Church groups argue that the ranch’s very existence demonstrates California’s lack of affordable housing, a particular problem for immigrant workers. Many of the Rancho de los Diablos residents are documented aliens. Some work in the area’s booming agricultural fields; others hold year-round jobs in restaurants, domestic service, construction and landscaping businesses or pick up day work in the exclusive Fairbanks Ranch area nearby. Affluent Californians “cannot live without them and yet they don’t want them,” says the Rev. Raphael Martinez of the North County Chaplaincy, a social-service agency. “What’s happening at Devil’s Ranch is a microcosm of what’s happening across California.”
The camp was tolerated for years when it took up a small portion of Robert Scarcia’s 78 acres. But now that it has spread to David Goodell’s neighboring property, Goodell is agitating to have it removed. “I empathize with the individual plight of these people–they’re wonderful people, they’re good workers,” Goodell says. But he insists that the amenities the church groups have brought have misled the immigrants into thinking they can stay there permanently and bring their families from back home. Now, Goodell says, the question is, “What is the city of San Diego going to do to help relocate these people?”
Residents of Rancho de los Diablos are wondering, too. City officials plan to demolish the camp within six months to a year. At least 10 shacks have been razed, and this week 25 more are due to be bulldozed. In the meantime residents are not permitted to make improvements, which has made conditions deteriorate further. Alberta Lopez, 27, says her family was threatened with eviction when they tried to patch the roof of the one-room shack they share with another family; it houses 15 people. “In over 17 years of representing farm workers in this state, I have not witnessed as appalling living conditions as exist here,” says Claudia Smith of California Rural Legal Assistance in Oceanside.
The North County Chaplaincy and a group called RANCHO (Rural Area Nonprofit Community Housing Organization) are competing for $500,000 in community-development funds to help resettle the squatters. RANCHO hopes to buy land nearby and build affordable apartments, though that would require several million dollars more in federal funds. An official from the Department of Housing and Urban Development visited recently, but the fate of such plans is uncertain. For now, the squatters are in a quandary. “If we have to go, we’ll simply have to find another place to pitch a little camp, because I cannot afford to pay the rent around here,” says farm worker Raul Garcia, who lives there with his daughter and two sons. Legend has it that Rancho de los Diablos was named for a nearby mountain, or for the harsh treatment migrants once received from a major grower. But the real “devil” may turn out to be the problem it poses for the city of San Diego.
