Four-year-old Jessica Flores is racing around with only stockings on her feet, a shoeless whirlwind with long, dark hair and a blue sundress. Chattering happily in Spanish, she darts back and forth between the family’s living room and the courtyard outside.

In the small kitchen of the four-bedroom apartment, a saucepan of squash simmers on the stove, lending the air a musky, vegetative scent. Having turned over the comfortable sofa and matching chair to visitors, Jessica’s parents, Santiago and Guadalupe Flores, occupy two of the four dinette chairs in the small eating area and smile indulgently at their youngest daughter’s antics.

"What I like best about this place is that it is calm," Santiago Flores says through an interpreter. "There’s a lot of space where the kids can play freely."

That wasn’t the case in the home the Flores family occupied until March. All nine of them were crammed into a one-bedroom apartment in Oxnard, and there was no place outside for a child to play safely unsupervised and unshod. Now, however, they’re among 52 families to find lodging in a new low-income apartment complex built by the nonprofit Cabrillo Economic Development Corp.

The Flores family thus straddles two sides of a profound divide.

Like all their neighbors in Villa Cesar Chavez, Santiago and Guadalupe Flores are farmworkers, members of the large, low-wage labor force that helps maintain Ventura County’s status as one of the leading agricultural regions in the nation. It is a labor force that for the most part endures poverty and substandard living conditions while making it possible for consumers to enjoy cheap food, local growers to sell a billion dollars’ worth of crops each year, and suburban homeowners to enjoy verdant views of orchards and fields surrounding their communities.

That the Flores family now finds itself in safe and relatively spacious surroundings, rather than the cramped, dilapidated quarters Ventura County farmworkers more typically occupy, is testament to the dogged efforts of the lawyers and activists who seek improved living and working conditions for immigrant laborers.

At the same time, the Flores family’s experiences underscore just how rare such good fortune is. Their lives throw into stark relief the painful paradox at the heart of the county’s agricultural empire: Ventura County farmworkers make less money than any other category of workers in Ventura County, yet their labor maintains the bucolic landscape that makes the county such a desirable — and extremely expensive — place to live. Raising a family under such circumstances is a daily struggle.

Flores puts it in terms any parent can understand. He looks at his children and says simply, "I don’t want them to have the same life I had."

Backbone of the industry

There is little in the way of reliable data describing the local farmworker population, an elusive target for demographers, census enumerators and economists by virtue of the social, linguistic and legal barriers that keep immigrants in the shadows. Even such a basic fact as the number of workers employed in the county’s fields and orchards is hard to pin down.

But by drawing on a number of sources, including the National Agricultural Workers Survey conducted by the U.S. Department of Labor, the California Employment Development Department, and reports by University of California’s Giannini Foundation of Agricultural Economics, it is possible to paint with reasonable confidence a portrait of Ventura County’s farmworkers.

There are about 20,000 Ventura County farmworkers, although the number ranges seasonally from a low of 15,000 to a high of 25,000 during the peak spring and summer harvest of strawberries, lemons and avocados. If they are like the rest of California’s farmworker population, 95 percent were born outside the United States, 91 percent in Mexico, and at least 57 percent of them are in the country illegally.

The vast majority, 73 percent, are male, and their median age is 32. Half have less than a sixth-grade education, and 53 percent speak no English. Nearly half have been in the United States more than 10 years, and they’ve been employed in agriculture an average of 11 years.

An increasing number do not speak Spanish or English. Of those California farmworkers who’ve arrived within the past two years, 38 percent are members of indigenous cultures from southern Mexico. They are survivors of the pre-Colombian population, descendents of the Maya, Aztec and other groups typically found today in remote rural areas. They generally are illiterate in any language, and speak dialects with no linguistic relationship to Spanish or English, such as Mixteco, Zapoteco, Amzugo and Nahuatl.

Low pay, hard work

As for income, it is likely that Ventura County’s farmworkers make, on average, a bit more than their counterparts in other parts of California, owing to the longer growing season and multicrop production that characterizes the coastal region.

Statewide, 75 percent of farmworkers earn less than $15,000 a year, and 43 percent make less than $10,000 annually. The median farmworker wage in California is less than $8 an hour, and only 20 percent are employed year-round because of the seasonality of the work.

A study prepared four years ago for the Ventura County Board of Supervisors found the median household income for local farmworkers was $22,000, although that included the earnings of all related people living in the same dwelling, an average of five people. The median personal income was reported as $11,759.

At the time, the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in the Oxnard-Port Hueneme area was $1,259 a month, or $15,108 a year. The federally defined poverty level for a household of five that year was $21,744. If the county survey was accurate, at least half of the county’s farmworkers lived in officially defined poverty in 2002. The current federal poverty threshold for a household of five is $23,613.

According to that survey, strawberry workers had a median annual income of $8,000, the lowest of any crop, whereas sod-farm workers made the most, a median income of $33,200. Again, this may well be a reflection of the seasonality of the work: Sod farms operate year-round, but for several months each year there is not much for strawberry pickers to do.

Period of unemployment

Santiago Flores knows all about that. He’s in the middle of the farmworker’s version of vacation, a period of unemployment — some of it covered by state unemployment insurance and some not — during which he can spend time with his kids, worry about paying the bills and rest up for the October start of the next strawberry season.

When that season commences, he’ll again be working 10 hours a day, six days a week, for a wage that averages $8 an hour when you take into account both the base hourly wage of $6.75 and the bonus for each crate of fruit he fills.

In the meantime, his wife heads off each morning before dawn to a Santa Paula vegetable farm, where she works eight hours a day, five days a week, earning $8 an hour planting and picking organic tomatoes, squash and other crops.

It’s not much, but it beats the wages in Mexico. The last time Guadalupe worked there, in 1976, she earned the equivalent of about $2.10 a day for a shift that started at 6 a.m. and ended at 5:30 p.m. At the time, the minimum wage in California was $2.50 an hour, according to the state’s Industrial Welfare Commission.

It was the search for better wages the led the Flores family, like so many of California’s estimated 1 million immigrant farmworkers, to enter the United States in the first place.

"People told me you could make a lot of money in California," Santiago Flores said.

Life in the fields

Santiago Flores is 51. He’s been working in the fields since he was 16, when he left his family’s subsistence farm in Oaxaca. He sought work first in the state of Sinaloa, where he picked tomatoes — and where he met Guadalupe in Culiacan, the state’s largest city — and then La Paz, on the Baja California Peninsula, where he picked cotton.

He crossed the border illegally in 1972 as a teenager and found work in San Diego County. For the next 14 years, he worked in the fields and lived under conditions that make even an overcrowded Oxnard apartment sound luxurious.

"We lived in the mountains, in caves," he said, "like gophers."

Mexican immigrants still live in the northern San Diego County hills, occupying cardboard shacks, caves and dwellings cobbled together out of plastic and other discards from the fields where they work. According to a 2004 report by the county’s Regional Task Force on the Homeless, about 2,344 San Diego County farmworkers were officially homeless, living in such primitive encampments or in the fields themselves.

Although he was living and working in the United States most of the year, Santiago returned each fall to Mexico, where in 1975 he married Guadalupe. The couple has nine children.

He continued to work seasonally in California, eventually leaving San Diego County and moving north to Santa Maria, where he learned to pick strawberries. Guadalupe remained in Mexico, sometimes working but mostly tending the household and relying on the money her husband sent back from the United States.

"When I was living in Mexico, I would just take care of the children," she said. "We had a house."

Santiago Flores took advantage of the amnesty and citizenship provisions in the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act to become a legal U.S. resident. In 1993, he moved his family from Mexico to Santa Maria, where at first they lived in a motel. They moved to Washington to pick apples, strawberries and raspberries, to Sacramento to harvest vegetables, and then came back to Santa Maria. Nine years ago they moved to Oxnard and found work in the strawberry fields

The one-bedroom apartment they shared until March rented for $1,150 a month. Now they pay $858 for a four-bedroom apartment. There are beds for all of their six children still living at home and their grandchild. Guadalupe and Santiago sleep on a mattress on the floor because they’re still saving money to buy a bed for themselves.

"As a parent, you have to take care of the children’s needs first," Santiago said.

Cheap food

At $8 an hour, even if both Santiago and Guadalupe Flores worked full time all year, they would gross $32,000 annually. But they do not work full time all year, so their income puts them well below the federal poverty level of $41,603 for a household of nine individuals.

It would not cost consumers much if farmworker pay increased enough to lift such families out of poverty.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, farm labor accounts for about 6.5 percent of the price of fresh farm products. Double farmworkers’ pay, and a dollar’s worth of food would theoretically cost about $1.07.

The average American household spent $5,781 on food in 2004, the most recent year for which data are available, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. This included $3,347 for food consumed at home, and $2,434 — 42 percent of the total — for food consumed at restaurants and other venues.

Of the total spent on food consumed at home, relatively little went for the kinds of products grown by Ventura County farmers. The average household spent just $561 on produce in 2004. And of that total, only $370 was for fresh fruits and vegetables; the rest was spent on processed produce.

Double farmworkers’ pay, pass the increased cost along to consumers, and the average American household’s produce bill would go up by $39.27 a year. Even if the wage increase raised food costs across the board by a similar amount — unlikely, since farm labor accounts for a much smaller percentage of the retail price for restaurant meals and processed foods — the average household would get dinged for another $404.67 a year. That’s roughly eight bucks a week, the price of a movie ticket.

The flaw in this reasoning, according to growers and economic analysts, is that farmers cannot unilaterally pass along production cost increases. Prices for farm products are set by brokers, wholesalers and retailers, who increasingly deal in a global food marketplace and can tap cheaper sources in countries where labor, land and regulatory costs are lower than in the United States.

"Farmers are price takers, not price setters," said Charles Maxey, dean of the business school at California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks, who has studied the county’s agricultural industry.

The most likely effect if farm wages doubled overnight?

"Farmworkers would make a lot of money for a short time until the farms start going out of business," Maxey said.

Eye on the future

Many elements of the Flores family’s story are typical of California’s farmworker population. The great majority are men, and although 64 percent of the state’s farmworkers are married, 28 percent live apart from their spouses. More than a quarter of those with children live apart from them.

This fragmentation of families — the men traveling to the United States to work, the women remaining in Mexico to raise children alone — is often cited by public-health workers as putting a profound strain on both individuals and on the social fabric of communities. And Santiago Flores is not reluctant to talk about the emotional toll exacted by two decades in which he saw his wife and children only sporadically.

"It was very difficult for me to be by myself here," he said.

On a recent afternoon, the Flores household offered sufficient domestic tumult to reassure him that lonely solitude is no longer an option.

Guadalupe Flores had just gotten home from a day spent planting cabbage on the farm where she works. Fatigue clouded her eyes, and her jeans and sweat shirt were caked with dirt. Some of the kids were already home from school and were running in and out through the front door, accompanied by an ever-changing constellation of young friends and neighbors with backpacks and Barbie dolls and textbooks. The air was alive with chatter and footsteps and the banging of doors.

Santiago Flores eventually slipped in through the garage door, having picked up the other kids from school, and watched the activity quietly but with a contented smile. It was commonplace chaos, and all the more precious for its predictable, everyday nature.

Like generations of immigrants before, Santiago and Guadalupe think about the future in terms of the opportunities it will offer their children, not themselves.

"That’s my goal, for them to study so they don’t have to work in the field," Santiago Flores said. "I want to get a better job, but I don’t have a lot of education, a lot of English."

Evidence of their faith in the transforming power of education is on display in the Flores apartment. Although it is sparsely furnished — an aged console television, dinette set, sofa, chair and end table are pretty much it — the living area also features son Felix’s graduation diploma from Hueneme High School, framed and granted a position of prominence atop the television, as well as daughter Janeth’s certificate of promotion from middle school, similarly framed and displayed on the end table.

They’re conscious of their good fortune in having traded a succession of motel rooms and overcrowded apartments for the relative serenity and security of Villa Cesar Chavez.

"It makes me really happy to be living here," Santiago Flores said. "I’m not the only one who needs this type of living. We need housing for a lot of people."