After a Life in the Fields, Farm Workers Looking for a Place to Call Their Own

INDIO —  After long seasons of stooping in the fields and rising ahead of the Coachella Valley sun to gather grapes and pluck tomatoes, 90-year-old Maria Rodriguez still gets up each morning itching to work the harvest.

But the harvest these days is gleaned from a backyard garden behind her apartment building, a housing project where she and other retired farm workers putter in the triple-digit heat just like other desert retirees.

In the middle of the sunbaked scrubland on the outskirts of Indio, the Desert Gardens Apartments is one of only a handful of developments in California dedicated to those who have spent their lives cultivating crops for others.

Nearly half the 88 units at the peach-colored project are reserved for retired field hands, providing a low-cost haven for people who in their old age often tend to be among the poorest of the poor, unprotected by such safeguards as pension plans or retirement packages.

“After all of their years in the fields, it is important that elderly workers have a place to live,” said Rodriguez, who is the oldest resident and one of the first at Desert Gardens. She moved to the complex when it opened 3 1/2 years ago.

There has been a long tradition of immigrant farm workers from Mexico and elsewhere returning to their homeland or moving in with family after leaving the fields for good.

But that is beginning to change, labor leaders and housing advocates say.

Many retired laborers are choosing to stay near the farms where they toiled, having raised their children and planted roots in this country. And many end up living alone, some by choice and others by necessity.

“In another 10 to 20 years, there are going to be hundreds of thousands of Latinos entering their golden years,” said Paul Chavez, son of the late United Farm Workers founder Cesar Chavez. “It’s going to be a critical issue and one we’ve got to be prepared to deal with head-on.”

Chavez is president of the UFW’s nonprofit National Farm Workers Service Center, which has overseen construction of 600 single-family homes and more than 2,000 rental units in California, Arizona and Texas.

The UFW, in fact, helped pioneer the concept of housing for elderly farm workers, opening the Paulo Agbayani retirement village in 1974. The 58-unit project in Delano was built for retired Filipino laborers who worked the fields and manned the picket lines during the Central Valley grape strikes of the 1960s.

That project has all but shut down now as the original residents have died, but the UFW housing group opened another project in Delano in 1999. While not exclusively for farm workers, most residents at the 80-unit senior housing complex have worked the fields at some time in their lives.

The same is true for a 75-unit senior housing project in Fresno opened in 1988 by another nonprofit, SER-Jobs For Progress. A third of the units are set aside for retired farm workers. But because the complex is surrounded by farms, more than half the residents are former field hands, said Rebecca Mendibles, executive director of SER’s Fresno office.

“We operate that project as a true nonprofit because we know the people are on true fixed incomes,” Mendibles said of the complex, where rent is $420 a month and hasn’t gone up in more than a decade. “We just recognize that the need is so great.”

A national study revealed the problem more than a decade ago, chronicling an elderly population plagued by poverty and largely hidden from public view.

The study, conducted by the Washington, D.C.-based Housing Assistance Council, found that older farm workers were often ineligible for federally subsidized housing because of their immigration status or the rules governing such projects. And many were found to be ineligible for Social Security benefits, a dilemma officials attribute to the practice of paying farm workers in cash.

The study also found that older farm workers were frequently too frail to join their families on the migrant work trail, likely to earn less in the fields than their younger counterparts and often forced to retire early because of the hard work and health problems associated with stoop labor.

Joe Belden, deputy executive director of the Housing Assistance Council and the study’s principal author, said he is aware of little updated research on the subject since the study was published in 1990. But he doubts much has changed.

“Some of the old cliches, like we saw in ‘Harvest of Shame’ 40 years ago, are still true today,” said Belden, referring to Edward R. Murrow’s groundbreaking 1960 television documentary on the dismal conditions facing the nation’s farm workers.

“We go to the grocery store to put fruit and vegetables on our tables, but we don’t always stop to think that there is someone responsible for harvesting our food,” he added. “Why shouldn’t there be some consideration for the people who have spent their lives doing that?”

John Mealey asked the same question a decade ago when he first proposed providing a soft landing for this group of workers. As executive director of the Coachella Valley Housing Coalition, Mealey and others at the nonprofit group had become alarmed by the early 1990s at the number of older farm workers living in substandard, and often unsafe, conditions.

Many inhabited the scores of illegal trailer parks that had sprung up like weeds across the lower half of the valley, partly in response to the closure of grower-run labor camps.

“A lot of seniors ended up getting trapped in these places,” said Mealey, who as head of the group since its inception in 1982 has overseen construction of more than 2,000 houses and rental units for low-income residents throughout Riverside County.

With a $350,000 loan, the Coachella Valley Housing Coalition bought the land for Desert Gardens in 1992 and embarked on a six-year building campaign.

All but $1 million for the $6.5-million project came from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s farm labor housing program, and it took years for the funding to arrive. Residents started moving into the complex in late 1998.

“We’re basically talking about a hidden population, a generation that has always taken care of itself,” Mealey said. “They’ve toughed it out all of their lives and aren’t very likely to go around asking for help.”

There is plenty of help available at Desert Gardens. Residents can get assistance paying their utility bills and get their meals delivered. Bus service is available for special activities and a counselor from the local school district shows up regularly to provide information about everything from how to learn English to how to obtain citizenship.

Home-care aides are available to elderly residents who need help with domestic chores, and social workers from the Catholic Charities office in Indio keep an eye out for seniors in the area who might benefit from living at the complex, where rent is limited to 30% of a tenant’s income.

That’s how 74-year-old Federico Sanchez ended up at Desert Gardens last summer. The former farm worker lost his home after Riverside County authorities red-tagged the rundown trailer park where he lived. He stayed in a convalescent home for a year because there was no other place for him to go.

Then Catholic Charities found him a studio apartment at Desert Gardens, where the air conditioners hum all day this time of year and the community garden grows tall with roses and cactus and a cornucopia of fruits and vegetables.

“In this area there are many people like me who can’t find housing,” he said. “I was very fortunate to have this place.”