ALIANZA PARA EL DESARROLLO San Elizario, Texas
Story and Photos By Mary Jo McConahay

On the U.S. side of the border with Mexico, thousands of families live in subdivisions without paved roads or basic utilities like water, bearing only shaky "contracts for deed" that withhold ownership until purchase price and interest are paid in full. The Alianza Para El Desarrollo Comunitario (Alliance for Community Development) began working with residents in these "colonias" four years ago to deliver potable water by truck; to assist with natural gas and sewage service; to transform contracts into manageable deeds; and most importantly, to provide education and training so residents might advocate and organize for themselves around daunting everyday issues of children's health, environmental protection, and basic services.

The West Texas wind sweeps across the pit where Carlos Jacobo stomps mud and straw to make his adobe bricks. It flaps the tar paper on his old shack, and lifts the blue cotton curtains his wife has already hung in their half-finished home. Saplings planted outside the door bend almost to snapping when suddenly, as quickly as it rose, the wind dies. Barbara Jacobo gazes out at the homestead her new husband brought her to seven years ago.

"I told myself then, 'I just gotta survive,'" she says. "I wasn't used to an outhouse." She wasn't used to living with no electricity either, no running water, no garbage pick-up. She wasn't used to the feeling of being ignored by civic authorities.

In their fifties, one-time sweethearts Carlos and Barbara reunited after broken marriages to others. Initially Carlos was embarrassed to bring Barbara to his colonia built in the desert east of El Paso. It is one of hundreds in a belt of substandard subdivisions that pepper the state's border with Mexico all the way to Brownsville, a thousand miles east. Residents bought land from often unscrupulous developers who promised services in a future that never came. Carlos, a welder disabled by a work accident, now looks over at his wife with a mix of delight and wonder. She has become adjusted to bathing out of 5-gallon buckets, and when there is no fuel for their camp stove, to cooking with wood in a sawed-off barrel. She drives 50 miles to work at a Walmart, switching to the overnight shift months ago because it pays 50 cents more an hour. Carlos meanwhile can make five of the adobe bricks a day, and their house has grown to two fine, solid rooms.

"They never told me it wouldn't have water," Carlos says of the two acres he bought in 1984. This colonia, called Villa Alegre, is five times as big as the town it surrounds, Fort Hancock. Yet its streets remain nameless. It doesn't appear on maps. Because it has never been properly zoned for residential use, it is ineligible for county water. A pump might run water from a tank into the Jacobos' house, but in a sinister Catch 22, laws say electricity cannot be provided to places that don't already have water service. Forget waste disposal: colonias are marked by low choking haze at sunset, as trash burns. Yet residents who live in trailers, or huts made of pallets and old tires, or who-like the Jacobos-attempt to build better permanent houses in small stages as money comes in, are workers and pay taxes. They are U.S. citizens, or legal immigrants, although undocumented family members may be part of the household. But political clout is low. "It's unjust-we've said if we're paying taxes why must we live without light? They don't listen," says Carlos.

Miles north in another colonia called Asencion, Miguel Guzman, a convenience store clerk and father of three, puts it this way: "It feels like there is one Constitution for America, and for us here, another kind of law, like the old days."Most colonia residents are Mexican American or immigrants from Mexico-law and custom once discriminated against them. Around the house sit tiny dishes of pancake syrup and vinegar, a potion to keep away green flies from nearby dairy operations. Health clinics are a mere dream. Mothers with sick kids go to a certain neighbor because she has a phone to call the emergency line at an El Paso hospital, 55 miles away. "They tell me to check for fever or see whether the child can bend his head, and they tell me what he needs, or to call the ambulance," says the neighbor. She repeatedly renews five prescriptions once issued to various kids for medicines, mixing and matching for others as needs arise, "out of necessity," she says.

In such conditions it seems extraordinary to hear Miguel's neighbor Teresa Caballero say, "If there are four of us here who can be a voice for the 20, and the other 16 can benefit too, we have to do it."

A mother of four with little formal education, Teresa nurtures plants against all odds by feeding them used laundry water, and shows other housewives how to chlorinate water to make it safe for drinking. "We're going to have a bath tomorrow!" Teresa's 4-year-old daughter, Ofelia, excitedly tells a visitor-the Alianza water truck is scheduled to arrive. Teresa says she "blesses" the driver every time he pulls away, hurrying to the next colonia. She is a natural local leader for Alianza, which depends on her kind of determination to push for what co-founder Daniel Solis calls "basic, dire human needs," colonia by colonia. "The poor must talk to the poor because we are the only ones who listen to each other," insists Teresa. For the first time, with pressure from Alianza, staffed by colonia dwellers, the settlements are appearing on county maps, a critical first step toward the goal of establishing legal existence.

"We're knocking harder on their door now," says Carlos Jacobo of local officials. "If it weren't for Alianza, they wouldn't hear us one by one."

Barbara Jacobo will never accommodate herself to the mosquitos, but like her husband she has come to admire the vista from the colonia, the wide desert, the Texas peak called Sierra Blanca that carries a memory of snow even in mid-summer. She looks forward, she says, while "people laugh" at the modern toilet and tub Carlos installed though they have no water, at a useless air conditioner on the roof and the chandelier she picked up at a flea market, although they have no electricity. "I'm preparing myself," she says.