Huron, California May not Exist in a Year

By Viji Sundaram, New America Media. Posted July 9, 2009.

Farm Supervisor Martin Diaz said through an interpreter that he makes $110 a day, plus he gets health insurance. His workers, nearly all undocumented like him, make $8 an hour each, but have no health insurance.

“There are people who are 70 years old and still working in the fields,” observed Leon. “There is no retirement age for farm workers here. They work hard and barely have enough to eat.”

Even before the present crisis began, Huron was a city that cried out for great improvement. While the southeast side of the town sports new apartments and spacious single-family homes, most of the rest of the town looks rundown. Pockmarked roads, peeling storefronts, few fresh produce stores, no fire department, no high schools, no hospitals, and high levels of pollution from pesticide spraying have made Huron of the most challenged towns in California.

Two weeks ago, nearly 1,200 Huron families stood in line outside the John Palacios Community Center to pick up a free box of canned beans, rice, pasta and frozen chicken, handed out by the Fresno County Economic Opportunities Commission (EOC), a non-profit organization that runs social programs for low-income families in the county. EOC’s monthly food distribution in the Central Valley towns of Huron, Firebaugh, San Joaquin and Mendota has been going on since March.

“We have even done two a month in some towns,” depending on how much food the EOC is able to purchase through donations, said EOC’s rural services coordinator Gabriel Romero.

Catholic Charities, corporations and individuals had donated most of the food this day, according to Romero. An anonymous person had donated boxes of socks, shoes and undergarments.

Some in line pulled their sombreros and scarves over their face when a video camera was pointed at them. Others turned away, looking embarrassed.

“People tell me, ‘I don’t want handouts, I want work,’” Romero said.

She said the food lines have grown longer since the distribution first began three months ago – that the number of families has almost doubled. But “there are people who just won’t come because of their pride,” she added.

Laura Garcia, 18, swallowed hers to join the line. Wheeling her 8-month-old baby in a stroller, she said she had no choice but to come because her farmhand husband had been laid off from his job three weeks ago and was finding it hard to snag another because of the water situation.

“Had my husband been working, I wouldn’t have come here,” she said. “Without water, there’s no work. I don’t know when he’ll find another. My baby needs food.”

Laura Cervanto, 20 and the mother of a toddler, said she had come because her husband’s monthly salary of $1,400 barely covered their food and rental costs, plus the small remittance he needed to send his family in Mexico.

Assemblyman Gilmore is convinced that if the federal and state-controlled water supply is restored to Huron and the rest of the Central Valley, Huron will eventually bounce back again.

“We need those pumps turned back on,” he said, otherwise the United States will have to turn to foreign sources for its food supply.

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