In Earthquake Rubble, a Town Finally Sees How Poor It Is : Living: Watsonville is tempted to profit from disaster: out with the tumbledown shacks, up with suburban tracts and malls. But what about the now-homeless farm workers?

The place I’ve called home for the past year or so is a motel just off Route 1 as it heads down the Pacific coast from Santa Cruz to Watsonville. Late on the night of the earthquake a friend called me from her home near Carmel, an hour’s drive south, to tell me what had happened. It was early the next day with me, since I was in southern Ireland, having just buried my mother. God was having a busy month of it. Aside from Hurricane Hugo and the earthquake, he had found time to direct a few cows into the path of a train carrying pilgrims to a shrine in County Clare.

It was hard to get news of the earthquake’s damage directly from my motel, but secondhand reports indicated that it was still standing. When I got back some weeks later, the kind Dutch ladies who live next door had cleaned everything up. In my kitchen there was a bucket full of broken crockery and the remains of Robespierre’s head. I had had plaster of Paris bas-reliefs of Robespierre and Saint-Just hanging on the wall. At a shock of 7.1 on the Richter scale, Robespierre, who believed in the Supreme Being, plunged from the wall. Saint-Just, who probably agreed with Fouche that the words “Death is nothing but eternal sleep” should be posted at the gates of all French cemeteries, dropped too, but stayed in one piece. I could have applied for federal emergency funds to buy a couple of teacups and a new Robespierre, but it didn’t seem worth the trouble. Around the motel, residential and catering to the lower end of the income scale, the fear was that the owner would himself use disaster-relief to upscale the place and throw everyone into the street.

A couple of days later I went for a walk around Watsonville with my friend Frank Bardacke, who’s lived there for 17 years. Watsonville, about 18 miles from the epicenter in the Santa Cruz Mountains, had been hit the worst. Of 765 buildings destroyed in Santa Cruz County, 333 were in Watsonville, as were 533 of the 2,438 buildings countywide suffering major damage. We walked along Lincoln Street and at first all seemed well, aside from tumbled chimneys announcing the folly of building with brick in California. Then there’d be a swath of disaster: boarded-up windows, porches askew, red tags on the front doors indicating that the places were done for.

Watsonville is a Third World town, meaning it is cheaply built, and though the price of a handful of nails would have meant foundation posts securely toenailed in, a lot of the poorer houses had been just resting on their pier blocks until the tremors pushed them off.

Prospect, where Frank and his family live, is a nice-looking street, typically working-class in a mostly working-class farm town--single-story wood houses, a bit of lawn out front. On Frank’s block the earthquake knocked out five houses, which had nine Mexican families living in them. By such a count you can reckon that Watsonville’s population, officially 30,000, is probably almost twice that number. Throughout the town, garages behind Victorian houses had held families paying $400 a month to sleep among vermin, getting their power from the main building, into which more families were crammed. So as the earth shook and the shacks fell, some of the working poor upgraded from garage slum to emergency quarters under canvas. Even the local newspaper, the Register-Pajaronian, felt emboldened to concede that the earthquake, a “natural” disaster, had merely highlighted the entirely human disaster of a town that, by the laws of motion of late American capitalism, had long ceased to provide affordable housing for the people from whose labor the wealth of the town derived. When the tremors stopped, people saw that the earthquake had posed more strongly than ever the question, what sort of a town is Watsonville to be?

Two hours south of San Francisco, Watsonville is at the head of the most productive vegetable-growing area in the world. Between May and October, the area produces about 80% of the fresh vegetables consumed in the United States. But for the past 10 years, as the seasons rolled by, economic pressures have been building toward upheaval just as surely as the tectonic plates grinding against each other along the fault lines through the Santa Cruz Mountains.

In the old days, a decade ago, Watsonville faced south down to the fields of the Salinas Valley whence came truckloads of vegetables into the frozen-food plants. Today, as Frank wrote in the excellent local bilingual monthly El Andar, it lives in the shadow of San Jose, one hour north: “Computer production has crept over Highway 17 into Scotts Valley, and in the last 10 years housing projects have shot up on the north side of town, peopled by folks who come to Watsonville to sleep by the Pacific Ocean, leaving low-paid computer assembly workers to live in the smog and drink the polluted water of what was once the Santa Clara Valley. We now seem to sit not at the head of the Salinas Valley but at the foot of the Valley of Silicon.”

Agricultural land worth $18,000 an acre is steadily being converted into building land worth anywhere from $55,000 to $110,000 an acre. And gleaming in the eye of every booster in town is the utopia promised by the powerful manipulators of real estate: a bedroom suburb with shopping centers where once the spinach grew, the working-class pushed into joblessness or over the Coastal Range into rural slums in the Central Valley, or back into Mexico.

In Watsonville, City Manager John Radin toured the streets, civil engineer in tow. Radin dreams of a Watsonville renewed in the image of Santa Rosa, a metastasizing node on the lymph glands running north from San Francisco. To observant citizens, there seemed to be a politically coherent pattern to Radin’s allocation of red tags. Down would go the International Senior Center for poor people, and down would go other venerable obstructions to progress.

But Radin’s joy was not unalloyed. This small farm town he’s been managing is politically sophisticated. Earlier this year the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Watsonville’s system of citywide elections was unconstitutional because it discriminated against Latinos. Although the vast majority of the population is Mexican and Chicano, only one Chicano has sat on the City Council, and he is a real estate agent. A court-mandated election on Tuesday promises to give some voice to the Mexican and working-class neighborhoods. Many candidates have vowed to use that voice to fire City Manager Radin.

But in Watsonville, it is not the official candidates, right or left, who lead the way. After the earthquake some homeless workers planted their tents in Callaghan Park, right in the center of town. City officials implored the people to remove to sanctioned refuge on the edge of town, out of sight and out of mind. The homeless stayed put. Here was the political pressure of visible deprivation, as opposed to the obscure hell of a garage shack behind a picket fence.

I walked through the park with Frank. There was a crowd around someone who had come to hand out a load of supplies. Others were standing near the bank of public telephones where, for a while after the quake, people could call free to Mexico. Frank chatted with a friend who told him that the people were spending their days around the tents, but they were sleeping in a house across town. “Why?” Frank asked. “It’s cold,” the man answered matter-of-factly. As did many of Watsonville’s astute inhabitants, he understood how to use symbolism. Here, with the unauthorized tent city, was an opportunity maybe to prize a trailer home out of the government, coaxing opportunity from disaster.

Watsonville and the earthquake pose one of the central political questions of the late 1980s. The earthquake left somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 people homeless. Meanwhile, “executive townhomes” are rising off Pennsylvania Drive at a starting price of $176,000 for two bedrooms; this in a town where by official count 17% of the residents live in overcrowded conditions and, as we have seen, the real figure is probably twice that.

West of Watsonville, along the sea’s edge, is Sunset Beach and the condo complex of Pajaro Dunes, mostly empty second homes of San Franciscans, sometimes rented out for corporate retreats. Between Pajaro Dunes and the town stretch artichoke fields worked by people who have nowhere to sleep but their cars. Everyone in Watsonville can see the class geography, and the quake has brought to the surface the earthly potential of an act of God.

At what point should a town declare eminent domain and seize developments like Pennsylvania Drive and Pajaro Dunes to house its people? Saint-Just knew the answer.