Less than 5.5%. That’s how much of Monterey County’s productive farmland felt the impacts of rain and flooding this winter.

Just under 20,100 of 366,000 acres.

One 18th.

And still, losses and damages to the local ag industry are expected to top $600 million. Individually, growers are frustrated, left wondering if cropland that suffered while runoff charged down the Salinas River could have been spared. Field work was delayed, in some cases, for months. Houses were lost, rent payments were put on hold, costs condensed, anxieties heightened and security ebbed.

That 5.5% starts to feel pretty big. Especially for those facing the strain of a sodden start to the growing season firsthand.

Over the last month and a half, as floodwaters receded and dry weather set in, the Herald interviewed farmworkers and ag laborers impacted by storms in January and March. Through interpreters, they detailed challenge after challenge. They spoke of losing work, scrambling to cover expenses and not knowing how to ask for help — of feeling forgotten.

Here are their stories.Claudia Chavez

“Well it’s hard because some companies, the first thing they do is hire their workers from previous years. So they leave new ones, the ones that want to enter as new employees, they leave them for last. So it’s hard.”

For Claudia Chavez and her family, home used to be a small house just south of Spreckels, one of two structures bookending rows of strawberry plants along River Road.

Then the floods came and home moved to a trailer while the family’s house of 15 years sat, left out to dry.

Last month, on a Saturday afternoon, Chavez, 42, settled herself in a folding chair a few feet away from her empty house. “We can’t sit inside,” she said in Spanish.

The weeks after March 11 have been an adjustment period for Chavez. She recalled watching the floodwaters from the rising Salinas River creep toward River Road — for the second time this year — wondering if they would recede before reaching her house as they did in January. Two days later, Chavez, her husband and their three kids evacuated, while the water continued to climb. The five of them slept in their car for three nights, then took turns staying with different family members until it was dry enough for them to head back home.

As of late April, they hadn’t returned to sleep at their house. Nor had Chavez started working.

By the spring, Chavez said she would be picking strawberries just up the road from her house, where she’s worked for more than a decade. But this winter’s weather left those fields underwater and Chavez without employment.

To survive, Chavez said her family has been relying on the income brought in by her 20-year-old son, who works at a local store. Chavez also said that while likewise sidelined by the floods, her husband recently started getting back in the fields again — one to two days a week and mostly to clean.

That was something, but not enough. Especially if Chavez and her family wanted to find a permanent place to live in upcoming months.

It was Chavez’s previous employer at the strawberry fields who lent them a trailer, she said. Chavez explained that also as the family’s landlord, he offered a trailer as a temporary solution while their house — his property — recovered from flooding or until they found a different place to lease.

The first option meant repairs, which Chavez said she and her husband would have to see through little by little, as they live paycheck-to-paycheck even during a regular growing season.

Asked if they had received any support, Chavez said social workers through her youngest son’s middle school and daughter’s high school had helped her fill out forms to see what resources their family qualified for. One application was for federal aid, she said.

At the start of April, President Joe Biden approved a disaster declaration in California, making federal funding available to those battered by storms across much of the state. For individuals, the declaration opened up federal support for housing assistance, food aid, counseling, medical support and legal services.

Facing some confusion with the FEMA application process, however, Chavez said that she had not yet heard back with options for assistance.

“We feel forgotten,” she said in Spanish, “because we haven’t received any help.” She later added, “People tell me that help is going to get here, but right now is when we need it and we aren’t receiving any.”

While they wait, Chavez said she and her husband have been exploring options for housing elsewhere, to give their kids a bigger space than one-fifth of a trailer. But so far, they haven’t found any alternative where they would be able to meet the financial requirements of starting a new lease.

Further fueling Chavez’s urgency is a fear that their landlord will take back his trailer before they are ready to move.

Without a secure place to stay, she worries.

_______

Florencio Torres

“You have to look forward and never look back to look at the damage that’s been done. The work has begun, so you have to look forward. What’s done is done.”

Florencio Torres didn’t see the rain coming.

He’s exhausted the past four months making up for it.

At 52 years old, Torres has spent nearly half his life in Salinas Valley ag fields. Working locally since the 1990s, Torres started with migrant gigs, traveling back and forth from Mexico between seasons until he got married and settled down in California for good.

He and his wife have lived in King City full-time for the past 14 years. Together, they have six kids, from ages 6 to 24. In a regular season, Torres cares for eight people in his household, including himself. Without obstacles, that’s a tall order. But bogged down by storms, staying on top of bills — and needs — is a beleaguered game of catch-up.

Sitting in the backyard of his King City home in late April, Torres explained in Spanish, that while he worked through the repeated rounds of torrential rain this year, the hours have been scarce and the pay meager since January — a marked difference from the usual schedule he relies on.

Typically, Torres works year-round for South County Packing, a subsidiary of the local produce company Rava Ranches, Inc. Rava Ranches opted to not provide comment for this story.

Not making enough to meet rent with his hours reduced, Torres borrowed from his brother to get by, he said. He cut expenses down to the necessities and took advantage of food stamps for meals. When he looked for extra help, Torres said support was hard for him to access. So he didn’t.

During and in the wake of this winter’s storms, city staff in King City said they often referred those seeking aid or relief to resources offered by the county or staged in nearby cities. Temporary services also circulated South Salinas Valley cities in February and again in April, to date, as part of mobile disaster assistance centers operated by the county’s Department of Emergency Management. King City staff recalled a mobile center setting up shop a few times since launching.

With in-town relief limited or otherwise located a city — or two — over, Torres said even when he did hear about resources available nearby, he found it difficult to actually go get what was being offered.

To Torres, the only help he and his family can depend on is consistent work.

As of last month, Torres said he was starting to get back to full, eight-hour shifts. He’s hoping the hours stay long from here on out, so he can start to recover and eventually, plan ahead for emergencies — to have a fallback if he falls through the cracks again.

_______

Silveira Camarillo Garcia

“What I saw is that we don’t have jobs where we can get money to be able to pay rent and for us to pay for food. Where we can get money, the work was destroyed. I tried to look for other places where there is work but people are filling them and they are getting only small amounts of work. They are not going to make enough for rent and food so that we can eat.”

Silveira Camarillo Garcia spoke softly, just barely above the families using Pajaro Park’s playground behind her. It was sunny, continuing on with April’s dry streak. Garcia barely looked up. When she did, Garcia’s line of sight fell across the street, to the county’s Disaster Recovery Center opened more than a week prior on April 13.

That’s the closest Garcia had ever come to the center.

Garcia, 48, was one of the more than 2,000 residents of Pajaro flooded out of their homes in the early hours of March 11, when a nearly 75-year-old levee failed upriver and inundated their small community.

A month and a half later, Garcia sat at a picnic table and recalled the past six weeks of her life: four were spent at an evacuation center, the rest were spent sleeping — but not really living — at her water-damaged home. She remained without a job, as floodwaters destroyed the Pajaro Valley strawberry fields she used to work in. And assistance, from county and federal officials at least, still felt out of reach.

Garcia moved to Pajaro two years ago with her husband and 27-year-old son. The three of them, unable to find a place they could afford on their own, moved into a single room in a larger house. Including Garcia and her family, the property accommodates eight people.

Speaking in Mixteco, one of several Indigenous languages spoken in southern Mexico, Garcia said the floodwaters got to about knee height in her family’s room.

“Water got into our house, the car, everything,” she said.

Everything, including her place of work. Garcia picks strawberries for a living. That’s all she does, she said. Her husband and son also work in the fields.

But when the Pajaro River levee breached in mid-March, an estimated 1,919 acres of Pajaro Valley strawberry fields flooded, totaling $160 million in losses, according to the County of Monterey Agricultural Commissioner’s Office.

Garcia said usually, she’d be making “good money” by late April, working six to seven hours a day — if not more — in the strawberry fields. This year, she was still without work by what would have been around a month and a half into her regular season. Meanwhile, her husband and son were just barely getting back to work again, after the family’s previous employer transferred the pair and a few others to a different field in Moss Landing.

For three days of work, Garcia’s husband made $160, she said.

Since the levee breach, the family has been relying on gift cards and cash assistance they received from nonprofits and community organizations while staying at the emergency shelter. But after weeks of depending on the one-time support, the sum was starting to run out. As it does, Garcia said she’s been thinking “over and over” about not having enough money to sustain her family.

Apart from community support, Garcia said she hasn’t been able to access help, in part due to the language barrier.

The county’s Disaster Recovery Center in Pajaro does have translation services for Mixteco speakers available, according to county Communication Director Nick Pasculli. Flood recovery information has also been disbursed in Mixteco via video, as part of a “community equity communication strategy,” Pasculli explained.

But past experience with attempting — and failing — to access relief discouraged Garcia from even trying this time around.

“If I go (to the center), they won’t understand me,” she said in Mixteco. “I won’t be able to get help.”

Feeling like the burden to communicate her needs was her responsibility — a daunting expectation for someone not used to being heard — Garcia resigned to getting by on her own.

She’s anxious to get back into the fields with her husband and son.

S

Though initially providing her first name to the Herald, this farmworker asked that she be left anonymous after providing sensitive information about her living situation. The Herald will refer to her as “S.”

While her work in the fields faced delays, S says home is where she’s suffered the most.

S lives in a mobile home, she explained in Mixteco, sitting on the steps of the Salinas’ Cesar Chavez Library in late April. She shares the space with her daughter and three sons, ages 7 to 18. The house, she said, was a good place to live. Until the mobile home got wet from flooding in March.

A strawberry field worker, S moved to Monterey County from Oxnard in 2014. Before California, she lived in Mexico. Asked why she settled down on the Central Coast, S said it was comfortable, so she stayed. She’s lived in her Salinas-based mobile home since.

The space S rents out is located in the backyard of her landlord’s property and is not part of a larger mobile home park, as she described. When storms returned in March, S said the mobile home and her family’s belongings inside were damaged by water that leaked in — including a new bed S purchased for around $1,000 before the rain started.

Told that county residents affected by the storms could receive federal aid, S applied for assistance. The Federal Emergency Management Agency inspected the mobile home and ultimately, offered S $300 in aid, she said, not enough to even cover the bed. But she worried for another reason.

When S applied for federal assistance, the process did not sit well with her landlord, she said. It caused a rift between the two, though S said they had always shared a “really good relationship.” Dynamics changed when FEMA came to inspect her mobile home — which her landlord does not have the proper permitting to lease out, S explained. Apparently nervous that he would be fined by the county for the unpermitted housing, S said her landlord gave her two weeks’ notice to leave.

S paid half a month of rent and waited. Two weeks came and went, with no word from her landlord. As of late April, S said she and her family still lived in the mobile home. But she’s not comfortable anymore, she added.

To provide housing and other types of needs assistance, FEMA is required by law to verify an applicant’s occupancy and/or ownership. Applicants must also prove that their disaster-damaged home was their primary residence. Tiana Suber, FEMA public information officer, confirmed that as long as someone has a lease agreement or something to prove that they are living at the residence in question, they can apply for assistance. She also assured that “all the other legalities” are the county’s authority, and that any information FEMA collects is not shared.

“We don’t share private information if that person is registered with FEMA,” she said. “That’s more of a county issue.”

Still, S said she’s scared of reaching out for any more help.

Ideally, S said she and her family would move from the mobile home — on their own accord — to a different place where she doesn’t have to worry about standing tension with her landlord. But jobless since February, the single mom of four has found it hard to locate any units within her price range.

S said she’s relied on aid from community organizations and low-income assistance from the county to get by until she can secure work again. But even if and when she does, S said she worries the pay won’t be enough to cover all of the needs that have piled up for her family through the winter.

At the top of the list: housing.

Vasilia Mendoza Mendoza

“COVID affected me but not as much as compared to the storms because the storms damaged my home and obviously COVID didn’t do that.”

For Vasilia Mendoza Mendoza, getting through the pandemic was a challenge. But it was nothing like this winter.

Earlier this May, Mendoza related her story, meeting for a brief interview at Central Park in Gonzales. The area was busy with locals like Mendoza, who made the trip out to grab some groceries from the Salvation Army through its “mobile ministry” van staged close by.

While volunteers ushered out produce and snacks by the basket, as they do in Gonzales every Friday morning, Mendoza tucked herself under the hood of her sweatshirt. She pulled the drawstrings tight and described her last four months.

In Spanish, Mendoza explained that the weight of heavy rains since January has been twofold: first, she was washed out of a job, then left to a damp home.

Mendoza has been a farmworker since she was 14 years old. Over the past two decades, she’s cycled through local fields in San Lucas, San Ardo, Gilroy, Hollister, Watsonville and Santa Cruz. She expected to continue this season. But by the time Mendoza sought work, lands she typically tended to were too wet to welcome crews, she said. Needing a job in the meantime, Mendoza shifted to packing produce.

To her surprise, hours at the local coolers weren’t what she had hoped, as storm impacts rippled through the market. Instead of the full-time schedule Mendoza anticipated, she’s been working around two to three days a week, barely making enough to cover her $1,500 monthly rent payments.

“No hay trabajo,” she said. “There is no work.”

Then there’s the matter of mopping up her house, which had its own run-in with floodwaters. To repair and replace what got wet, including carpet and furniture, Mendoza applied for federal aid. The Federal Emergency Management Agency inspected her house, she said, and offered help with water-damaged wood. Mendoza is holding out for more.

Otherwise, she explained, resources have been few and far between.

“Now, I can feel when people are in need and there’s no help for them,” she said in Spanish. “I can feel it now.

“I hope to God,” she continued, “(for something) better.”

Elizabeth Millan

“Well the stress. Stress and anxiety appear. And from there one is no longer well because one is tense.”

To Elizabeth Millan, a full work week is 50 to 55 hours. Lately, her schedule has been half that, at most.

Millan packs vegetables for Braga Fresh Foods in Gonzales. Millan has worked at the facility, 10-12 hours a day, for the past three years. Before that, she was in the fields.

Standing beside two extra-large grocery bags, topped off with Cheez-Its and orange bell peppers, Millan said she started going to the Salvation Army for help at the start of April. The resource, alongside local Catholic charities, has been a big help, she said, after her hours at Braga Fresh slumped through the winter. Braga Fresh did not return the Herald’s requests for comment.

With her hours cut, Millan said she’s been making, on average, $1,800 a month, if she’s lucky. She used to make $2,500. The difference, she said, has been difficult to manage.

“Imagine, just think about rent, and how much you have to pay for rent. … gasoline and other expenses I need to (cover),” she said in Spanish.

Millan cares for her two kids with her husband.

Mid-interview, Millan paused. She pulled out her phone and held it up. On the screen, there was a picture of a medicine bottle. For the stress, she said. Asked to go on, Millan shook her head.

“Um,” she started. Choking up, she put her phone away. “I can’t.”

Millan is hoping hours improve as this year’s growing season gets underway, so she can help and support her children.

Olivia Peña

“The truth is, yes I do worry.”

Maria Romero, Lieutenant for the Salvation Army Hollister Corps, asked Olivia Peña: “¿Ha recibido ayuda del condado o de otros funcionarios?”

“Have you received aid from the county or any other officials?”

“No,” Peña said.

Peña packs vegetables and fruit for a food processing facility out of Gonzales. She did not say what company but that lately, hours have been light — 20-28, versus the regular 50 she was clocking in before the storms.

From the fields to the processing line, Peña has worked in the local agricultural industry for 25 years. For the last two, she’s been a single mom and the sole provider for her family.

“I feel desperate sometimes because I’m the only support in my house,” she said in Spanish. “It’s a lot, what I pay for the apartment.”

Rent, Peña said, is about $2,000 a month. For the entire month of April, Peña estimated that she made just barely around $1,800. Earlier in the year, she was making around $1,100 a month. Peña said that sometimes, she doesn’t make rent.

“This week we only worked two days,” she said the first week of May. “Last week, we worked four.”

Waiting for work to pick up, Peña said, “I try not to spend money on other things just to save my roof for my kids.”

For aid, Peña said that she relies on the Salvation Army and, on occasion, local Catholic charities. Any more than that, Peña is hesitant. Not knowing how to read or write, Peña said she doesn’t know how to reach out for assistance or what she’d be looking for.

And she is afraid to ask.

Brenda Amador

“Well, truly terrible. Very bad. It’s worse because I don’t have my mom.”

With her 3-year-old son at her side, Brenda Amador walked through Gonzales’ Central Park. The Salvation Army had stopped distributing food for the day, but she paused to let her son climb the playground.

At home, she has a 13-year-old, and she’s expecting a third child in the coming months. Her kids, she says, are how she stays positive.

By the start of May, Amador said she had been without a job for about a month and a half. Dependent on temporary employment, she had previously been working in the fields picking lemons and most recently, at a cooler in Gonzales. But with the demand for production jobs mounting as regular field workers waited for flood-impacted farmland to dry, Amador saw her hours slowly diminish, until she was let go. She’s been trying to find a replacement since.

As a temporary worker, Amador secures jobs through the employment agency Constant Staffing, LLC., which has a location in Salinas.

After losing her cooler position, Amador said she has been “calling and calling and calling” Constant Staffing to see if they had any other work available, with no luck.

Ixel Cervantes, branch manager for Constant Staffing in Salinas, said that from January through April — and especially in March — needs for local ag work escalated.

“Our phones would not stop ringing,” she said. But the supply did not match demand.

According to Cervantes, for around every 100 calls Constant Staffing received from those looking for ag work, the agency could send about 10 people out to an assignment.

“It’s unfortunate because we don’t have enough jobs for everyone,” she said, adding that the high labor supply also allowed companies to be more selective about what workers they brought in. The good news is that with weather conditions drying out since April, allowing some workers back in the fields, Constant Staffing is starting to see the labor market even out, Cervantes said.

Still, Amador worries that she won’t be the first to get the call to go back. Or, that because she’s pregnant, she won’t be as attractive of a hire. But for her family, Amador is keen to keep looking.

“How can I feel?” she said in Spanish, taking her son by the hand again. “I feel sad. But at the same time, I’m doing my best to move forward, for the sake of my kids.”

In response to the severity of this winter’s storms for much of California, $492 million in flood mitigation measures has been proposed for the 2023-24 state budget. The funding will not only go toward continued recovery for flood-affected communities but also long-term investments to prevent future flooding.

According to Scott Murray, Deputy Director of Public Affairs and Outreach Programs for the California Department of Social Services, these funds “will directly benefit undocumented Californians and the communities they live in (by) protecting against flooding, (providing) more resources for emergency response and evacuations, improving water infrastructure, and more.”

Murray also said the Department of Social Services is working to fund nonprofit organizations that will provide disaster recovery services, including case management and direct assistance, to eligible individuals and families who experienced hardship from the storms and cannot access assistance due to their immigration status.

The details of these programs will be available “in the near future,” Murray said.

Asked how the state will identify those in need of this support, Murray said, “Selected nonprofit organizations with demonstrated experience and capacity to deliver services to the eligible immigrant communities will assist the state in reaching those affected by the storms.”

“As trusted community organizations,” he continued, “they will be conducting their own outreach to the undocumented community through their existing networks and through the local amplification of the existence of these recovery supports to eligible undocumented Californians.”

Local interpreters and translators made this story possible. The Herald would like to thank Anayeli Rodriguez of Mujeres en Acción, Maria Romero of the Salvation Army, Itana Avdalovic and Janet Flores for their help in seeing this piece through.