Center – Ismael Sanchez, a farmworker from Mexico, traveled the fields in Colorado without much thought to his living conditions – until he started his own family.
Then he came across Tierra Nueva. The cutting-edge development for migrant farmworkers in the town of Center helped convince Sanchez, 30, to plant roots with his wife and two young daughters in the rich soil of the San Luis Valley.
“Now that we have found a better place to live, we are staying put,” Sanchez said.
Sanchez came originally from Chiapas and has worked for seven years in the valley. He has legal status as an agricultural worker, a requirement for residency at the development.
Besides being the largest migrant farmworker housing project in the country with 216 dorm units and 25 townhomes, Tierra Nueva has won national awards for its design and related social services.
“Generally speaking, it would be considered pretty high quality for what you see created for folks at this income level,” said Ken Wade. He is chief executive of Neighbor Works America in Washington, D.C., an independent federal agency that provided seed funds for the $6.3 million development and a newer $4.2 million sister project in Alamosa completed last year.
In years to come, converting migrant farmworkers into residents will prove a key economic-development issue for communities like Center, said Al Gold, executive director of the Westminster-based Colorado Rural Housing Development Corp., which developed Tierra Nueva and Tierra Nueva II.
“If you don’t have housing, you can’t attract workers,” Gold said. “If you have quality housing, you will attract quality workers.”
Colorado’s ranchers and farmers produced $6.7 billion worth of products last year, making agriculture one of the state’s top industries.
As rural communities age and continue to lose population, and as immigration enforcement tightens, areas with labor-intensive crops like the San Luis Valley’s will find workers increasingly hard to come by, said Jim Tonso, a co-owner of Cañon Potato Co. in Center.
“We don’t have a labor force in the U.S. willing to do this work,” Tonso said. “We need people to do this work. We have got to house these people, give them decent housing and decent lives.”
Although mechanization has reduced the need for workers to plant and harvest the valley’s important potato crop, two newer crops to the valley, lettuce and spinach, remain labor-intensive.
Tonso remembers the days when workers lined up for jobs. Now, farmers must scramble to meet demand during the growing season, straining the workers they have and delaying shipments.
While he hasn’t lost an order, Tonso said it is only a matter of time before crops in the valley are lost because of a lack of workers.
“They don’t have a clue of what we are dealing with,” Tonso said of federal bureaucrats and immigration opponents.
Population seasonal
Center is a town of 2,300 at the southern end of Saguache County, one of Colorado’s poorest counties in terms of income. During the summer season, migrant laborers swell the population by 800 to 1,000 people, Tonso said.
The role of agriculture continues to grow, even as the rest of the town’s business base withers, added Tonso, who served as mayor of Center for eight years. Over time, the town has lost its drugstore, car dealership and other contributors to its tax base.
“We would like to see population growth, some kind of growth,” Tonso said.
That’s where Tierra Nueva comes in. Originally built with dormitories, the project was expanded in 2004 to include 25 townhome units for families more likely to stay put year-round.
A crew of four keeps the dorm rooms and townhomes maintained and handles the flow of tenants, helping them integrate into the community.
Farmers can focus on what they do best, raising crops, while Tierra Nueva manager Raymond Hurtado and his crew can focus on their expertise, managing properties.
Tierra Nueva has a 75 percent occupancy rate in the off-season, nearly three times the national average for such developments.
Rents for the townhomes are set at 30 percent of a family’s income, which in Sanchez’s case works out to $300 a month for a three-bedroom unit.
Tenants have access to a laundry center, health care screening, a computer lab and English and literacy courses.
Residents can join a soccer team that plays in a league against teams from across the valley. Each August, once the crops are in, a fiesta celebrates that occasion.
The community provides a fenced playground, a day-care facility and a Migrant Head Start Center managed onsite in conjunction with Otero Junior College.
The program, which cares for about 100 children from 6 weeks to 6 years old, runs from late June to mid-October, allowing parents to work without having to worry about their children.
Restaurant a draw
Tierra Nueva even boasts its own Mexican restaurant, El Aztec de Oro, where for $7 residents can dive into a huge buffet of home-style food.
The cooking is so good that it draws diners from miles around. Michael Trujillo, an attorney and judge in nearby Monte Vista, is among them.
Trujillo, also president of the San Luis Valley Farm Worker Housing Corp., said, “Farmworkers, ranchers, bankers all eat at the restaurant. People get to know who these folks are.”
Trujillo said he became interested in migrant housing after seeing numerous cases before his court related to drinking, drugs and fighting at migrant farmworker camps in Saguache County.
Worker camps historically have been isolated from the surrounding community, providing their residents with minimal services. As mechanization reduced the volume of workers coming into the valley, landlords found it more expensive to keep up the housing stock and build new units, which were coming under stricter regulations and could be occupied for only four or five months a year.
“The housing conditions were deplorable,” Trujillo said. “Few people brought their families.”
Strict rules for tenants
The situation is different at Tierra Nueva. Tenants must obey strict rules against drinking. Security cameras monitor the dorms. That doesn’t mean an occasional fight doesn’t break out, Trujillo said, but they are much rarer.
All tenants are screened to make sure they are in the country legally. Federal laws bar workers on temporary visas from living in government-funded housing projects, although housing advocates want to change that.
“Those are the people we can’t help,” Hurtado said. “We have to turn them away. It is hard for them to understand why.”
Sanchez makes $7 an hour in a potato processing plant and says he has to budget carefully. While work is plentiful in the summer, his hours shrink in the winter, when the utility bills are higher.
But he remains thankful. Tierra Nueva provides him and his family with the best living conditions they have ever had, and he aspires to even greater things.
Colorado Rural Housing offers a program that helps tenants move toward homeownership, something four families at Tierra Nueva have used.
“That is my dream, to own my own home,” Sanchez said. “I’m realizing the American dream.”
Staff writer Aldo Svaldi can be reached at 303-954-1410 or asvaldi@denverpost.com.
