By Karen Gutierrez and Janice Morse
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Enrique Avila (left), a Mexican immigrant whose sister Cecilia Avila-Hernandez and her two children died in a mobile home fire Dec. 31, meets with family and friends after a funeral Mass. Manuel Velasquez, husband and father of the victims, sits in the center. (Patrick Reddy photo)

WARSAW, Ky. - Fire linked to a space heater killed Cecilia Avila-Hernandez and her two small children on New Year's Eve. But it was the Mexican family's isolation and poverty that set the stage for the blaze.

It's a scenario familiar to many immigrants in Greater Cincinnati. Officially, about 21,700 Hispanics live in the region. But if undocumented workers like Avila-Hernandez are included, the number approaches 50,000, social service agencies say.

These are the people who fix roofs, cut lawns, wash dishes, clean hotels and pack boxes throughout Greater Cincinnati. In addition, Kentucky's annual tobacco harvest could not happen without Mexican laborers such as Avila's husband, Manuel Velasquez.

For this group, serious housing problems are not uncommon. One of every five immigrant families lives in bad conditions or must pay more than half of family income for housing, according to a 2003 report by the national Center for Housing Policy. That compares to one of every seven American families.

Of the immigrant families with problems, 57 percent are Hispanic, the report states.

In Greater Cincinnati, these immigrants face discrimination that limits their housing options, advocates say. Some fall prey to slum landlords who assume they won't complain. Others lack English skills to communicate problems, so they live with leaking toilets, missing window panes, doors that won't lock and broken appliances.

"There's no heat here," says Marisela Miranda, 26, who lives in a west-side Cincinnati apartment building occupied entirely by Hispanic immigrants.

She and other tenants pay about $275 a month for one-bedroom apartments, but "you have to go buy your own heater at Wal-Mart or something," Miranda says in Spanish.

Miranda wasn't surprised to hear of the fatal blaze in Kentucky. She knows of other fires caused by heaters in immigrants' apartments, she says.

In Hamilton recently, a Hispanic immigrant family went without heat for a month before contacting the city's Human Relations Department, director Vaughn Lewis says.

The family had tried using a portable heater but saw smoke coming from an outlet, Lewis says. After prompting from the city, the landlord fixed the furnace once, but the problem has recurred. Lewis now has another call in to the owner.

"It saddens me when I go into a house with such bad conditions," Lewis says. "Typically it will be little children and mothers who are there while the fathers are off to work."

Father works, family dies

Such was the case at the Avila/Velasquez home on Dec. 31.

The couple lived with their children in a mobile home on the tobacco farm where Velasquez worked in Gallatin County, about 40 minutes south of Cincinnati.

Relatives say Velasquez, 24, paid no rent to his boss, farmer Kenneth Cozine, with the understanding that Velasquez would be responsible for any repairs to the old mobile home.

The couple, who spoke little English, had done a lot to fix it up. Still, there was no central heat.

On Dec. 31, Velasquez was stripping tobacco when an extension cord plugged into an electric heater set the couch on fire.

Avila, 22, apparently tried to put it out, then ran to get her napping children, Naomi, 3, and Alexander, 3 months. Overcome by smoke, she died at the foot of the bed where the children's bodies were found, says Kentucky State Police Officer Danny Stivers.

The couch had stopped burning by the time Velasquez returned for lunch. Known as a hard worker, he had stayed late on the job that afternoon, says Gallatin County Sheriff Nelson Brown. Upon discovering the bodies, Velasquez tried calling relatives of Cozine to ask them to dial 911.

But he couldn't make himself understood, Brown says, and it was too late anyway.

During a funeral service last week in Carroll County, Velasquez broke down in tears as the bodies of his wife and children were carried away in a single casket.

Minerva Nava, a sister-in-law of Velasquez, calls the fire a terrible accident for which no one is to blame.

But she also laments the housing difficulties faced by immigrants. Some put up with bad conditions because rent is low, Nava says. Others would rather live in better places, but face many obstacles. Landlords, for instance, usually request multiple references, which recent immigrants don't have, Nava says.

"Sometimes there aren't options," she says.

Housing troubles complex

That's also the case in urban areas such as Cincinnati, where discrimination is sometimes a factor.

In 2002 and 2003, a fair-housing agency in Cincinnati sent white and Hispanic testers to 43 apartment complexes in Butler, Clermont, Hamilton and Warren counties. The Hispanics were treated differently than the whites - shown fewer apartments, for instance - 51 percent of the time, says the agency, known as HOME, or Housing Opportunities Made Equal.

Without access to decent housing, Hispanics are often at the mercy of slumlords, says Pam Dixon of the housing group. Some immigrants are afraid to speak up about bad conditions, especially if they're here illegally.

But housing problems are also more complex than that.

Single men who come here for manual-labor jobs, for instance, are notorious for letting the housework go. Crowded together in small apartments, they frustrate landlords and don't do much to raise a building's standards.

Communication is another problem, and it's not just language-related, says Oscar Perez, a Mexican immigrant who lives in an apartment on Cincinnati's west side. Every culture has a style in which complaints are made, says Perez, 42. Even if immigrants speak some English, they don't necessarily know how to broach a subject with their landlords, he says.

Partly for this reason, some gravitate toward apartment buildings occupied entirely by other Hispanics, with Spanish-speaking managers.

Marisela Miranda, the Mexican woman who had to buy her own heater, lives in one such building.

"Everyone knows you and speaks your language, and nobody treats you badly because everyone is Latino," Miranda says.

The downside is that at $275 a month, apartments are not well-maintained, even when tenants complain.

Miranda says a portion of her ceiling fell in after an upstairs neighbor's bathroom started leaking. Dirt and cockroaches were coming through the hole. She alerted management, but nothing was done, so she started withholding rent payments. After three months, the ceiling was finally fixed.

A roof overhead

Less than a mile from the fire in Gallatin County, Enrique Avila recently paid $3,000 to purchase his own mobile home.

Avila, a brother of Cecilia Avila-Hernandez, lives with his wife and three children in the mobile home, whose family room is dominated by a kerosene heater. It's a cheerful space nonetheless, with couches, carpet and colorful posters on the wall.

But a tour of the rest of the dwelling reveals its shortcomings.

A heat register is missing from the kitchen floor, and duct tape covers the hole. Broken windows are sealed with plastic and plywood. In one of the two bedrooms, an electrical outlet dangles from the wall, wires exposed behind it.

Avila moved in about three months ago and hasn't had time to make repairs, he says.

Such dwellings may not look like much. But for many immigrant families - focused on earning money in America - they're enough.

Cristina Avila, a sister of Cecilia, puts it this way:

"Although we don't like how we live here, we deal with it, because we are here."

E-mail kgutierrez@enquirer.com and jmorse@enquirer.com