Poverty Persists, but Life Has Improved for Texas Colonias

By Lee Hockstader
Washington Post Staff Writer

CAMERON PARK, Tex. -- When she tosses in bed at night, Martha Guereca dreams of moving her late husband's body from the treeless pauper's cemetery
where he lies to a proper grave, someplace she can bring flowers.

Florentino Olivares, who has worked as a migrant laborer most of his life, dreams that the computer repair course he just finished will translate into a job that will
spare him another season in the blazing hot fields.

The dreams in Cameron Park are like that -- as modest and immediate and not quite reachable as the ramshackle roofs over people's heads. This is, according to
the Census Bureau, the poorest place in the United States.

Home to about 6,000 of the poorest Mexican immigrants, it is one of the biggest and oldest of about 1,800 colonias, shabby, unplanned, scantily regulated
conglomerations of shacks, trailers and tumbledown houses that dot the U.S.-Mexico border, most of them in Texas. But in the last half-decade or so, a new feature
has gained a tentative toehold in Cameron Park and some other colonias amid the familiar terrain of decrepit housing, rusted-out cars, inadequate sewers and terrible
roads.

The feature is hope.

Buoyed by waves of state and federal cash and a crazy quilt of public and private aid programs, places like Cameron Park are starting, slowly, to look less like
Dante's Inferno and more like neighborhoods that are simply very poor.

The streets, now paved, no longer disintegrate into impassable mud pits after it rains. Nearly all houses have been connected to running water and electricity, and
many have stoves and refrigerators, indoor plumbing and toilets. In a part of the world where temperatures reach 100 degrees and stay there for weeks, some
people have managed to buy air conditioners to cool their bedrooms.

Many families in Cameron Park, perhaps half, still scratch out a living as migrant laborers, but the sons and daughters of others have steady jobs in the armed forces,
schools, stores or government offices.

"It's not an idyllic little place," said Antonio Zavaleta, an anthropologist and vice president at the University of Texas at Brownsville who, as a boy, helped his father
carve out streets of what became Cameron Park. "But it's not the Cameron Park it was 15 years ago."

Last November, Texas voters endorsed Proposition 2, which will channel $175 million toward improving streets and drains and toward building sidewalks in
colonias. There is talk of installing street lights. And in Cameron Park, whose size and notoriety have resulted in attention and largesse, a bank of computers has been
installed at the community center.

Many of the houses remain leaky and roach-ridden, but gradually others are being repaired, or razed and replaced. Scores have been improved or constructed with
grants and low-interest loans from the nonprofit Community Development Corp. of Brownsville, funded by the federal and state governments. Still others are the
initiatives of their owners.

Pride in Poverty

On a sweltering Sunday afternoon this month, Incarnacion Hernandez, 27, sweated in a sleeveless muscle shirt as he hammered nails into the frame of what will be
his new house. Straight and spare, the pine frame stands at the front of the lot, obscuring the dilapidated plywood shack to the rear where Hernandez and his wife,
Veronica, have lived for 10 years.

Over salsa music blaring from a radio, Veronica Hernandez, 30, shouted happily in Spanish: "In the new house, the kitchen alone will be twice the size of this old
house!"

"I feel free here," said Incarnacion Hernandez, soft-spoken and doe-eyed, a carpenter with a ninth-grade education and a monthly income of $1,100. He dismissed
the idea of quitting Cameron Park and renting a place in Brownsville, a few miles away. Better, he said, to own his lot and home, no matter how modest. "We don't
want to owe anything to anybody."

Martha Guereca, who wants a proper burial for her husband, lives in a plywood shack swarming with cockroaches. One day, her son Jose, who is 8, took a book
from the house into school, only to find it was teeming with roaches when he opened it in class. The other kids laughed at him, Guereca said.

Guereca is 44, tiny and shy. She supports three children and two grandchildren on a monthly income of $850 in Social Security payments, plus $449 in food stamps.
"The good thing is that we live here, that we have someplace to live," she said. "The bad thing is that it's infested with roaches."

Not only roaches. In the crawl space beneath her house, rats, mice and opossums scurry in the dark. One of her two toilets is broken. Spider webs fuzz a statue of
Christ outside her bedroom.

Yet, for Guereca, some relief seems on the way. The Community Development Corp. says it will start building a modest, low-interest house for her family at the end
of the month.

It would be a wild distortion to portray Cameron Park as on the cusp of the American Dream. Despite signs of progress, colonias remain wretched places.

According to the Census Bureau, nine of the 10 poorest U.S. communities of 1,000 households or more are colonias and other immigrant settlements near the
Mexican border. Cameron Park has the lowest per capita income, $4,103 a year. Barely one person in five has a high school diploma.

In recent years, the North American Free Trade Agreement has triggered a population boom and job opportunities along the border. But the population has
outpaced the supply of affordable housing. And in the view of critics, many of the new jobs pay wages so low that they reinforce poverty. There are fears that
NAFTA will swell colonias with thousands more illegal immigrants.

"It's creating a huge need for low-income housing," said Lee Maril, sociology department chairman at the University of Texas-Pan American, who has written about
poverty and the border. "Where are these people going to live, especially the ones from Mexico?"

Handling Growth

According to local officials and scholars, colonias were condemned to poverty at birth. Starting in the 1950s, developers snapped up low-lying, agriculturally
worthless land along the border. They divided it into plots and sold it to the growing population of migrant workers allowed into the United States during and after
World War II.

Prices were low and conditions mean. Lots were sold without access to water, sewers or electricity. Immigrant purchasers could buy land cheaply, but they did not
receive title until it had been paid off. If they missed a payment, the developer could repossess the land, evict the buyer and sell it anew.

For years the colonias grew, unfettered by state laws or local ordinances. They were filthy, frequently flooded and forgotten. Some were on the edge of cities, but
the cities wanted no part of them, seeing them as a potential financial drain. Rather than annex Cameron Park, for instance, the city of Brownsville simply grew
around it.

That left Texas colonias in the hands of county governments, which, lacking the power to enact ordinances, were outgunned by Texas developers and real estate
agents.

Spurred by local media reports and the rising clout of Hispanic voters, Texas politicians woke up to the misery. Starting in the late 1980s and accelerating in the
1990s, the state allocated money to the colonias to hook up electricity, then water. Developers were barred from selling small plots without water and sewer
hookups.

As governor of Texas in the late 1990s, George W. Bush never visited a colonia, but he pushed and signed a dozen bills designed to help them.

"All together, we've pumped in tens of millions of dollars at the state and federal level," said state Sen. Eddie Lucio Jr., a Democrat whose border district includes
about 100 colonias. "It would've been cheaper to relocate these people to good areas and good homes than it's been to try to fix the problem."

Invisible Existence

Today at least 400,000 people live in Texas colonias, most of them in the state's southern tip. Yet these communities remain largely out of sight. Because they are
unincorporated, even the biggest ones, such as Cameron Park, appear on no map. Few street signs point the way to them.

"Even to the people downtown [in Brownsville], we're like outsiders," said Christina Olivares, 27, whose husband, Florentino, recently completed a computer course
and is hoping for a better job. "When they hear 'Cameron Park,' they think, 'Trouble.' "

Health conditions are poor, and residents suffer from sky-high rates of diabetes, cancer, asthma, hypertension and cardiovascular diseases. Most colonias residents
have no medical insurance, which means no private hospital will treat them except in an emergency. The nearest public hospital to Cameron Park and the other 100
colonias in Cameron County is in Galveston, Tex., about a 480-mile drive north.

Father Michael Seifert, the priest at Cameron Park's San Felipe de Jesus Catholic Church, recalled the plight of one illegal immigrant, the mother of five, who
developed breast cancer a few years ago. Lacking health insurance or cash to pay a doctor, she turned to the church, which raised $400 for a coyote, or people
smuggler, who spirited her past federal Border Patrol checkpoints on the highway north. Only by breaking the law, said Seifert, could the church help her get
treatment at a public hospital in Houston.

"It doesn't go along with our idea of the American dream and apple pie, and that's the hard thing for most of us to swallow," said Paula Gomez, executive director of
the Brownsville Community Health Center. "But when I first started, we had babies dying of dehydration and diarrhea because of lack of access to potable water.
That's not the common thing anymore."

Some scholars see the improvements as helpful but limited, fearing that colonias have been lifted to a surface-level subsistence but not much higher. "The bottom line
has been raised," said Maril, the sociologist. "What I don't see happening is them getting much beyond that."

Others think hopes and dreams can go a long way in Cameron Park and similar communities.

"Colonias are bad, bad things," said Nick Mitchell-Bennett, manager of housing programs for Community Development Corp. of Brownsville. "The way they were
developed is the problem, the shame. But these people have hope and a dream for the future."

                                               © 2002