“Community First, Us Second”: Shining a Public Light on Texas Colonias

Please join us today, August 1, 2024 at 1:00 PM EST for the Rural Assembly Everywhere annual online gathering. Part of the program will focus on the Rio Grande Valley. We will share some of the stories collected during Rural Assembly’s visits to the region.

If you are unable to join us today, the event will be archived and available to watch online at a later date.

When Cristela Gonzalez Rocha returned to her home in Hidalgo County, Texas, at night, it was pitch black. There were lights on in her neighbors’ windows, but nothing lit up the street except the headlights of her car. She lives in a “colonia,” a rural neighborhood on the edge of the city that has no streetlights.

Colonias were first built as affordable housing for orchard and farm workers in the Rio Grande Valley. Developers divided the former farmland and sold lots, but often did not provide basic elements of public infrastructure typically taken for granted, such as sewer or septic systems, electricity, paved roads, drainage and public lighting. According to the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs, an estimated 150,235 people live in 937 colonias throughout Hidalgo County.

But González Rocha is hopeful that her neighborhood will get streetlights next year. She’s an organizer with La Unión del Pueblo Entero (LUPE), a local union founded in 1989 by farmworker leaders Dolores Huerta and César Chavez. For the past seven years, she’s helped Colonia residents petition Hidalgo County to install public streetlights. Now it’s her turn.

“I got involved because where I live in Colonia, we still don’t have public electricity,” she told the Daily Yonder. “My daughters ask me, ‘Mom, why did you leave us last?’ And I say, ‘The community first, and then us, right?'”

The lack of basic infrastructure such as streetlights poses very real dangers for people living in colonias. There have been multiple incidents of children living in colonias without streetlights being hit by cars while playing outside or waiting for the school bus. Emergency vehicles sometimes have trouble finding the right home because addresses are not clearly marked or recorded on maps. And people are afraid to walk through their neighborhoods at night.

To get public lighting in their neighborhood, Gonzalez Rocha and her neighbors need to gather three-quarters of Colonia’s residents’ signatures and submit a petition to the Hidalgo County Commission, the governing body of Hidalgo County. The neighbors also need to agree to pay their own electricity bills. If the petition is approved and submitted to the Commission, the street lights will be installed the following year.

This is not an easy process—it takes time and commitment from Colonia residents to garner community support, gather enough signatures, and appear in court—but it is also a reliable legal tool for gaining public attention, the culmination of more than a decade of campaigning and the passage of several state laws.

When pigs fly

The first state law on public lighting in the colonia was passed in 2005. But it was powerless, with neither funding nor enforcement mechanisms.

Martha Sanchez, a recent retiree from LUPE, started working there in 2006. She said she was naive enough to think the problem was solved: When she asked a magistrate judge why none of the colonias had public lighting a year after the law was passed, the judge laughed in her face.

“It woke me up. And I said, ‘So what do we need to do?'” Sanchez told the Daily Yonder. “And he said, ‘If pigs fly, we’ll have public lighting.’ There’s no way the county can afford to put public lighting in Colonia. It’s not going to happen.”

But Sanchez and LUPE aren’t deterred. People in the Rio Grande Valley face many challenges, she said, including poverty, isolation and lack of resources. But she believes collective organizing power is the solution.

“The only way we’re going to create the change that people need to live with more dignity is to organize. That’s our power,” Sanchez said. “People who have been marginalized for generations because they’re poor, because they don’t speak English, because they’re women, because they’re people of color. Our job as organizers is to get people to believe in their own power.”

LUPE organizers knew the county wouldn’t work with them on its own, so they began attending county Magistrate’s Court regularly, wearing matching royal blue bandanas to identify themselves as LUPE members.

“I told them we’re going to be like a tick in your ear every Tuesday,” she said. “We’re going to be here and our leaders are going to voice their needs.”

LUPE members also traveled to Austin to address the state legislature, which ultimately passed a more enforceable and comprehensive law in 2017. This was a turning point for the public lighting campaign because it established a procedure for colonia residents and the county to work together to address the problem — the same procedure González Rocha follows today to install lights in her colonia. Since the law went into effect, an average of five to eight colonias have had public lighting installed each year, bringing the total to about 50 colonias to date.

“The day the bill passed, we went back to the committee and said, ‘Pigs are flying in the air today,'” Sanchez said.

LUPE’s current executive director, Tania Chavez Camacho, says the group is also helping to write rules for the new model subdivisions to ensure that new neighborhoods aren’t built without critical public infrastructure: Developers must provide not only water and electricity, but also paved roads, sewers and streetlights.

However, residents of many colonias that were built before these new rules were enacted still lack access to such basic necessities.

“We’ve come a long way, but there’s still a lot of work to be done,” Chavez Camacho said. “We have to go from colonia to colonia because the counties and the government are not yet ready and are leaving the work to us.”

Please join us today, August 1, 2024 at 1 pm ET for Rural Assembly Everywhere, our annual online gathering. Part of the program will focus on the Rio Grande Valley. We will share some of the stories collected during Rural Assembly’s visits to the region.

If you are unable to join us today, the event will be archived and available to watch online at a later date.

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