Historic labor camps morph into communities
CALDWELL, Idaho - CALDWELL, Idaho (AP) — Spawned by the New Deal, they were known for decades as labor camps — sprawling complexes of modest housing to shelter the field workers who migrated through Canyon County each growing season, then moved on.
Migrants from Mexico kept returning, and many stayed put, sinking roots generations deep into the neighborhoods now known as Farmway Village and Chula Vista Acres. Most of the residents now stay year-round and, thanks to a recent waiver from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, a growing number work in areas beyond agriculture.
"It's comfortable here, familiar. I like it," said Cecilia Flores, who has lived at Farmway Village north of Caldwell for nearly all of her 27 years. "Who knows? I might be here till I'm 80."
A third-generation villager, Flores is happy to be raising a fourth there — her daughter Amaya, who will turn 6 this fall.
"For about six months, I lived in Boise, and I never let my daughter go outside without me," she said. "I wanted to come back. Here, I don't worry about my daughter going outside.
"There's a big difference between living in a subdivision and a little community," said Flores, who manages the Farmway Village store. "In a subdivision you know maybe the three houses around you. Here, you know everybody."
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With more than 1,100 residents, Farmway Village is a larger community than three of Canyon County's cities: Greenleaf, Notus and Melba.
"We are literally maintaining a small city," said Mike Dittenber, executive director of the Caldwell Housing Authority, which operates Farmway Village.
And there's a lot to maintain, including 31 acres of grass, 3½ miles of private roads and a wastewater treatment plant.
Farmway Village covers 81 acres off Farmway Road north of U.S. 20/26 and west of Middleton. Its grassy expanses are lined with massive shade trees that look like they could date back to the neighborhood's origins in the Depression-era New Deal. It boasts a community center, a sheriff's substation, Head Start, a store and a laundry, handy, because it is several miles from city amenities.
While Farmway Village remains surrounded by farmland, the city of Wilder has grown around the 120-unit Chula Vista. Its 30 acres sit on Wilder's western flank, an array of tan brick duplexes and houses at the corner of Idaho 19 and U.S. 95.
With between 400 and 450 residents, Chula Vista represents nearly a quarter of Wilder's population, and David Lincoln, Wilder Housing Authority administrator, estimates about 80 percent of the school district's students live in the complex.
Like Farmway, Chula Vista features grassy expanses and shade trees. It also boasts a new playground, basketball courts and student-painted murals.
"People who don't live here bring their kids here to use the parks and just walk around," said Brenda Morales, a Gates Millennium scholar who's lived in the same Chula Vista house since she was born nearly 18 years ago.
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The labor-camp label and the preconceptions that go with it have been hard to shake in some circles. But for residents and administrators, Chula Vista and Farmway are no different than any other government-subsidized housing development — except, perhaps, for a stronger sense of community.
"The whole concept of labor camp is not in our vocabulary here," said Lincoln. "We call it Chula Vista. It's low-income housing."
Some of the popular presumptions are true: The vast majority of the former labor camps' residents are Hispanic, and most work in the fields or in agricultural industries. But the connotations that often accompany those facts are way off, residents say.
"They just think poor people live here," Morales said. "They do work in the fields, but people think that's all they do."
Estella Zamora, a Caldwell Housing Authority Board member, said there seems to be much less stigma attached to living at the farm-worker complexes than there was when she was growing up. She lived at Farmway Village for much of her childhood and now lives in Caldwell, where she heads Canyon County's court interpreter office.
One lingering misconception that particularly irks administrators is the belief by some that many farm workers are in Idaho illegally. All renters must show proof of legal residence, Dittenber said.
"But we're not immigration," he noted. "We don't investigate."
These days, most of the renters live there year-round, though both Chula Vista and Farmway try to keep space open for migrant workers, whose numbers have dwindled in recent years.
Lincoln, who grew up in Wilder, remembers school enrollment rising 30 percent in spring and fall because of migrants' kids. Now, he said, Chula Vista's population dips only slightly in the winter.
"We used to have people migrate from Texas, Arizona and California, about a dozen, who'd come here at the end of March," said Chula Vista office manager Sylvia Reyes. "They don't anymore. There's just no work."
"Lately we had one (migrant family), but maybe not next year," Reyes said. "It's too far to come for a month or two of work."
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As farm jobs grow harder to come by, the former labor camps are welcoming more and more renters who don't work in agriculture. For the year ending May 31, Farmway Village received 191 applications from would-be renters, and only 44 of those, about 23 percent, were farm workers, Dittenber said. About 65 percent of Farmway's 246 units are occupied by families with at least one adult who works in agriculture, he said.
According to the 2002 Census of Agriculture, the number of hired farm laborers in Canyon County decreased 33 percent from 1997 to 2002, Dittenber said in a recent report to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That trend has held true until recently, he said, citing various factors.
Population growth and the now-silenced real estate boom gobbled up hundreds of acres of farmland, he said, and increased mechanization reduced the need for human laborers. Biogenetics played a significant role, too, he said, producing Roundup-ready seeds that can withstand weed-killers and thrive without the need for workers to pull weeds. Such seeds are now available for three of the area's most common crops, alfalfa, corn and beets, he said.
Faced with those trends and a need to keep the rent money coming, Farmway and Chula Vista received waivers from the Department of Agriculture, which helps fund the complexes, to allow them to offer units to non-agricultural workers.
"Ironically," Dittenber said, "we're seeing an increase in farm laborers now because the economy's so bad: People are losing their jobs and going back to where they started."
"They're out de-tasseling corn, not by choice but because they have to feed their families," Zamora said.
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Farmway Village got its start as the Idaho Migratory Labor Camp in 1939, and the Wilder Labor Camp, now Chula Vista, was established around the same time, Lincoln said. Both are part of the first string of labor camps President Franklin Roosevelt established to provide housing for Midwesterners heading west to find jobs, Dittenber said.
The New Deal program spaced the camps so cars traveling at 35 mph could get from one camp to the next in 10 hours, Dittenber said. What's now known as Farmway was midway between camps in Twin Falls and Baker City, Ore.
When Zamora's family started coming to the Caldwell labor camp in the late 1950s, the lifestyle was far different than it is now, she recalls.
"We did not have running water, and we did not have a bathroom in the apartment," she said of the "barracks." ''The cooking stove was a wood stove, and the heating stove was the wood stove."
Those buildings were torn down in 1969 and replaced with cinderblock fourplexes. Those units, which rent for $265 a month, are tiny, packing two bedrooms, a bathroom and a kitchen/front room into 350 square feet. Farmway staff are in the process of tearing out walls to create a couple of doublewide units to better meet families' needs, Dittenber said.
An array of stick-built houses was destroyed in 1992, replaced by townhouses that provide more than half of Farmway's 246 apartments.
"A five-bedroom costs $500 per month, and all you pay is electricity," Farmway financial officer Ayde Cortina said. "You can't beat that."
Cortina lived in the complex from 1958 until last fall, when she bought a house in Caldwell. Her new home is bigger, she said, but she misses living in the Farmway community.
Even when the complex was a labor camp and its accommodations were spartan, Zamora, Cortina and others say, it was a good place to live and grow up.
Zamora recalls using a stick to draw hopscotch grids on the ground and playing "war" with apples and plums from trees in the labor camp. Highlights included regular visits from the red Champion Bakery van, which sold fresh coconut doughnuts for a nickel.
The complex used to host big dances, and Cortina remembers it could be tough to find a space in Farmway's showers when everyone returned from the fields between 4 and 6 p.m. on dance night.
"We used to laugh about everybody at the dance smelling like onions," she said.
Livy Lopez, who moved to Farmway in 1984, said the sense of community was stronger in the old days than it is now, but neighbors still look out for each other.
"There's not as much socializing now," she said.
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There also isn't as much freedom now, Lopez said, citing tighter rules and regulations than in decades past.
She said a good friend of hers was recently evicted from Farmway after her son was caught with drugs. Her friend could have stayed if she had been willing to make her son move out, Lopez said, but "we Hispanics, we don't kick out our kids."
Dittenber said he gave the woman the choice of kicking out her adult sons or leaving after both sons were arrested, one for smoking marijuana in a Farmway parking lot. Dittenber said he has worked hard to increase safety and reduce crime in his three years at Farmway, and being vigilant about drugs and gangs is a key part of the formula.
"Now it's much safer," Flores said. "Before, you felt safe, but it was also unsafe. Drive-by shootings happened fairly often."
There is much less gang activity at Farmway now, she said, and Lt. Daren Ward, patrol commander for the Canyon County Sheriff's Office, agreed. Dittenber notes with pride that gang graffiti seems to be a thing of the past at Farmway.
"When I started, we were spending $2,500 to $3,500 a month to cover up graffiti," he said. "Now I've been 16 months graffiti-free."
Ward said crime at Farmway Village has "dropped pretty significantly" in the past few years, and the most frequent complaint at the complex is disturbing the peace.
Ward said he doesn't have statistics to compare crime rates at Farmway with other areas, but "there's really nothing to compare it to" because the population density is so much higher than in other unincorporated areas of the county.
There is likely more crime per capita at Farmway than in other small Canyon County communities, he said, but "if they were all an apartment complex, I'm sure the amount of crime would be about the same."
Dittenber recently installed security cameras in the complex, which he and Flores said have reduced a variety of irritating offenses, including reckless driving.
Another move by Dittenber inadvertently helped enhance safety, he said. When he outlawed smoking inside the apartments last year, residents started spending a lot more time outside, looking around the neighborhood.
"All of a sudden you have a neighborhood watch program," he said with a laugh. "I was getting calls from four or five smokers a day, saying they saw a shady character, or someone was illegally putting stuff in the Dumpster."
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