Families are crammed into garages and rooms, with thousands on the way to put fruit on our tables. But the storms have left them with few places to live.
By SAUNDRA AMRHEIN
Published October 3, 2004
[Times photo: Stefanie Boyar]
Rosa Mendoza and two of her eight children, William, 4, and Jose Luise, 10, hang around one of the family's three Arcadia mobile homes that Hurricane Charley ruined or damaged.
ARCADIA - For Flor Villeda and her husband and daughter, home is a noisy house with five other men.
For the Flores family, it's their garage.
For the Mendoza parents and their eight children, it's a two-room mobile home. Thousands of farmworkers living in flimsy mobile homes and shacks in Central Florida have been left homeless by Hurricanes Charley, Frances and Jeanne.
Activists and officials say they're worried the situation is about to get much worse.
Starting this month, tens of thousands of migrant workers are expected to start flooding back to Florida for the start of citrus season.
The big question: Where will they live?
"It is going to be a mess," said Gyla Wise, director of health and family services for the Redlands Christian Migrant Association in Immokalee.
The nonprofit organization, which provides child care for migrant workers, says the storms damaged farmworker housing in 16 of the 20 counties it serves.
"I think there are going to be a lot (of farmworkers) piling together" in the same home, Wise said. "I know there are people who are trying to look creatively at solutions right now. But (funds) are usually not quick in coming."
Indecent housing
The men are loud and smelly. They drink beer. Their music blares long into the night, says Flor Villeda.
This is no place for a young woman and a daughter of 13 months, say Villeda, 25, and her husband, Rogelio Mendoza, 34.
But the young family has little choice. Hurricane Charley blew out the windows and ruined the walls of the mobile home they rented in this Arcadia neighborhood in DeSoto County. Few other rental options remain intact or available.
"It's hard to find a place around here to live," Villeda said in Spanish, holding Mariela in her lap in the shade of the house.
The hotels are either booked, too expensive or too far away.
Instead, they pay $240 a month to rent a room in the one-story concrete block house they share with five men.
Mendoza, a legal U.S. resident from Mexico, collects $480 a month in unemployment. Some is sent to their two sons in Mexico. The money will soon run out. He says he hopes to get work picking oranges again this season. But more men are returning to the groves, and they have a prior claim to the house.
If she and her husband are kicked out, they don't know where they'll live. He has inquired about federal aid but hasn't heard back.
"I don't know what's going to happen," he said.
Solutions in this devastated neighborhood of agricultural workers run from ingenious to hardscrabble.
Jaime Flores, his wife and six children now live in their garage, which sits next to what was once the home he owned.
Inside the garage are two beds, a sofa, a kitchen table, sink, stove and refrigerator. The three girls, watching an afternoon novela, or Spanish-language soap opera, sleep inside with the parents. The sons sleep in the company van outside. A shower, salvaged from their destroyed home, is rigged behind the shed.
"Charley came and took my house," said Flores, 40, standing next to a cleared lot that was once his homestead. Only its outline remains, traced in the ground by landscaping and a doorstep to nowhere.
Flores, a machine operator in nearby orange groves, planned to drive to Ocala this weekend to buy a replacement mobile home with the $35,000 awarded from his insurance company. But a double-wide big enough for his family could cost twice that, he said.
Federal officials told him he didn't qualify for a loan, he said.
Several streets away, 45-year-old Jose Mendoza and his wife, Rosa, did qualify for a federal loan. But he doesn't want to go into debt and pay the interest, he said as his 10-year-old son walked a rooster on a leash.
A tractor driver in the groves, Mendoza saved for decades before buying three mobile homes for himself, wife and eight children. Charley tossed one of the homes into the trees, damaged the roof on the second and tore the third in half.
Its living room - still adorned with an entertainment stand and a picture of Jesus - sat open to the afternoon sky.
The family of 10 has crammed into the other two-room trailer, Mendoza said.
Despite his own problems, Mendoza said he feels bad for the migrant workers expected back soon. Many are in the country illegally and they rent, making federal aid or insurance assistance unlikely. (The Federal Emergency Management Agency can provide help if one member of the family is a U.S. citizen.)
About 2,000 to 3,000 migrant workers usually show up around his section of Arcadia alone every fall, he said. He wonders where they'll go. The streets are lined with shells of mobile homes. Huge balls of aluminum perch in the trees.
"I don't know where they are going to rent," he said.
Waiting and watching
Another possibility: the migrant workers may decide not to come back at all, said Fritz Roka.
Roka is an associate professor of agricultural economics for the University of Florida at the Southwest Research and Education Center in Immokalee.
Word of devastation has spread through citrus-rich Florida, including the heart of the Florida's primary grapefruit region where Jeanne and Frances came ashore.
But there's still work to do, Roka said. Not only did some crops survive but other areas need workers to remove storm debris or rebuild packing houses.
Another scenario could be an influx of even more workers than usual for posthurricane cleanup, he said.
If they arrive as expected, farmworkers could be stuck in even worse living conditions than normal, activists worry. They might decide to find housing in counties like Hillsborough and Pasco and commute to work elsewhere. Or mercenaries might take advantage of them, charging high rents for shabby homes.
"There needs to be a social agenda to clean up the messes out there," Roka said.
Some signs of hope
Help might be on the way. But it probably won't arrive before the farmworkers do.
"It's not going to turn into bricks and mortar for this season, even if they move at lightning speed or record pace," Roka said.
Activists for migrant workers are waiting to see what Congress approves for farmworker housing from the $12.2-billion of aid President Bush has requested in hurricane relief.
So far $5-million has been made available for farmworker housing by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, said Tim McNeilly, assistant director for legislative and public affairs for USDA Rural Development.
Applicants can ask for loans or grants.
A meeting on farmworker housing is planned this week in Arcadia by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, said Chris Roberts. She is HUD's migrant farmworker program specialist for Florida.
This hurricane season could lead to a permanent improvement in housing for farmworkers, activists said.
"What we've started doing with Charley, we went to the USDA and to our congressional delegation and said we need . . . to build bricks and mortar housing geared to farmworkers and their families so we don't have to go through this every hurricane season," said Ray Gilmer, public affairs director for the Florida Fruit and Vegetable Association.
Aside from private help and pending government funds, growers will likely step forward, Gilmer said.
Growers fear that if they don't solve the problem, the trained, experienced workers will go elsewhere - not just this year but for seasons to come.
"The first thing growers are thinking about is replanting and having housing available for their workers," Gilmer said. "It's critical."
TO LEARN MORE
To contact the U.S. Department of Agriculture Rural Development office about grants or loans for building housing for farmworkers, call (352) 338-3402.
