By Dr. Duncan Earle, Director, Center for Inter-American and Border Studies, University of Texas at El Paso
While issues of legal and illegal traffic (in money, people, drugs, etc.) dominate much of the national news about the US-Mexico border, many local issues are often overlooked or misunderstood. During the NAFTA debates, attention was drawn to the issue of colonias, the burgeoning shanty settlements proliferating along the US side of the border, especially in the state of Texas, where until recently there was little regulation of land beyond the city limits. However, the way in which colonias were and continue to be defined and characterized, both officially and in the popular media, tends to emphasize their physical characteristics as inferior housing without adequate services, and not as places where low-income people have come to live as an alternative to slum rental, permanent migration, or homelessness. For reasons I explore here, colonias are systematically mis-identified as "things" ---a problem of inadequate material conditions--- an approach that both mystifies them as social formations and arrests the kind of thinking that could lead to more solid policy and better community development efforts.
Colonias are no small problem for border counties. In Texas alone there are at least a third and perhaps as many as a half-million people living in some 1500 settlements located in marginal locations adjacent to urban areas, but far enough away from them to not enjoy most services. Colonia housing production derives from selling an unimproved lot on 15 to 30 year contracts. Failure to make payments or developer bankruptcy results in eviction, usually with a loss of all equity. Residents improve these lots as and when they are able, at their own risk, and most suffer from lack of public water, drainage, sewerage, decent roads, and the other amenities people come to expect in middle class housing developments. However, given the low incomes of these residents, such amenities are often beyond their immediate reach, when combined with the monthly land payment. This is the fundamental contradiction involved in efforts to force private, profit-driven developers to provide basic to-code infrastructure. Without the intervention of government and/or non-profit sectors, the cost of such improved developments are beyond the reach of the poor. Since these non-profit and government sectors tend to be reactive, not proactive, they continue to legislate constraints on developers and to deliver social services and housing rehabilitation projects to existing colonias, but they do not address the continuing demand for low-income housing. Colonias currently are growing at a rate of about 10% per year.
Equally serious is the lack of understanding of who lives in colonias, and how they might become proactive participants in their own community development process. Because official definitions of colonias, "..substandard, unincorporated subdivisions lacking basic services...", do not make reference to people, this materialist fixation tends also to promote erroneous stereotypes about colonia residents, ones that often feed into other border misconceptions. These include the idea that colonias are invasions from Mexico, even though most colonia residents are either legal residents of the U.S. or citizens, and that colonias are "pockets of hopeless poverty" when residents are statistically not much poorer than low-income Mexican-Americans generally, and have comparatively lower levels of "chronic underclass" social pathologies (like single mother households). Other media perceptions characterize them as analogous to natural disasters, a form of disease, and as a form of environmental pollution. Such concepts rush into the vacuum that is created by the materialist fetish of the officialized definition. The view from within has no voice.
Social science research has not been carried out to provide that voice. To date there is not one oral history of a colonia resident, one case study of a colonia community, or one regional overview of colonias (beyond demographic and infrastructure issues) in print. Moreover, the people who are engaged in colonias social outreach programs and projects rarely keep notes or produce publications describing what they do and what they have learned from their experiences. As a result there is no institutional memory, no legacy of understanding to pass on to new workers and projects in an area of work well known for high personnel turn-over.
The implication is that such documentation is a luxury, or worse, an indulgence, money and time better spend on the immediate tasks at hand. However, we would never take such an attitude against research in launching, say, a new airplane design. We test, evaluate, make a prototype, see how that flies, modify if necessary, all before beginning serious production. By contrast, in this unstudied social arena service agencies of every stripe feel perfectly justified in using the poor as their testing ground, often in a full-scale program never pre-tested, with no ongoing outside evaluation and no post-program assessment (beyond those issues required by the project funder). In short, no organizational or institutional memory that would allow us to better understand who colonia residents are and what forms of intervention might work well or poorly. Each new effort, therefore must reinvent the wheel.
A great many efforts at solving colonia problems designed and carried out by service organizations fail or are not sustainable, reach only a small segment of the targeted population, or are unable to reach those most needy. Many of those who work for failed efforts, not surprisingly, blame their clients. In a recent survey I supervised in one Texas border county, colonia residents were cited as the number one cause of colonias program failure. Not one person interviewed said, "We should have learned more about them before we tried this", although a number said, "We do not understand why they behave the way they do." The general tone was that we, the professionals, know what to do but the people of the colonias won't cooperate.
Blaming the failures of ill-informed, poorly designed and/or inappropriate programs on the intended beneficiaries is especially ironic when we realize colonia residents are making a heroic effort to emerge from poverty by self-help means, building their own homes from recycled materials, economizing on the few resources available, creating communities in the midst of every obstacle, and seeking to improve their lives through gainful employment when and where ever it can be found. As long as community development agencies see colonias as places they are free to experiment with--all the while with no obligation to the residents, to institutional memory or to social science--these projects appear doomed to failure. The failure of, and in many cases resistance to, documentation not only serves to prevent learning about colonias but promotes ignorance about their social and cultural realities, and in turn prevents the formation of reasonable policies and informed approaches to community development.
Colonias are places where people with unique qualities and needs live. Only by knowing who they are and how they live their lives can we begin to help without hurting. Shifting from material to social definitions, and making a concerted effort to understand those social factors through research are necessary first steps to actively resolving the problem of colonias.
Dr. Earle is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas at El Paso whose research includes the Maya of Guatemala and colonias along the U.S.-Mexico border.