cease-and-desist order in 2003 to stop operations but that he ignored it. In 2004, he said, the bureau gave him a list of needed repairs.

“We were too far advanced at that point, so going back and trying to fix everything seemed impossible,” he said.

“I was too far into it at that point, so I said I’m not going to do it.”

Duro, former chairman of the Torres Martinez tribe, has consistently complained that he was singled out for harsh treatment even though there are four other large trailer parks on the reservation, some older than his.

“They were targeting me,” he said.

Duro said when tenants didn’t pay, he used threats.

“At some point when they reached a high level of nonpayment, we would just turn the electricity off,” he said.

When asked by lawyer Chandra Gehri Spencer, who also represents the tenants, why he didn’t take them to court, Duro shrugged.

“It was too time-consuming and we figured we would get the rent from them one way or another,” he said. “They’d pay after we turned off the electricity. We were actually kind of lenient.”

Spencer asked Duro if he heard allegations that tenants were asked for sex in lieu of rent. A former Duroville resident made that claim last year while she was being tried on charges that she burned her trailer. She was acquitted.

“I think that was a big farce,” Duro said heatedly. “They played that thing dirty and she got away with it.”

Final arguments will be heard Thursday.

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david.kelly@latimes.com