Thread: Mecca for misery

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Mecca for misery
In this town, a bed is often cardboard, a bath is often a creek


01:44 AM PDT on Sunday, June 25, 2006
By DAVID OLSON
The Press-Enterprise


Daniel López spends most days surrounded by dirt: the dirt of the vineyards where he picks grapes, the dirt shore of the drainage ditch in which he bathes himself with contaminated water, the dirt of the dusty lot in rural Mecca where he and hundreds of other farmworkers sleep.

The desert heat during the day is intense, the flies and mosquitoes a constant menace at night. For the nearly two months of the Coachella Valley grape harvest, there is no escape.

"Is this living?" López, 39, asked in Spanish as a pickup truck on the lot swirled a cloud of dust toward his face while it passed workers preparing for bed. "There is no justice."

Thousands of migrant workers who toil in Coachella Valley vineyards, citrus groves and vegetable fields each spring and summer have little choice but to sleep on the ground, in their cars, in dilapidated trailers or crammed together in dingy rooms. Housing in Mecca is so scarce that those who do not arrive early in the harvest are forced onto the streets, transforming the normally somnolent farming town near the Salton Sea into a giant labor camp.

Everyone -- the growers, the county, the state, farmworker advocacy groups -- agrees that the situation is dire. Yet no one has come up with a consensus solution. So workers like López continue to live amid the dirt.

If you have eaten a California-grown grape in the past few weeks, López or someone like him picked it. The Coachella Valley grape harvest, which began last month, is the first in the state, and the only one until early July.

No one knows exactly how many workers arrive each spring for the harvest. Government and nonprofit groups' estimates range from 5,000 to 15,000. The vast majority are Mexican-born men. Some are undocumented but many are legal U.S. residents who live part of the year in or near Mexicali and migrate to the Central Valley after leaving Mecca. More than two dozen public and private agencies are now conducting what is believed to be the first comprehensive survey of Coachella Valley farmworkers, so they can better understand laborers' needs and have hard data to support requests to fund additional services for them.

It's Better in Mexico

Yet it doesn't take a statistical study to discover how desperate the lives of migrant farmworkers are. Drive in and near Mecca during the harvest and you can't miss the laborers sprawled out on cardboard on the dirt lots, the workers gathered around portable stoves in the desert brush, and underwear-clad men drying themselves after emerging from polluted agricultural drainage ditches.

"Not even in the poorest part of Mexico are conditions like this," José Robles, 55, said in Spanish as he stood next to his home during the harvest -- a 1983 Ford F-150 pickup truck -- before dipping into a drainage ditch to wash the dirt and sweat off his body. "In Mexico, at least you can shower and have a roof over your head."

Each year after the Coachella Valley grape harvest, Robles travels to the San Joaquin Valley for the pear, cherry and peach harvests, and then to Oregon or Washington state for fruit harvests there. Nowhere else is the housing and service crunch as severe as it is in the Coachella Valley, he said.

Riverside County is hardly the only place where farmworkers sleep in conditions that former federal Housing Secretary Andrew Cuomo called "disgraceful" during a 1999 visit to Mecca. Workers in Montana have been found living in caves. Vegetable pickers live in plywood-and-plastic shelters in the canyons near Carlsbad.

There are homeless migrant farmworkers throughout California, but rarely in proportions as high as in Mecca, said Richard Mines, who has researched farmworker-related issues around the state for the Davis-based California Institute for Rural Studies. One reason is that the housing shortage in the Mecca area is especially severe, he said. Another might be that many migrant workers in the Coachella Valley have homes and families just over the Mexican border, and they are willing to endure five or six nights sleeping outside if they can see their families on weekends, he said.

Market Lots Are Homes

Farmworker homelessness is more visible in the Coachella Valley than elsewhere in California, said Jack Daniel, directing attorney for the Fresno office of California Rural Legal Assistance. Homeless migrants in other parts of the state typically sleep in cars, backyards or fields, he said. Mecca is the only place in California where Daniel has seen hundreds of people camped out in the center of town. That is largely because Mecca businesses owners, residents and police permit it, he said.

Two Mecca food stores, Leon's Meat Market and El Toro Loco, own the lots where many workers sleep. Laborers also sleep in cars parked throughout town. Cpl. Dennis Gutierrez, a spokesman for the Riverside County Sheriff's Department, said he is unaware of anyone from Mecca complaining about homeless migrant workers, so police leave them alone. Several workers said police in the Central Valley are less tolerant of people sleeping outside.

In Mecca, where many residents either work in the fields or used to, empathy for migrant farmworkers is high, said Sal Alejos, a member of the Mecca Community Council and himself a former farmworker.

Eddie Leon, owner of Leon's, said his consent for workers to sleep on his 1-acre lot is recognition that they have nowhere else to go. It also brings in customers, he said. Business during the harvest is about double what it is in August, when there are relatively few migrant workers, Leon said.

For much of the day during the harvest, the two dirt parking areas are almost empty.

Like most other workers, Alfonso Jaurejui, 29, avoids returning to the treeless El Toro Loco lot as long as possible. After eight to 10 hours picking grapes, he and several friends instead head out to a date grove off Highway 111 south of town, where they wash clothes and bathe themselves in a nearby ditch, and then chat in the shade while their clothes dry.

Some workers have rashes from immersing themselves in the ditch water, which contains pesticides from agricultural runoff and bacteria from the feces of animals and birds that also use the channels, said Jose Angel, assistant executive officer in the Coachella Valley branch of the California Water Quality Control Board.

Riverside County and the Desert Alliance for Community Empowerment operate 18 showers near Mecca to give workers an alternative to the ditches, but Jaurejui said he did not know about them.

As the sun sets and the searing temperatures begin to drop, aging pickup trucks and cars trickle into the dirt lots. Workers lay out cardboard, air mattresses and wire fold-up cots and prepare for bed. By 9 p.m., many are sleeping to rest up for a backbreaking day of grape picking that begins as early as 5 a.m. Odor from four portable toilets wafts through the air.

Hector García tries to make light of the situation.

"Welcome to Room X," he said with a laugh as he pointed to a piece of cardboard -- his bed for the night -- on a lot behind El Toro Loco.

The smile disappears when he talks about the care with which landowners treat crops such as chili peppers, which are sometimes covered with netting to protect them from the scorching sun.

"The landowner cares more about his chili than he does about us," García, 37, said in Spanish. "Why can't they put some tarp up here to give us some shade? We're the ones doing the work and generating the profit."

Joe Mota, the Coachella-based Southern California regional director of the United Farmworkers of America, said growers should at least help fund efforts by nonprofit groups and the county to provide housing and other services.

"Agriculture is a multimillion-dollar industry here, and they can't do something to work with others to ensure that farmworkers have a decent place to sleep?" Mota said.

Growers Say They Tried

Mark Draper said he is tired of people blaming growers. A partner in a Coachella Valley sod-farming operation and a former farm-labor contractor, Draper said that in the late 1980s and early 1990s he rented government-approved trailers to 20 of his best workers. Providing housing generated employee loyalty and allowed workers to flee the converted garages and crowded rooms where they had been living, he said.

Yet Draper said government inspectors nitpicked so much on what he considered minor code infractions that he closed his housing operation.

"I think growers as a general rule want to provide the best conditions possible for their workers," Draper said. "They won't do it if they could face large fines and if they have to deal with layers of bureaucracy."

Draper said he is unaware of any employer-owned farmworker housing currently in the Coachella Valley.

Vineyard owner and labor contractor Blaine Carian recalled how until the early 1980s, perhaps more than half of Coachella Valley growers -- including his father -- operated labor camps, ranging from Army-style barracks to smaller rooms with bunk beds. Then inspectors began aggressively enforcing codes, and the growers ended up tearing down most of the housing, he said. "They (inspectors) created the housing shortage," he said.

Some of the housing was in poor shape and "needed to be closed down," Carian said. "But there were a lot of facilities that were really nice."

John Mealey's memories are different. Mealey co-founded the Coachella Valley Housing Coalition in 1982 to help farmworkers escape the ramshackle housing that he said most lived in.

"I don't recall ever seeing any decent farmworker housing provided by growers," said Mealey, the coalition's executive director. "The housing that was available was very old and substandard."

Since 1982, the coalition has built about 2,000 homes and apartments for farmworkers, although most are geared toward year-round residents. It runs the only subsidized migrant housing in the Coachella Valley, a 128-bed complex near Mecca with landscaped grounds and spacious, fully furnished apartments. Workers pay $30 a week, and the coalition and county fund the remaining operating costs.

Demand is so high during the grape harvest that the coalition has to turn away up to 200 applicants a day. An 88-bed addition is planned. Mealey said the coalition tried in the 1980s and 1990s to get local growers to help fund the group's efforts, but none would donate.

Arturo Rodriguez, a lawyer in the Coachella office of California Rural Legal Assistance, said growers' complaints about excessive regulation are "an excuse to justify their lack of involvement." State and county inspections focus on "basic habitability. These are basic health and safety issues that anybody providing rental housing has to comply with."

Other Locales Find Housing

Sonoma County growers have had no problem abiding by state employer-housing codes, said Nick Frey, executive director of the Sonoma County Grape Growers Association. Growers there have opened more than 670 beds of migrant housing over the past several years. Landowners see the housing as a way to attract a high-quality, reliable work force, Frey said.

In Napa County, growers tax themselves $10 an acre to help fund 180 beds run by the Napa County Housing Authority. The fees yielded $450,000 last year.

In the 1980s and again in 2003, Riverside County officials proposed tents to house workers, said Leticia De Lara, legislative aide to county Supervisor Roy Wilson. Each time, California Rural Legal Assistance threatened to sue. The county argued that the tents were better than the street, De Lara said. Washington state uses the same rationale and each year erects dozens of 7-foot-high, 375-square-foot tents that house up to seven workers each.

Rodriguez said tents would give the county and state an excuse to not build permanent housing. "Just because people work as farmworkers doesn't mean they aren't entitled to anything less than the same standards others have," he said.

In Mecca, many of those who arrive at the beginning of the harvest can find housing. But some are not willing to pay for it.

Fernando Vargas, 48, said he would rather sleep on the piece of cardboard he lays out each night in the El Toro Loco lot than pay the $120 a month or more that most landlords in Mecca charge to live in what is often an overcrowded room or mobile home.

Vargas earns a typical wage for grape harvesters: about $9 to $10 an hour, including per-box bonuses -- although, like most farmworkers, he cannot find work during much of the year. The median nationwide annual farmworker income in 2002 was about $9,000, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Outside the Rules

A look through the backyards of Mecca reveals lines of trailers, garages and small concrete buildings. Many are rented out to farmworkers.

Behind one house near central Mecca sit two trailers and a four-room concrete building. Thirty-seven people live there during the grape harvest, most of them farmworkers, said year-round resident Adriana Estrella.

In one of the concrete-and-wood rooms, Manuel Lugo reclined on the bottom of one of four rickety wooden bunk beds crammed into a 150-square-foot space. State law permits only three farmworkers in a room that size. Eight live there.

The men pay $140 a month each, or $1,120 for the room plus use of a dirty kitchen down an outdoor concrete path.

"What are we going to do?" Lugo, 38, asked. "That's what he charges. It's a lot, but it's better than the street."

The average 825-square-foot two-bedroom apartment in a large complex in the Coachella Valley rents for $906 a month, according to the Novato-based research firm RealFacts.

Lugo said there is much cheaper housing in Indio, about 25 miles to the northwest. But owners there typically require contracts of six months or more and large deposits, and they have stricter limits on how many people can live together, he said.

A single 120-watt bulb lights Lugo's room, and a swamp cooler barely blows out air. A can of Black Flag sits near the door. Leonardo López, 49, said he fumigates the room each morning because there is no screen to keep out the mosquitoes and flies. There are no dressers, so workers jam clothes underneath beds.

State and county officials acknowledge that many of the trailers, backyard buildings and other farmworker housing scattered throughout the eastern Coachella Valley lack permits and violate codes. But they said they usually only inspect housing if there is a complaint. To strictly enforce all codes -- rather than concentrating on more serious violations -- would push even more people onto the streets, said David Lawless, a supervising code enforcement officer for the county.

"We have nowhere to put people," he said. "No one has come up with a solution to the housing problem."

Reach David Olson at dolson@PE.com or 760-837-4411.

It's Better in Mexico

Then return and spare us all.

"It's better in Mexico" then why are you here? If you people can come up with money to pay smugglers to get you into the US why can't you afford to stay in your own countries? If it is so bad here go home!!!!