America's Third World: Border Colonias in Texas Struggle to Attain Services
McALLEN, TEXAS — For decades, millions of Mexicans flocked north across the U.S. border.
With agricultural jobs plentiful in South Texas, thousands of mostly low-income Hispanics began settling on cheap, rural plots of land, parceled off by developers who assured them basic infrastructure and services such as electricity and sewage systems soon would follow.
Decades later, many are still waiting.
Half a million people live in Texas' colonias – largely impoverished neighborhoods that fall outside of city limits and can lack basic public services. These orphaned communities are peppered around the Southwest, though most lie along the roughly 1,200-mile Texas-Mexico border. About 900 of the state's 2,300 or so colonias are concentrated in the Rio Grande Valley's Hidalgo County – one of the fastest-growing counties in Texas – and while many colonia residents are living in the country legally, some are not.
Residents built homes on these subdivided lots as they could afford to, resulting in the jumble of trailers, small houses and makeshift shacks standing today. Many roads are unpaved, homes may lack clean water or solid waste disposal, and with no trash service,garbage is simply burned outside.
"With the colonias, there are some areas that are on the outskirts of the city where there's more impoverished homes and people, and they don't really have the basic needs. … People here are very humble," says Melissa De Leon, who coordinates the Expanded Food & Nutrition Education Program for Texas A&M University's AgriLife Extension Service.
These ramshackle living conditions have led to a plethora of health concerns. According to a 2015 report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas that focused on colonias in six Texas counties, about 38,000 colonia residents lacked access to clean drinking water. Those living in flood zones may be prone to mosquito-borne illnesses, and those near farms may face exposure to toxic pesticides, the report said.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/americas-third-world-border-colonias-in-texas-struggle-to-attain-services/ar-AAxmN8Q?li=BBnb7Kz
A libertarian utopia.
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