Oscar Ceja's dream home, under construction in Oxnard's La Colonia neighborhood, rises from a dirt patch, cloaked in black paper and wire mesh, a gazebo topping a front door that splits a two-car garage.

Ceja, a 36-year-old construction worker by day and mariachi singer by night, hopes to finish the 3,700-square-foot house on Grant Avenue by Thanksgiving, replacing the modest shack where he has lived with his parents and sister for years.

"If I don't do it now, when am I going to do it?" Ceja said, noting similar efforts around him. "People are tired of seeing things thrashed up."

It's a common refrain around one of Oxnard's oldest neighborhoods, which suffers under a stigma associated with gangs, drugs and violence. Interviews with Ceja, city officials, police, merchants and neighborhood activists, however, reveal a different story — that of a full-blown renaissance.

Crime is down in La Colonia. Property owners are renovating and building homes. Private developers are hoping to build affordable housing. Next summer, Our Lady of Guadalupe Church is scheduled to break ground on a new sanctuary, roughly at the same time the city hopes to start razing and rebuilding one of its oldest public housing projects.

"I think when people think of Colonia, they shouldn't think of it as the wrong side of the tracks," said Vicky Gonzalez, a member of the La Colonia Neighborhood Council. "They should think of it as a city within a city."

Once known as Colonia Gardens, the land — just east of the city's downtown business district — belonged to white farmers who sold it to Latino families in the early 20th century.

Latinos, who made up nearly half the city's farm labor force, quickly settled there. The area soon boasted its own newspaper, La Voz del La Colonia, which sponsored fiestas and parades. By 1948, some 8,000 people called it home, according to historian Jeff Maulhardt's tome, "Beans, Beets & Babies."

A neighborhood's decay

Today, the neighborhood still wears its Latino roots with pride. Cooper Road, the area's main drag, bustles with activity as residents patronize Mexican businesses and restaurants and children walk to nearby schools.

"Before it was really terrible," said Consuelo Camberos, co-owner of La Paloma Loncheria, a restaurant she and her husband, Fulgencio, have operated for 29 years. "It's changed a lot."

Several factors contributed to the transition from the vibrant 1930s and 1940s to the crime-infested '70s and '80s, said former Mayor Manuel Lopez, 80, who grew up there. In the 1950s, some property owners rented homes, feeding a mass influx of residents who took little pride in the neighborhood. Also, police didn't patrol often, Lopez said.

Councilman Andres Herrera, 61, who grew up there in the 1940s and '50s, recalls a community of dirt roads, cut off from the city proper by the railroad tracks along Oxnard Boulevard.

"We were kind of insulated," Herrera said.

Things changed somewhat when the city built the Third Street bridge over the railroad tracks in the early 1970s, Herrera said, noting it brought more social and medical services.

By the 1980s, mid-day robberies were commonplace and even more frequent at night, said Jose Andrade, vice president of the Colonia Village Tenants Association, who's lived there for 24 years.

Gang members sold drugs at the handball courts in Colonia Park, said Oxnard Police Senior Officer Luis McArthur, beat coordinator for La Colonia.

Few people trusted police. Even fewer reported crimes. Police officers always traveled two to a car, said Oxnard Police Cmdr. Cliff Troy, who recalled residents throwing rocks and bottles at cops.

"I can't remember the last time that kind of a call happened," Troy said. "We didn't have the relationship and trust we have now."

That relationship bloomed in 1993 when police opened a storefront on Grant Avenue. Two weeks before the opening, an arson fire damaged the facility, recalled David Keith, the department's public information officer. Still, police Chief Harold Hurtt insisted on opening, damage and all, Keith said.

"I remember him saying, These punks are not going to win,'" Keith said.

Emboldened by the storefront, residents worked with police and state regulators to close down bars that were magnets for drugs and prostitution, Gonzalez said.

The city tore down the handball courts in the mid-1990s, McArthur said. Crime in the neighborhood dropped 60 percent from 1992 to 2002, the most reliable statistic available after the storefront opened, Keith said.

Stigma of the Chiques gang

Residents know that La Colonia still wears a stigma as crime ridden. They attribute that to the Colonia Chiques street gang, whose moniker comes from the neighborhood.

But gang crime has dwindled and the Chiques' mishaps — which have significantly dropped — more often than not took place outside Colonia, Keith and others say. They credit the court-ordered safety zone that restricts gang activities.

"If they didn't have a gang injunction, I wouldn't have bought this (property)," said Ruben Chavez, who recently built a 3,400-square-foot craftsman style home on Bonita Street. "I think it's totally one of the safest areas."

Meanwhile, over the past 20 years, the city's Housing Authority secured federal grants to establish youth sports programs, computer classes and a job training center. The city landscaped street corners as incentives to tenants, who followed suit with improvements, Housing Director Sal Gonzalez said.

"People wanted to know that we cared," Gonzalez said. "Here we do not believe we're just the landlord."

With these programs fermenting, private developers pounced on empty lots in La Colonia when the real estate market surged in recent years, said Matt Winegar, Oxnard's development services director.

Five years ago, affordable housing developer Henry Casillas, who grew up in La Colonia, counted nearly 50 empty lots. Today, there's about a dozen, said Casillas, who's awaiting approval for 24 affordable townhomes at the corner of First Street and Hayes Avenue.

Investing in the area

Staying in Colonia makes a lot of sense given today's housing market in coastal California, Casillas said. Many Colonia residents found it easier to draw on years of equity and finance additions or new homes, he said.

"Why not have a nice house where you can have an easy payment?" said Ceja, whose parents bought the property for $40,000 in 1980 and used a $200,000 loan to finance their new house.

Chavez calls La Colonia a beach community without the ocean. Neighbors linger on front lawns to chat. Strangers say hello. Everything you need is within walking distance.

"There are corner markets," Chavez said. "If you want to eat tacos, if you want to get something, you walk somewhere."

Next year, the city hopes to break ground on a $59 million project that includes renovating the 260 public housing units at The Courts. Built in 1952, the single-story, barrack-like homes have deteriorated. Termites, mold and mildew are commonplace.

"It's too old," Andrade, 50, a disabled farmworker and Courts resident, said recently while pointing to where termites have eaten at his roof.

Andrade and his family are one of more than 40 families the city will pay for their temporary displacement during construction. He welcomes the project, which also will include new affordable and market rate homes.

The renovation follows a recent $1 million upgrade to 170 other public housing units and remodeling of Cesar Chavez Elementary School, both nearby.

Around the corner, the Our Lady of Guadalupe Church's new sanctuary next summer will accommodate increasing numbers of parishioners, who celebrate Mass each week.

The church has raised $4.3 million toward the $5 million construction tab, said Siobhain O'Reilly-Hill, chair of the church's construction committee.

Several empty parcels around La Colonia brandish signs indicating plans for commercial and residential development. Habitat for Humanity has filed an application to build a duplex on Cooper Road — on a parcel where federal authorities once seized a house in a drug raid.

The long-term effects of these changes play out inside the La Colonia Boxing Center on First Street. Inside this Oxnard institution — under a cinder-block foundation and red corrugated metal roof — dozens of kids, mostly from La Colonia, gather every evening, their hands taped, shadow boxing and working out on heavy bags.

But unlike grandparents, who worked in fields, and parents, who rose to blue or lower white-collar jobs, they want a college education, said O'Reilly-Hill, principal of Our Lady of Guadalupe Elementary School.

For years, Robert Garcia, a former junior lightweight champion who operates the center, watched many kids at the gym succumb to drugs and gangs. He rarely sees those problems anymore.

Justin Cisneros, 14, has been training at the gym for six years. He looks up to the boxers there and dreams of going pro and "living a good lifestyle."

"I also want to go to school," Cisneros said. "I still have my chances to be whatever I want. I want to be a doctor."

— Staff writer Adam Foxman contributed to this report.