£-!-hA09raphr .'!:.f /),2 i3o(j~{ 80-03 Pe:thID fJ/Ia.., et/,
/0 ill fJ e.o. f b/l's" it? " Jtf{ '> (tJ cI6 ;j1/flJ1(!)cJfa.- ~Jl6S, PP i LjJ- /65
LI1
140 / Hlhlo Vi!a
Foucault. Michel. 1970. The Older of/ flillgs: Alllm-!ltleo!0f,Y o/thc liw1UlI1 Sci·
/'/Ices. New York: Villtagc.
Ha~away. Donna. 1985- "A M"'nifesto for Cyborgs; Science, 'Iechnologr, and
Socialist [-emjlliSlll in the 19805." Socialist Revicw 15 (2): 65-1011.
Hill. Jane H. 1993. "Hasla fa Vist::!, Uab)': Anglo Spanish ill dIe Amcric:J1l
Sourhwcst." Critique ofAmiJ/Y)prJlogy [3 (2): 145-76.
Kearney, Michael. 1991. "!lorders and l.loundaries of Statc and Self at the End
of Empire." jrJurnal ofHistoriCIII Sociology 4 (J): 52-74­
bdau, Ernesro, and Chama) Mouffe. 1985. /{egmlOl~J' and Socialil·t Strateg;':
Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso.
- - - . IYS? "Post-Marxism without Apologies." New Left Relliew 16(,:
79- 106.
Novirz, David. 1:;89, "Arc, Narrative, anJ Human Nature." l'hilosopky fmd
Literature J3 (r): 57-74.
Pol kinghorne, Donald E. 191111. Ntm'tllive Knowing and the !illma 12 SciC'IJ(cs,
CHAP') E R
6
Metaphoric EnrichnlCJ1t and Material Poverty:
The Making of "Colonias"
Sarah Hill
Albany: State University of New York Press.
R-icoeu r, Pau I. )984. lime and Naml/hle. Vol. I. Trans. Katll leen McLaugh Ii 11
and David Pellauer. Cbicago: University ufChicago Press.
RoselHvald, George. and Richard L Ochbcrg, eds. 1992. Stoned Li,Ies: The
Cultural Politics ofSldf Understandmg. New Haven, Conn,; Yale Un ivcrsity
Press.
Somers, Margaret R. 1992.. "Special Section: Narrative Analysis in Social Sci·
ence, Pan 2.. Narrativjry, Narrative Identity, and Social Action: Rethinking
English Working-Class Formation." Social Science History l6 (4): 591-63°.
'[aylor, Charles. 1989. SOllrees a/the Self The Makillg ofthe Modem Identity.
Cambridge: Harvard University Pre:;s.
van Dijk. 'ieull A. [993. "Stories and Racism." In t.,rarrative and Social Control:
Critical Ptrspectivfs, ed. Dennis K. Mumby, 121-42. Newbury Park, Calif:
Sage.
Vila, Pablo. 2.000. Crossing Borders, Reinforcing BOIdas: Socia! Categories,
A1ttflphors, and Narrative Jdtmtities (}II the U.S.-Mexico Frontier. Austin:
University ofTex.as Press.
White, Hayden. 1981. 'The Value ofNarrativity ill the Representation of
Rcality." In 011 Narrati1Jl:, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell, [-24, Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Shortly after I moved to El Paso ill rhe spring of [994, I encountered
a dark side of the U.S.-Mexico border's celebrated porosity: colonias.
One county official afrer anothcr described colonias to me as "Mexico
north of the border," illlpoverished settlements thickly cOllcenmned just
beyond the city limits, where poor people-"Mexicans"-Iived without
water, sewage disposal, eI ectrici ty. an d paved roads. Co lOll ia reside lHs
demonstrated "typical" Mexican ingenuity. They reportedly cobbled to­
gether "substandard housing" from anything chey could find: cheap, dis­
carded, and recycled building materials. dilapidated trailer homes, and
old school buses. But their illgenuity revealed their ignorance of basic
hygiene. Counry health authorities complained that diseases common
to Mexico ran ramr~nt in colonias because residellts dtew water from
shallow, hand-dug wells, contaminated by nearby outhouses, faulty septic
systems, and cesspools. Not infrcquelltly, the lucal newsp:Jpers reported
on cobnias' alarming sanitary conditions, as evidenced by local health of­
ficials' regular public assertions that colonia residents "literally drink their
own excremen t."
For an anthropologist drawn to EI Paso at the dawn of thc free­
trade era by the excitetnent of poststnlctLlr:J!ists' recent discovery of the
U.S.-Mexico border as the most promising metap.horie and actual site
of cultural hybridity, i ndetcrmillacy, and tr:Jnslocality, colon ias were so­
bering. ] expected to find a vibrant social life tha t teased and defied the
poJjticaI boundary, emerging, as Chicana poel Cloria Anz:lldua (19 87)
142 I S,lI't1.h Hill
Met'lphoric FmidmU'IJI lind MtlIerilli I'OI·crt)1 / /13
promised, 1ike a "lifeblood" flowing hom the wounds of the First 'World
alld the Third World scraping against each uther. Instead, 1 found, ill
the views of many EI Paso city residents, unpleas;lnt remi ndees of EJ
Pasu's inability to keep Mexico safely across the intcrnational border. In
place of rhe nourishing lifeblood of Anz;lldua's "third C\J!r nre," J found
a predominantly Mexican American city fearful of the poisonous fecal·
laden eOluelll Howing unchecked from colonias pupulated by Mexicans
who had transgressed the political boundary wilhout leaving behind
their putadvely self-soiling Mexican ways.
To many currently living in El Paso and ocher Texas border cities,
colonias are an unwelcomed but taken-for-granted feature of the sub­
urhan terrain.' In EI Paso, the term "colonia" requires no definition;
its invocation conjures up images 011 the llear huriwn of shantirs and
outhouses, overflowing seplic systems and poor Mexican immigralHs.
But lhis now commonplace feature of the border landscape is filf hom
rillleless. Culonias, as J will demo/1strate, came 10 public atrcnl iOIl dur­
ing a few heightened monlhs of intensive press coverage in early 1987.
Before that, the settlements that eventually came to be called colonias
were invisible to most city residents, so invisible that the couney's high­
est-ranking elected official observed in 1988: "The word colonias is just
in lhe last 12 to 14 months become part of the political dialog" (U.S.
House 1988, 112). Underserviced, low-income suburbs full of self-built
homesteads had quietly been accumulating along the ci ty boundary since
just after World War II (Towers J991). Nonetheless there was litrle pub­
lic interest in them until the label ".colonia" unleashed a flood of phobic
antipathy toward those areas said to be populated by poor, unhygienic
Mexicans. And lest colonias should slip from anyone's mind, a steady
supply of fresh images ill the local media continually feeds the soCial
imaginalY with irrefutable, persistent evidence of colonias' Mexican char­
acteristics and their existence just beyond lhe social and physical bound­
aries of civility.
It is not for want of governmellt effort that colonias have sustained
themselves as sites of border transgression on the edges of U.S. border cit­
ies. Since co(ollias first came to prominence in the late 19805, hundreds of
millions of dollars have poured into border counties to hale the growth of
colonias and to provide the public works infrastruclllre necessary to keep
colonia residents from living mired in their own wastes. Nonetheless,
even as the colonia problem comes ullder comrol, colonias remain, in
the local imaginary of El Paso City residents, highly visible sites of uni­
form disgust, disdain, distaste, or disregard. Long after rhe characreris­
tics initially said to Ill<lke up a wloni;l-priocipally the lack of sanitary
infrastrucrute-have disappe:ltcJ, colo nias still rCI11~ in marked, i 11 the
local nonnative imaginary, as colonias, that is, as sites of failed hygicne.
Colonias :lee thus 1110 rc than juse material things. They are also, as
) will argue in this chapeer, ideological spatial constructs predi<.:ated OJl
images of "dirty" Mexicans that are borh fueled by, and further produc­
tive of, the material processes that shape the conditions in whicb many
of EI P:Jso's poor live. Rather Thall seeing colollias as simply a descrip­
tive shurthand for suburbs that conform to a p:Jnicular set of negatively
consti tuted crileria, 1 wil! argue tbat the idea of colon ias can crihures
the
to (hdr material constitution. :Jnd tu the lllaleri;.1 UII1:>titlll"illl\
border itself'. Colon ias---as ideas 1l1:lde I"e:' 1--·-(( lIHrihllle to ill(' bordn's
lJistorical panerns of wC<llrh accullIulation alld the ollgoillg,/(>rll1ulatiom
for determining soci<ll and pulitical kgitilllacy :lIllOJlg a f}()!ll,Lu iOIl, wh iell
like AIl7.aldt1:l·:> (19~7) l:lIl1om "nllcva nlcsliz;IS" (II ClIillt'1'I1Hl (;6I1lc7.­
Pefia's (1996) "warrior
gringostroika" bleed back and ((Hlh ;1Cl'OSS the
a securely Jdined
political boundary, ever threatening the stabiliry
nation-state :Jnd national ci rizemy. Colonias arc determined hy, and de­
terminative of, the physical and metaphoric efforlS to impose internal
borders all th e 0 therwi se ill creasingly vague bonIer! :1nds.
In the following pages, I will explore the making
colonias as all
entwined historical process that has emerged frolH the colllperi ng inter­
ests real estare developers, politicians, health officials, and the residenrs
of areas said to be dominated by colonias. CoJonias are not SIalic out
contested. They have been continually remade and challenged over the
past decade and a halfby tensions alllollg both lhose who have cnriched
themselves by colonias' existence and rhose who acti vely seek to eliminate
them and to eradicate the distinctions between rhem and lhe smrou nd­
ing social and built environment. In the first section of this chapter, r
consider the rise of colonias in EI Paso, from the mid-196os to rhe lllid­
19805, as a particular artifact of the kind of capitalise accum ulatiolJ that
geographer Neil Smith (1984) calls "uneven development." In the second,
I examine the shift in debates over the consequences of that development
that fueled rhe labeling of "colonias» in 1987. In the third, 1 turn (0 the
material and representational processes that colHinuc to make colonias
real rhings and spati;tl categories llwrking the border within EI Paso.
Th is essay draws U pOll archival research and my lou r years of living
in El Paso, from 1994 to 1998.2 [ conducted the bulk of the ethnographic
or
or
or
or
or
Melflp!;aric FI1I'idJlnenl and Mll/eria! Poverty I 115
/44 I SlImh Jld!
ficldwOI'k repurted here over six: months in the summer ami fall ill 1996.
Interviews with county officials took place over the course of tHy resi­
dency ill the county.
UNEVEN DEVELOPMENT IN THE BORDeRLANDS
EL PASU'S 10,000: '\111 RD WORl.lJ" LURKS ON OUTSKIRTS 01' SUN CITY.
In Ell'aso County you need
l10t
cross the U.S.-Mexico border to find
the Third World. from the Aoodplains near the Rio Grande
sandy hills north oflmerstate
10,000
10,
to
the
city-county health officials say some
PCQPJc are living in impoverished housing dC'Velopme/lt~ known
as colanins,
-Ell'aso Ilerald I'osl, 7.11pril1987
El Pasu city residents probably first encountered colonias, named as such,
3 January 1987, when the city's arrernoon newspaper, the £1 Paso
Herald POJt, published three stories on "Third World" conditions just
outside the city limits. The stories provided rhe first derailed accounts
of vast areas of the county where people who lacked piped drinking
water ano sewerage drilled wells from which rhey drank water COll£:ll1li­
nated by their "cesspools," described as "green," "foul smelling," and
full of "human w;:lste," according to the City-County Healrh Depart­
ment. Health Departmem officials calted these areas ''colonias.'' They
poillleJ to doz.ens of them across the coullty where an estimated ten
thousand "Mexicans" or "Hispanics" lived. In a more extensive report
published three months later, public health officials nored that "colo­
nia" simply meant "subdivision" in Spanish, but they also srressed that
the City-County Health District used the rerm specifically to refer to
those subdivisions where "pervasive" poverty "means unsanirary condi­
tions."3 Large maps showed readers the colonias' locations-scattered
around the edges of the city and up to the county line, thiny miles from
downtown EI Paso. Photographs documented the colonias' poverty and
their unsanitary conditions; one large photo on the title page showed a
colonia resident digging a homemade septic reservoir, and deeper in the
article, photos showed outhouses, shanties, broken-down trailer homes,
and small children playing in yards filled with garbage. Health officials
did not pull any pUllcllCSj they :ls~crted that colonia residen ts "do not
fully understand ... hygiene." Here, in early 1987, [or the first time,
nc\.vspaper readers encountered a graphic truth: "These people down
011
here are drinking their waste and they don't undetstand it," repurted
one oOidal.
1 'he report closed with one reporter's firsthand experience of rhe (ilth
of colonia !ife. Reponer Thaddeus Herrick spell( t\.vellty-four hours with
a colonia family--seventeen people crammed int.o a trailer and adjacent
shack where the air was "thick with the odor of people, their bodies,
worn clothes, leftover food and ripe trash. Herrick confessed how dirty
he felt, with his "matted hair" and his ullwashcd mouth thick with "the
lingering taste of last night's meal." He could not escape rhe sense that
he was "entangled in the home's filth, a ware of every particle of dirt,
every germ I breathed," graphically illustrated in anecdotes like the fol­
lowing: "{ did usc the rank ollthouse, holding my sweatshirt over lily
nostrils (0 fend off the powerrul Hel)ch.... O<;casionally Fci ipe, who
suffers from a hacking cough, spits his phlegm on the floor. 'lattoo ...
one of fOUf dogs ... pees on it. And the children, most of whom have
chronic coughs, play ill ir" (FI Pam Hmrld PI/st, 7 April 19R7, 10).
This report firmly established the illde1i ble ill1a~ery that h;ls WIlle 10
be associated with colonias.'! MallY ill EI Pasu, including e1eLtcd and ap­
pointed officials, continue to cumpla.in that colunias are "Third World."
Colonias' lack of sanitary infrastructure and colon ia residents' reponed
failure "to understand the hygiene issues" show tu CQUllty officials how
out of place colollias arc in the otherwise modern, First World city of EI
Paso. Presumably those who commellt 011 colonias in this way have in
lllind a notion of modernity and Jevelopmenr as something distinctly
spadal rather than merely temporal. The Hm \X'udd is not only devel­
oped and modern, with the Third World lagging behind (Escobar 1995;
Ferguson 1990); the First and Third Worlds occupy differellt, discrete
geographic domains chat are isomorphic with the edges of nation-states.
But where the Third World appears within the border of the First
World, as it does in the colonias of El Paso (at least according to one
strain of thinking among some county residell£s and ofllciaJs), the very
categories of" First" and "Third" World are called into question both
temporally and spatially. Colonias seent to threaten all <lnachronistn-a
return ro an earlier developmental stage----or a geographic impossibility.
In this way, what people imagine about colonias contributes to a condi·
tion Patricia Price has termed "spatial schizophrenia" in her expansion
of Fredric Jameson's and Jacques Lacan's work 011 the rupture of temporal
signs in late modernity. For Price (2000), in the border region, both space
U
/16 I Stlll1!J !lill
Metap/J()ric DJridJlIICllt and J\1alrria/ Pil7JeYlY I 117
anJ time have wine unhinged from the rdialJle fictions of mappable
nation-sta tes and from the Iineari ty of history. When COli 11 tY officials,
the media, and city residents call colonias "the Third World," they sig­
nal their schizophrenia-their anxieties over the collapse, contortions,
and confusion of time and space. In colonias, it is feared, the border
between the United States and Mexico melts away, and history moves
backwards. To Neil Smith (1984), however, capitalist "development" is
everywhere and inherently uneven. W'hat ::lppears to be a temporal upset
of landscape is sim ply the detritus of capitalism unfolding across -time
and space, transforming nature and continually creating and destroying
a heterogeneous built environment through which diverse investmelHs
now and from wh ich profits are taken. Uneven JevdOpllleJll, more so
than "underdevelopment," attulles liS to understanding c<lpitalism's dy­
namic production 0[, and dependency Oil, dilTerences llot simply at the
level of the nation-state, or between the "developed" "First World" of
the "North" and the "underdeveloped" "Third World" of the "South."
Uneven development, Smith contends, carries Oll at various scales si­
mulmncously, within and between neighborhoods, regions, and nation­
states, as well as geopolitical blocks. In fact, it is Ulleven developmellt
that creates the spatial categories (e.g., nations and "First" <lnd "Third
World") that we attempt to fix in our minds as the structures undergird­
ing the temporal frallle of capitalist form. Seen in this light, colonia5 are
the name given to an investment strategy in £1 Paso County that takes
advantage of difFerences constituted at multiple scales, including those
stemming from policies enacted at the federal level in both Mexico and
rite United States.
federally funded progr;l/lls for reOelllcllt cr<ldicaeion and highway COll­
struction had wiped out hundteds of rental units in. downtown El Paso.
Farmers-turned-real estate developers exploited the county's almost
nonexistent zoning laws and its lax enforcement of subdivision regula­
tion by simply surveying their land, bulldozing dirt roads, and selling
quarter- and halF-acre lots without any further illfrJstrucrure development.
The developments grew in size and number, according to Towers, as more
low-wage workers laced a steady decline in purchasing power when the
city's economy, caught in the larger vortex of changes that stimulated
indusrrial growth across the border in Ciudad Juarez, shifted away from
metals processing and chemical mallufacr uring and toward light indus­
tries such as apparel and electronics assembly Clowers 1991, 58~l02).
Faced with few vi:lble housing options, EI Paso's hurgcon ing r:1I1 ks
of low-wage workers canvassed low-cost real estate just heyond the city
limits. Despite the lack ofint'rastructure provided by developers, and the
presence of agriclllwr;Jl chemic<l! residues in the soil, the small proper­
ties held appe<ll; they alTered Ihe promise of horne ownersh ip. Moreover,
mally buyers regarded the absence of pipet! water, sewer<lge, :lI1d other
typical urlxlll amenities :IS only tempotary hurdens becwse developers
hequently promised th<lt the city woulJ <lunex the subdivisions and
soon thereafter supply ci ty services. In wh<l( cOlin ty and state officials
came to regatd as grotesquely usurious contracts, developns sold theit
land under "contracts for deed," arrangements th;1t allowt~d sellers to
retain title to the lots until all payments (usually spread over fifteen
years) had been made. rail ure of even one paymem emitled developers
nor only to repossess the lot bur also to take ownership of any improve­
Poverty on the Outskirts
ments made to the property (Ward 1999, 91-94). In this arrangement,
developers' minimal investments were further protected by buyers' feats
of los i ng thei r very sign ili(an tit I ves rill en ts.
The most signillG1I1t of the policies at (he scale of the niltion that con­
colonias took place ill the 1960s. According to George Towers (T991),
several coincident factors yielded colonias as a vital element in the port­
folio of a risj ng class of EI Paso real esra te entrepreneurs. Initially, the
end of the Bracero llrogtam (an agricultural guest worker agreement
that allowed Mexkan cirizens to work seasonally in the United States)
Inherent to uneven development is the exploitation of olle class by
another through the manipulation of the built environment; one class
prospers by passing the COStS of the built environment's transformation
onto others. Subdivision developers initially prollted from the labot of
homestead purchasers whuse seU:buih housing improved the value of
real estate outside the city limits. More importandy, however, developers'
coincided in the mid-196os with the gradual exhaustion of farmland
fertility in the county's lower valley area, along the Rio Grande /lood­
plain. Farmers, seeking to convert their worn-out cotton fields to some
profitable usc, found a population itll1ced oflow-income housing, 3fter
steady accumulation of profits over two decades turned them into a pow­
erful economic block that effectively pressured the city into <lssuming
the expensive burdens of infi"astructure installments that further raised
the value of their exh~usted farml:JI\d. Developers who sold land with in
tributed to the material production of what eventually came to be called
118 I Sandi Hilt
Metflp!U!I·il· hmd'IllWI 'liid t.1f1tniaL Poverty I /19
five miles of the city lirllits, ill <1 mile cilled the extraterritorial jurisdic­
tion (E·I)), easily obtained city annexation of their developments, and
with that the extension of services such as water, sewerage, and paved
roadways to the homcstcad purchasers (Bath et al. 1994). Nonetheless
city officials were not happy with the retroactive public works construc­
tion in areas where some residents had no public roadway access, where
soils had poor drainage, where densities were low, or where space had not
been set aside for sewer and water lines (£I Paso Herald Post, 2[ February
1.984). Because lllany Jevelopers deliberately avoided filing plats (plan­
ning maps) or securing subdivision <lpproval (B PdSO Times, 2 July J983;
EI Paso Herald Post, 2 July J983), cicy officials began calling the settle­
ments "illegal subdivisions" in order to generatc public antipathy toward
developers and nudge them toward planning and wning compliance.
Uneven development both creates and exploits differences among
people. During thc 1970S and 1980s, both developers and some city of­
ficials, while they dickered over who should bear thc costs of suhurhan
development, cast subdivision residents as distinctly different from city
residents, effectively making them :lJld the spaces ill wh ieh they lived
different. For exampIc, in countcring developers' insistence that the cifY
should provide water for their subdivisions, the long-tenn general man­
ager of the £1 Paso Water Utili ties, John Hickerson, routinely drew a line
in the sand between rhe city and whatever lay outside it. "We're a city of
El Paso department," he insisted, "and [our] total responsibility is within
the city limits" (EI Pas(J Times, 23 December (986). By not extending city
services beyond the E1'J, subdivision tesidents were forced co rely on
themselves to provide drinking water and sewage disposal, pushing their
bodies beyond the limits tolerated by city residents and making them­
selves "abnormal" when measured against the norm of city residents, as
Silva (1998) has observed. This constitution of categoric alteriry went
beyond the numerous remarks that "when those folks hought those
lots outside of the city, they knew there was no water therc" (El Paso
Herald Post, 15 March J984), or that thc "people who go there make a
conscious decision" to live without water and sewerage (3 January J987).
And they went beyond simple diffetences of desire, as in the argumcnts
put forward by one dcveloper in his angry reaction to a court-ordered
injunction to bring his subdivision up to city standards: "Curbs and
sidewalks, people out there don't want that stuff" (B Paso Timer, 22 July
1982; italics mine). These assertions began to rest on fantasies of somatic
evidence that subdivision rcsidents' bodies differed, by virtue of their
long residencc in the suhdivisions. John llickerson, the wat er utilities
general manager,' publ icl y douhted subdivisiuns' rcsiden ts' c1aiJm that
their well water was poisonous: after a heated. meeting with subdi\·ision
residents, Hickerson rold a reporter, "They [subdivision residents] say
there's no watel". That's a fallacy. The families that have moved ~here are
living in areas where people have lived for many, many years without
a public water supply. They had wells, and they drank the same water
that these people raday are saying they c<ln't drink" (El Pmo Herald Post,
10 December 1983). The ilisistencc that uneven development had made
Sll bdivision residents different (as if they had acd imatized to a hostile
environment) scrved to deny, as Lupez, and Reich (19~J7) poillt out, the
necessity or providing subdi vision I'esidellls wilh the same basic vita! ser­
vices that cit)' resiJctlts took for granted. This "agenda denial" helped to
etch on to the landscape a particularly resource-poor built environment
th rough which could be contillually read the subdivision residents' es­
sential difference from (hti r cit)' tlcigh hnl"s.
IklltDFIUNG ON DANt:r'lWlIS
l;rom 1979 through J986, Illost news coverage 01" the troubling subdivi­
sions focuscd on the character of lhe developers and their cxploit:ltion
of hamstrung bureaucracies. The actors ill these stories were the devel­
opers; the problem was the subdivisions themselves. Linle mention was
made of subdivision resideIHs. s But hy the early 1980s, a shift in national
policy helped tIIrn attention away hom the illegal developers and to­
ward the "illegal" activities of the subdivision tesidenrs. A Jl\uvcmen t al"
the natiolialleve! again came to shape rhe course of EI Paso's Ullevell de­
velopment, this time hy contributing ideologically as weI! as materially
to the areas of the COllllty where growing numbers of poor lived.
\Xlhen, in 19!?2, the Rcagan adm inisttation took 1I p the charge of "se­
curing our borders" agai nst rll e thrca t of U Ilfcgulatcd i llllll igration, l\A exi­
can immigrants suddenly hecame a "til reat to natiollal 8ecurity" (Dunn
1996,2-5). In this climate, the country f{)Cused Oil Gorder ciries such as FI
Paso :lud huw they wert' seemi ngly iIJdisti tlguish:lb1e fralll t!lci r 1\1exicall
neighbors (Hili 2000, 144-60). At the very moment rhat All1.3ldli;l ;Ind
other Chieana/o poets celebrated the harder's vaguc definition, major
media uutlcts denigrated it with hyperholic imagery of unstoppable ilH­
migralJ ts storming thc borders and streaming into the United Stares. In
a return to historical patterns of tensions hetween Mexic;ln Americans
and Mexicans (Gutierrez [99')), Mexican J\ 11IericIIJS in EI Paso asserted
150 I Smah fJil1
A-fel<lplwri( I:ilrilhlllwt fwd Mll/eria/ I'IIIJ(T/:Y / /5l
grealer efforts to distinguish lhelllselves from Mexicans, lest they be
mistaken for tht" unwanted aliell imruders then makillg llation<ll head­
lines and provoking congressional hearings (see also Vila 2000). As onc
prominent El Pasoan put it: "Our skill culor and hair is associated with
the poor illegal alien who wades across the Rio Grande," provoking His­
panics, as another described, to "discriminate against illegal aliens" (1;:,1
Paso Herald Post, summer J983, 24}J'
Although health officials in £1 Paso Counry had sought to provoke
public concern over the illegal subdivisions for some years, their efforts
finally succeeded when they struck a chord {hat echoed chis rising na­
tional xenophobia. It is nor incidental that at the very moment when
Mexicans were cast as a threat to thc national body politic, health of­
ficials GIst lhem locally as threats to the actual bodies of city residents.
While health orGcia!,,' characterizations o( (he subdi visions did not di­
rectly cngage the highly charged imllligration debate, (hey wcre surely
not ancitheLical to i r.
In December 1986, rhe City-County Health District made irs first
formal appeal to (he County Commissioncrs COlin (or establishment or
"better monitoring" of on-site waste disposaL While health department
officials ex presscd concern over the public health consequences of sub­
division lot size and the lack of sewerage services, both acknowledged
to Slel1l from developers' violation of plaulling regulations, they also
;:Idvocated scrutiny of residents' resolutions-that celebrated Mexican
resourcefulness-tO problems generated by developers. Develupers may
have set up the conditions for poor sanitation, but the problem then
became one of contending with residents: health officials claimed that
resident~' homcmade, unreliable excreta disposal systems polluted ground­
water. In histrionic rones, heaJth officials warned that "improper sewage
disposal is turning groundwater into a cesspool and rural El Pasoalls
literally are poisoning themselves by drinking frolll it" (EI Paso Times,
23 December 1986).
[0 this way, the illegal origins of the subdivisions began ro recede
iII the wake uf the pathological character of resiJcll IS' waste disposal
practices. Whereas earlier accounts of "illegal subdivisions" had focused
on developers, newer accounts took developers our of the story and
zeroed in on residents. Before the Herald Post's 1987 special report, whcn
county hcallh officials tried to d tum up support for controlling thc be­
havior o( subdivision residents, county eJected officials shrugged their
shoulders, seating, "You can't do anything with them" (i.e., subdivision
residents), revealing all unapologetic lack ofimeresl in residcHls (El Paso
Times, 23 December 1986). After the report, huwever, in the charged
national anti-immigrant climate, residents' sanitary violations became
the primary COllcern, and developers faded into the background: "Some
of the cOlonias are not platted according to state law, making them il­
legal subdivisiuns. But the most serious danger of colonias is the health
hazard of unapproved sewage systems that Hl;Uly residents install" (El
Paso Herald Post, 10 October 1987). Likewise, in another example, the
developers have vanished, since the relevance is no longer what develop­
ers have done but what residents do;" they build faulty excrela disposal sys­
tems: "Unregulated building outside rhe city limits has resulted in sewage
disposal-septic tanks and illegal cesspools-spilling into groundwater"
(3 January J987). Rnthcr lhan the subdivisions lhcmsclves bcing UIl­
regulated (as they had been described in the past), now the activities of
subdivision resideills were unregulated (such as in their buusi llg COB­
struction) and illegal and pathologic,) (as in theif cesspools). Subdivision
residents, in these accounts, "do not fully understand hygiene issues."
They were "poor and uneducated," "[l<live," "firsr generation inlll1i­
grants," who lacked what was presumed to be basic awareness of the
dangers of human wastes: '1\11 o( the waste that those people are generat­
ing is in tbe grollndw<lter--all of ir. Those people there all have septic
systems. These people down here arc drinking their own waste," a health
ofllcial srated (3 January 1987). They don't have "enough sense not to put
in an unsafe system," said one developer (ro OctOber 19R7)'
To make the colonia problems relevant to city residents, heaILh of­
ficials tried to erase the distinction-thar j maginary line ill the sand­
betWeen city and county. They did so by pointing out that conc;lgiollS
were unbounded. Newly elected county judge Luther Jones agreed: "This
is one community here. It's nOl the ci ry and everything else. J(people are
sick because o( the water they uri nk, they could be tratlSmi lling diseases
to people throughout the coullty." Those people, he in~isted, "don't
live in the county iii isolation bur in the urban community of EI Paso"
(1:1 Paso Herald Post, 3 ]allu;Jry lyl!7). At the same time, the new name,
"colonias," given to the subdivisions also imposed a difference between
county anti cilY residents while linking lhem inrinwdy th rough excre­
ment. Spanish-language terms and Spanish in general have provided sta­
ple means for asserting class distinctions in EI Paso, as Pablo ViI;:,. (2000)
has shown. Here the lise o( a Spanish-langu:lge term implies not simply
poverty but also violations of norms of health 3nd hygiene lhat secured
152 I Sarah Iii!!
Me/llphori!" I:'nridJlnmf tlnd Materia! 1'(1/1(1'1)' I /53
the spatial-temporal distinction betwecn the First and Third Worlds,
and the United States and Mexico. Continual asserriOIl that homestead­
ers "arc coming from Cludad Ju~rez" (El Paso Herald Post, 3J December
1987), and more subtle suggestions that colonia residents were more
IVlexican than American by returning to Juarez for medical treatment
(7 April (987), or by listening to Juarez radio stations (7 April 19 87),
facilitated the Imagining that "colonias" were the "Third World" whose
contents threatened to spill over to the rest of the county (31 December
19 87). As leaky Third Worlders in a Third World space north of the bor­
der, both colonia residents and colonias themselves could be the vectors
of illness: co Ionia wastes "seep unfiltered in to the soli and eventually
reach the underground water table, little by little contaminating the
water th at everyo ne d rin ks" (El Paso Herald Post, 10 October (987). Fears
uf diseased colonia residents entering the workplace raised the specter of
a thrc;lt to the literal health of the COUllty'S economy (3 January J987)·
In his testimony to Congress in 1988, Judge Luther Jones expre.e;scd
his desire that "thc cOl1l111unil)' that does nut live near colonias, that
Jives in the city and has all the scrvices," recognize thal "thcre is a con­
sequence [to] those peoples that live inside the city. Their quality of life
is affected by the colonias" (U.S. House 1988, (24). In fact, judging by
the way the usc of the term "colonjas" changed in newsp"per coverage
from its introduction ill 1987, Jones and city-county health officials did
indeed stimulate non colonia residems to take all almost obsessi ve inter­
est in the colonias. By 1989, the term "colonia" no longer appeared in
quotes or accompanied by a dehuition. The newspapcrs 110 longer pro­
vided maps for readers to visualize the location of townships such as San
Elizario, Socorro, Moon City, and Momana Vista, purportedly domi­
nated by co10nias. Colonia stories no longer carried helpful orientation
guides that located colonias "in the southeast corner of the county" or
"north of 1-10 uff MOlltana Avenue." Hy 1991 colonias appeared in news
coverage ufEI Paso's two (hily papers two (0 three times a month (Lopez
~nd Reich 1997, 162-63). When colonias found a place on the menlal
map of the residents of the city of EI Paso, thcy moved in from the re­
mote reaches uf the coun ty.
both by enabling lIIuch murc powerful count}' 7.()lliug laws and by rais­
ing significant state and fCdcl';llmonies lor illf"rasttuctlltt" constrlH,:tion'
and residential connections ill colonias all along the Texas-ivlexico hor­
der (Ward 1999, 90-91). N um ero liS governmcnlal and no IlgoVCrllmen­
taJ agencies have undenaken concerted efForts ro eradicate cesspools and
institute behavioral changes to improve household hygiene in colonias.
While figures are nOloriously fluid, by one estimate, within the next
half dccade, the numbcr of colollias lacking water and seweragc can
be reduced to 5 percent of £1 Paso's 21/~ colonias; as of July 2000, more
tha.n half (l25) h;ld received connections (Office of the Secret::lry of State,
personal communication, Aptil 2001). Tht' "lexas Water Development
Board's most recent figures (April 2001) for EI Paso County indicate that
dose to three-quaners of the county's estimated 74,600 colonia residents
IlOW have city water (w,,,'w.TWDB.gov), thanks in part to more than
$250 million in fedcralllloney appropriated jDr i1l1i'astrucrure COllstruc­
tioll.7 An additional $'l~ millioll ha.~ bCTn al!ot!cd to provide grant :Jssis­
lance for 4,000 lO 6,000 households (totaling 20,000 to 30,000 reside/lts)
to link to W:lter and scwcr:lgc infi-aslluClun: (Center fUf Envirolllnelllal
Resource Management, personal communication, April 2001). And hun­
dreds of thousands of dollars have been spent on education GlInpaigns
for the improvemem of colollia residents' healtll. Public health officials'
energetic and tireless effons to bring public a ttention to the colonias
problem has changed-for the hetter-the material wuditium of many
colonias.
Nonetheless this fixing of the colonias problem has also "fixed" co­
lonias in another sense; it has made descriptions of uneven developmen t
accomplices to more general patterns of class dynamics in the United
States that disadvantage large secrors of the laboring population. Colonia
residellts are "fixed" to their class position by being fused to the land­
scape that is said (0 deterllline who the)' are, and their rights (0 political
and social legitimacy. Colonias are now far more than just the real estate
that warehouses the counry's poor. They serve ill the delineating, demar­
cati ng of space and subjects as the pillcers of the hec trade/neoliberal
era grip, ever more tigh dy, rhe sucial imaginary of border cities. As U.S.
firms continue to erode lhe bOllndaries of national capital wilh their ac­
celerated manufacwring relocation to Ciudad JWlrez-which has grown
to be Mexico's largest cxport prucessor-Iow-wage labor in hoth cities
has been ever more fixed in place by increasi.ngly restrictive U.S. im­
lJligration enforcement. III all acme dispby of tbe paradux of uncven
COLONJAS UNMADE AND HEMADE
Coun ty heal tb officials' t:fforrs to correct the material consequences of
uneven development in EI Paso County have achievt:d notable sllccesses.
By 1999 state legislation severely restrained future colonia development
1.51 I S,rmIJ [ !ill
MC/l/phOlic !:inithllli'll! fIIut M'llrrittll'(JI!CI'IY I 1"j.)
devdopmClIl that has seiu::d El Paso, just three mouths prior 10 the in­
auguratioll of NAFTA 011 I January 1994, the Border Panol undertook
its "Operation Blockade," a major OHcllsive to secure the border in El
Paso that to mallY observers looked like a military occupation of the city
(Immigration Law Enforcemcnt Monitoring Project 1994; Vila 2000;
Spenet, this volume). More recently, with the increasing criminalization
of unlicensed migration, the stakes for determining who belongs on
which side of the border have risen dramatically, making the metapbors
of dirt and excrement that enliven imagini ngs of colonias ever more po­
tentially damaging in their material consequences for colollia residents.
The work that public health officials and politicians have done all
behalf ofcolonias has persistently fueled ideas about colonia~ as a demar­
cated spatial zone of social difJerence, a boundary area with an alTlbigu­
ous legitimacy within the boundary of the United States. While colonias
are a key public issue in EI Paso County, as Lopez aud Reich (1997) have
documcil ted, the actual considerations of colon ia residents are consis­
tently ignored by county officials and business leaders who use talk of
colonias to veil their inaction on colonias problems. Moreover, the talk
ofcolonia residents' inabililY to govern their hygiene easily translates in the
local Imaginary to colonias' inability to self-govern as communities. This
view oflimited ability to self-govern reinforces contemporary practices of
casting Mexican immigrants as incapable of appropriating American cul­
ture and thus undeserving of political entitlements (Chavez 1997)·
One particularly powerful agent active in fixing colonias in both
senses is Dr. Lawrence Nickey, the nuw-retired long-term director of
the City-CouJJty Health District. Nickey is perhaps the best-known
authority on border health. Although Nickey's ceaseless efforts to bring
attention to the urgent public heal tii problems present In colon ias
have generated significant social and material changes in colonias) he
continues to make frequent public prescntations with now egregiously
outdated descriptions and photo illustrations. He has done so before au­
diences ranging frum congressional committees to ollt-oF-town medical
conventioneers, and visiting local high school, collcge, and postgradu­
ate groups, including the students in the University of"lcxas, I-lousron,
School of Public Health's satellite program in EI Paso. His practice of
spatially fixing colonias-defining and mapping a determinate space
called colonias-has been predicated on a charactcrization of colonias
as sites of temporal stasis, as places where Mexicans remain Mexican,
mired in their self-soiling ways. I heard Nickey on three separate occa­
siolls in 1995 and 1996 deliver a public address in which he poitlted to ;t
pholUgraph of a colonia homestead 10 illustrate the proximity of a fami­
ly's fai led septic system to its well. His description never varied: "These
people are liter311y drinking thcir own excrement." As of J 998 (the b test
report I have heard uf h is presentations), he- COil tinlled to underscore the
class interests underlying uneven development and the p:ltlwlogi7.ation
of colonias. According to Nickey, colonia residents work in the service
economy-in food preparation, housekeeping, and child care-thereby
spreading their contagions to all those city resiJelHs who, despite their
own careful attention to good hygiene practices, art:" defenseless agai nsr
colollia pathologies.
Nickey's slide show is a blum iIlStrtllllClJ(. Accord i!\g to Nickey, the
failure to maintain a strier bOll ndary bt:twcen the self and irs excrelllent
anywhere in the county indexes a colonia. In his descriptions, the ab­
sence of sanitary infmstrucLUre and piped drinking water signals a pre­
sUllled set of household bchavior~ in violation of sanil;1ry norllls. This
campaign to promotc widespread awareness of a widespread problem
has created a uniform definition oCco!onlas alld colonia residents; it has
helped to render vinually all of lhe lower valley area of the county a co­
lonia. As Nickey has said 011 more than one occasion, ~lUinring to a slidc
of a litLle girl dipping iJl[o a barrel dearly marked "Not for storage of
potable water, "This happens every day, all along the U.S.-Mexico bor­
der." In this way, colonia.s' timelessness makes them potentially space­
less as well. By declaring tlJat "we have a whole town that is essentially
one big colonia-Socorro," Nickey has dulled city residents' powers to
imagine the heterogeneity
social life of colonias, fianening a broad
or
range of heterogeneous social relations, diverse land-use patterns, and
differential construction of the built environment. With his aggressive
public relations work, he ha..~ helped fold lllallY :lreas of the COUnty not
actually colonias but contiguous to colonias into the spatial logic of
colonia production, making them indistinguishable from colonias in
the normative imaginatiolJ of city residents, public health officials, and
others who ullwitti ngly p;:micip;lte in rhe rcproducrioll of colonias even
as they work toward colollia eradication. This d iSCllr~ive production of
colonias has been so powerful and thorough that living in areas of rhe
cOllnty designated as "colonjas" converts residents of those areas in to
colonia residents whether or not they ever relied on self·drilled wells and
homcmade excreta disposal systems.
f 56 I Sa1l/IJ I fill
\FiJere Are the Colonim? WI/JIlt Art' the Co!om:as?
When I first arrived in the county, I presumed th;H finding the colonias
would be easy, that they would readily stand out from the landscape.
Hu t seeing colollias proved no easy task. In my first few uiunths, 1 ac­
companied several county and state agents Oil their rounds of colonia",
training my eyes to discern the features th:H my guides pointed out.
However, when I encountered residents of these areas, they quali fled Illy
vision. For example, at a U.S. EPA hearing in downtown EI Paso, r Illet
a resident of Montana Vista not long after my first driving tour of an
area of subdivisions !lorth of Interstate Highw::JY 10 that radiates uff of
Monlana Avenue, one of lhe city's major east-weSl axes. This man rar­
tled otT the names of several subdivisions in the vicinity of h is house (i n­
eluding the olle in which he lived) that were not <.:olonias. Colonias, he
instructed me, are subdivisions that do not have water access, and only
certain areas of MOlltalla Vista lacked water, making only them colonia-~.
Later a resident of one of the subdivisions that he had named 2S a co­
lonia pointed out to me that her subdivision W;lS not a colonia because
It s/;ollld have had water. This resident explained that the state had i Ill­
posed ,1 moratOrium on further water connections ;Jfter her family had
purchased its lot, paying a substantially higher price th:lll they would
have paid in neighboring areas becauseof the guarantee of water.
Unsurprisingly, such efforts to redraw the colooia boundaries-to
specify colonia contours with more social and spatial precision-were
not uncommon ill the mid-199OS. Often these efforts themselves etched
more firmly into the landscape the definitions of colonia., :is preJic<lted
on a lack of sanitary infrastructure and corresponding failures of house­
hold hygiene. A 1994 visit to one of the farming communities that h:is
been home to the cOllnty'S oldest colonias was illustrative. On this occa­
sion, another anthropologist and I stopped in the old town center of San
Elizario to admire the shady square and its colonial-eta buildings, includ­
ing a reconstructed adohe church, which displayed a large memorial to
those from San Elizario who had died in World War 1I. As we studied
the mostly HispaniC Jlallles paillted OIl the wall inside the church, we
met an older lIlall, who introduced himself as the caretaker. He praised
liS for our imerest in history, something that in his view local kids did
not possess. Exciledly and with exaggerated p::mtomime, he described rhe
boys in the town, high school kids-ch%s, he called them-who wore
their ball caps on backwards, who didn't even greer him as they slouched
j11ettlpl!orir l:inichmm/ ami MII/aial !'()1Jcrt)' I 157
past the chmch, and defaced its walls with their vandalism. My compan­
ion asked if the kids caused any kind of trouble. The caretaker pointed
to the public bathrooms just near the church door. "We keep the bl1nos
closed because you wouldn't believe whar they do." Theil he described
jamming toilets, shaking his head in disgust.
\'{!he n I asked w heI'e the clla los C:l1\le fro Jll, the ca re taker gestu red
southward, and with emphasis s:iid, "Las colonias. You just drive over
there, and you'll see them, the colonias." He explained the prohlem:
"Those people arc new, but LIS, we belong here, we have been hcre for a
long lime. They are new. They don't know how to behave, and they are
messing thi IlgS up for us. People like yOll from El Pnso, when they think
about San Eli7A'1rio, lhey think 'colonias.''' [n San EliLario's shrine or his­
spatial lJolllldaries
tory, the caretaker IJl1dcrsuHcd fhe relariol1sh ip
to excremen tal imagery wi th it is i l1S iste nee that colon ia resi de n ts have
come to dominate the spatial imaginary of people like us, from EI Paso.
He marked the difference between himself and the colonia residents not
simply by a claim to prior residency in San Elizario (dating from long
before there were either "illegal subd ivisions" or "colol1 ia.~") hut al.~o hya
legitimacy of "hchaving right" and respecting social norms. His mention
of bathrooms was [elling: colonia residenrs "don't know how to behave,"
and part of the lack
understanding of gaud behavior is evident in
their abuse of sanitation.
Similarly, many families I met during the sUlllmer of1996, while I was
conducting an evaluation of a hygiene intervention designed to help co­
lonia residents safeguard against sd f-contamination, likewise took great
pains to distinguish themselves frolll what the prevention presumed to
be colonia behaviors. Premised on the City-County Healrh District's
teports of colonia residents' COllSUlll,;tio n of fecal-colltaminated well
water, the intervention :lImed to instruct householders in basic sanitary
education (i.e., demonstrating the dangerous link between fecal COIl­
taminarion of drinking water and intestinal illnesses) and in low-cost
measures to purify well water (e.g., chlorination). Modded on successful
inten'entions undertaken throughout Latin America, the intervention
had fi-ustrated its plauners and implemellters, for ;lCcorJillg to a follow­
up survey OJle year after the intervention, tCwer than one-half of the
tra ined families ad he red to th e practices advocated by the in rerven ti all.
Gne reasou quickly became- clear in my interviews.
The intervention had been premised on a f1awed assumption that re­
vealed what '!cresa de Lauret is (1997) calls the "violence of rhetoric": none
or
or
158 I Sarah Ifill
of the inrerviewed colonia residents reported that they had ever drunk
water from their on-site wells. Rather, they reserved that water for gen­ eral nonpotable uses (though they often expressed reluctance ro bathe
or wash dishes or clothes in it). They simply described it as unsuitable.
It smelled Lnd, and it left an itchy residue Qll the skin. MQsr residents
obtained drinking water from city-supplied standpipes or taps :H venues
such as churches, a local lumberyard, or rhe homes of kin living in the
city. This in itselfwas a remarkable finding. It suggested to me that health
officials may have engaged in a slippage bet>veen describing colonia resi­
dents as lIsing cont:uninated well water and drinking contaminated well
water. Even if perhaps some colonia residents had, in the early 19 80s,
drunk well water, the generalizations about colonia residents, propagat­ ed by Nickey and others ovcr the course of morc th:lll a decade, had not
only brought llIuch-needed federal aid to colonia". These generaliz::I­
lions also perpetuated acts of violence upon residents-intrusions ittlo
their JIlOSt privatc and personal spaccs-that cxpb illed some residents'
open hostility to reasonably helpful envirollfnental health interventions
(after all, this particular intervention provided llseful information on the
secure storage and dispensing of drinking water). Target families were
well aware of the assumptions about colonia residents' excremental vio­
lations underlying the design of the in tervention. It was this, more than
the lessons of the intervention itself (which residents all largely agreed
WdS useful), to wh ich reside n ts 0 bjected.
Residents expressed their hostility to the intervention by indicat­
ing their awareness of city residents' imagining of colonia residents as
self-soiling, a characterization thar extended to all colonia residents ir­
respective of their actual sani tation practices and physical facilities. As
one participanr acidly pointed out, "People think we are poor because
we live in colonias, and in Mexico only poor people do nOl have water
or plumbing." She weut 011 to provide a counternarrative of Mexican
hygiene; Mexicans, she asserted, arc hypervigilant of cleanliness because
to be poor in Mexico "is one thing, to be dirty is another." Another
resident, after wldly receiving my assistant, declared: "You people don't
know how we live here. You just think you do." He then described how
his family was well aware of the dangers of dirty hands, dirty bathrooms,
aud so forth-knowledge, he said, that the intervention presumed he
lacked.
An interview with one of the intervention's promoters was particu­
larly telling. Over the course of a long afternoon, this promoter told me
,
i,
.\1
~
I,
'!
~
"
1l1e1dp/;ori( F/lrichmmt (//ul Mauriall'olJrl"t)' I 119
how powerless she felt to comba t the powerflll normative discourse
that had convened her into a colollia resident. Like many of her neigh­
bors, before moving to the colonia, she had never before lived without
plumbing or city-supplied water. She had grown up in Amarillo, lexas,
and had moved to.El Paw with her husband, who wantcd to be closer to
his family in Juarez. Although she and her husband had prepared them­
selves [or the physical hardships of homesteading by planning before
their move how ro secure drinking water, they found themsel yes shocked
at the presumptions about Lolonia rcsidcn ts that they regularl y eilCOUll- "
tered Oil 1heir trips to the city, in the local media, or from their children's
experiences in the local public schools. Much of this sensation, she
recalled, W;L~ vague-she could not pinpoint its source. However, with
sOl11e rduct:lllCe, she confessed I hat rhe lnf('I"/J('lIflll/l itself had proven
decisively to her that those who did not live in colonias regarded colonia
residems ::IS lacking a IXL~ic sanitary code uf behaviol. Uti ring the course
of her [faini ng :IS :l. prol11oter, she found hersd f strllggling fIn distance
from tbe normati ve notion of the typical colonia resident. At the same
time, she eagerly sought 10 appropriate the tools that could help stich
residents overcome the behaviors that had so stigmatized them and the
largcr space in which they rill Jived. She admitted that she had embraced
the horror of her neighbors' putative hygienic violations, which then
did not bear up upon actual encounter with man y residen ts themselves.
Tu be sure, she assured tile, there were certainly some residents whose
sanitary behaviors and conditions she felt cuuld benefit from the inter­
vention's lessons, but ['Ir fewer than she had imagined. Moreover, she
encountered great variation among her neighbors. While somc of them
were indeed quite poor, many were lIot and were in fact more solidly
lower-middle-class, like her and her family.
Strategic Appropriation of'Colonii'''
,/
\
III the mid-1990s, residents in colonias knew that they remained suspect
of self·soi I ing long after infrastructure installations. The spatial logic
had become tautological, revealing how the violence of rhetoric takes on
materia I fo rce. [n iti ally, the presence of sci f-soil in g defined coloni::ls as
distinct spaces. Nonetheless the persistent efforts to redraw the bound­
aries of colonias outside of oneself were Ilot the only response to what
Sit va (1998) calls the process of colonialization. Some embraced the
language of uneven developmen t ::Ind in so doi ng sOllght to upset the
process that created colonias; they appropriated the term "colonia" as
160 / SflmlJ !Jill
parr of a strategy for r~killg control over the very excrclllelltallJroblems
rh;ll created the sp(l(ial sligma of colull ias. They cllg;tged ill what Ibkhri Il
(1968) called displaced abjcclion--the appropriation of oppressive dis­
course for subversive political ends. As federal monies began to How
(award the border for infrasCl"ucture improvemeIHs in colonias, in the
miu-1990s, t encountered greater discussion about whether areas that
had traditionally not been called "colonias" might now call themselves
colonias. Some noncolonias began to call themselves colonias to stake a
claim on federal funding that could greatly benefit border communities
lacking a significant tax base for public works and social services expen­
ditures. While securing welfare state largesse would hardly seem to be a
subversive undertaking, in the context of the highly charged altHosphere
that had so tainted colollias as sites of excremental violation, it indeed
takes a certai n bravery to willingly appropriate the term. And those
who did so only did so with the confidence that they could control its
meaning-i n other words. they intended to sever the term from its ex­
cremental origins and in so doing rcsigllifY the space of colonias while
resignifying themselves.
The discussion reached Sunland Park, New Mexico. an incorporated
com muni ty abutting EI Paso's western city Iimils, in the fall of 1994.
Unlike a colonia, Sunland Park had been platted bl:Jore lots were sold.
Its streets were laid out on a Ileat grid. residents enjoyed water, sewemge,
and electricity, and most lived along paved streets. Nonctheless residellts
wondered if they undid their ankles of incorporation whether they
might be cI igible for some "colonia" funds. Olle evening jlJ the fall of
J994 at a crowded meeting of rhe Concerned Citizens of Sunland Park,
one resident cOllllllented, "Somas llIas una colonia que city!" (We are
more a colonia thall a city]. Well aware that colollias had a distinct and
negative notoriety a.~sociatcd wilh excrelnental poll ution, the concerned
citizens nonetheless deba ted whether the designation could help rhem
defeat what they viewed as their corrupt city hall anJ hring federal help
for their principal environmental concern, a hazardous-waste landJill
operating adjacent to one of the city's wells. Sunland Park residents
expressed their willingness to appropriate the term precisely because of
its associations with emuent waste, but only because they felt they could
turn those assuciariolls to their advantage. Key, however. in this appro­
priation was the source of water pollution. The contamination that they
feated ill thei r drinking water did not stem from the presumed habits
of individual households but rather calTle from the actions of a suspect
/I,h-Itfp/}or;r /;;II'illm1('1l1
{/Jl({
Mfllni(t! !'(J/}f'l't] / !<l1
waste m;magernent compaJI y. Implicitly acknowleJging (h;H "colonias"
were auolll POll11l iOI1, rhe)' cOllsidered cd\il1g lheir COll1II\Ulli ly a colonia
to close down a polluting agent.
On other occasions in tbeir dTorr to obtaill bureaucratic redress for
their lack of infrastructure, colonia residellts vigorously identified them­
selves as colonia residellts. They did so, like the COllcerneJ Citizens of
Sunland Park, by externalizing the origin and continued source of coJo­
nia sanitation and poilu tioll problems, by in effect strivi ng to politicize
uneven devdopmen t and tum r he attcl1 tion back 01l1O the class interests
underlying colollias. For example, in August 1994, a group of around
thirty re.sidents of Sparks, one of the coullty's best-known colonias,
turned up at a counry commissiollers meeting to protest the- proposed
sale oftots nonh of the intersmte highway. While the developer c::lrefully
referred to his propenies ::IS "lTliniEtrms," (he Sp;nks rcsidrl1ts boister­
ously called the real eSlate a (01011 i". They raisrd concerns abollt rhe
health of prospecri ve lot purchasers, a.~senillg rhe colin ty's Illoral obliga­
tion to prevent the proliferation of more llllsanit;ny serdelllenrs. 111 so
duing, these colonia residen ts could wi flingly embrace the cerln. \X!h ile
they had not necessarily flf."tual(y serar" red rhemselves from their wastes,
colol1 i'l
they had dOlle so symbol ically by attributing the problem
excremen t to its origillS, 110( t he colonia resideills hut lhe hure;Hlcrars,
elected officials, anJ developers who had made, and could contil1ue to
make, coloni<ls in the first place.
or
CONCLUSION
Many have commenred ,hat the contemporary moment's extensive onto­
logical reworking of borders-the dcbordering and rebordering, as Staudt
and Spener (1998) put it-calls for mure than descriptions of "transverse
borders," but instead a wholly new epislemology of borders :lIld bound­
~ries (see especially Price 2000). Borders need to be unJerstood as not
Simply productions of :1Il innate, strtlctllfal hum;!lJ tendency to deploy
what Mary Douglas (191l1l) calls "pollution rules" to mark sociallirnits
when a social UHler feels itself under attack. Ceriaillly, pollution rules
seem to have risen to the {orc in El Paso County, as din and disease were
the primary symbols that made culunias into distinct spaces to delimi(
the otherwise vague borderlands. And as Dough~ su astutely observed,
there does seem to be somerh ing parriclllarly compelling abollt dirt-as
matter Oll t of pIKe-that serves to mark the temporal and spatial lim­
its of modernity. The hallmark of Westerll civiliz:uiufl, llOled Norbert
-
... _.....
!()2 I Samh !Jilf
Elias,
is the ~bilit}' to separale oneself from oJ\l;~'s boJily waste (Elias
sewers both define rhe Third World and harken
back to the nineteenth century (Reid 199t), their contemporary presence
seelllS irrefutable evidence of significant social differellCe becwccn those
who have perfected the illdividual and collective care of the self and
those who h:we not.
1978). Because Opell
Nonclhcless it is vi tally important to recogniU:" the particular materi­
al processes of uneven developrnenr that enlivened the discourses of dirt
and disease that came to [l)ark El Paso's border in the mid-J')8os, and to
pay attentioJl to how those discourses became constitutive of uneven
development itself. In this we may obtain a more effective epistemologi­
cal grasp On the formation of new borders and rhe means for subveni1lg
Ihem Ollto]ogic:ally. Ironically, the material impoverishmclH suffered by
rna ny su burball res iden ts of E[ Paso COUll ty became the means by wh i ch
the meraphors of the border becnme so enriched, Colonia discourse,
because it emerged from processes of wealth accumulation that disad­
vantaged poor suburban residents, obstructed cololl ia residents' access'
(0 the most tr:1l1sfotmative visions of the border mct::lphor, that which,
as Chela Sandoval writes, "self-consciously transfonn [s] ... identity" in
a way that "maneuvcrs, poetically transfigures, and orchestrates wI! iJe
demanding alienation, perversion, and reformation in both spectators
and practitioners" (1991, 3, 15). So long as colonia residents are subjected
to rhe spatial label of colon ias and rhe predacory ptactices of teal estate
development, they will have only limited access co the transformativc
material and discursive possibilities that the border's indeterminacy
holds. So lung as they remain imprisoned in llorm3rive illlagin ings of
themselves as unrelenti ngly, statically dirty Mexicans, wrongly positiuned
Oil the north side of the border, they will remain on the downside of ma­
terial power. But, as the closing section of this chapter illustrates, colonia
residen ts may just be bcginning CO upset rhe colun ia balance of power.
NOTES
I am grateful 10 Jeff M..skovsky and to participants in the Eighteenth Latin
American l.abor I lislory Conference, particularly my commentators Danny
James and Anure Horton, For their careful reading of earlier versions of this
chapter. (And I offer my apologies for ohstinately failing to heed all of their
suggestions.) [ also Ihank Megan Reynolds for her encouragement and contri­
hutions to SOI11C of this :uticle's substantive points.
_._ ... ----- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - _ . _ - - - - - - ­
Mellll'hm-ir b/rilhmenl rwd Mlr/crill! PovalY / J(jJ
J . There is 1I0W extenSive III forlll<llioll availnhk 011 colonias, iJlc1lldillg doz­
en.1 or sLUdie", rcpons. and Web reSOUlces. produced hy agencies ranging from
Ihe EI Paso Co IIIIII till it Y FOLl nd" cioll alld the' Jexas Arto mey General's Office to
the Lyndon B. Juhnsol1 School of Public Affairs and Ihe U.S. Department of
HOllsing alld Urhan Development.
2. A note Oil methodology: George Towers's (1991) thurough comuing of
the 10c:!1 newspapers nchived 011 microfilm yielded the rich rderence list on
which my historical invesrigation is b:lsed.
3. Prior to 1987, while 110r all unkllown term to EI ['aso newspaper read­
ers, "colonia" carricd 110 particular social 01 sparial significllioJl and cetrainly
no soci:ll stigma in EI Paso; il was a lerm. if recognizcd ;11 all, as sumcthing that
referred to spaces across the border in CiuJaJ Ju.ire7., where until the early ty80s
"colonia" simply lllealH neighborhood 01 Cl1 III 11111 llilY. In her, JlI~r('z's 1110.11 elite
mhdivision of 111" I'J(,O.~ alld 1970S was l1:1n1('<1 "Colon;;1 LI1S Nogales." The
tern I'S !Ilca ui 11 g sh ifted in .I \l~i le7. w II ell the ci t y',I POPl1l al i<)[l 1,00111 cd all (1 til e 1'[ t L
(Mexico's IOllglil!\e ruling party) lost conlrol of land allocatioll. Beginni Ilg in the
19S0S, impoverished settlements organized by maverick political brokers prolif­
erated Oil the ci t y edges. As l.hese selr1cllKIHs ha vc aII hee n called '\:u10l\i as," "co­
lonia" has come ro refer specifically to wor1{illg-dass or !,oor sett!clllctlIS. Thus,
ror somc lillie now, developel's jJl Limbl .Jtdrc7. h:we Gilled their fully serviced
subdivisions "fwccion:lInientos" (which ([~nslares lirer~lI)' as "subdivision") to
l1lake clear to (1f<lsp<:ctivc huyers thai I hey arc pllrcha.ling ICli estale ill 11Iiddle­
class neighborhoods, rather than ill workillg-Lhl.~s "colonias" (I lill 2UOU).
4. This imagcry lws calmued alrclitioll 1101 only locally bn t nariollally. From
rhe moment of their naming, in these early 1987 accounts, colonias quickly bursl
their boundaries ro becoillc a problem of ll~tiol1al cOllcern. In August 1987, the
Washington Post feattlred a he:l{l!ining story clHided "£1 Paso's Perimeter of
Poverty," and Newsweek. N Be's loday Show, alltl Lift lllaga'l.inc soon ran fea~
lures Oil colonias. \'Virhill "1(lIlIhs C()llglt..~.~ allllOlIlll'ed plans to hold hearings
to learn the magnitude of the "colonia problem" un the border, The border is
111 ade alid remade in the period ic teru 1'1\, by 11 a Ii (lila I IT1CJ ia ou tlets, to col un ias.
III April 1995, the Nf7l f }ork Ttmr.r publislJ(;(1 a lenglhy feature on colollias, and
in Ocrober of thai year, CBS's Sixty. Minutes broadcasl ;1 seglll<:l1t Oil colonias in
EI Paso Coun ty.
5, lypjcal headlines rail: "City, COUlIt}' Discuss Plans to COl1uol Subdivi­
sion Sales" (El Pa.50 Hemld 1'O.\l, 17 April 1980); "Dt"vd0l'ers outside El )aso Are
l~rgeted" (f?! Pasn Times, 22 July 1982); "City Begins Subdivision Crackdown"
(El Paso Times, 2. July 1983); "City hies Lawsuit over Subdivisions' Failure 10
Conform" (El Paso Herald Post, 2. July 19& j); "El I'asu Targels Illegal Subdivi­
si()ns~ (El Paso Herald Post, 21 february '9&4); "CiIY Moves In on Developers
outside City Lilllits" (EI Pas!! TimeJ. 11 July 1984).
G. This is e.5ped311y clear ill the Herald Posts f04-page supplement, pu(,­
lished in Ihe summer of 1983, which devoted one-third
;l~ coverage to Ihe
or
1M / Sfllf1!J /lilt
tupir.: of "illegal aliens." One story documented Mcxic<ll1 American violeTH.:e
agaim t "i II egal alkns" who crossed the ri vcr in to the preuulll ina 11 rJ y poo r, H is­
pan it neighborhoods of So uth EI Paso, alld others featured corn plain ts aho u t
illeg'll al iens by several of Ihe city's leading Mexican Amcri<.:am. Nnionally
known historian Os<.:ar l\hrdnez stated baldly that the illegal "affects and hurt~
the image or dre llispanic ht~t'e" (l::t !'mo f-1el"dfd l'mt, SUJIllllcr Jy1l3, ::'-1).
7. This fUJlding r.:ame t1uough the declaration of colonia;; as "economically
distressed areas" (EDAJ» and has been appropriated to coJonias all along the
'Jcxas border, not just in EI Paso County. See Ward J999.
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