[Source: Ruben Hernandez] -- Marie Lopez was born in a migrant camp on Goodyear Farms in the West Valley in 1957. Five farm worker camps for Mexican American laborers were created in 1917 by the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company in the area of the Valley now named Litchfield Park. Lopez's early memories were of hundreds of members of her extended family -- "Everybody took care of each other's kids." Dirt roads crisscrossed farmlands of cotton, lettuce, onions and alfalfa that stretched to the western horizon. In the evening, Mexican music drifted from the migrants' shacks, and cars and trucks unloaded hungry workers returning from laboring in the fields all day. Today, Goodyear Farms, along with the migrant way of life for many Latinos in the West Valley, have disappeared. Almost a century later, history reveals a generational exodus of the Latino harvesters into new towns and cities, and into different ways of earning a living. Urbanization has steadily nibbled away at West Valley farmland. Today, hundreds of thousands of acres of cropland have been converted into auto and shopping malls, restaurant rows and vast swatches of family homes. This year Arizona surpassed the rest of the nation in adding new residents. And the fastest growing region of the state is the West Valley. Western Maricopa County has overtaken the East Valley as the supergrowth region, mid-decade Census figures show, with much future growth predicted. Economic forecaster Elliot Pollack, whose firm Elliot Pollack & Co. reports economic trends, predicts the West Valley's population and housing explosion will grow strong for decades. About 44 percent of the Valley's population is expected to live in the West Valley by 2020, Pollack said during a presentation to WestMarc, the region's economic development organization. About 58 percent of the Valley's housing units built in the next decade in the western Maricopa County. For Lopez - now bearing the married name of Marie Lopez Rogers and the title of mayor of Avondale - the recollections are bittersweet. "You have mixed feelings to see the past go away," she says. [Note: To read the full article, click here.]
