Squatters’ Camp Offers Hardscrabble Life, but Thick Cardboard : San Diego: They call the place Rancho de los Diablos, Ranch of the Devils. Authorities call it a health hazard; migrants call it home. But the last 350 residents are supposed to be out by October.

SAN DIEGO — They call the place where the Diaz family lives Rancho de los Diablos--Ranch of the Devils. Visit them, and you’ll understand why.

The four-room shack is cobbled together with salvaged cardboard and plywood, the roof thatched with green trash bags to repel rain. Carpet pieces cover dirt floors. Small windows in two rooms allow the only natural light.

Still, this migrant camp represents an improvement.

“In a way, this house is better,” said Rogelio Diaz Torrez, 25. “The cardboard is thicker. In Mexico, the cardboard is very thin.”

Less than a mile away, the rich have multimillion dollar homes--among them, singer Janet Jackson. But Rancho de los Diablos is for the immigrants hired at low wages to harvest fields, clean homes or watch children.

The camp is nestled in a ravine along a quiet but polluted stream. Its homes, city inspectors say, are fire hazards. Its bumpy dirt roads flood during rainstorms, and portable toilets promote infection.

Started by a few migrant workers as a squatters’ settlement in the 1970s, the camp ballooned to 700 men, women and children. And the squalor grew.

Nearby homeowners pressed the city to condemn the shacks; some have already been torn down. The last 350 residents must be out by October.

“This is private property, substandard and illegal,” said Tony Khalil, senior city engineer. “The conditions they’re living in now, I don’t think anyone should be living in those conditions.”

And, in fact, the Diazes don’t want to live here.

“We’re here for necessity, to save some money so we can go back to Mexico, go back to rent in San Diego or save enough for a down payment on a house,” said Diaz’s 27-year-old wife, Juana.

The Diazes came to the camp two years ago when Rogelio lost his job in a produce warehouse, and they could no longer afford their one-bedroom apartment in south San Diego. Now, Rogelio earns $6 an hour packing frozen pizza and lasagna. Juana can make $30 a week selling tamales to farm workers headed home.

They have two children--Maribel, 1, and Rogelio Jr., 3. Juana’s mother, Concepcion Alarcon, also lives in the shack.

Rogelio is a legal alien; Juana is not, though her papers are in the works. She tells stories of her visits to Mexico, and the dangerous and difficult return trips.

She originally came north six years ago, enlisting a smuggler for $150 after her brother was shot and killed in Santa Ana, Calif.

His body was shipped home but the family couldn’t afford even the cheapest burial service or tombstone, so Juana came to the United States to baby-sit and clean houses. Eight months later, her brother had his gravestone.

“Not all immigrants come and try to abuse the system,” Juana said, wiping a forearm across her brow as she scrubbed a pair of jeans on a slab of concrete. “I feel that if it wasn’t for Mexicans, no one would be picking the fruit and vegetables. No one else would be out in the fields.”

The Diaz home has some comforts--a small TV-radio charged with a car battery and a larger television and VCR run by an electric generator. The Diazes watch Mexican soap operas and listen to Spanish-language news.

The generator also provides light at night and powers Juana’s blender, in which she grinds hot green and red chiles for her eye-watering salsa.

Just past the clothesline is her garden of chiles, pumpkins, cucumbers, tomatoes, cilantro, mint, strawberries and a bright stand of sunflowers.

The camp is a microcosm of life in Mexico. Families from the Mexican state of Oaxaca, many who speak Indian dialects, live in shanties on one side of the stream. Families from Guerrero and nearby states, who speak mostly Spanish, live on the other.

Down the unmarked dirt road that leads to camp, boys kick around a soccer ball, and mothers stroll babies amid cackling chickens and wandering dogs.

Young men huddle against an abandoned car, playing poker. Smoke from cooking fires floats by.

Bad times come on Fridays--payday--when outsiders visit the secluded canyon and some of the younger men let loose.

“They go and get drunk,” Juana said, cradling a nursing Maribel. “That’s when you have the shootings.” She fears a bullet will puncture the flimsy walls of her home and hit a child.

Over the years, church and social service groups and immigrants rights advocates have tried to improve the camp.

They set up a solar power system, brought in portable toilets and garbage bins with weekly trash pickup, arranged for a pipeline that brings in clean water and established a church, a general store and several open-air “restaurants.”

The store even stocks cellular phones that residents pay to use--a call to Mexico costs a dollar.

But conditions never improved enough, and the camp will soon close. A nonprofit agency, Esperanza, won a $518,000 federal grant to help families pay rent for up to a year and provide rent and utility deposits for single men.

Dave Goodall, co-owner of the property, said he and partner Robert Scarcia wanted the camp shut down much sooner. But church, social-service and city officials asked them to wait until they figured out what to do.

In the meantime, nearby homeowners sued Goodall and Scarcia to close the camp. “They said they didn’t like all these people walking through their back yards and in front of their homes,” Goodall said.

The migrants, Goodall insists, are “tough workers and just wonderful people. The devastation comes when they’re encouraged to bring their families. They can’t support their families on the wages they’re earning.”