Peoples' Self-Help Housing

Family finds a community, a home

11/30/04 | By June Rich | News-Press Correspondent

Ana Elisa Fuentes | News-Press | Residents of the Carpinteria Camper Park celebrate a communal Thanksgiving, complete with a light game for the children. Peoples' Self-Help Housing purchased the park in the summer of 2003.

After nine years of housing purgatory, the Mora family is finally home.

For years, Miguel and Blanca Mora couldn't afford to rent their own place in the Santa Barbara area, so they shared a house with extended family.

The couple camped out in the living room for three years with their children, Sheila and Miguel, now 13 and 7, and eventually graduated to a bedroom, still a tight proposition with 11 other people in the house.

"To avoid problems with the others, we stayed in our own space," said Mrs. Mora, 33, who cleans rooms at a Montecito hotel. "The only time we left our room was to fix food."

Birthdays were always celebrated in the bedroom—including eating the birthday cake—and Christmas trees were never an option.

Little Miguel called it a prison.

But that's all changed since the family moved to the Carpinteria Camper Park in September, just a little more than a year after the park's purchase and transformation by Peoples' Self-Help Housing. The organization is a recipient of this year's News-Press Holiday Fund.

At the park, the family has its own camper, and everyone has a bed. They share a bathroom only with one another.

"Now that we're here, we're doing OK," Mrs. Mora said with a broad smile. "Before, the tension in the house carried over into our relationship with each other and the kids. It's much better now. We're more at peace in our relationship."

In years past, the Mora family's move to the Camper Park wouldn't have improved their lives much. The spot on Via Real just off Highway 101 had long been one of the South Coast's most miserable ghettos.

Old trailers leaked sewage, as did the public bathroom. Abandoned cars and garbage littered the place. There was no hot water, so residents ferried water from the public bathroom to makeshift "kitchens" set up outside.

"You'd have 15 guys living in a trailer, then getting drunk in the middle of the day. Cars would drive by really fast. We were afraid to let our kids play outside," Maria Guadalupe Benitez, a resident and mother of five, said through a translator.

Peoples' Self-Help bought the place in the summer of 2003. The organization replaced the worst of the trailers, cleaned up the garbage and hired a manager to live on the premises.

Now, the happy cries of the park children punctuate the steady roar of cars passing on Via Real.

Mrs. Benitez's daughters, both in elementary school, also get a lot of help at the new education trailer, where an after-school tutoring program and Internet access are available thanks to Peoples' Self-Help.

The trailer is a cool oasis in the lively park, with a large, colorful alphabet rug spread across the middle of the floor and computers on the fringes. Encyclopedias and other reference materials line the walls. Adults attend English classes at night there.

Perhaps most important, however, is the sense of communal life that seems to be burgeoning at the park, evident especially in its holiday plans.

Although Christmas is roundly celebrated, when you talk about holidays, people tend to think of the Day of the Virgin, Dec. 12.

The holiday, a national celebration in Mexico, commemorates the tale of a poor Indian who saw a vision of the Virgin Mary in Mexico nearly 500 years ago, though Church officials doubted his account. The story resonates with the park's population of working poor.

In the nine days leading up to the holiday, a procession of neighbors carries an icon of the Virgin Mary and flowers from house to house to light candles, partake of coffee and bread, and to say the rosary.

On Dec. 12, there might even be a mariachi band.

"Before we didn't celebrate," Mrs. Benitez said. "We stayed away from the public spaces."