Octlan Special Edition – Part One

Los Bomberos

Photography: Greg A. Cooper
Story: M.E. Sprengelmeyer
Reprint by Permission Ventura County Star
April 6, 1997

OCOTLAN, Mexico – When the battered CB radio squawked about a furniture truck on fire, the region’s only fire brigade, a bunch of baby-faced bomberos in their teens and 20s, took off in an old red pumper truck. Just a few kilometers down the road, it backfired and stalled.

Following in his dad’s sedan, firefighter Ismael Iniguez Vivas picked up one of the other men and plodded toward the fire behind a tractor. When they finally reached the burning truck, they frantically started shoveling dirt onto the gas tanks that were spitting flames

Finally, Capt. Esteban Godinez Brera drove up in the Ocotlan Fire Department’s new toy – a yellow firetruck donated by the faraway city of Oxnard, Calif.

The fire was out in a few minutes. As an emergency, it was no big deal, but as a symbolic moment, it was. Just hours before, visiting Oxnard firefighters had trained their Ocotlan counterparts on the overhauled truck, marking yet another link in a chain of strong connections between the sister cities.

A formal procession had been scheduled for the next day down La Calle Oxnard, but the bomberos were so elated that Godinez took them on an unscheduled parade after the fire.

A policeman with a rifle strapped over his shoulder signaled for them to stop, just so he could get a closer look at the truck. Then, flashing their signal lights, they maneuvered it through the narrow streets on the poor side of town, honking and waving at all the kids who stopped games of street soccer to stare.

“We’re just very proud right now,” said Godinez, who started with the department when he was 15 and the ragtag brigade had barely any equipment at all.

That’s changed, thanks to a group of Oxnard residents who were casting around for a sister city in the early ’60s.

When their first pick didn’t work out, several committee members realized that their families all came from the area around Ocotlan, 60 miles south of Guadalajara.

Oxnard and Ocotlan share some basics. Both are agricultural centers that have opened themselves to heavy industry and the sprawl of new houses. Both have around 150,000 people.

But they’re bound most strongly by the many families that have split their lives between the two places, changing both in the process.

Nobody knows just how many Ocotlan natives went to live in Oxnard or how many have since returned to Ocotlan. But if you stroll the streets here for a couple of hours, you’re sure to bump into a few from either group.

A man walking by the black, foul-smelling Rio Zula says he used to work in the fields of Oxnard. His brothers and sisters are still up there.

Leading kids on a field trip, a local school principal says he has a sister who teaches in Port Hueneme.

A woman shouts out to a group standing next to the Oxnard firetruck near the city’s landmark church: “Say hi to Gonzales Road!” It turns out she used to live in Thousand Oaks and has friends in Oxnard.

There’s even an Anglo fellow from Port Hueneme. He speaks barely a word of Spanish, but he let his buddy talk him into moving in with his family down here to start an early retirement. He instructs a reporter: “Don’t tell anybody about this place.”

Like Oxnard, Ocotlan is a town with rough edges. It has its upper class, but there are plenty of poor people. The lack of government money for basic services is hard to ignore.

People sweep the streets and sidewalks in front of their houses religiously. But there’s no money to repair, or even pave, many of them.

There’s no money for putting up more than a few streetlights. There’s a makeshift library, but no money for books.

The city’s fire department can only afford to pay a handful of men the equivalent of about $1,800 per year for full-time jobs. The rest – about two dozen – are volunteers. There’s no money for modern lifesaving equipment – or, for that matter, practically any other equipment.

That’s where Ocotlan’s sister city comes in.

In 1970, Oxnard firefighters and community groups held barbecues and other events to buy a 1939 Seagrave firetruck for Ocotlan. It was practically a museum piece in the United States but it was the first truck Ocotlan ever had. Before that, fighting fires was a matter of bucket brigades and garden hoses.

Ocotlan received another gift in 1979, when Oxnard firefighters raised a few thousand dollars for a 1950 Mack firetruck that the city was retiring. And in 1996, Oxnard officials decided to donate its 22-year-old yellow Van Pelt fire engine.

All the firetrucks were below U.S. standards because of their age and condition, but they were just about state- of- the-art in a place like Ocotlan.

Last November, a group of Oxnard firefighters organized by former Chief Manny Perez made a trip to Ocotlan. Their mission was to train the Ocotlan bomberos on their new truck and on the Jaws of Life extricating tool, but they came away with some lessons of their own.

The firefighters left Oxnard just a few days after voters defeated a utility tax that would have gone for more police officers, more firefighters and new rescue equipment. On the way to Mexico, the men grumbled about the discouraging vote – but they didn’t say much more about it after they saw how little the Ocotlan firefighters have.

The Ocotlan fire station sits in a fenced-off compound next to a school. Outside, a tin roof spans a carport where the department stores the three Oxnard firetrucks, plus a half-dozen old vans and other clunkers they scavenge for spare parts.

The place is crawling with children, day and night. Ocotlan has no real recreation center and the jefe de bomberos, Osvaldo Romero, thinks the kids will stay out of trouble if he lets them do gopher work.

The firefighters are mostly students, many taking classes during the day and working their shifts through the night and on weekends. They wear mismatched, tattered fire coats, once yellow and now the color of soot, with markings from the California fire departments that discarded them.

They handle several calls per day about hives of abejas africanas, the “killer bees” that have stung a few residents into comas.

But the chaotic highway through town is the department’s biggest problem. Mexican drivers don’t have any qualms about passing on either side, at times turning the road’s two lanes into a dangerous four.

In the four days that the Oxnard firefighters were visiting, there were two fatal collisions.

That’s why they spent a full day training the bomberos on the Jaws of Life, the hydraulic prying tool that helps free people trapped in mangled cars.

At a crowded junkyard, Oxnard Firefighter Dan Gildea showed the Ocotlan crew how to “clip and flip” a car’s roof. His Spanish-speaking partner, Martin Aguilar, answered questions from the bomberos about every little detail.

Back at the fire station, Oxnard Fire Capt. Pete Chavez, Engineer Dave Reyes and Firefighter Bill Gallaher demonstrated features of Ocotlan’s new truck. In a way, it worked too well; the water pressure burst holes in some of Ocotlan’s worn hoses, which were earlier castoffs from Oxnard.

It was an eye-opener for the Oxnard firefighters.

“They were hungry with desire but their equipment is what was holding them back. I just realized what we’ve got,” Oxnard’s Chavez said. “I think we get spoiled. We should look at what we’ve got instead of what we don’t have.”

For Aguilar and Reyes, the trip was revealing on a more personal level. Both have family still living in Mexico, but it took Ocotlan to remind them how much they need to re-establish ties.

Reyes’ grandmother brought her sons to Oxnard before World War II. Before she died, she would talk about the old days in Mexico, and of one day going back to visit. “But it was one of those things where you just get on with life,” he said.

Reyes and his family lost contact with their relatives in Mexico, but after the trip to Ocotlan he thinks he has found a new “family” and a stand-in hometown.

“It’s not a modern city like you’d expect to see in the United States,” he said, “but what you’ll find there is a lot of culture and friendly people that want nothing more than to have a decent life and the same things we have: families, jobs, a comfortable living. I think they have it all.”

[Part Two]