Jul. 19--MENDOTA -- With a staggering unemployment rate, severe water shortages and a struggling economy, the last thing this impoverished farming town needed was more bad news.

City officials learned recently that Mendota soon will lose its only bank. When it closes next month, the self-proclaimed Cantaloupe Capital will become the only incorporated city in Fresno County without a bank.

In many small communities, this would be little more than an inconvenience: Customers would drive to the nearest town or bank online.

But in Mendota, where most of the 10,000 or so residents work in the fields and few have computers or cars, losing the only bank will make life even tougher: Many will turn to check-cashing services and have to pay higher fees. Meanwhile, some worry that crime rates could rise as more people carry around cash, and that businesses will be less likely to set up shop.

One city official estimated that 60% to 70% of people in Mendota use the Westamerica bank branch in the middle of town.

Jose Garcia, a farmworker who stopped by the bank on a recent afternoon, said he will have to start stashing his money in his wallet after the bank closes. But he is worried he and others will be targeted by the groups of unemployed men who are known to jump residents and steal their cash in this largely unpoliced town.

"They'll beat you up and leave you with nothing," Garcia said in Spanish.

This isn't the first time Mendota has lost its bank. In the late 1990s, the branch shut down for about two years. Joseph Riofrio, a City Council member and the manager of Westside Grocery, said customers at that time often would pay him with damp bills that smelled funny -- a sign, he said, that they had been buried underground "in a jar or something."

If the bank closes Aug. 14 as planned, Riofrio said he expects Mendotans will return to their old habits.

"Many people are going to flat-out shut their accounts down and go back to stuffing their money under their mattresses," he said. "If someone breaks into their home or a fire happens, there goes the money."

The closure also threatens to stall any potential economic development in Mendota. Businesses are often wary of settling in a town that lacks a bank because it's a hassle to bank out of town and because it signals a weak local economy, city officials acknowledged.

The Mendota bank once was a branch of Merced-based County Bank. But that bank failed earlier this year and was sold by the federal government to San Rafael-based Westamerica.

It's unclear why Westamerica is closing the Mendota branch, though it will keep another branch eight miles away in Firebaugh.