Despite Hard Times Residents Remain Loyal to La Colonia : Community: Some say the area’s bad reputation is exaggerated. ‘There are a lot of good people here,’ insists one woman.

From behind the protective orange bars guarding a small cafe on Cooper Road, Irma and Rigoberto Reyes are busy long before sunrise preparing the morning meal.

While darkness and mist still blanket the barrio of La Colonia, laborers huddle in bunches on street corners and parking lots and city parks.

Buses and flatbed trucks soon will arrive to deliver those who have jobs to the fields. The others will hang out on the streets and look for work.

Once part of this morning gathering that involves about one-third of La Colonia’s population, the Reyeses now run a restaurant and catering truck that feeds the very laborers they used to work with.

“We knew we had to break away and continue to work hard so that we wouldn’t be poor all of our lives,” says Irma Reyes, who a year ago was pulling strawberries from the ground. “Now we have to raise up this business. We have to make it work for ourselves and our children.”

Irma and Rigoberto Reyes are two of the 8,000 people struggling to make it in La Colonia. There are others like them. The housewife. The field worker. The local artist. The community volunteer.

Norma Gaston is in that group. She used to work the fields around La Colonia and still lives with her two sons on a quiet street in the barrio.

Pablo and Maria Valencia are also part of the barrio. They still work the fields and are raising two children in a run-down house near the center of La Colonia.

Then there is Clay Young, an artist of some renown who works out of the house his father built. And Carmen Ramos, the local bank supervisor. And Darrell Samuel and John Avalos, who have left La Colonia but who come back everyday to coach a flag football team.

Life in La Colonia cycles from one hour to the next in a whirl of activity that a lot of outsiders never see.

The barrio is notorious for its gangsters and drug deals, but much of daily life is common, even ordinary. Children go off to school each morning. Struggling families scrape together the rent each month.

And despite its problems, La Colonia instills a loyalty in many who defend the barrio when it’s attacked, and who choose to live here when they could live somewhere else.

“We aren’t the cream of the crop, as far as the city goes,” says Norma Gaston, who for nearly 40 years has lived on a street of longtime residents. “To people on the outside we are an eyesore. But our reputation is exaggerated. There are a lot of good people here.”

The vibrant 68-year-old is one of the few blacks left in an area that used to have a sizable African-American population. Ten years ago, there were nearly 450 blacks in the area. Today there are fewer than 300.

Even Gaston has thought of leaving, but she could never find a place where she wanted to live more.

“I know that when I cross those railroad tracks, I’m home,” she says.

Home to Pablo and Maria Guadalupe Valencia is a tired and tattered one-room cottage, where plywood boards replace busted walls and broken windows in a daily fight to keep the rats away.

A broken fan is about to drop from the ceiling. The couple and their two children shower in a communal concrete stall. They share an outhouse, which until recently didn’t even have a door, with another family.

The cottage is one of five in a muddy compound. Code enforcement was here not too long ago and ordered repairs. The landlord replaced some light fixtures and wiring, and installed a new sink and counter in one unit. And the residents say they’ve been told to expect rent increases as a result.

“We live here because we can’t afford to live anywhere else,” says Maria Valencia, noting that her husband is an unemployed field hand looking for work. “Right now we barely make enough to feed our children.”

Many of those hungry children show up each morning at Juanita Elementary School, which serves free breakfast to low-income students who make up nearly all of the school’s 950 pupils.

“The parents here are struggling and, as a result, so are their children,” said Principal Anthony Zubia. “It’s not that they don’t want to learn, it’s just that they have had a bad start.”

Young, the African-American artist, has seen the same thing in his years in La Colonia. His old, stucco house is filled with paintings and silk screens that show his vision of the barrio.

Young has lived in La Colonia, on and off, since his father built a house here in 1945. He explains that this is where Oxnard’s black population lived back then.

He says much has been done to La Colonia over the years. It doesn’t take a genius to tell the difference between the barrio and other parts of Oxnard.

“Those are the kinds of things that happen to poor people,” he says. “The people who need services most are the first ones to get shafted.”

The hardwood floors of the house are worn and rutted. Young’s artwork lines the walls, and spills out of one bedroom reserved for sketching and painting.

He has carved a scene from the Oxnard Farmers’ Market into a block of wood. He has completed a self-portrait capturing his weathered 66-year-old face, complete with salt-and-pepper hair and a small goatee.

And he has another painting of a group of men who gather around noon in Colonia Park to play dominoes.

While those men study the spotted white rectangles in the late afternoon, the Colonia Cougars flag football team sharpens its game. In five years, coaches Darrell Samuel and John Avalos have molded the youngsters, 7- to 14-year-olds, into a championship team.

Both coaches grew up in La Colonia.

“A lot of these kids are out here just begging to be part of a family,” said Samuel, a corrections officer at juvenile hall. “I tell them that if they push hard enough, one day we’ll be like the other side of the tracks, and they’ll fix our streets and trim our trees just like anyplace else.”

Samuel is a gentle man by coaching standards. He never yells at his players. He teaches them patiently for hours and watches as they practice until the sun goes down.

Sunset is a busy time in La Colonia. Lines spill out of check-cashing stores as laborers get off work for the day. Even at the Bank of A. Levy, the only bank in La Colonia, the lines are long but the service is fast.

Bank supervisor Carmen Ramos lives around the corner from the small branch office, which has about 1,500 local customers and $4.3 million in deposits.

“We know that the people here are like anyone else,” Ramos says. “They have money, they want to own their homes. We’re tapping into a Hispanic market that for a long time had no place to turn.”

The streets empty out as the sun goes down and the darkness and the mist settle back into the barrio.

Singers belt out gospel tunes at Cristro Rey Church on Cooper Road. In a dark tavern a few blocks away, a four-piece band belts out a tune about a loving man and a lonely woman.

Black-and-white police cars circle the streets, moving along pedestrians who stand in one place too long. The police cars are part of the image of La Colonia for many who live outside the barrio.

“It’s gotten worse,” Ramos says of the barrio where she has spent most of her life. “But it’s not a bad place to live.”