Pasquala Beaza looks on while watering her plants in front of home at an unpermitted mobile home park in Thermal, Calif. Squalid housing for migrant farmworkers has for decades been a depressing reality in many places where crops are grown.
November 2010
In the five years Pasquala Beaza has lived in a squalid trailer park for migrant farmworkers, she has endured the stench of sewage overflows, street flooding and blackouts.
When temperatures soared to 115 degrees in the baking Coachella Valley and an electrical fire killed the power for a month, her family couldn't take any more.
Beaza's husband and four other residents sued their landlords in state court.
In doing so, they joined a small but growing minority of trailer dwellers fighting to improve conditions at more than 100 poorly maintained mobile home parks that dot the dusty crescent-shaped valley 150 miles southeast of Los Angeles.