1 Bedroom for a 15-Person Family: Orange County's First Company Town for Citrus Farmers

From La Habra to Santa Ana, independent colonias and some corporate-run camps housed citrus workers. This was Orange County's first company town for citrus workers and it was also a space where workers asserted their own community.

In the early twentieth century, Japanese American citrus workers had slept in rough bunkhouses here. When World War I interrupted immigration and caused labor shortages, the La Habra Citrus Growers Association built family-style housing to attract Mexican American workers here, using red wood that gave the neighborhood its name, Campo Colorado, Red Camp. Rent in the 1920s was $7.50 a month.

In 1919, Alfred Zuniga's family moved in. He recalled their home "had one bedroom, one tiny kitchen and a living room" for their fifteen-person family. His parents slept behind a curtain in the living room while the children crowded into the single bedroom, until his father constructed a second bedroom from cast-off railway wood. There was not enough space for beds for all, so Zuniga slept on the floor. To help his family, Zuniga began picking in the citrus fields at five years old. Despite the physical challenges, Zuniga remembered it as "a great place to grow up" because of the neighbors.

Campo Colorado residents organized large celebrations for Mexican Independence on September 16th and the Christmas procession Las Posadas, as well as dances to raise money for their powerful baseball team Los Juveniles. That team included Jesse Flores, who went on to become one of the first Mexican American Major League Baseball pitchers and then a pioneering scout for the Minnesota Twins.

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In the 1920s, Orange County built segregated schools for Mexican American children, including the West Side (later Wilson) School near Campo Colorado, made from old army barracks and surrounded by bare gravel: conditions that were sadly typical for the "Mexican schools" across Orange County. West Side educated as many children as La Habra's Lincoln School for white children, but in half the space and assessed at one-quarter the value. Students were punished for speaking Spanish, so Alfred Zuniga, who arrived at school knowing no English, chose not to speak at all. More than one-quarter of students here were required to repeat a grade and the dropout rate was so high that the retention rate was only 15%.

The school district partnered with the La Habra Citrus Growers Association to hire an Anglo woman who lived here and tried to guide residents to be "model citizens." In English classes for adults, she taught men words like "pick" and "prune," while women learned vocabulary for house cleaning and etiquette. Wealthy whites often toured the camp, especially during "Better Homes Week," a competition for the best gardens in the village.

That corporate paternalism crumbled in 1936, when nearly half of Orange County's citrus workers went on strike for higher wages, better working conditions and the right to unionize. Orange County Sheriff Logan Jackson recruited veterans to patrol the fields, providing the new Anglo guards with steel helmets, ax handles and the instruction: "Shoot to kill." Hundreds of Mexican American citrus workers were jailed during the month-long strike, some were deported, and, in Campo Colorado, fifty families were evicted. In the end, they won a small wage increase but no union.

In the 1940s, Mexican American workers found other opportunities in wartime employment and the citrus association shifted to employ German prisoners of war here, then braceros, who were Mexican contract laborers ineligible for citizenship. The citrus association sold this land in 1955 when the whole county was shifting to suburbanization. A decade later, it was condemned by the health department and bulldozed. Mobile homes now occupy this site that remains tenuous housing for Orange County's diverse workers.

To learn more: Gonzalez, Gilbert. "Labor and Community: Mexican Citrus Worker Villages in a Southern California County, 1900-1950." University of Illinois Press, 1994.