Please join the Rural Assembly at the annual Rural Assembly Everywhere online gathering today, August 1, 2024, at 1:00 pm EST, where part of the program will be dedicated to the Rio Grande Valley. It will feature some of the stories gathered during the Rural Assembly’s visit to the region.
If you can’t make it today, the event will be archived and available online at a later date.
When Cristela Gonzalez Rocha returns to her home in Hidalgo County, Texas, at night, the neighborhood is dark. Though there are lights in her neighbors’ windows, nothing illuminates the streets except the headlights of her car. She lives in a “colonia,” a rural neighborhood beyond city limits, that was built without streetlights.
Colonias were first built as cheap housing for laborers who worked in the orchards and farms of the Rio Grande Valley. Developers subdivided former farmland and sold the parcels, but frequently didn’t provide basic elements of public infrastructure that are usually taken for granted, including sewage or septic systems, electricity, paved roads, drainage, or public lights. According to the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs, an estimated 150,235 people live in 937 colonias across Hidalgo County.
But next year, Gonzalez Rocha hopes her neighborhood will have streetlights. She is an organizer with La Unión del Pueblo Entero (LUPE), a community union that was founded in 1989 by Dolores Huerta and César Chávez, leaders of the farmworker movement. For the past seven years, she has helped residents of colonias petition Hidalgo County to install public streetlamps. Now, it is her turn.
“I got involved because I live in a colonia that still does not have public light,” she told the Daily Yonder. “And my daughters ask me, ‘mom, why did you leave us until last?’ And I tell them, ‘First the community, and then us, right?’”
Lack of basic infrastructure, like streetlights, poses very real dangers to people living in colonias – there have been multiple incidents of children in unlit colonias being hit by cars while playing outside or waiting for the school bus. Emergency vehicles sometimes struggle to find the right houses, since addresses are not well marked or recorded on maps. And people are afraid to walk around their own neighborhoods at night.
To win public light for her neighborhood, Gonzalez Rocha and her neighbors will have to gather the signatures of three-quarters of the residents of her colonia and submit the petition to the Commissioner’s Court, the governing body of Hidalgo County. Her neighbors will also have to agree to pay for the costs of the electricity themselves. Once the petition is approved and submitted to the Commissioner’s Court, the streetlamps will be installed the following year.
This is not an easy process—it requires time and commitment from colonia residents to build community buy-in, raise enough signatures, and attend court. But it is also a reliable legal pathway to access public light, the fruits of more than a decade of campaigning and the passage of several state laws.
When Pigs Do Fly
The first state law addressing public light in colonias was passed in 2005. But it was toothless – there was no money or enforcement mechanism behind it.
Martha Sánchez, who recently retired from LUPE, began working there in 2006. She said she naively believed the problem had been solved. When she asked the judge of the County Commissioner’s Court why there was still no public light in any colonias a year after the law was passed, he laughed in her face.
“It opened my eyes, and I said, ‘so what do we need to do?’” Sánchez told the Daily Yonder. “And he said, ‘When pigs fly, you’ll be able to [get public light]. There’s no way the county is going to afford to put public light in the colonias. It’s not going to happen.”
But Sánchez and LUPE were not deterred. People in the Rio Grande Valley face many problems–poverty, isolation, lack of resources, she said. But she believes organizing collective power is the solution.
“The only way that we can create the change necessary for people to live with more dignity is to organize. That’s the power that we have,” Sánchez said. “People who have been devalued for generations, because they’re poor, because they don’t speak English, because they’re women and women of color. Our job as organizers is to convince people of their own power.”
The LUPE organizers knew the county was not going to cooperate on its own. So they became a consistent presence at the county’s Commissioner Court, wearing matching royal blue bandanas to identify themselves as LUPE members.
“I told them, we’re going to be like a tick on your ear every Tuesday,” she said. “We’re going to be here, and our leaders are going to be expressing their needs.”
LUPE members also traveled to Austin to speak in front of the state legislature, which eventually passed a more enforceable, comprehensive law in 2017. This was a turning point in the public light campaign because it set out a procedure to help colonia residents and counties address the issue together, the same process Gonzalez Rocha is now following to get light in her colonias. Since the law was instituted, an average of 5-8 colonias receive public lighting every year, nearly 50 colonias in total so far.
“The day the legislation was passed, we went back to the commissioners, and we said, ‘Today pigs are flying,’” Sánchez said.
LUPE has also been involved with developing rules for new model subdivisions, which ensure that no new neighborhoods are built without critical public infrastructure, according to Tania Chávez Camacho, the current executive director of LUPE. Developers are required to provide not only water and electricity, but paved roads, sewage systems, and streetlights.
But residents of many colonias built before these new rules were made still lack access to those fundamental necessities.
“We have come a long way, but there is still so much work to be done,” said Chávez Camacho. “We have to go colonia by colonia because the county, the government, hasn’t gotten their stuff together and they leave it up to us to be able to do the work.”
Please join the Rural Assembly at the annual Rural Assembly Everywhere online gathering today, August 1, 2024, at 1:00pm EST, where part of the program will be dedicated to the Rio Grande Valley. It will feature some of the stories gathered during the Rural Assembly’s visit to the region.
If you can’t make it today, the event will be archived and available online at a later date.
The post ‘First the Community, Then Us’: Bringing Public Light to Texas’ Colonias appeared first on The Daily Yonder.