Migrants Swell the Hidden Barrios of Thousand Oaks

On any given day on a Thousand Oaks street corner known as Las Piedras, dozens of hopeful day laborers come running at the sight of a slowing car.

A cock strolls around a yard on Fairview Road. On weekends, the air is filled with sounds of Mexican mariachis and salsa music.

“I could go anywhere. Fresno. Bakersfield. But here I have work,” said Francisco Gutierrez, a Mexican laborer from Oaxaca.

Gutierrez is one of scores of Latinos who live in the two-block neighborhood off Thousand Oaks Boulevard known to its inhabitants as Tijuanita.

The small corridor just north of the Ventura Freeway is one of the hidden barrios in a city known primarily for its neatly tended housing tracts and high median income of more than $43,000 a year.

Although the 1990 U. S. Census indicates that the number of Latinos in the city has more than doubled since 1980, and that they make up nearly 10% of the city’s 104,000 residents, those who work with Latinos say those figures are grossly understated.

They hide the number of people who head for the city when work is available or who live with relatives only part of the year, they say.

“If the census says 10,000 Latinos, I can guarantee you there’s over 20,000,” said Carlos Ramos, pastor of the Centro Cristiano Emmanuel, a five-year-old church that primarily serves Central Americans. “There’s enough Hispanics here for 10 churches.”

Across town from Tijuanita, in Newbury Park, the Las Casitas condominium complex and Los Arbolitos apartments are home to thousands of Latinos who work at a nearby industrial park.

And an apartment complex on Warwick Avenue is widely known as the Yucatan Peninsula, because it houses dozens of migrants from the southeast Mexican state of Yucatan.

“It’s like a barrio here in this complex,” said Jorge Martin, 32, who lives in an $895-a-month, two-bedroom apartment with his wife, his 2-year-old daughter and three other men. About 20 other relatives live nearby. “There’s a lot of people from the Yucatan.”

Stores that cater to Latinos have sprung up in strip malls, and within the past five years, Catholic churches such as St. Paschal Baylon began holding Spanish-language Masses every Sunday and celebrating Cinco de Mayo and Mexican Independence Day.

Yvette Renner, who coordinates the Latino ministry for St. Paschal, said she has seen the Latino congregation increase from a few hundred families to more than 1,000. Today, a quarter of the 4,000 families who belong to the church are Spanish-speaking.

Experts say communities such as Thousand Oaks offer Latinos the low-paid and temporary jobs that many white suburb dwellers are unwilling to take. They include cleaning and food-preparation jobs at hotels and restaurants, day care and housework.

“They move where there’s going to be less hassle, where they can work five days as opposed to three days a week,” said Leo Chavez, an anthropology professor at the UC Irvine.

Cathy Mahon, coordinator of legal services for the Central American Refugee Center in Los Angeles, said many migrants who used to stay in the downtown Pico-Union district are relocating to newer suburban communities.

And Thousand Oaks is not the only destination. They have also moved to Moorpark and Simi Valley, where the demands for short-term laborers are higher than in Los Angeles.

“You’ll find people that were regulars on corners in Los Angeles are now finding limited work opportunities,” Mahon said. “People can get more work in areas that are being newly built.”

A few Latinos have come to Thousand Oaks for the same reason Anglos do--to flee crime-infested neighborhoods in Los Angeles.

Luis Fernando Gatica used to live in Los Angeles and work at a Carl’s Jr. restaurant in Santa Monica.

But Gatica’s expectations of his newly adopted country were dashed when members of a Mexican and Central American gang that called itself “La 34” began to hassle him. One night, on his way to work, they spray-painted his uniform and threatened Gatica with death if he didn’t join.

“I was afraid for my life. I began to think that Guatemala was better than Los Angeles,” Gatica said. “That’s when I began to think about going someplace cleaner and safer.”

Gatica said he can work fewer hours for a higher wage delivering newspapers in Thousand Oaks. And he has never been threatened, even when he walks around the city at night.

Today, when the 23-year-old Gatica calls his cousin, she talks of almost weekly shootings in the old neighborhood off Olympic Boulevard. Last weekend, a teen-ager was shot around the corner, she told him.

“When I go to Los Angeles, I don’t want to be there long,” Gatica said. “My life is better here.”

Day laborer Rudolfo Alanes, 20, from Durango, Mexico, regularly finds work on a street corner off Thousand Oaks Boulevard. Although he has been told that there are jobs farther south, he has never considered leaving.

“I ask you, what could they offer me there?” Alanes said. In May, he sat in his house watching news footage of the riots in Los Angeles. “Here they don’t beat up on you. In Los Angeles, they do.”

The worst thing that Thousand Oaks police officers have done to him is to take him to jail for loitering. He was subsequently released.

But there are trade-offs for those who have made the move.

Rents for one- and two-bedroom apartments, even in the shabbier parts of Thousand Oaks, range from $650 to $900. For many, affordable housing means doubling and tripling up in each room.

Mario Cano, 37, from Pachuca, Mexico, earns $5 an hour at a local nursery and shares an apartment on Warwick Avenue with a brother and six other men. There are beds in the small living room of their two-bedroom place, which costs $900 a month. The household has no telephone and no car.

“We all live together because I don’t earn enough to live alone,” Cano said.

The public transportation system is limited and slow. Many of the migrants rely on bicycles, both during the day when buses are running and at night when no buses run at all.

For some, living in the suburbs can be lonely. Cano manages to send his wife and children $500 to $600 a month.

Each December, he goes back to Pachuca to see his family.

Cano has never considered moving to Los Angeles. “Working in Los Angeles is like working in Mexico City. It’s too dense there. I like working here.”

Some community residents say they are uncomfortable with the look of the mini-barrios, where laundry flutters on clotheslines, balconies are jammed with bicycles and streets are cluttered with broken-down autos.

After neighbors of Las Casitas repeatedly complained of loud noise, fights and urinating in public, Thousand Oaks passed an overcrowding ordinance aimed at preventing such problems.

In Tijuanita, residents last year complained that day laborers harassed neighbors, and some residents called for a crackdown on laborers who look for work on public streets.

But city officials have been reluctant to intervene.

City Manager Grant R. Brimhall predicts that the increase in migrants will continue as the city grows. And he says the city must refrain from violating the constitutional rights of day laborers.

Brimhall said he learned a valuable lesson from his father.

Just before Brimhall’s freshman year in high school during the 1950s, his family spent a whole summer picking produce across the state.

“It’s my personal view that we need to be helpful to those who are transient,” he said. “Even though some of the workers are not documented aliens, there are still certain rights that they have.”