Harvesting Hope

RANCHO SESPE —  Tiburcio Juarez arrived at the nation’s largest lemon ranch a few days after Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected president in 1932.

For the next five decades he pruned, sprayed, picked and irrigated the groves that surrounded his family’s plywood shanty on old Rancho Sespe.

“Oh, that place was just a little wooden house. The wind blew through. It was cold,” said Juarez, 83, a stooped, smiling man who still dresses like a field hand in a red plaid shirt and blue cotton pants.

He rummages through his closet and pulls out a rusty camp stove. “This is what we cooked on,” he said, shaking his head.

The days of deprivation are gone forever for Juarez and 99 other farm worker families who have constructed their own New Deal amid 20 serene acres of orchards in the Santa Clara Valley outside Fillmore.

Their home now is a pastel-colored laborers’ commune, owned and managed by the 550 residents themselves. Today, the children of the farm workers are schooled in the county’s only all-day Head Start center. Tutors teach English to the adults and a nurse stops by regularly to check on everyone’s health.

The new Rancho Sespe is a lasting monument not only to the unyielding spirit of a group of men and women who fought for the right to make a better life for themselves, but to the man who inspired them to believe in their power--Cesar Chavez.

“Before, I lived in a little old house that was just a bunch of standing boards,” said Isabel Gonzalez, 70. But on the picket lines with Chavez, Gonzalez learned he had a voice, and how to use it. “We would fight for things like this development.”

A decade after farm worker activists broke ground amid mariachi music and Mexican dances, the new rancho project is a low-crime, high-pride model of what can come from a struggle when it is fought to the very end.

Without their fight, the old-timers say today, their families would still be crammed into cheap rentals in crowded slums, and praying for a better life.

But now, laborers retire here. The pickers and packers of Fillmore and Piru wait in line for years to move here. The children of the fields stand a better chance of learning a language their parents hardly speak and moving up an economic ladder their families never climbed.

“I used to know the old Rancho Sespe. And I know this one. The difference is great,” said John Zermeno, a teacher of migrant children since 1974. “Nowadays, you talk to parents over there and they’re saying, ‘Yeah, my child is going to go to college.’ Before, they wouldn’t even imagine it.”

Rancho Sespe is one of a kind, and not just because it is surrounded by green orchards and purple mountains, miles from the nearest city. It is a place of peace and tranquillity that is in short supply for poor people today.

During the three years that Sheriff’s Deputy Luis De Anda has patrolled the rancho, he recalls only one incident of violence, when one young man struck another over the head with a bottle. Drug use is minor. Graffiti is rare and quickly painted over. A youth’s gang membership can tip the scale toward his family’s eviction.

“I would say they have 1% of the crime they would have if this community was in Fillmore or Santa Paula or Camarillo or Oxnard,” De Anda said. “The joy I have with these kids is that they’re always looking out for the other. So if one kid is starting to get in trouble, they might come to me and say, ‘Could you talk to him?’ ”

“I also like this place because I’m Mexican, and it has that flavor--the same customs and festive days, foods and music,” added the 39-year-old De Anda. “I would want my own kids to grow up in an environment like this. To me, it’s pretty close to paradise.”

Battle Over Whether Project Should Be Built

If Rancho Sespe today stands as a model for poor families building their future, it wasn’t long ago that a battle raged over whether it should be built at all.

It was going to be a slum. It would attract crime. Its squalid conditions would pollute the agricultural fields around it. That was what critics said after Rivcom Corp. bought the largest lemon ranch in the world, the 4,300-acre Rancho Sespe, in 1979.

The new owner fired about 200 workers who had voted to join the United Farm Workers, and about 500 families were ordered out of two camps along the Santa Clara River.

Some workers refused to move, linking hands to block bulldozers.

Activists argued Ventura County was obligated to replace the labor camps for the residents. Cabrillo Economic Development Corp., which had saved another farm worker camp in Saticoy, formed the Rancho Sespe Workers Improvement Assn. and bought the 20-acre orchard of a Santa Barbara gentleman farmer three miles east of Fillmore and nearly two miles south of Piru. But area farmers fought to keep the new project from being built in a farm belt.

Critics claimed farm worker children would vandalize farm property or be poisoned by pesticides. It was even said the local cemetery would not accommodate farm workers.

“I opposed it because it was out in the middle of an agricultural area,” Fillmore Councilman Roger Campbell said. “My fear still is that it’s going to be the beginning of a city. It’s poor planning to put a housing development out in the middle of nowhere, isolated from all the city services.”

Finally, in 1987, the state Court of Appeal sided with the farm workers, allowing construction of the new rancho.

“It was a tremendous victory,” said Carmen Ramirez, then chief attorney for Channel Counties Legal Services, which represented the laborers. “Farm workers asserted their rights.

“I remember going out to the old Rancho Sespe and Cesar Chavez was there,” Ramirez said. “He made a speech and it inspired the people and they hung on, waiting for something good to happen. The result is what you see today, a decent place to live. And if you have a secure home, everything flows up from there.”

With a Farm Home Administration loan of $3.5 million, the Sespe workers broke ground in spring 1988. Cabrillo completed the project in 1993, and was given an Award for Excellence by the Federal National Mortgage Assn. for its creative approach to low-income housing.

Today, the pinks, browns, yellows and grays of the rancho’s buildings, which caused it to be dubbed Rainbow City in its early days, catch the eyes of motorists on California 126, east of Fillmore.

Its one- and two-story apartment clusters have the look of a well-kept condominium complex with two playgrounds, fields and courts for soccer, basketball and volleyball. It has a tree-lined central promenade, and a bustling community center named after Chavez.

The rent is set low, $363 to $515 a month for two- to four-bedroom apartments, depending on income. Today, families are allowed to remain even as they begin to climb out of poverty. Some earn as little as $7,000 a year, but one household with several working children made $59,000 last year. Some are saving to buy their own homes elsewhere, since the Rancho Sespe apartments are owned by an association, not by individuals.

Free education is part of the plan. Federal money pays for Ventura County’s only all-day Head Start and day-care program for preschoolers. For older children, a teacher-staffed homework center--the busiest in the Fillmore school district--is connected to the Internet. Poor students are bused to extra classes in Fillmore and Piru during breaks in year-round school.

Tutors teach English to adults. Psychologists counsel couples on domestic violence. Nurses drop in to advise new mothers on nutrition.

The poorest residents receive food baskets at Christmas. And in the summer, dozens of youths participate in the rancho’s Junior Olympics. Young and old, male and female, residents field their own soccer teams.

Residents say it all works because everyone must obey firm rules. Parents are required to control their children, trim their yards and pay their rent on time--or they lose the privilege of staying. Three families have been bounced in the past three years for not following the rules. Just last week, managers served a 30-day eviction notice on a new family that hosted a party that led to fights with youths from Santa Paula. A silver foil marijuana pipe was found in a parking lot nearby.

But nearly everyone gets along most of the time, probably because they are related or know each other well.

“The peace is great because they’ve been a community since the old rancho. Everything is so stable,” project manager Andres Alcaraz said. “Everybody here is cousins or something, and that’s how it was on the original ranch. The farmer would say, ‘You’re a hard worker. Are there any more like you where you came from?’ ”

Maria Gonzalez, a 44-year-old teacher’s aide, was one of the first to move in. She had lived at the old ranch since she was a child, and was determined to have a better life.

“I was on the UFW picket lines. And I took my son, Eddie, with me,” she said. “It was there that he learned he had to work hard to make it. He wants to be an attorney. I think he got that idea from the struggles.”

Eddie Gonzalez, a 1996 honors graduate from Fillmore High, is a 20-year-old junior at the University of Chicago. He is attending on an annual $32,000 scholarship, with Maria and husband Mario, a packing shed worker, kicking in $2,000 a year in support.

“Because the rent is lower here, we can help,” she said. “People need to know that from projects like this, some kids get in trouble, but there are a great many who are going to college.”

For Many Students, College Is Next Step

On a sunny December afternoon, Ventura College freshmen Fernando Prado, along with cousins Maria and Georgina Mejia, leap from a public transit minivan at the Rancho Sespe bus stop, returning from a day of classes.

They are typical of the rancho’s contribution to Fillmore High’s June graduating class. Nine of the rancho’s 12 graduates are going to college, most to two-year campuses in Ventura and Moorpark. Some are attending the two-year colleges because they cannot afford the expense of a four-year university.

But for Prado, 18, and the Mejia cousins, both 20, the community college is an ambitious step because they are studying in a language they have not entirely mastered, and in a country to which they arrived only a few years ago.

“I think we study twice the amount of a normal person that was born here,” Prado said. “But we see the jobs our parents have. They work hard for almost no money. Myself, I’m working at McDonald’s right now, so I really want a better job.”

Prado and his cousins never lived at the old rancho. They moved into the new project after the second phase opened in 1993. And they came to the Santa Clara Valley only after their fathers had been here for decades, toiling in the fields to make the money their families lived on in rural Mexico.

“It’s so hard to think about my dad,” Georgina Mejia said. “He was here for 30 years by himself before he could bring us up. That’s why we want to succeed. To help him.”

Her father, Enrique, still works at a nursery in Santa Paula. But her 21-year-old sister is a store cashier and her 23-year-old brother a construction worker. She’s the lucky one, Georgina Mejia said. She gets to attend college, and work only as an after-school aide at the rancho’s homework center.

Prado is a member of the extended family that moved collectively from the farms of Michoacan to Rancho Sespe. His father, uncle and brother--all farm workers--each has an apartment.

“This is a perfect place,” Prado said. “The kids can play outside and the parents don’t have to worry all the time. When I come home from work, I’m tired. But it’s quiet, so I can sleep all night.”