End of a Fight : UFW Signs Agreement for Laborers to Leave Camp on Old Sespe Ranch

A nine-year battle over housing for farm labors at the historic Sespe Ranch near Fillmore appeared to have drawn to a conclusion Wednesday, when a representative of the United Farm Workers signed an agreement promising that residents would vacate the property by June 13.

After that time, the union agreed not to represent residents seeking to assert further right to occupy labor camps that Rivcom, a farming corporation that manages the property, has sought to shut down since buying the sprawling 4,300-acre ranch in 1978.

“It’s not over till it’s over, but it appears to be over,” said the UFW’s Ventura County Division Manager, Karl Lawson.

“It’s definitely a relief for the UFW, for the people living there and for us too,” said Donald D. Dauer, president of Rivcom.

The agreement still must be signed by the 43 union members who, with their families, have refused to leave the ranch after a January deadline set by the company, Lawson said.

But he predicted “that we’re going to have 100% participation” among the union members.

The agreement also calls for residents to sign legal documents absolving the ranch’s owners and managers of responsibility in the event of injury at in the camps. The houses were condemned in 1980 and are without natural gas.

For its part, the company has agreed to give $500 in relocation expenses to each former employee who leaves by Feb. 8 and $250 to those who leave by March 7.

But the settlement offered little relief for the 35 workers like Agustin Alamillo who two weeks ago packed up their families and left the ranch after Rivcom posted eviction notices on company housing. Later, crews hired by Rivcom gutted vacated houses in the ranch’s two farm-labor camps and marked each with a red “X” for demolition.

It was an ironic turn of events for Alamillo and many others.

Nine years ago, Alamillo had stood beside 500 fellow farm laborers who kept a bulldozer from demolishing the clapboard house of a co-worker. On a recent morning, he stood in another line--this time to plead for a cheap apartment replacing his own soon-to-be-demolished clapboard house.

The 48-year-old fruit picker waited at a Fillmore community center to apply for scarce government-subsidized housing with other farm workers evicted two weeks ago from the former Rancho Sespe. The makeshift office of the Ventura County Housing Authority had yet to open, but already members from 26 families stood ahead of him.

Help was unavailable for any of them. A new low-income housing project was to open soon in Meiners Oaks, 20 miles away, but nobody knew exactly when, or how many families would be competing for the 32 available units.

Eviction Notices Posted

At issue had been a state Supreme Court ruling allowing workers to stay in ranch housing until the state Agricultural Labor Relations Board renders its long-pending decision on benefits due the workers after they were illegally denied the right to union representation.

Company officials, however, relied on an ALRB ruling that they said enabled them to tear down the houses, which were condemned in 1980, whenever they want.

As many as 50 Latino families had refused to leave the company houses, saying they again intended to resist eviction efforts, just as they have several times since Rivcom’s original attempts to oust them after buying the ranch in 1979. They had hoped to stay on the property until the summer of 1989, when a housing development earmarked for farm workers opens near Piru.

But for Alamillo, a 22-year-resident of the ranch, the battle was over last month. He turned his attention to finding a place to live for himself, his wife and their five children. A daughter, Juana Medina, who is married to another Rivcom employee and also has five children, was evicted Jan. 20 from a separate Rancho Sespe house.

With the men earning between $400 and $800 a month, depending on the amount of work available on the ranch, they could not afford unsubsidized housing in Fillmore, said Alamillo, a native of Mexico who became a naturalized citizen in 1983.

Both families now are crammed into a two-bedroom house in Fillmore with relatives. Seventeen people are sleeping on beds, couches, and floors.

“We still don’t know where we’re going,” Alamillo said in Spanish, clutching a brown paper bag containing identification and half-completed applications for housing.

Few Options

He is not alone. Although current employees received $1,000 in relocation fees if they left last month, the eviction has left them with few housing options.

Families typically wait between two and three months just to learn whether they qualify for low-income housing, according to Carolyn Briggs, executive director of the Ventura County Housing Authority.

Of those who qualify, only 40% find a rental unit that meets government standards. Fillmore only has 248 housing units that qualify for subsidy and all are taken, she said.

The housing authority is giving priority to families leaving Sespe as “persons displaced by a private action,” a distinction that puts them one step above typical low-income families seeking housing, Briggs said. An additional housing specialist has been assigned to the Fillmore post, but no cheap housing is available.

The uncertainty has cast children of the Sespe workers into turmoil. “When these students come to my office,” said Manuela Rice, a counselor to migrant students at Fillmore High School, “they usually cry.”

“It’s hard for them to concentrate on their class work if they’re worried about coming home and finding their belongings in front of their houses,” Rice said.

Still, the situation is not as bad as first feared. The Zoe Christian Center in Oxnard, the county’s only shelter for the homeless, was bracing itself for 85 evicted families, said Claudette Wheat, assistant director. But as of last week, she had not heard from a single Sespe evacuee.

Families Cope

Instead, the departing families have fended for themselves. Some are staying with friends or relatives, sometimes on the ranch itself. Many live several families deep in small houses. In other instances, families have split apart, with husbands, wives and children staying each in different households.

At least one family has moved into a garage, said Karen Flock, supervising project director at Cabrillo Economic Development, the nonprofit organization overseeing the construction of the housing for the Sespe workers near Piru.

“A lot of the arrangements they’ve made are hush-hush because they’re afraid social workers will take their children away from them,” Rice said. Even though the dilapidated houses were condemned in 1980 and natural gas has not been piped to the property since then, residents feel at home in the labor camps where yards are planted in vegetables and cactus, and the dirt trails that connect houses are cluttered with children, chickens and dogs.

“In a way,” said Jaime Zepeda, a leader in the effort to resist eviction, “it feels like Mexico.”

At the very least, he said, the ranch holds a common history--sad as it sometimes has been--for its residents, some of whom have lived there as long as 50 years.

A thicket of eucalyptus trees reminded Zepeda of the time police raided a cockfight there. A clearing brought to mind a potluck wedding that residents threw for farm workers too poor for a more elaborate ceremony. And, in a field bordering the Santa Clara River, there was the fiesta held to honor Cesar Chavez, when the labor activist showed up to lend the Sespe workers his support.

While the camps yield memories to its longtime residents, they represent a headache to the property’s managers, who would like to raze all the structures and replace them with citrus groves. Rivcom officials say the settlement will remove residents from substandard housing that poses a danger to them and to the company.

“The liability exposure is tremendous,” said Riverbend President Donald Dauer. “Insurance companies won’t even talk to us.”

It is not the company’s fault that displaced workers have failed to save enough for non-subsidized rentals, said Riverbend Vice President Perry L. Walker.

“I don’t think it should be a big surprise to anyone that they have to leave,” he said. “But they haven’t paid rent in nine years and even if they’ve saved just $150 to $200 a month in rent, theoretically they should have quite a bit of money to relocate.”

The dispute began in January, 1979, when Rivcom bought the citrus ranch and fired 200 workers who had just voted to join the UFW. It also evicted about 500 workers from the two labor camps on the ranch.

Farm workers contended that their firing was in retaliation for union activities. Opposition solidified a month later when Rivcom sent crews to demolish the homes of two workers who were out of town. A woman from the same Mexican village as the absent tenants laid down in front of the bulldozers, some 500 other workers surrounded the house and Channel Counties Legal Services Assn. took up their cause.

The Agricultural Labor Relations Board later supported the workers, ordering Rivcom to allow 200 UFW workers to continue living at the ranch until ALRB’s pending ruling on the labor dispute.

That decision was upheld by the California Supreme Court. But when Rivcom later rehired 35 workers, the ARLB ruled the company did not have to provide housing for the families of those and 35 additional workers who had remained on the ranch without working there.

An appeal of that decision is pending.

In negotiations last summer, the UFW agreed to a Jan. 15 evacuation deadline in exchange for relocation fees of $1,000 for each of 35 current Rivcom workers. But with the approach of last month’s deadline, officials with the UFW and Channel Counties Legal Services negotiated unsuccessfully for an extension until replacement housing could be constructed.

5-Day Extension

Instead, Rivcom gave current personnel until Jan. 20 to leave without losing their relocation money. For the 35 families who left, the future is uncertain--but so is the future of the ranch.

Sold last year to new owners--a partnership called Sespe East and Sespe West--the ranch is again on the block, said Edwin Nutt, a Fillmore agricultural real estate broker who is handling the offer.

But the future of the historic ranch almost certainly doesn’t include Alamillo, who recently returned to survey the wreckage of what had once been his home. Windows had been ripped from their sills and doors pulled from their hinges. Odd bits of furniture lay in the front yard. Across the house’s peeling, sun-blistered walls, someone had scrawled in blocky, brown lettering: La casa que tumban de tu hermano es de tu Dios .

It means: “When they destroy the house of your brother, they destroy the house of your God.”