In the United States, a colonia is a type of unincorporated, low-income, slum area located along the Mexico–United States border region that emerged with the advent of shanty towns.
The colonias consist of peri-urban subdivisions of substandard housing lacking in basic services such as potable water, electricity, paved roads, proper drainage, and waste management.United States Department of Housing and Urban Development. State Community Block Grants: Colonias. Washington DC: U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Retrieved March 6, 2014 Often situated in geographically inferior locations, such as former agricultural floodplains, colonias suffer from associated issues like flooding.Neal, D. E., Famira, V. E., & Miller-Travis, V. (2010). Now is the Time: Environmental Injustice in the U.S. and Recommendations for Eliminating Disparities (pp. 48–81). Washington DC: Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.
Furthermore, urbanization practices have amplified the issues, such as developers stripping topsoil from the ground to subdivide land, and the resulting plains then become breeding grounds for mosquitoes and disease. Traditional homeownership financing methods are rare among colonia residents and so the areas consist of ramshackle housing units that are built incrementally with found material on expanses of undeveloped land.Dabir, S. (2001). Hardship and hope in the border colonias. Journal of Housing & Community Development, 58(5), 31. Colonias have a predominant Latino population, and 85 percent of those Latinos under the age of 18 are United States citizens. The U.S. has viewed border communities as a place of lawlessness, poverty, backwardness, and ethnic difference.
Despite economic development, liberalization, intensification of trade, the strategic geographic location of the southern U.S. border region does not stop it from being one of the poorest in the nation. Most cases had shown that its communities formed after landowners illegally sold and subdivided rural lands, often to buyers who did not understand the terms under which this land was being sold. The contract for deed through which plots were offered by land developers often had false promises that utilities would be installed.
The majority of the communities have no water infrastructure and lack wastewater or sewage services. Where sewer systems exist, there are no treatment plants in the area, and untreated wastewater is dumped into arroyos and creeks that flow into the Rio Grande or the Gulf of Mexico.
More than 2,000 colonias are identified within the U.S. The highest concentration is in the Rio Grande Valley, Texas, with others in New Mexico, Arizona, and California. Evidence suggests that in 2007 there were more than 1,800 designated colonias in Texas, around 138 in New Mexico, 77 in Arizona, and 32 in California. These settlements are part of an informal sector or informal economy that is not bound by the structures of government regulations within labor, tax, health and safety, land use, environmental, civil rights, and immigration laws.
Etymology The Spanish word colonia means a 'colony' or 'community'. In Mexican Spanish, it is specifically a 'residential quarter [of a city]', and a colonia proletaria is a shantytown.Collins Spanish-English Dictionary, online, s.v. In Spanglish, the English-Spanish mix, colonia began to be used to refer primarily to Mexican neighborhoods about thirty years ago. A 1977 study uses the term colonia to describe rural desert settlements with inadequate infrastructure and unsafe housing stock.Lyndon Baines Johnson School of Public Affairs. 1997. Colonia Housing and Infrastructure 1 "Current Characteristics and Future Needs"; 2 "Water and Wastewater"; Policy Research Report no. 124; vol 3, Regulatory Issues and Policy Analysis. Austin: University of Texas. Since these Hispanic neighborhoods were less affluent, the word also connoted poverty and substandard housing.404 In the 1990s, colonias became a common American English name for the slums that developed on both sides of the Mexico–United States border.
The history of the word colonias in the United States, and its interpretation through politics, suggests that places called colonias are not to be perceived as natural or prosperous communities. In many parts of Texas, Spanish-language terms are often used to frame and highlight a class difference.Vila, P. (2000) Crossing borders, reinforcing borders: social categories, metaphors, and narrative identities on the U.S.–Mexico frontier. University of Texas Press, Austin. The term colonia is an essential symbol for public policy in the United States, and this Spanish name is a critical component for constructing public and policy attention, underscoring the settlements' differences and labeling them as racialized and distinct places, which has a powerful way of constructing and reinforcing marginality.Wilson, D. (1996) Metaphors, growth coalitions, and black-poverty neighborhoods in a U.S. city. Antipode 28.1, 72–97.Wilson, D. and H. Bauder (2001) Discourse and the making of marginalized people. Journal of Economic and Social Geography 92.3, 259–61.
Definition Section 916 of the Cranston–Gonzalez National Affordable Housing Act (1990) (NAHA) defines colonias as any "identifiable community" determined by objective criteria that include the lack of potable water and adequate sewage systems, the lack of decent, safe, and sanitary housing, and which were in existence before the passage of the Act. According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the term colonias has a specific meaning within the U.S., referring to a community within the rural Mexico–U.S. border region with marginal conditions related to housing and infrastructure. Other definitions and criteria for a colonia are used by the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the Texas Code.
History Researchers traced the first colonias in Texas to the 1950s and early 1960s.Cisneros, Ariel. "Texas Colonias." Housing and Infrastructure Issues. Dallas Fed, June 2001. Web. March 19, 2014. These appeared as an informal housing solution for low-income predominantly Hispanic wage-earners through a model referred to by scholars as the "incremental approach". Due to the rise of the maquiladora industry—foreign-owned factories in Mexico creating goods for export—the border population quickly grew and in 1965 created a housing shortage for these workers. The overlap of four variables attributed to the development of colonias: high demand from a population of low-income wage earners meeting a low supply of affordable housing, a supply of low-cost and fruitless land, the absence of regulations on the subdivision of that land, and a legal way for that land to be sold to individuals. Land developers began purchasing low-value land in peri-urban areas where strict enforcement of housing and environmental laws was either weak or nonexistent. During this period the sale of rural lands without basic housing policies was lawful. Colonias were hidden from view due to physical isolation and properties were divided into small lots, which would be bought by low-income families via contracts for deed. These deals, which sold unimproved lots, included undocumented and thus unenforceable promises to provide basic provisions such as water, sewage, and electricity.Delgado, Richard. "Rodrigo's Twelfth Chronicle: The Problem of the Shanty." Geo. LJ 85 (1996): 667. Because these deals lacked a foreclosure period or buyer's protection, any property that was not paid in full could be repossessed and resold by the sellers, who retained title for the land and were allowed to keep all payments the buyer had made. As more dwellings appeared with minimal infrastructure, the value of the land decreased and ultimately became more affordable as a living option for low-income families on the border.
Colonia communities grew rapidly in the 1990s when the number of residents almost doubled from 1990 to 1996. This can be subject to the effects of globalization and the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994, which industrialized the Mexico–United States border, created many jobs,"Legal Issues in New Mexico's Colonias Report." Environmental Justice Issues (2010): 1–72. Web. February 27, 2014. and encouraged migration."Globalization." Merriam-Webster, n.d. Web. May 7, 2014. People shifted from traditional agricultural labor to work in transportation, construction, and manufacturing. This led to an increased informality of U.S. housing, with colonias forming and growing because of the border's strategic location and trade liberalizations.Cesar, Rodriguez A., and Boaventura De Sousa Santos. Law and Globalization from Below: Towards a Cosmopolitan Legality. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2005. Print. However, due to the lack of financial mobility, colonia residents face significant challenges escaping the colonia bubble. In June 1996, the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs successfully obtained a waiver from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to set new housing-standards for colonias."Colonia Housing Standards (CHS)." Colonia Housing Standards. Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs, n.d. Web. March 21, 2014. The resulting standards provided a basis for safe and sanitary housing to alleviate the existing health risks. These standards are necessary for economic development in colonias because unsafe infrastructures and lack of education and jobs inhibit their growth.Donelson, Angela J., and Adrian X. Esparaza. "The Colonias Reader." Economy, Housing, and Public Health in U.S. Mexico Border Colonias. The University of Arizona Press, 2010. Web. May 7, 2014.