Calexico, Calif. — On a hot afternoon in April, Ismael Arvizu opens a community fridge located inside the Calexico Wellness Thrift Store on 2nd Street to fill it with water bottles, bananas and loaves of bread. Arvizu does this more than once a week. The food and water are available for free to anyone who needs them. Recently, that happens more and more often, he said.
Arvizu, together with Dylan Castillo, organize and activate community members and resources to help Calexico residents in need. Two years ago, they, and three other college students, founded Calexico Needs Change (CNC) as they observed hardships of transportation, lack of basic needs and housing, and even homelessness among students moving across the border lines located next to the Imperial Valley Campus and main campus of San Diego State University.
The community fridge is one of the projects CNC members actively sustain through donations and grants as part of a larger project. The Holistic Wellness Project, as they formally call it, has the on-going objective of improving the wellness of Calexico residents.
“We saw the need; we saw that there was a lack of food accessibility or water for people. We saw the concern. We know how the environment is like, especially as summer approaches, so we just decided to find funding, apply for the funding, use that for the project and we’ve been going since. It’s been a really successful turnout,” Castillo said.
Members of CNC advocate, educate and empower their community members living or working in Calexico, according to their Instagram site. The group is based on the San Diego State University Imperial Valley Campus and involves community residents on and off campus.
CNC operates as a collective. Whenever they identify a need, they contact residents, other non-profits and city officials to organize, Arvizu and Castillo said. When CNC had to move the community fridge indoors due to heat preventing the food from cooling, they reached out to Blanca Morales, owner of the thrift store, to ask her if it was possible to house the fridge there. “They took us with open arms,” Castillo said.
CNC continually organizes food distributions at local parks in Calexico and areas surrounding the Imperial Valley Campus. They also have two small wooden boxes that operate as a community library. On December 2021, with help from the Asian Pacific Youth Leadership Club from Calexico High School, CNC members painted and stocked the libraries which are located in front of the offices of the Calexico Housing Authority.
Members of CNC acknowledged that the pandemic gave them the impulse they currently have to organize.
“Covid impacted Calexico differently. We had to advocate for everything… From the beginning of the pandemic there was a lot of injustice and that activated us differently,” Daniela Flores, co-organizer for the Imperial Valley Equity and Justice Coalition, said.
Among of the projects the coalition was involved early in the pandemic was an encampment for homeless farmworkers.
"(Due to waiting lines,) Many people were taking most of their time just crossing and coming back," Arvizu said. "So, what do you do? You're going to end up sleeping in the streets and then wait until 4 a.m., wake up and go to work, and then do that for five days straight."
CNC and Hugo Castro, from the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, co-organized the farmworker encampment project and helped provide shelter for Mexicali residents looking to avoid crossing the border to get to work.
City councilmembers Gloria Romo and Raúl Ureña, supported the encampment, according to Arvizu and Castillo. They agreed on farmworkers' necessity to have a place to stay apart from their homes across the border. In addition, the Calexico Police Department offered to help organize the encampment around its establishment on Jan. 25.
"Hugo Castro did the initiation of putting campsites, buying tents and setting them up in late January of 2021," Arvizu said. "Then they took them down early April."
Calexico police took the encampment down due to safety concerns for the residents on April 7, according to a report by KPBS.
"We and other members of the community had basically made a makeshift little community," Castillo said. "We set up tents for anyone you know who was working or in place of need."
The city council at the time voted to impose new plans for the land that the community encampment was on. Selling the properties to the government allowed authorities to enter the space and clear it of the community members staying there and receiving resources. The land was repurposed as an extension of the border but essentially served as a method to remove unhoused people from the area.
"Unfortunately, the encampment got demolished," Castillo said. "They had a whole crew here, machines coming through like leveling out the whole area, a lot of loss of the resources and donations that community members gave."
Members of CNC were not deterred. According to Castillo, the connection and community built between groups have allowed those within to find different methods of getting their message across. In addition, building community has led to the expansion of CNC's message, which has allowed more people in the area to know about the resources they provide and to be able to access them.
“(We) will continue to be a vessel and a voice, an outlet for our community to hear what they’re doing.”
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Fátima López and Ariadna Ramirez contributed reporting. Cover photo by Fátima López.
Samantha Festin is a journalism student at San Diego State University.
Alani Ayala recently graduated as a journalism major from San Diego State University.
This story was produced with the support of the Bilingual Program at the School of Journalism and Media Studies at San Diego State University in partnership with Project Sage.
Credits:
Photos by Samanta Festin.