Inside a Jumble of Poverty, Texans Build a Future

from The New York Times

By ERIK ECKHOLM

RIO GRANDE, Tex. — Along muddy roads invisible from the highway, some families crowd into battered trailers patched with plywood. Others jam into self-constructed dwellings that seem designed by Dr. Seuss — wood and tarpaper shacks attached to half-finished concrete-block rooms, wires and hoses snaking in.

The counties of South Texas are among the nation’s poorest, and their jumbled subdivisions, known as colonias, home to 400,000 Hispanic-Americans, can certainly look the part. Since the 1950s, developers have carved small lots from mesquite woodlands and floodplains, selling them to workers with the promises that utilities, sewers and paved roads would follow. They rarely did, and for decades the colonias were seen as hopeless slums.

But now a different picture is emerging. After years of protests by residents, belated regulation by the state, and an influx of aid from government and private groups, more than two-thirds of the colonia dwellers in six border counties finally have access to water lines, safe sewage disposal or both, compared with a small minority just 15 years ago, according to a report by the state in December.

Through frugality and hard work, in a process known as incremental building that is rare in the United States but common in the Third World, families are transforming hovels into homes, one wall and window at a time.

While the jerry-built shacks may look crude, they are often the works in progress of determined parents willing to spend decades to create a heart for their extended families. Many start with used trailers and upgrade as their finances improve. Their determination perhaps explains why the colonias, despite infrastructure gaps and lack of amenities like parks and street lights, are not suffused with the bleak resignation evident in the most blighted urban centers or parts of the deep south.

Delfino and Martina Martinez bought their lot three years ago on Las Lomas colonia near here for $19,800, paying 18 percent annual interest to the seller. They and their three children crammed into a battered “Holiday Rambler” trailer. As the family struggled along on his construction jobs and food stamps, Mr. Martinez, 49, built two concrete bedrooms. Next will come a kitchen, living room and bathroom.

“People see the colonias as a bunch of run-down places where all these Hispanics live in squalor,” Jorge Vanegas, director of the Center for Housing and Urban Development at Texas A&M University, said. But they are abuzz with ambition, and with recent government aid, he said, “we’ve seen progress on many fronts,” although new, underserved colonias “keep popping up in new areas.”

Belying another stereotype, a large majority of residents are long-term, legal residents or citizens, data show. Original buyers were often migrant workers, but now more residents work at minimum-wage retail jobs, in construction or in housecleaning.

As the infrastructure of the colonias (pronounced coe-LONE-yas) improves, however, the soaring price of land makes quality housing harder for workers to afford.

The Martinez family, with an annual income of about $15,000, worries about its $200 monthly payments to the seller. The family paid $700 last year for a septic tank — before that, they went to a relative’s house to use the bathroom — and several hundreds more for water and electrical hookups. To put a roof on their new bedrooms, they obtained a $2,500, two-year loan from the Community Resource Group, a nonprofit organization based in Arkansas that has helped thousands of colonia residents secure proper deeds and now offers small home-improvement loans.

On a recent evening, as a dozen chickens roamed, a fat pig grunted and the radio played lively Mexican music, Mr. Martinez was digging up the hard ground behind the bedrooms with pick and shovel, getting dirt fill for the slope where he will build the new rooms.

“We have faith our life will be better,” Mr. Martinez said, “as long as our health is O.K.”

The history of the colonias is filled with broken promises to buyers and contracts that left many vulnerable to losing everything when they missed payments. Titles were not handed over until land was paid for, and sometimes deeds were not officially recorded.

But protests by residents and groups like the United Farm Workers of America, as well as rising Hispanic political power, drew state attention. Since 1989, laws have tightened development standards. The state appointed ombudsmen to ensure that buyers got the required services.

In 1995, the Texas Legislature required developers of new colonias to install electricity, water lines and sewage pipes or septic tanks.

Federal and state grants have also helped bring utilities and paved streets to older colonias, though the task is far from complete. The 2006 state analysis of six counties found that the continuing lack of infrastructure and proper drainage in 442 colonias with 62,675 residents “exposes the population and surrounding communities to increased threats of infectious diseases and public health hazards.”

Some early residents used colonia homes as a springboard to moving on, but many have shown determination to sink roots in this region, where lax zoning standards permit them to live in houses as they build them. The results are not always pretty or safe, but for many, they offer a chance they could not pursue elsewhere.

“In our culture, once you have property, you belong, and even if it’s a shack, you stay,” said Blanca Suarez, the Starr County ombudswoman for the state’s Colonia Initiatives Program.

Despite their hard work, most residents remain poor, with longstanding problems like low high school graduation rates. Nearly all the children are covered by Medicaid, but Texas provides little health coverage to adults.

Elia Estrada, 35, is suffering the consequences. Ms. Estrada, her husband, a construction worker, and their three children have been living in a one-bedroom structure while she and several relatives help finish a house at Proyecto Azteca in San Juan, Hidalgo County. Families put in 550 hours of “sweat equity,” and then they can buy one of the 800-square-foot, three-bedroom homes for $30,000 on a 20-year no-interest mortgage. The houses are attractive and meet all codes.

“We’ll have our own bedrooms,” she enthused, taking a break from painting windows.

“But I’m sick a lot these days,” she added. She found a doctor who would see her for just $35 and discovered she has high blood pressure and diabetes. But she cannot afford treatment.

The oldest colonias tend to have the nicest houses, in part because families bought plots for $500 and have had decades to complete construction. In newer settlements like the eight-year-old Abraham colonia, also in Hidalgo County, empty lots now cost upwards of $20,000 and many residents are still at the early stages of making a house.

Alma Avila, 33, her husband and four children live in a yellow trailer in Abraham with missing window panes that they cover with plywood. The satellite dish is, she said with a laugh, “just for decoration.”

But Ms. Avila and her husband are taking the long view. They bought their plot five years ago for $14,000, on a 15-year loan.

“Once we finish paying for the lot, we’ll have money to start thinking about a house,” she said. “I hope this trailer will last 10 more years.”

Ms. Avila has already planted saplings and flowers.

“I want to live here forever,” she said. “Someday I can sit under those trees.”