COACHELLA VALLEY: Near desert paradise, farmworkers live in poverty
Yes, children in Somalia, Sudan, and Afghanistan are worse off - but just barely.
Even the names of unincorporated communities here — Mecca, Oasis — evoke biblical lands, befitting the man-made plagues that beset the region. This desert valley is one of the country’s richest agricultural areas, an irrigation-fed bounty of table grapes, bell peppers, seedless watermelons and most of the country’s dates. Island-paradise palms spring mirage-like from the hot, arid soil.
This Coachella, unvisited by hipsters who attend a yearly music festival in the valley, is one of the poorest, densest areas of the United States — especially during grape season, when an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 migrant workers pour into already crowded quarters, sleeping in fields, alongside irrigation ditches or on swatches of cardboard in the dirt parking lot of Leon’s Market in Mecca.
Israel and Fatima Gutierrez — the parents of Neftoli, 7, and Alexis, 5, and residents of the Rancho Garcia Mobile Home Park — live the nightmare daily.
The vinyl floors of their disintegrating trailer, which they rent, are dimpled with moisture. Plywood covers holes where windows once were, affixed with duct tape to walls in a slow state of collapse. Rats are a constant presence; sometimes, frogs make their way through the pipes. An extension cord leads from a single light bulb hanging from the bedroom ceiling to a socket with exposed wires.
“Sometimes, the niños shock themselves and scream,” Israel Gutierrez said.
In the tumbledown warrens of America’s pre-fab favelas — California’s Third World — the 20th century is a dim memory. Basic needs such as potable water, safe and reliable electricity, rudimentary sanitation and clean air can go unmet. Darryl Adams, the Coachella Valley Unified School District superintendent, who took over last year, visited some of his young charges recently in 115-degree heat.
“These children were splashing around in little portable pools getting infections from unclean water,” Adams said.
“This is the Golden State, the great state,” he said. “I had no idea.”
