Duroville was not, technically, supposed to exist in the form it took. The Desert Mobile Home Park near Mecca, California, sat on the Torres Martinez Indian Reservation and grew into a community of around 4,000 people, most of them Purépecha farmworkers from Michoacán, Mexico — people who had come to harvest the dates and grapes and vegetables of the Coachella Valley and needed somewhere to live. What they built was precarious and overcrowded and, by 2009, the subject of a federal court order. It was also home.
The park took its name from Harvey Duro Sr., a Torres Martinez tribal council member who created the community on reservation land. As both a tribal member and a landlord, Duro occupied a complicated position: he was providing housing — often the only affordable housing available — to agricultural workers who might otherwise have had none, in a region where farmworker housing has historically been inadequate. The residents who came were largely Purépecha people from Michoacán, one of Mexico's most economically distressed states. They came to work; they stayed and formed a community. By the 2000s, Duroville was a functioning settlement with all the informality that implies — dense, improvisational, and home.
When federal and state authorities sought to close Duroville due to substandard conditions, the case moved to the federal courts. On May 1, 2009, Judge Stephen G. Larson ruled that relocating the community 'would create one of the largest forced migrations in the history of this state.' The ruling did not end the pressure on Duroville but did inject a civil rights dimension into what had been framed primarily as a housing code matter. A court-appointed receiver took over management. During the transition, hundreds of dogs in the community were neutered or spayed, and 145 were adopted out — a detail that reflects how completely the intervention reached into the texture of daily life.
Redevelopment plans were drawn up. New housing was proposed. The Torres Martinez tribe, the state, and federal agencies worked through negotiations about how to replace Duroville with something more suitable. Then the 2012 California budget crisis arrived and the redevelopment plans collapsed when funding evaporated. Duroville became one of those places that the policy system had identified as a problem, mobilized to address, and then been unable to fully resolve — a gap between the urgency of intervention and the staying power of institutional follow-through. The people who lived there had already understood, long before the courts took notice, that the Coachella Valley's agricultural economy depended on labor that the valley had never adequately planned to house.
Duroville was located near Mecca, California, in the eastern Coachella Valley at approximately 33.55°N, 116.11°W, on the Torres Martinez Indian Reservation. The area sits just north of the Salton Sea's northern shore, at roughly 150–200 feet below sea level. From the air, the eastern Coachella Valley at this location shows a grid of agricultural fields, date palm groves, and scattered settlement. Nearest airports: Jacqueline Cochran Regional Airport (TRM/KTRM, approximately 5 miles to the southwest), which serves the agricultural community of this area. The Salton Sea's blue expanse is visible to the south and southeast.