Over Half-Million Live In Texas Slums Along Border

by Mary Jo McConahay

(PNS) FORT HANCOCK, Texas- -- When Barbara Jacobo was growing up in West Texas, her dad worked in the oil fields as a sandblaster and owned three houses. Now she is one of 600,000 residents of Texas colonias -- ramshackle settlements near the border with Mexico -- who live with no water, no lights, no waste removal.

It wasn't the mid-life marriage she had dreamed about.

"I wasn't used to an outhouse. I wasn't used to cooking on a camp stove, or outside with wood. I was used to having everything," says Barbara, 54.

"Look at me now," she laughs.

After 16 years of monthly installments to a landowner's office -- he never met the seller -- Carlos Jacobo, 55, paid off his plot in one of hundreds of rural substandard subdivisions that meander along the south Texas border from El Paso to Brownsville. Until 1999 it was not illegal to sell such plots for residential use, although they are ineligible for services. The colonias themselves, with names like Villa Alegre, where the Jacobos live, don't appear on maps. But here in El Paso County, some local towns showed a 100 to 200 percent jump in population in the l990s, according to the 2000 census, because the colonias surrounding them grew so much.

The colonias are ignored. Couples like the Jacobos and other families are invisible.

Sometimes, when colonia residents try and call attention to their living situation and demand changes, other locals may call them "invaders," as if they didn't pay for their plots and pay taxes every year. Poverty and health statistics in the 43 South Texas counties where colonias are rooted resemble Third World numbers. When the Department of Agriculture put Texas near the top among states with high levels of hunger in l999, then-Gov. George W. Bush snapped at reporters, "Where?" He never visited the colonias.

Some colonias used to be acres of cattle pens. Some were cotton fields sold off when the market dropped in the l970s. For residents, however, colonias mean living space that is available (there is a housing shortage in El Paso), affordable (local jobs have moved by the thousands across the border since NAFTA), and expandable, as families grow or immigrant relatives arrive. Carlos Jacobo loves his spot, where he can look across the soft desert landscape from the Guadalupe Mountains in the north toward Mexico in the south.

But the original landowners were sometimes unscrupulous. "They never told me it would never have water," says Carlos.

That's why Carlos didn't want to bring Barbara home when he re-met her, a sweetheart of his youth, on a trip to Odessa after both their marriages had failed. Barbara thought his reluctance meant he had another woman, or that Carlos was lying about his marriage. "He was so embarrassed about where he lived, he didn't know how to tell me."

The first thing Barbara says she wanted to do when she arrived in the wide valley was figure how "to survive." It was a homestead of white dust, salt cedars, propane light. A shack covered with tar paper. Drums of water for bathing and boiling, trucked from town. Her worst moment: "When I had to cook in a barrel -- I didn't cry, but I asked myself, is it going to work?" Barbara looked at her new husband, sitting in a chair outside surveying the expanse of sand, mesquite and wild yellow flowers, and told herself to be strong. Maybe they could move some day. But Carlos would say, "If we go to the city we'll have nothing. We'll pay rent. Here if we invest $50 it's ours, no one can take it away." It was the first house he had ever owned.

Barbara, a hairdresser, convinced Carlos to go to Odessa, for a year, where she could earn money with old clients. But she saw he was unhappy. There is a point in every relationship when it can dissolve, or make the kind of leap forward that gives it fiber to withstand troubles ahead. "We'll go home," she said. Back to the colonia, where they would work at things together.

Carlos began to make adobe bricks in a pit from mud and straw, wetting the mix to just the right consistency the way he learned as a boy from his Mexican father, kneading the mush with his feet, constructing the molds, setting the bricks to dry in the sun, producing five to ten at a time. Barbara drove her old car an hour's drive to a job at a Wal-Mart, switching to the night shift when she discovered it paid 50 cents more an hour. They do without meat, to save money. Carlos, disabled in an accident five years ago that ended his work as a welder, nevertheless has built a new house of the adobe bricks, and whitewashed it.

They have bought a television and an air conditioner, hoping some day electricity will flow to their colonia. "Other people don't believe it will happen -- they think we're crazy," says Carlos. "But I have all the wiring and fixtures installed, just waiting for the electricity." Barbara proudly flicks dust from a couple of elaborate second-hand chandeliers, ready to hang. No water runs in their clean, modern bathroom, but someday it may.

"I've learned a lot from my husband, and been amazed at him," says Barbara. "Look -- he made me French doors," although they remain closed most days against the wind that brings sand up from the desert.

When dark begins to fall, Carlos Jacobo is sitting quietly outside, looking out over the valley. Inside, Barbara lights a propane lamp, and some candles.