WESLACO, Texas, April 30 (UPI) -- The Rio Grande Valley in spring is already all heat and haze and humidity. Texans move rapidly from cooled home to car to office and you wonder how on Earth early settlers lived without air conditioning. But there are modern Texans living without it, and without electricity, running water or drainage, too.
They are usually recent immigrants, Mexicans who have made it, often illegally, across the Rio Grande and the fortified and patrolled border that lies just a few miles to the south of Weslaco and Texas A & M University, where I spoke to John Robinson, an agricultural economist.
"It's not really a valley, it's a delta" said Robinson, and so it seems. The land is flat, utterly without relief, and, where sprawling industrial development has not taken hold, is irrigated and green and farmed with sugar, corn, cotton and citrus fruit. These are crops that for the most part enjoy a subsidy or quota protection (in the case of sugar) from the federal government.
It must be tough to work those fields, especially between April and October, in the heavy heat. But there are people who are willing to do it.
The same people are looking for land themselves, land on which to build a first home in this country.
In San Carlos, a small town near Weslaco, a sign spiked into a muddy field announces Frontera Heights with "Owner financing with $500 down."
"Sometimes you see $100 down payment, or even $1," says Veronica Villarreal, who's generally called Ronnie. She works for Texas A&M in a state-funded program that involves teaching people in the area about nutrition, food safety or how to sow, for sowing can provide an income.
Ronnie is driving me and her colleague, Melida Ochoa, on small roads through the hot fields in the pleasantly cool car.
"Some of those lots are bought several times," says Ochoa. "That´s what the 'owner financing' means. The landowner finances the deal and then if the payments aren't kept up, he takes back the land. The buyers lose everything."
The low price will attract buyers even if the land is without electricity or running water. Frontera Heights, however, claims "underground electric" and "water meter included." The homes there and in other colonias, as these developments outside city limits are called, aren't all basic, but many of them are.
"They build them themselves," Ochoa says, "they start with a little shack in the back and then try to build something better up front."
A shack that looks as though it might be for a lawn mower and a few tools: it is a home. An old trailer, its paint peeling, its mobile days long gone, parked now in a field and surrounded some yards away by a wire fence: It, too, is a home, standing less than proudly on its own plot of land. To most Americans, this is Third World squalor.
The homes begin with a sale. A farmer, usually, sells some land to a developer. "They will sell the least good land, land, say, that's liable to flood," says Robinson. The developer then divides up the land into lots and looks for buyers, people who are willing to set up home outside any city limits.
In Britain, where this writer comes from, you couldn't do this. Any building requires permission from the local government and would not be granted if neither electricity nor running water were available. But in Texas the sales have taken place and are taking place.
"It's partly a Texas thing, partly a border thing," says Robinson, "this uncontrolled development."
Sometimes it offends the environment, sometimes the eye. It goes ahead. What sort of America is it building?
"The young ones don't have respect. Parents are losing control of their children. They are very young, they are still not brought up themselves. I work with teenage pregnancies and I don't agree with that," says Ochoa as we drive up to the community center of San Carlos, a small town near Weslaco.
About 50 women are sitting in a waiting area. We speak to Yolanda Martinez, who is involved with providing health care. "One pediatrician gives his services free to us," she says.
"A church in Harlingen (Texas) is thinking about helping us with the cost of medical attention and drugs for adults."
I ask if many of the people using the services are "undocumented:" that is to say, illegally present in the United States. "About 45 percent of them" Martinez replies.
"Isn´t it stressful for them, worrying about whether the INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) might come one day and deport them?"
"They like to keep a low profile," she says.
"We give classes sometimes, gynecological or nutritional," Ronnie adds, "and we ask them to write their names and addresses down, but only if they want to. They are afraid to identify themselves. They ask, 'What is this list for?'"
"What rights do they have?" I ask.
"They have property rights," Ochoa says, "The INS can't come on to their property unless someone has called up. Then they're obliged to investigate."
"Sometimes if they have a fight, they shop one another," Ronnie adds.
"And if they are deported?" I ask.
"They lose everything, everything they've worked for and paid for," Ochoa says.
The life of the illegal immigrant seems to me a horribly insecure one, vulnerable to land sharks and to the authorities and even each other and struggling to establish themselves in communities that are poor and sometimes troubled.
"There were two gangs," Ronnie adds," but now there's mostly the Texas Chicano Brotherhood. They have shoot-outs, mostly over drugs."
"Is there much drug-trafficking?"
"Oh yes, the INS and the police are always catching them," the women say.
"There are drugs in the elementary schools. You can buy roaches for a dollar." Ronnie adds. "They get them in Mexico."
"Roaches" are benzodiazepines, 10 times as potent as Valium, sometimes deliberately slipped into alcoholic drinks to reduce another person's inhibitions.
On the other side of the valley, Mexico has drugs and alcohol problems, too, yet it seems a world away. The Mexican family is often strong. The respect of which Ochoa speaks is more firmly rooted, especially in the countryside and smaller towns where old communities retain their cohesion. Do the Mexicans who cross to struggle for a new life in the United States regret doing so?"
"No," Martinez replies firmly, "even with all the problems, they prefer it here. They can earn money. They feel they are getting somewhere. They don´t want to go back."
But what about the other side of the equation? The impact of immigration on the United States. That is something through history which colonists have never thought much about: the impact on the colonized country.
"Readers will ask what good the immigration does for America," I say to the women.
"Americans won't do the work we´ll do," Martinez says, "working in the fields, waiting on table, cleaning. We'll do it. They won't."
Martinez and Ochoa both know about the work in the fields. They did it as children.
"I used to hate that, traveling up to Indiana in the summer to work the fields there with my family," says Martinez. "Sometimes we would go in April and wouldn´t get back till December. I would hear from my friends about what they had done in the summer. I would miss that."
Ochoa recalls similar experiences. "The farmer would provide one-room houses and we would go up there. We would work from early to late and have some schooling in the evening. There wasn't much time for fun. It was hard."
This was something new to me: not just migrant men but migrant families following the agricultural work about the country and then returning to the valley. The women say it happens less now but has not disappeared entirely. The Texas Migrant Council has teachers, they say, who will follow the children north, to bring some continuity to their education.
Huge difficulties and many contradictions. A few miles away from our conversation the Border Patrol, whose numbers have increased several fold in the past decade, is keeping watch, trying to prevent illegal crossing of the border. And then, in the colonias, more government spending tries to help those who have entered to establish themselves and integrate. Those giving the help are the children of former immigrants a generation or two ago and now bastions of the community.
Fields to be worked in the blazing sun. A shack in a field as a home. The new Texans are not unlike those who came a century or more before to begin farming here. The country of immigrants keeps receiving them. Still its opportunity beckons. The children of the immigrants will be Americans and will share in the new country's promise.
Throw open the border and tens of millions of Mexicans would join them. For it is in a trailer in a Texas field, and not in their own vast country, that Mexicans see opportunity. History suggests their judgment is right.
Inside Mexico is a weekly column in which our international economics correspondent reflects on the country in which he lives part of the time. Comments and story suggestions please to icampbell upi.com.
