Fresno County, left in the dust

A couple of years ago, were you to have swung by Westside Grocery in the town of Mendota on a Thursday or a Friday, you probably would have had to linger for a while in the sizzling Central Valley heat. The little store was so busy that the line of customers waiting to cash paychecks and make purchases would often spill out the door and halfway down 7th Street.

But now the paychecks have dried up, along with the farmland in these parts, thanks to a cruel confluence of drought, environmental regulation and years of political neglect.

On a recent end-of-week visit to the market, I found the place empty, save for two jobless men loitering inside and the owner, Joseph Riofrio, and his teenage son, who stood behind the front counter hoping for customers. Over the next hour, half a dozen or so folks trickled in. A couple bought snacks. Most, though, had stopped by to take care of their utility bills -- many of them delinquent. Westside Grocery doubles as a Pacific Gas & Electric payment center.

"People don't know where they're going to get the money," said Riofrio, shuffling through a stack of orange PG&E past-due notices. "Some are paying with pennies and dimes."

Riofrio's own business has fallen off 60% in the last six months.

Mendota (population 9,870) has gotten a lot of attention of late, what with its unemployment rate now topping 40%. The state secretary of Food and Agriculture showed up here last month. So did Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has called on President Obama to issue a federal disaster declaration for Fresno County.

But what Riofrio and others will tell you is that, despite the surge of interest in this region, the crisis did not materialize suddenly. Rather, the people of Mendota and their neighbors -- in Kerman, Firebaugh, San Joaquin and a handful of smaller burgs -- are the victims of a long and painful slide. This is California's Detroit.

The 47-year-old Riofrio, whose grandfather settled in Mendota in the early 1940s and started the grocery, has watched the area mature from a temporary outpost for migratory labor to a permanent home for tens of thousands of farmhands and others. Along with this transformation has come a rise in Latino political power. (Riofrio himself serves on the City Council.) And though unemployment has always been high and poverty severe, for a time a vibrant rural culture was being forged out of the fields.