The Nation: Greetings From California: Letter From a State in Crisis

Greetings From California: Letter From a State in Crisis
By Marc Cooper

July 29, 2009


There is science, logic, reason; there is thought verified by experience. And then there is California.--Edward Abbey


Poking around this jumble of ramshackle trailers lined up along a dozen dusty, unpaved roads on the outskirts of the Torres-Martinez Indian reservation, surrounded by the barren and baking Southern California desert on three sides and a fetid, smoking rubbish dump on the fourth, you'd think naming this place Duroville was nothing short of a cynical, deliberate joke. Duro, in Spanish, means "hard" or "tough." Duroville. You know, Hard Times Town.

Instead, it's just a cutting coincidence. A decade ago, sensing opportunity amid a severe housing shortage for Mexican-born farmworkers who toil in the nearby fields, local resident Harvey Duro opened up this land for any campesino willing to park his trailer for about $500 a month. So what if there was no running water, no plumbing, no health regulation of any sort and if, in general, Duroville was really no better than the Dust Bowl-era labor camps described in The Grapes of Wrath?

Yet the 3,000 or so mostly Purépecha Indians (from the Mexican state of Michoacán) who populate this outpost between posh Palm Springs and the near-dead Salton Sea have fought relentlessly--and successfully, thanks to a recent court order--for the right to keep building this hardscrabble hamlet and are adamantly grateful for the modest haven it offers them and their families. Especially on a summer day like this, when the mercury tops 112. "Thank God for Duroville," said 45-year-old farmworker Elias. "Without this, where would we have to live?"

Elias knows of what he speaks. Just a few miles up the road, in the preposterously named flyspeck town of Mecca, several dozen of his co-workers simply sleep in their cars in the parking lot of El Toro Market. Riverside County officials, resigned to this degradation, are caring enough, or at least are realistic enough, not to evict them and instead provide toilets and weekly portable showers. "Things here are worse, worse, worse than ever," said Emanuel Benitez, a community outreach worker at the local office of California Rural Legal Assistance. "These people make about $13,000 a year. They have no money for rent. And anyway, there are no places here to rent."

All this, a mere two hours southeast of 90210. ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090817/cooper