THERMAL, Calif. — In the five years Pasquala Beaza has lived in a squalid trailer park for migrant farmworkers, she has endured the stench of sewage overflows, street flooding and blackouts.
When temperatures soared to 115 degrees in the baking Coachella Valley and an electrical fire killed the power for a month, her family couldn’t take any more. Beaza’s husband and four other residents sued their landlords in state court.
In doing so, they joined a small but growing minority of trailer dwellers fighting to improve conditions at more than 100 poorly maintained mobile home parks that dot the dusty, crescent-shaped valley 150 miles southeast of Los Angeles.
“We didn’t want to go all the way to a lawsuit, but with a situation like this, there was no other way. It’s a basic necessity, and we were forced to,” said Beaza, 51, a hotel housekeeper, whose trailer was labeled unsafe by the county because of the power outage. “And the problem that we have is almost nothing compared to the problems at other places.”
Once afraid to speak out about deplorable living conditions, residents like the Beazas are taking trailer-park owners to court and winning.
A Riverside County judge who restored the power last week at the Beazas’ park ordered the landlords Thursday to maintain the sewage and electrical systems and refrain from evicting tenants or raising rent in retaliation. Residents at two other parks — mostly low-income farmworkers, many of them illegal immigrants — also have sued.
Crisis with a long history
The victory marks the first time an entire park has organized itself and represents a turning point in a decades-long debate about an affordable-housing crisis that has plagued the eastern Coachella Valley.
“The model is to have the community be the driving force,” said Sergio Carranza, executive director of the Pueblo Unido Community Development Corp., a nonprofit spurring activism. “We want to give the power to these families.”
Wretched conditions for migrants predate the arrival of Dust Bowl refugees in California’s fertile fields, but the situation in the Coachella Valley, known for its table grapes, dates, chile peppers and other crops, is unique.
“It’s sort of an epidemic,” said Megan Beaman Carlson, an attorney with the California Rural Assistance League Inc., which is helping residents with lawsuits. “I think it became too big of an issue for the county to be able to properly monitor.”
The brothers who own Hernandez Mobile Home Park, where the Beazas live, say they pooled their money to open their property as a way of helping migrants out. But the situation grew out of control, and now the brothers are stuck with a 24-trailer site they can’t afford but can’t shut down because of a court order.
“My brothers made this to help people in need. People came saying, ‘I don’t have a place to stay, I need a place to stay,’ and now they’re suing us,” Oscar Hernandez said. “They’re trying to make us look like bad people, but everything we have is here.”
Living on hope and faith
In the late 1990s, local officials cracked down on unpermitted sites, but that just forced residents to flock to nearby American Indian reservations — where the county had no jurisdiction — or to become homeless. Advocates won a $21 million settlement against the county for discriminating against low-income Latino families by targeting three dozen sites.
Now, the county is targeting the most dangerous locations and working with nonprofits to improve conditions and build affordable housing for the future.
“We have our hopes up, and we don’t want to give up on it,” said Maria Arredondo, a grape harvester who lives at St. Anthony’s Mobile Home Park in Mecca. “We have to have the faith.”
