New Mexico's Crusaders for Colonias

Las Cruces is a friendly, if fast-growing, 70,000-person town at the southern border of New Mexico, cradled between the mountains and the mesas.  If perhaps it lacks the romantic air of Taos or the turquoise tint of Santa Fe, it does boast psychedelic sunsets smeared across an infinite sky and a terrific burrito bar, the family-run Chihuahua’s on Mulberry and Solano, where the flour tortillas are doughy and light to the point of ethereal.  Most of its complacent, unassuming citizens (university-affiliated, army or retirees) would never guess that only a few miles south—and east, and also north—teem over thirty colonias, rural subdivisions inhabited by landowners, up to 18,000 in one community, who might lack potable water, wastewater systems, passable roads, or safe housing. 

The Colonias Development Council (CDC) has known this for a while.  The group has gone through as many names as it has self-conscious incarnations: beginning as the Farmworker Organizing Project (operating by means of the Catholic Social Ministries), morphing into the Colonias Organizing Project, a more radical social activist group, and finally, twenty years later, identifying as the CDC, a now stolid, methodical group most of whose nineteen members are younger than thirty.  Some of them are completing a GED, associate’s or bachelor’s degree at the same time. 

If the CDC has transmogrified over the years, the problems they attack remain much the same.  Mexican farmworkers—some legal, some not—have been living on small colonia lots in some cases for decades.  80% of them fully or partially own the land on which they live, as compared with the 64% state average.  But the parcels of land they painstakingly purchase from developers, who subdivide a sixteen-acre square into increasingly tiny bits, often lack basic amenities, easy access and septic tanks.  The real estate contract fees are exorbitant and predatory, since residents often lack a bank account or credit history and make too little money to apply for loans, and those who miss even one payment are at risk of having their property seized, nullifying years of disbursement.  The developers, for their part, claim that extortionate practices like a 15% interest rate simply “minimize risk.” 

The cultivation of southern New Mexico’s four main agricultural products—pecans, onions, chile and cotton—has become increasingly mechanized, sloughing away available human jobs.  Many citizens of the colonias have no experience performing ‘obvious’ tasks like opening a bank account, figuring out their taxes and buying land.  Often, families of four must make do on a yearly income of $12,000.  Unlike many of the 1400 colonias in the state of Texas, New Mexican colonias usually have access to water and increasingly to wastewater systems; their biggest problem, instead, is substandard housing.  Dodgy wiring often sparks trailer fires, and trailers built pre-1976 are ineligible for insurance. 

Rhetoric has it that the border patrol and the sheriff don’t work together, but collusion is frequent; often, entire communities are locked down and searched with dogs.  “At CDC we’ve totally reconceptualized citizenship and are unconcerned about whether the homeowners are legal residents,” says Megan, although she points out that many, having been granted amnesty in the ‘80s or been landowners for ages, are legal.  “Talk of illegality makes people suspicious, keeps them from coming to meetings, and in effect creates an anti-community.  We believe that if you’re civically engaged, in other words engaged in developing economically and politically and socially, then you’re providing a service to your society, whether or not you have the paper.”

Currently CDC works with nine of the thirty-seven colonias in three neighboring counties.  Mauricio de Segovia works with youth in two of them, preaching the gospel of critical thinking in favor of the regurgitation.  “I want them to be civically engaged,” he says.  “I want them to question.”  As they complete their bachelor’s degree in accounting, Elva Varela and Erika Contreras teach finance on the colonias, both one-on-one and at night classes for parents at the elementary school: how to file taxes, read a credit report, and choose a bank, for instance.  Patrick Wenger, a former intern, has taken on the issue of affordable housing by investing in a machine that produces cheap-but-sturdy compressed earth blocks from dirt, water and a bit of cement.  The idea is to build earth-block duplexes and greenhouses where people can grow vegetables to sell at the future farmer’s market in Anthony, linking affordable, energy-efficient housing, economic development and food security.  “This area is all agribusiness, so the only thing most people grow on their own are maybe green chiles, and buy everything else at Wal-Mart or Sam’s Club, depending on where the sales are.”  Building the earth-block homes would use local materials, local labor, and because adobe stabilizes temperature much more efficiently than thin trailer walls, energy costs would plummet. 

A waste services conglomerate proposed building a landfill atop the colonia in Chaparral; with the help of CDC, community leaders took the case all the way to the Supreme Court.  Members of another colonia, this one hundreds of years old, had spent two of them planting a community garden, involving local children every Saturday morning and offering organic-food courses.  After the recent flooding, FEMA reclaimed the land for emergency housing, and the county granted their request.  Twenty-two local families worked to fight the ruling, however, and the garden—so far—has been left untouched.

Megan Snedden has been with CDC for seven years, working with a group of women to erect a childcare center.  Currently the Columbus center, a double-wide trailer, has 24 children and work for five part-time employees, but use of the facility fluctuates with peaks and troughs in the picking season.  It could theoretically accommodate more children, but the $7 per-child daily fee exceeds what many can afford.  “It’s tough to manage, and far from sustainable,” Megan says.  “The women mostly stopped their education after second grade, so small-business skills are lacking, but how do you solve that?”  A long-suffering plan for a different daycare center in Chaparral has expanded to include a commercial kitchen, sewing room and multi-purpose room, but the original exciting idea to build it from straw bales proved too expensive and the group has resigned itself to purchasing a quadruple-wide trailer instead.  “Instead of something environmentally efficient that benefits local construction, we’ll have to get a pre-fab building from out of state instead,” says Megan ruefully.  “Long-term, it’s the worse investment, but it’s all we have the money for.  If we try to raise more funding, we’ll lose the money that’s already been granted, so we’re kind of stuck.”  She sighs.  “I wanted it as much as they did.” 

Megan’s at-once disappointing and stimulating anecdote underscores the complexity of the organizer’s work.  Over the years, CDC has modified its identity and organizing style, always on the hunt for the most effective way to challenge the status quo, significantly adding an economic development component to the community organizing and advocacy they’re always done.  Ray Padilla, now a teacher at a local charter high school, managed a CDC youth center project in the ‘90s that imploded after student artists graffitied a Zapata quote they considered inspirational on a mural; reactionary locals interpreted it as incendiary and ordered it removed.  Although Legal Aid lawyers rubbed their hands gleefully at the prospect of an easy court victory, too few of the parents were willing to represent their children in the case—many of them worked at the school cafeteria or as teacher’s aids, and they had too much to lose.  “It was a lesson in power relations,” says Ray.  CDC now approaches its work more moderately, less “in-your-face,” as Megan calls it.  “We have to balance economic sustainability while at the same time keeping on with the organizing,” she says.  “So we do more diverse kinds of work.  We lose members when we stray from the basics.”  Organizing can have lots of different faces, argues Ray.  “It doesn’t matter whether you schedule one-on-one meetings or big parades,” he says.  “Is it challenging power relations, in its own way?  If it does that, it’s organizing.  Had we been more moderate about the youth center, it might still be here.  These people don’t come here to become radical socialists, remember.  They came for the American dream.” 

Megan, for her part, has stopped believing in revolutions.  She believes the best she can do is change little things in people’s lives.  There are 52-56,000 people living in New Mexican colonias, but the dogged nineteen in the squat white building that houses CDC have decided, at least for now, that the best way to make improvements is slowly, steadfastly, a few souls at a time.

In October and November 2006, I meandered circuitously between San Francisco to Miami under the auspices of Minnesota-based nonprofit Renewing the Countryside, interviewing farmers, ecologists, musicians and activists for a book on youth revitalizing rural landscapes all across America.  Hero-bosses Jan Joannides and Brett Olsen have allowed me to post my interviews here, but look for them in the Youth Renewing the Countryside book, due out in the spring of 2008.