Colonias dwellers organize for better life

National Catholic Reporter, July 3, 1998 by Gary MacEoin

Encouraged by Las Cruces, N.M., Bishop Ricardo Ramirez, some of the poorest Spanish-speaking people in the state are pressuring their elected representatives for federal aid to match their own efforts to build decent homes with good water and paved streets.

Members of this new special-interest group live in colonias, unincorporated low-income settlements in the Rio Grande Valley just north of the Mexican border.

New Mexico has the highest proportion of inhabitants living below the official poverty level, 25.4 percent (1996), nearly twice the national average of 13.7 percent. Bishop Ramirez is chair of the U.S. Bishops' Campaign for Human Development.

The settlements are a major and growing phenomenon in Texas, which has 1,400 colonias, and New Mexico, which has 55. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development defines a colonia as a community within 150 miles of the Mexican border that lacks potable water, adequate sewage systems, accessible electricity, paved roads or decent, safe housing. Incidence of typhoid, tuberculosis, hepatitis A and other contagious diseases in the colonias are far above national averages. Two out of every three colonia residents have no health insurance.

Dona Ana County, N.M., an area twice the size of Rhode Island, has 37 colonias, with 40 percent of the county's population. The federal aid now being sought is for a pilot program in two of these colonias, El Milagro and Vado, a program to serve as a model that can be replicated.

"The goal of colonia dwellers," said Ruben Nunez, "is land and home ownership." Nunez, an immigrant from Mexico and a colonia resident who worked for years as a farm laborer, is a full-time community organizer employed by the Colonias Development Council.

"A family buys a plot of land from a developer with no money down and monthly payments of $100 to $150. It's a risky business," he said, "because they do not get title until they pay off the full cost of several thousand dollars, plus often exorbitant interest rates. With irregular work, they at times must pay more than half their month's paychecks to the developer to avoid foreclosure."

Building materials are often scavenged, wooden pallets from behind grocery stores, scraps of plywood and tarpaper found in dumpsters, old cinder blocks, coffee cans hammered fiat. Nothing is wasted. Fences are made from bed springs or stacks of used tires.

The median annual household income in El Milagro is $13,100, well below the county's poverty threshold of $17,487. More than a third of families live on less than $10,000, with agricultural stoop labor as the principal source of income.

"When we started speaking to them four or five years ago," Ray Padilla, a youth organizer,-told NCR, "we thought wages and work conditions would be their top concern. They told us, however, that what they needed most urgently was livable houses, clean water, roads to get their children to school. Most of these people are U.S. citizens, and thanks to our efforts to register them as voters, they are becoming a potential swing vote in the county and state."

Schools rank high in every needs survey. In a Texas A&M study, 80 percent of colonia residents rated education as a top priority. The same percentage believed that hard work and learning had more bearing on their lives than luck.

"The bishop," Antonio Lujano said, "has played a key role. He stimulated colonia residents to organize for citizenship education, environmental issues and youth and daycare projects." Lujano, head of the diocesan Office of Social Ministry, is a veteran community organizer.

The diocese has been long an advocate for the colonia residents. In 1995 it intervened to get the county authorities, who had moved to red-tag most of the houses and trailers in El Milagro as not up to code, to agree to a moratorium. That moratorium continues. Earlier, the diocese had started a self-help organization in Salem, a colonia that has now developed into a community with small stores, an athletic field and a stamp of permanence.

Bishop Ramirez chairs a Task Force of more than 30 community agencies and organizations that created the Colonias Development Council, an independent community organization of over 15 government and private agencies including banks and churches, as the official instrument to supervise colonia developments. A small planning grant from HUD when Henry Gonzalez was its head started the process by paying for a survey of El Milagro and Vado.

Winston Martin, regional representative of HUD, recently informed the Task Force (of which he is a member) of a new HUD initiative to improve conditions in the colonias in Texas, New Mexico and Arizona. It is the basis for the current application to HUD for a $3 million grant.

The objective, wrote Ramirez in a cover letter to HUD Secretary Andrew Cuomo is "to build viable communities where Third World conditions predominate ... by matching adequate human and material resources with grassroots and local strategies."