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 The
fires are still burning in the lives of farmworker and immigrant communities
in inland North County.
Most of the centralized aid money has not yet been distributed, awaiting
a countywide priority-setting process. Meanwhile—
- Farmworker and day laborer families, unemployed, are starting to face
eviction.
- Approximately 40 rural/largely farmworker families were displaced
from fire-destroyed trailer homes in the Valley Center/Pala/Pauma/La
Jolla reservation areas. Some are using Red Cross motel vouchers, but
in far-away Escondido, and the vouchers are running out. Some are doubling
or tripling up with other families, creating tenuous and overcrowded
conditions. And some have simply taken to open-field, “spider
camp” homelessness.
There are solutions.
WHO: Community HousingWorks is a co-founder of the Poder
Popular/Farm Worker CARE Coalition. The Coalition is currently
a funded collaborative of the California Endowment, with three members
supporting promatoras: Cal State San Marcos National Latino Research Center
(Konane Martinez), Vista Community Clinic, and Community HousingWorks.
However, the Coalition has 18 members, links to most of the grassroots
and government organizations that touch farm workers, and is the product
of ten years of cooperative work in farm worker communities (dating back
to the HOGAR program that resettled families from the canyons into apartments
in the late 1990’s).
WHAT:
- Farm workers have been largely hidden from the relief system –
too many National Guard, no reason to trust -- or have had real difficulties
making those systems work. Poder Popular has stepped in to find and
advocate for these families……. We still need money
for rent help!
- We have a good interim solution for the burnt-out families: buying
used residential trailers and placing them at Lilac Oaks Campground.
Interfaith Community Services made a similar solution work after the
Paradise fire, and is working with Farmworker CARE Coalition members
and Father Luke at San Antonio de Pala Mission to make it work again.
Interfaith has scrounged 6 trailers, and is hunting for more used ones.
Lilac has saved 47 spaces. We need trailers or money to buy
them!
Please mail all donations to: Community Housing Works,
Attention: Patti Hamic-Christensen,1820 S. Escondido Blvd., Ste. 101,
Escondido, CA 92025. Make checks payable to Community Housing Works. On
subject line, please write: Farm Worker Fire Relief. Community HousingWorks
is collecting donations for distribution by the CARE Coalition.
OR: Donations may also be made at
www.chworks.org. Follow the “Get Involved” link to the
donations page and be sure to reference “Farm Worker Fire Relief
“.
More information? Contact: Patti at phc@chworks.org/
760-432-6878 X 309.
PS: I also want to share this information with you:
Behind the fire lines, here’s what one of us saw:
“Over the past week I have heard countless news stories about the
fate of local horses as they were evacuated and taken care of during and
after the fires, yet I heard nothing of the fate of thousands of farm
workers and their families. Media messages regarding this disaster systematically
excluded migrants only to later label them looters, criminals and illegal
aliens. Law enforcement and border patrol systematically prevented farm
workers and their families from evacuating and seeking aid the past week.
Evidence of inequality lies in the multitude of testimonies now emerging
from the ashes of local farms, camps, trailer parks, and evacuation centers.
- Farm workers in Carmel Valley had to continue to work despite the
mandatory evacuation orders; a young boy received warning of the approaching
fire after waking up to witness a river of fire streaming toward his
trailer in Rincon.
- Latino farmworkers were evacuated into a local high school gym while
tribal members remained in the rooms at the local casino; a local family
delayed evacuating their trailer until the last possible minute on the
reservation because the border patrol was sitting outside their home
during the evacuation; and the list goes on.
Now, in trailers and evacuation centers, there are countless farmworkers
and their families that FEMA won't reach:
- a young couple with two children and one on the way has lost everything,
their trailer, car, clothes, everything;
- families living in Rice Canyon are paralyzed in their homes without
access to food and water due to the intense presence of the migra, or
border patrol that continues to terrorize the community.
Qualcomm massages and cots were not accessible to the countless immigrant
communities that learned once again that they live at the seams of this
society, a society which has once again unraveled to reveal true hypocrisy,
inhumanity and structural violence that plagues us all.
Please mail all donations to: Community Housing Works,
Attention: Patti Hamic-Christensen,1820 S. Escondido Blvd., Ste. 101,
Escondido, CA 92025. Make checks payable to Community Housing Works. On
subject line, please write: Farm Worker Fire Relief. Community HousingWorks
is collecting donations for distribution by the CARE Coalition.
OR: Donations may also be made at
www.chworks.org. Follow the “Get Involved” link to the
donations page and be sure to reference “Farm Worker Fire Relief
“.
More information? Contact: Patti at phc@chworks.org/
760-432-6878 X 309.
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