THE FUTURE ARRIVES IN THREE ROCKS

...The average total family income at Three Rocks is between $2,300 and $3,500 a year...

...A new well, pumping station, water main, and storage tank are in operation and ready to service all the community's houses when they are completed late this summer...

...In the meantime, the construction of a second Casa de Manana near Goshen had been completed under AFSC auspices and was passing on its tools to the self-help builders of a third Casa de Manana near the adjoining towns of Cutler-Orosi...

...As Angela Sei-berling, a college student from Iowa, summed it up, "For many of us this is the first time we have really had a chance to do something for someone else without any thought of personal gain...

...January marched in, wet and chilling ¦—and bringing with it an answer to their prayers for a financial miracle...

...The rent was raised to $12.50 a month, ostensibly to cover costs of pump repairs...

...But even three, Cabrera insisted, proved that it could be done...

...Mrs...

...Few in the central valley are unfamiliar with the Three Rocks story...

...Cabrera learned that the money for the building materials had been obtained through loans from the Federal Farmers Home Administration, and that a Quaker service organization, the American Friends Service Committee, had helped procure the land...

...Some children, no doubt, were at school in Cantua Creek, a small town a few miles down the road...

...The FHA, on the other hand, considers a family's earning record as a basis for its eligibility for a loan...

...Behind a parking lot fronting the highway are a gas station, a couple of stores, a cafe...

...A number of Fresno's leading citizens, under the auspices of the AFSC, formed an El Porvenir Committee...

...All I'm concerned about is that people have a place to live...

...Fresno's leading citizens, press, churches, and service clubs rallied to the cause of El Porvenir...

...Burciaga lost no time in closing a deal for the twenty acres adjoining Three Rocks...

...That exception is the unfinished business of El Porvenir...

...He deeded over most of its eight acres, shanties and all, to the residents thereon, to be held in common ownership...

...Pride is persuasive—even when it is all one has...

...Many rose before dawn to work an extra hour or two before going on to their jobs on the Giffens farms...

...But when I first came to Three Rocks the families who had joined their fortunes under the corporate banner of El Porvenir had only just achieved their first giant step: They had the land on which to build...

...A small stucco Catholic church guards one flank, a hardware emporium the other...

...With the project on its way to fulfillment, Bard McAllister moved on to another AFSC project in Zambia, Africa...

...Not that my visit was unique...

...Eventually Cabrera and his neighbors began to hear stories of farm laborers in adjoining Tulare county who, by some miracle, had found means to build their own modern homes on their own land...

...One of the Soviet Union's farm journals points to it with relish in an article entitled "How Capitalist Farmers Treat Their Labor...

...And Cabrera talked of building more than fifty...

...It is not just another subdivision...

...Of a projected total of fifty-four houses to be built, sixteen will be ready for occupancy in March...

...Some of the shanties housed as many as twelve people in two tiny rooms...

...Inasmuch as they had been condemned as unfit for human habitation by health authorities of neighboring counties, he was able to buy them up at one dollar apiece...

...For more than a decade county officials have sought in vain to eradicate it...

...A new brick wall, built by last summer's work campers, fronts the division...

...Not many who had begun the long campaign were there to celebrate...

...An expanse of flat, scrubby acreage of sandy, yellow soil adjoined it...

...The smaller, three-bedroom house was occupied by a young couple with their one child...

...The problem of funding a self-help, minimum-budget subdivision can have more wrinkles than a Fresno raisin...

...But the babies, the toddlers, had to be left behind in these stifling hutches...

...Yet this eight-acre tract in the heart of California's San Joaquin Valley is one of the most notorious rural slums in the nation...

...An independent, nonprofit organization, funded by Federal loans and grants, it expands the original housing program on a statewide basis...

...From Visalia came word that an anonymous benefactor in San Francisco had donated $10,000 for the purchase of land...

...Such incomes are hardly enough to carry them over the seasonal months of unemployment, much less pay for land and building materials...

...For many the dream had faded with the fading years, and they had moved on, succeeded by more tenacious Three Rocks residents...

...But the pump soon broke down...

...Actual control of the project and final decisions, Washburn pointed out, would always be theirs...

...It lay spread with sunlight as heavy as poured honey...

...How had it been possible...

...By mid-May, six weeks ahead of schedule, the three houses were ready for occupancy...

...In May, 1967, sixteen college students from all over America, from Hamburg, Germany, and Kobe, Japan, arrived to pitch their tents and spend the summer helping to build El Porvenir...

...This was—and is—Three Rocks' "residential" district...

...Seasons changed...

...All that remained, he assured Bard McAllister, was routine paper work...

...Cabrera went to the town of Goshen, Tulare county, to find out how the miracle was being achieved...

...They agreed to follow whatever road they had to go...

...For the shanty-dwellers of Three Rocks, the future, so long on its way, has begun to arrive...

...On that first visit I swung off the highway, following a pair of washboard tire-ruts that wound behind the stores through a rookery of sixty-odd wood and tar paper shacks...

...When I first visited it in the fall of 1966 these few buildings were a lonely island in an ocean of plowed furrows...

...Money for streets, water, sanitation—all the emoluments of urban development as required by the subdivision standards of Fresno county...

...The local press, running a story on El Porvenir's rosy prognosis, included statements by McAllister expressing satisfaction with the end of the Federal law that permitted the importation of Mexican braceros...

...The services of local engineers, architects, landscapers, technicians, and a prominent attorney were gladly volunteered...

...Recruited by the AFSC, the young men and women had paid their own way to gather here under the supervision of a builder from Canoga Park...

...Cabrera sat down on a bench in the narrow doorway and looked into space...

...And waited...

...Today they have company...

...With spring, however, they had to devote increasing time to the new crops...

...The shock inspired the Fresno Bee to sound a clarion call: "El Porvenir must not fail...

...It was never restored to service...

...He found that by investing their own labor and an average cash outlay of $6,000 each, three families had built three houses...

...Most of Goshen's erstwhile dreamers moved on...

...It is a classic test of whether government, philanthropy, and individual effort can solve social problems creatively...

...David Burciaga, project director for the American Friends Service Committee, had told me that he kept his office-trailer beside the home of Rufino Cabrera, president of El Porvenir, Incorporated...

...Well-spoken, self-educated, looking ten years younger than his forty-one years, Dave has devoted the last several years to a dream—a dream shared by Rufino Cabrera, Otilio Quintero, Jesus Guiterrez, Plutarcha Flores, and many of their neighbors and fellow laborers—the dream of a future that is only now beginning to come true...

...The campaign continued into the fall...

...After a hard day in the fields the Mananistas had often worked on their new houses until after dark...

...She explained in halting English that Rufino had been delayed by extra work...

...Howard Washburn resigned his AFSC post to become its executive director...

...On April 1 groundbreaking ceremonies were conducted under soggy skies that did little to dampen the joyous spirits of scores of El Porvenistas...

...Without spelling out its reasons, the company withdrew its gift of land...

...It was at that point that the AFSC—with one exception ¦—terminated its self-help housing program...

...The shacks are considered no worse than many labor camps and are conveniently located...

...Rufino Cabrera's train of dreams was no longer a string of empties...

...In the summer of 1966 a grant of $113,500 from the Office of Economic Opportunity to El Porvenir paid for streets, sanitation, and operational costs, with a promise of additional funding where necessary...

...When they had begun building the previous winter not one of the farm-hand builders of Casa de Manana had known even the rudiments of construction...

...Three families, three houses...

...Shortly thereafter the Giffens Farms Corporation which, together with most California growers, had fought to retain the authority to import Mexican labor, snatched the ground from under El Porvenir...

...That winter, as in previous winters, Three Rocks workers huddled in their shacks, listening to the rain on their roofs and the drip of water leaking into pans on floors beneath...

...To this day Three Rocks residents are daily forced to haul water from labor camps, irrigation ditches, or from Cantua Creek, five miles away...

...After a moment she said, "Ten years...

...A water pipe had once been laid from an adjacent well, with one spigot for every eight shacks...

...One skeptic pointed out that a total of ten families had originally begun the Goshen project—incorporated under the banner of Casa de Manana (House of Tomorrow) . They had applied for the necessary loans and waited...

...When I asked its location Burciaga pointed past Three Rocks' northern boundary...

...The streetless, shack-strewn vista was caught in a catalepsy of sunbaked desolation...

...A car snaked up the path and halted: David Burciaga...

...Fresno's Mayor Wallace Henderson sprang into the breach, proclaiming "Three Rocks-?/ Porvenir Week," and calling on all citizens to cooperate with the Fresno Area Council of Churches and all volunteer groups to make the project a success...

...It would be a calamity," the Fresno Bee editorialized, "if the proposed self-help project were allowed to founder on the issue of subdivision standards...

...Each family had pledged and fulfilled 1,500 man-hours of labor, according to records kept by a mutually selected supervisor...

...In the end there were only three families left to see the dream come true...

...Since 1960, and even before that, a parade of officials, sociologists, and other white-collar intellectuals had drifted by to study Three Rocks, to meet Rufino Cabrera and his fellow farm laborers...

...Such foreign labor, he felt, was a threat to the living standards of local farm workers...

...There was no motion, no sign of life...

...But when the family heads of El Porvenir reconvened at their schoolroom headquarters in Cantua Creek they voted to refuse the gift with thanks...

...Its prime owner and entrepreneur, Raymond Minnite, created the community by purchasing shacks from various labor camps and relocating them on his property...

...From one of the anonymous hovels a child whimpered...

...County street standards entailed a staggering initial expenditure of $80,000...

...Those with smaller and less dependable incomes—the extremely poor who are most badly in need of its benefits—find self-help housing out of reach...

...Its inhabitants, I surmised, were still out in the fields, working the crops which each year earn more than three and three-quarter billion dollars...

...His health failing, Rufino Cabrera relinquished the presidency of El Porvenir to the vice president, Otillo Quin-tero, in time for the new president to preside over the groundbreaking...

...All the curbs and gutters are in and the streets graded...

...Threatened by what then seemed the imminent dissolution of his slum community, the patrone of Three Rocks took a bold step...

...They have been hauling water now for more than nine years...

...With the cooperation of State Senator Howard Way and Assemblyman Gordon Duggy, the AFSC midwived the birth of Self-Help Enterprises, Inc...

...It has been a great experience working with these wonderful people who started El Porvenir with only a spark in their eyes and a dream in their hearts...

...Her face lit up when I told her how much I looked forward to meeting her husband...

...Under the guidance of Howard Washburn they had learned as they went along...

...There is an equity of hope, organization, and volunteer assistance which still stands and can be redirected...

...An expected grant from the Office of Economic Opportunity might just be able to swing the lesser cost...

...As new property owners, Three Rocks residents would now think twice before trading their bird in hand, however unappetizing, for Cabrera's roast turkey in the future...

...Will a new site be donated...

...I don't own the shacks," he is reported to have told a newsman from the Fresno Bee, "so I'm not responsible for their condition...

...The AFSC starts projects, then—having proved their value—moves out as indigenous groups or other agencies take them over...

...Months dragged by as the red tape untangled slowly, torturously...

...Washburn's talent for solving problems combined an understanding sympathy with a dynamism that got things done...

...No one came running, deed in hand...

...How long have you lived in this place...

...Two four-bedroom houses were now occupied by the Gomez family with their ten children, and the Jimenez family with eleven...

...They sought and found counsel and aid at the Farm Labor Projects office of the American Friends Service Committee in Visalia...

...Three Rocks lies some thirty-six miles west of Fresno and twenty miles south on Highway 33...

...At Bard McAllister's suggestion that a gift of land on which to build El Porvenir would help provide a permanent pool of skilled domestic farm labor, Russell Giffens agreed to donate twenty acres near Cantua Creek...

...McAllister pleaded with county supervisors to soften the requirements...

...They raised money and collected tools and equipment...

...Not all residents of Three Rocks shared this enthusiasm...

...He had even gone to Washington, D.C., accompanying Burciaga to a conference with poverty program chief Sargent Shriver and other high Government officials on the problems of rural housing...

...Sociologists have published studies of it...

...And, too, the price was right: $3 per month...

...A family with a good earning record could borrow an average $6,000 at four per cent, repayable over thirty-three years, to be used only for building materials and some specialized services...

...With the help of concerned Americans throughout California, college students from the United States, Europe, and Japan, and the devoted enterprise of the American Friends Service Committee, fifty-four families have banded together in taking the future into their own hands to build a new, modern community which they have named, appropriately enough, El Porvenir—"The Future...

...Not a board was in sight, not a tool...

...From mid-January to early April, when there is little work in the fields, they were able to devote full time to construction...

...Eleven more will have floors, six have frames, and five have roofs...

...Their proposal was rejected out of hand...

...Each family earned a "sweat equity" of $4,000—more than any had ever made in cash in any one year...

...Commercial banks consider the average farm laborer too great a credit risk for loans of any kind...

...A licensed builder, he outlined the rough road that lay between the shanty-dwellers and the homes of their dreams...

...The FHA more recently has made it even more difficult to obtain such loans by raising the interest rate to five per cent and insisting that applicants be virtually free of debt...

...Executive head Bard McAllister assigned field director Howard Washburn to work with Cabrera and his people...

...Cabrera and some thirty of his neighbors met in a schoolroom at Cantua Creek and, under Washburn's tutelage, elected officers and filed applications for Farmers Home Administration loans via the agency's regional office in Fresno...

...Once set up on foundations of wood blocks, rocks, and metal junk, he had no difficulty renting them to families of farm laborers employed on the vast Russell Giffens Corporation farms which dominate the landscape...

...David Burciaga spent the rest of the year vainly canvassing land owners and farm corporations for a gift of twenty acres...

...It was easy to identify the shack I sought: A large house-trailer was parked beside it...

...Otherwise the wanderers of Three Rocks and their charismatic Moses, Rufino Cabrera, could well drown in a sea of red ink...

...But it is the residents themselves, the Mexican-American farm workers living in the hovels of Three Rocks who are changing all this...

...With 1966 around the corner, their erstwhile benefactor had a change of heart and offered them the land once again...

...Ramona Cabrera, a strongly fashioned, graying woman, emerged as I got out of my car...

...Early in 1967 another OEO grant to El Porvenir for the completion of a water system breached the last barrier between dream and reality...

...Others were likely working on the corporation ranch with their parents...

...IRVIN ASHKENAZY is a free lance writer whose articles, short stories, and light verse have appeared in numerous publications...

...Cabrera and other Three Rocks workers approached their landlord with a bold plan: They would replace the hovels by securing a Federal loan to build a community of modern, mutually owned houses...

...But it needed more fuel: money...

...For three months they laid foundations, raised frames, and built walls...

...They were homes of which any man could be proud...

...It was hard to believe...

...Authorities were reluctant to initiate condemnation proceedings again as there was no apparent place for the shack-dwellers to go...

...The regional director of the FHA, Douglas Geren, beamed optimism when presented with El Porvenir's newly drawn articles of incorporation...