The Colonias: Outside the Water Line
Near Mcallen, Texas
Drive north or east from McAllen along any county road and eventually the pavement ends. The paved road gives way to caliche, which is the calcium-rich gravel that the Valley uses in place of asphalt when asphalt isn't budgeted. The caliche gives way to packed dirt. And somewhere along that dirt road, if you look at the houses, you will see a pattern: small homes built in stages, cinder block mixed with older wood sections, satellite dishes on the roof, no water main running to the street.
These are the colonias. The Spanish word simply means neighborhoods, but in South Texas it has a specific legal and economic meaning. A colonia is an unincorporated subdivision that was sold, usually through a contract-for-deed arrangement rather than a conventional mortgage, to low-income buyers who were promised utilities that were never installed. The practice accelerated in the nineteen fifties and continued through the nineteen eighties. Land developers subdivided property outside city limits specifically because they faced fewer requirements there. They sold lots to working families, often farmworkers and maquiladora employees, who built homes incrementally over years and decades.
Texas had an estimated five hundred thousand colonia residents living in more than two thousand colonias as of the early two thousands. Hidalgo County has the heaviest concentration. About sixty-five percent of colonia residents were born in the United States.
The infrastructure gaps have been real and serious. Many colonias have lacked potable water service, treating water from tanks hauled by truck or drawing from shallow wells. Sewage disposal has historically relied on septic systems of varying quality, with untreated wastewater sometimes reaching drainage ditches and ultimately the river. Federal recognition came with the nineteen ninety Cranston-Gonzalez Act, which directed Community Development Block Grant funds toward colonia infrastructure, an acknowledgment that a modern American city had, for decades, allowed a shadow city to grow at its edges without the services that American cities take for granted. Conditions have improved unevenly since then.
