Earlier this summer a photo exhibit went up in Point Reyes Station, a coastal enclave an hour and change north of San Francisco. The exhibit celebrated the area’s agricultural roots even as a recent legal settlement seals the fate of the ranches that remain.
The portraits spoke of generations that tended the land here, faces reflecting both pride and nostalgia in a way of life that is vanishing, but there was something missing.
“We were invisible.” That’s Lourdes Romo, executive director of Papermill Creek Children’s Corner, a preschool located on the western edge of town. Romo was born in Jalisco, Mexico and came with her family to Point Reyes when she was 10. Her father took a job on one of the area’s ranches, which is where she grew up.
“Coming from Mexico, from a large family of tias and tios, being brought to a place where it is so isolated… I was really upset,” she recalled, describing her experience in school where she and her siblings were among the few who didn’t speak English.
“We spent so much time in this little closet-sized room. They didn’t know what to do with us. That was really hard, feeling like you’re invisible and like no one cared for you,” said Romo.
Point Reyes, or the “Point of Kings” in English, on the western edge of Marin County, marks a breathtaking stretch of the Northern California coast. The area, home to historic cattle ranches and dairies dating back to the mid-19th century, was made a national seashore in 1962. Over the subsequent decades, environmental groups have been in an uneasy tension with ranchers here.
That tension came to a head following a lawsuit filed in 2022, the latest in a series of efforts to push ranchers out of the national park. Last January, all but two of the ranching families settled, agreeing to a buyout in exchange for closing their operations.
The farmworkers and other ranch tenants, mostly immigrant Latinos like Romo’s father, had no say in the negotiations. All will lose their homes and many their livelihoods as a result.
“They feel sad, working in a place for many years, raising their kids here,” explained Alma Sanchez, an organizer with West Marin Community Services who leads the nonprofit’s Abriendo Caminos program, which works to address the needs of West Marin’s Latino residents while building bridges with the broader community. “They wonder how their lives will be after they leave.”
The nonprofit is administering a resettlement fund of $2.5 million intended to support the families displaced by the settlement, money that became available thanks in part to advocacy by local Latinos angered over having been shut out of the negotiations. The county is also working to secure emergency housing and job support and retraining for the displaced families.
Sanchez says the support is a sign of the emerging solidarity between the area’s immigrant Latino and majority white communities. “People here want to support local immigrants. Without immigrants, this community — and this country — would not be what it is.”
Loretta Murphy, operations manager with the nonprofit West Marin Fund, has lived in Point Reyes for decades and says that growing recognition has “been an ongoing process.”
Last year her organization published a study revealing the squalid housing conditions and tenuous livelihoods for many of West Marin’s farm workers and their families. The study prompted community meetings with local officials and alerted white residents — many for the first time — to the issues farmworkers face.
Sanchez was among the few Latinos who joined in the meetings. “I encouraged community members to participate, and talked about our housing needs, and people started to learn more about us.”
Then came ICE.
According to Murphy, West Marin residents took lessons from President Trump’s first term, when Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents carried out operations in the area.
“There were meetings at the school, they had everything organized, there were notaries from the bank, lawyers, people from the probation department, people from all the different entities,” she said of that time. “People felt like we needed to help any way we could.”
When rumors began to circulate earlier this summer that ICE was once again in the area, residents of Bolinas — about 15 miles south — “got in their trucks, their vans, their campers and blocked the two roads in and out and said, no, not going to happen here,” said Murphy, tears welling up as she described the moment.
“It gave everyone a sense that you’re not in it alone.”
Still, Sanchez says fear in the community is palpable. She points to another recent incident when uniformed officials (Sanchez believes they were most likely probation officers) arrived in town, prompting fears of a raid. “They visited some local businesses, and people there were very afraid. They ran out of the store.”
She says in this current climate, support from neighbors and the broader public is essential to fostering greater civic participation, especially for those who are undocumented. “It’s only possible if you are around people who support you. That is the only way.”
The question is whether that support comes too little and too late for Point Reyes’s immigrant farmworker community.
“Not a lot has changed if you are a family who is new to the country,” said Romo, speaking in one of several classrooms at Papermill Creek. Across the hall, a group of children played, most of them Spanish speaking.
“I see the same challenges in the families that I serve,” she continued. “And one of the reasons I am in this role now is I don’t want any child to feel the way I did.”
Romo, who is participating in an oral history project capturing the voices of Latinos in West Marin, says there are members of the community who continue to remain invisible, including immigrant women and mothers on some of the outlying ranches who don’t drive and who spend most days in isolation.
“They have stories. They are contributing, but they go unseen,” she said.
And while her own parents retired and returned to Mexico some 20 years ago, Romo remained, having grown roots in the place where, as a child, she felt forgotten. “I stayed. This community is me. This is my community.”
This story is part of “Aquí Estamos/Here We Stand,” a collaborative reporting project of American Community Media and ethnic/community news outlets statewide tracking how current White House policies are impacting Californians, especially in rural regions, and how residents are responding.
