As California floods, a farmworker town is forgotten — again

“I want to cry, but a tree has to be strong while its branches break, and I am the tree,” Antonio Huezo, 72, said as he surveyed the damage. “We have worked more than 40 years to achieve all this, and in 24 hours or less everything we made over a lifetime is gone.”

The Huezo family is among thousands across the state who are reckoning with the toll of a brutal run of winter weather. But longtime residents, local officials and activists say a history of disinvestment and marginalization has left Pajaro and the 3,000 people who live here especially vulnerable.

Last month’s flooding, they say, shows how entire towns can fall through the cracks of local, state and federal systems meant to prevent disasters and assist recoveries. In the weeks since the flood, Pajaro has become an example of the ways in which the country is ill-prepared to address climate-change-fueled devastation in its most at-risk communities.

“The way it’s playing out is exactly as predicted,” said Nancy Faulstich, the founder of Regeneración, a local climate-justice advocacy group. “The people with the fewest resources who are on the margins of society are going to experience these unnatural disasters. What’s clear is we are not prepared as a society for these shocks.”

Authorities knew the levees in Pajaro could fail again, but an improvement project has languished for years. In mid-March, the river burst through a hole in the embankment and plunged nearly every corner of the unincorporated town underwater, the worst disaster since the flooding of 1995.

Residents are furious that more was not done to protect them from a predictable crisis. Officials in Monterey County, home to Pajaro, acknowledge that local leaders have not prioritized the town, but they insist the paradigm is shifting and they’ve called for more state and federal support.

“Historically, these communities have not received the attention of all the levels of government that they deserve,” said Luis Alejo, the chair of Monterey County’s Board of Supervisors. “Only recently are we changing and redirecting resources to communities that never had them.”

The Huezos were finally permitted to return to their pale yellow home at the end of a block off Pajaro’s main road late last week. In the town, houses were caked in noxious mud and debris. Mold was sprouting from ceilings. Contaminated water had streamed into the Huezo home’s first floor, destroying all it touched. Outside, it wrecked their truck, carried trash bins far into the lettuce fields behind their home and toppled a statue of St. Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of ecology.

For Maria Huezo, 72, Antonio’s wife, who has lived in Pajaro with her husband for more than four decades, the devastating flood was more evidence of something she has long believed: “We’re always forgotten here.”