Dream houses.

To get some notion of the changes occurring in California's Salinas Valley these days, one need look no farther than Moro Cojo and Marmo's Pinto Lake.

For those who are unfamiliar with it, the Salinas Valley is, in the words of native son John Steinbeck, "a long narrow swale between ranges of mountains, and the Salinas River winds and twists up the center until it falls at last into Monterey Bay."

Located just a few miles from the Pacific, the valley is one of the most fertile places on earth, and at least half of the broccoli, artichokes, lettuce, and cauliflower Americans put into their salads come from this stretch of central California.

The valley's agricultural abundance, valued at more than $2 billion annually in Monterey County alone, is harvested by a sizable army of farmworkers. Not long ago, most of these men and women were, in Steinbeck's words, "harvest gypsies," migrants who followed ripening crops around the state. But times have changed. Fields in the valley now yield more than one crop a year. Growing plants require constant attention, and this in turn has meant that farmworkers, in most cases, are no longer gypsies. They have settled down--when they can.

Salinas is in the grip of a chronic housing shortage made worse by the fact that the area is fast becoming a bedroom community for people who work in Silicon Valley and San Francisco far to the north. Farmworkers seldom take home more than $12,000 a year--usually substantially less--a severe disadvantage in a housing market ranked as the sixth most expensive in the United States.

So, like poor people the world over, these farmworkers, when they have had no other place to turn, have sheltered themselves in any way they can. Ten years ago several families were found living in hillside caves and using water from a nearby irrigation ditch. The public outcry that followed was catalyst for the birth of an organization that, over the years, has dedicated itself to helping farmworkers find decent, affordable housing while at the same time teaching them how to empower themselves so they are no longer helpless victims of an uncaring society.

Tucked away on the upper floor of a building in downtown Salinas, the Center for Community Advocacy is small and operates on a minuscule budget, part of which is provided by the Catholic Campaign for Human Development.

CCA's credo is to help farmworkers learn how to fight--and win--their own battles. Many of these people come to the Salinas Valley from Mexico. They speak little or no English. They have no idea of their rights. They don't know how to protect themselves from rapacious landlords.

It is not surprising that they frequently wind up in places like Marmo's Pinto Lake.

At one time, Marmo's was probably quite respectable, a weekend retreat where families could relax on the shores of a small lake. But it has gone to seed, and today farmworkers pay exorbitant rents for a chance to live in near squalor.

Like so much poverty in America, Marmo's is safely out of sight, invisible to the streams of tourists and commuters who drive north and south on a nearby highway.

At first glance, Marmo's is deceptive. It is not one of the wretched labor camps, the infamous Hoovervilles, where farmers fleeing the Oklahoma dust bowl lived in shacks of cardboard and flattened tin cans during the Great Depression. Here people shelter themselves in trailers lined up along a dusty road. Some of the tiny plots have been brightened by flowers. Cars, a few of them of recent vintage, are parked nearby. Children play noisily at the lake's edge.

"What's so bad about this?" a visitor might ask. But look a little closer. The trailers are old and leaky and crowded. The smell of the camp's backed-up sewage system hangs in the air. The electrical system is unreliable, and turning a faucet does not always produce even a trickle of water.

Jesus Fernandez, a Marmo's resident for 10 years, has had to stretch a tarp over his aging trailer to keep out rain. The money he earns as a strawberry picker usually is enough to put food on the table for the seven people who share his trailer and to pay the monthly rent of $400. But Fernandez, a short, voluble man of 42, is more than a strawberry picker and family provider. He's a principal actor in CCA's long-range plans to help farmworkers in the Salinas Valley become more self-reliant.

He was elected leader of the tenant committee by his neighbors after CCA showed the small community how to organize. CCA tutored the committee--and similar committees throughout the valley--about their rights and tried to instill in them a we-don't-have-to-take-this-any-more attitude to solving their problems.

Speak up--make noise. Send letters. Negotiate. Withhold your rent unless things get better. Be persistent. These are the tools that Fernandez and his neighbors have started to use in their search for a more comfortable, healthier life. An early result: They have drawn their landlord into a discussion about the necessity of spending several hundred thousand dollars on a new septic system.

Much remains in the camps that needs changing, of course. The new tools are still being wielded by inexperienced hands. Some landlords remain resistant to pressure, but living conditions have improved markedly in many places over the past decade, thanks to CCA's intervention.

They will improve even more if Moro Cojo is any indication of what lies ahead.

California is a state where new housing subdivisions are so common they are practically invisible. Not so for Rancho Moro Cojo. When it was announced in the early '90s that low-income farmworker families would be allowed to build their own homes just east of Castroville, fireworks erupted. More affluent subdivisions in the area ran up the NIMBY (Not in My Back Yard) flag immediately. Environmental groups complained about the destruction of more farmland. It took CCA and other nonprofit groups devoted to the farmworker cause almost a decade to steer the project through this fractious labyrinth.

In mid-January the final obstacle was removed. The family teams who arrived with their tools were farmworkers, not builders. With help from professionals, they began to pour concrete and erect the wooden frames of what eventually will be 175 single-family houses. Backed by a $750,000 loan from the Mercy Sisters' affordable-housing organization, Moro Cojo is the largest "sweat equity," or owner-built, housing project in the Salinas Valley.

One reason CCA has been so effective in its mission is that its senior staff member has trod the same hard path that most farmworkers have traveled in their flight from Mexico's interior. He understands them. Empathy comes easily.

Sabino Lopez was the first person hired by CCA back in 1990. The second oldest son in a large family that had been doing stoop labor in the fields of Mexico for generations, Lopez was 17 when he accompanied his father to Salinas. It was a hard life for a boy who had not made it beyond the sixth grade and who wanted to become educated. But there was little time for school in a 90-hour work week. And little energy left for study.

A few years later Lopez discovered Cesar Chavez, the charismatic leader of the United Farm Workers, and became a volunteer organizing workers in the fields around Salinas. He married and had six children, learned English, and finally began to draw an adequate salary. But he never forgot the 13-hour days he had put in at his father's side, when the most he ever made was $1.15 an hour, with no overtime pay and no benefits. He never forgot the miserable surroundings in which he and his father had to live.

"I saw my father grow old in the fields. I wanted something different," he says.

Lopez has successfully remade his life and now is determined to help farmworkers--people he understands so well--remake theirs in the Salinas Valley.

PAUL CONKLIN is a photographer living in Port Townsend, Washington.