The Dreamer

Salvador Ferreira used to dream of a house, a job--the chance for something more than the life his parents eked out for their family in rural Mexico. Today, at 38, he has the job, a family of his own and, this December--if all goes according to schedule--he’ll have the house: new, two-story, multiple bedrooms and on Salvador Drive, a street named for him.

The house is part of Oxnard’s innovative Villa Cesar Chavez, a development that is being built for farm workers and which will exist largely because of Ferreira’s fierce tenacity in a tenant-versus-slumlord legal battle that dragged on for nearly four years.

“I’m not a hero,” Ferreira insists. But at a time when the triumphs of the working poor are few and far between, his is certainly a stunning achievement. It stands as evidence that when someone with passionate beliefs--in himself, in justice and in the righteousness of his adopted country--gets pushed too far, anything can happen.

Salvador Ferreira is soft-spoken and polite, with a drooping mustache and a handsome, unlined face that gives no hint of his difficult past. His birthright was poverty. His family’s pueblo, Santa Ana Maya, Michoacan, was so remote that it lacked roads connecting it to large cities. Residents survived by growing vegetables or pig feed. Ferreira’s father was landless, however, and in the late 1950s he became one of the more than 3 million braceros who were brought into the United States to pick crops. Jose Ferreira returned to Mexico as poor as when he left, and for Salvador it cut deep. “All he did was work,” he says softly. “It hurt to watch him when one of us was sick and he couldn’t find money for a doctor.”

As a teenager, Salvador, one of four children, also was looking north. Education had been an impossible luxury, so he’d started working at age 12. Sigue adelante--move forward--was Ferreira’s driving creed, but to do so he needed to leave. His father tried to dissuade him. “He said, ‘You’ll suffer,’ ” Ferreira recalls. “ ‘You’ll go hungry on the trip, and after you arrive . . . disillusionments. Humiliations.’ ”

Ferreira’s early days in the U.S. in 1984 were, in fact, wretched. “No one hires you when you’ve got no connections,” he says. “You’re like someone with your eyes covered, no idea where you’re going.”

For eight years, he lived in a series of cheap, shared rooms. He settled in Oxnard, harvesting strawberries--$1.75 per 25-pound box, $6,000 to $7,000 for a seven-month season. Farm workers’ pay at first had seemed astronomical--”If I got a check for $200 I thought, ‘$200! In Mexico, what would this be?’ ”

But in the early 1990s, after marrying and having his first child (wife Martina Bejarano also had a young son), he realized that his paycheck wasn’t sufficient. He moved his family into one of 21 crumbling wooden shacks just off Hueneme Road because the place cost only $450 a month.

The house that would change Ferreira’s life “was in terrible shape, but we had a good life there,” he says. “I didn’t have to struggle to pay the rent. And I liked it for the kids [after Sandra, now 11, came Laura, 10]. The road leading to it had huge mud holes, so no cars came through, and I didn’t worry when they went outside to play.”

When it rained, however, the site became a horror. The shacks, built in the 1930s as temporary farm worker housing, had single wall construction and sat on concrete blocks. Water leaked through rotting ceilings and walls and collected in pools beneath the floors. Clothing and sheets mildewed; the walls grew black with mold. Broken pipes leaked raw sewage into the yard. Rats ran through the house. Occasionally, the landlord made a few “repairs,” such as covering a hole in a wall with plywood attached from the outside, so nails protruded into the living room.

One rainy night, Ferreira came home from work to find his home flooded. When he called the landlord, things got ugly. “He told me if I didn’t like it, leave,” Ferreira says. “The way he came, beating on the door, screaming at me, using obscenities! I felt humiliated.”

Not long after, neighbor Alfonso Villegas complained to the city, which sent a building inspector. When the landlord was cited for numerous code violations, the Ferreira and Villegas families, along with two other families who also had complained, received eviction notices.

For Ferreira, a line had been crossed. “When you’ve given everything and this is how you’re repaid, you feel horrible,” he says. “And when you hurt inside because an injustice has been done to you, you have to fight.” By then, Ferreira had become a permanent legal resident of the United States. So he did what an American would do: He found a lawyer.

Barbara Macri-Ortiz, formerly with Channel Counties Legal Services and now in private practice, represented Ferreira and the three other families being evicted. They lost at first, then won an appeal and--with four additional plaintiffs--went on the offensive, suing for rent reimbursement and later for fraud when the landlord avoided a judgment by giving his property to someone else. The process was drawn out and nasty. Local police came around; there were rumors that immigration officials would be called. Ferreira and the other plaintiffs even met with angry resistance from fellow tenants who wanted no trouble.

In 1997, the city of Oxnard condemned all of the shacks, and the Ferreira family moved to a public-housing complex. Conditions were better, but their apartment was scheduled for demolition in a renovation. Another child was born, Jasmine, now 7. It wasn’t until 2000 that an out-of-court settlement brought Ferreira and his fellow plaintiffs $10,000 each and the right to buy the 4.2-acre property on which their former homes had sat, or to designate a buyer. They chose a local developer of nonprofit housing.

For Ferreira, the long struggle had meant nighttime meetings after exhausting work days, missed work--and wages--and tension with unhappy neighbors. He never wavered, pushing the others to keep going as well.

Ventura attorney David Shain, who worked pro bono on the case, found him an extraordinary client. “He exemplified a quiet dignity and determination,” Shain says. “He had a great deal of resolve and a trust that justice would prevail. And it was extraordinary that someone who hadn’t had an easy time of it could put so much faith in others.”

Macri-Ortiz says her clients reminded her of people she had worked with in the United Farm Workers: “People who are used to getting kicked around and who don’t throw in the towel if things don’t work out right away.”

“I’ve never been someone who lets the pressure get to me,” Ferreira says. “This wasn’t about courage. I’ve learned patience to endure what happens. When I first came, I said to myself, ‘I’m not going back. I have to make it here.’ Sigue adelante is all I think about. During the time we were waiting, I believed we would succeed. What this man was doing was wrong. And I think this is a country that believes in the truth.”

It took another four years before ground was broken on the complex that will hold Ferreira’s new house, five other single-family homes and 52 townhouse apartments. During that time, he and Martina had a fourth child, Daniel, now 16 months.

Today, Ferreira has a new job picking broccoli, which pays more. The financial boost will allow him to meet the qualifications of Habitat for Humanity, which is building the Villa Cesar Chavez homes.

“I’ve gone through a lot of hard times,” Ferreira says. “I want to have my house and to know my children won’t suffer the way I did.”

The struggle has changed him. “It gave me a maturity,” he says. “It helped me value myself more as a human being.”

Ferreira has no illusions that he’s a Cesar Chavez-style leader, but he hopes his success will offer encouragement to other farm workers.

“Be honest and work hard, but you don’t have to allow anyone to abuse or humiliate you,” he says. “We’re in a country that can help us. Defend yourself.”