113 degrees at work, failing AC at home: Farmworkers can’t escape life-threatening heat

One morning this summer, several days into temperatures above 110 degrees in this farming community, Socorro Galvez, 53, began to feel weak as she picked grapes in the suffocating heat. Not right now.” For advocates, the large number of challenges facing workers and families in the eastern Coachella Valley can sometimes feel overwhelming — low wages, the lack of affordable housing, dirty water, inadequate electricity — all of it made worse by the growing threat of increasing heat. “But we just have to keep fighting.” Her group is working with the county on a proposed Enhanced Infrastructure Financing District for the eastern Coachella Valley, which would allow the county to tap property tax revenue to help pay for water, sewer, utilities and other needed infrastructure in the region. “It is not American for people to be living here as if they were living in Third World countries.” Local officials also are working to move residents from Oasis Mobile Home Park — but those plans could take a few years, county officials said. “The reality is that a lot of the people who live in these unpermitted parks are undocumented and they don’t qualify for affordable housing funded with federal money,” said Pedro Rodriguez, executive director of the Coachella Valley Housing Coalition, the largest low-income-housing developer in the region.