Pastor Mendoza has gone to court to push for paved streets. The work still hasn't happened. He puts the high stakes in stark terms, recounting that a sick boy died before an ambulance could reach him about a year ago, delayed by the conditions of the roads. Still, Mendoza clings to an optimistic long view, "Maybe I won't be able to see paved roads during my lifetime," he said during a Sunday service at La Feria Gardens colonia, "but my grandchildren will. From heaven, I'm going to see streets made of gold."
La Feria Gardens sits just outside the official boundaries of La Feria, Texas, in what residents describe as "the Forgotten Colonia." Nobody has stepped forward to take formal leadership, and basic infrastructure improvements have been stalled for years. There are no streetlights. When it rains, the unpaved roads become barriers in the most literal sense. One boy said classmates bully him over the muddy shoes he can't avoid after rain.
This is the landscape of the colonias: not one place, but hundreds of unincorporated subdivisions along the Texas–Mexico border where basic services were missing when families moved in, and in many cases are still missing now.
An estimated half-million people live in the more than 2,300 colonias across South Texas. These neighborhoods, which trace their origin back to the 1950s, form a parallel landscape to Texas' incorporated communities, where families live, work, and raise children, while navigating persistent gaps in water access, sewage treatment, paved roads, lighting, and secure land tenure.
Built Outside the System
In Spanish, "colonia" simply means neighborhood. But along the U.S.–Mexico border, the term carries a specific legal and planning meaning: unincorporated residential subdivisions, often informal communities established outside city limits and on low-lying land, where basic services are missing or incomplete.
Most colonias expanded in the mid-20th century as border populations grew, while affordable housing inside cities fell short. Developers carved up cheap land outside city limits into small lots and marketed them largely to Mexican and Mexican American working families who could manage a small monthly payment, but not a conventional mortgage.
Sales were frequently made through contract-for-deed arrangements that withheld legal title until the last payment and offered few protections for buyers. Developers avoided requirements that would have forced them to install water, sewer, and drainage.
State Representative Terry Canales (D–Edinburg) has argued that the problem is complex and that laws mean little without an enforcement mechanism in place. He pointed out that counties often lack the code-enforcement capacity to police these developments. In 2013, Canales authored House Bill 2091, a Texas Property Code reform aimed at curbing contract-for-deed abuses, following numerous cases where colonias properties were resold again and again while interest accrued, and buyers remained deedless. The reform strengthened penalties and clarified that buyers gain legal ownership once their contract is properly recorded, not after years of payments with nothing to show for it.
But the rules can't undo all of what has already been built.
From Groves to Subdivisions
In the Rio Grande Valley, the landscape still carries the shape of an older economy: irrigation canals, packing sheds, and flat fields that used to be citrus groves. In the early 1900s, developers marketed the region as a transformed frontier—irrigated land with rail access to ship crops North. Citrus became a defining crop, and the Valley's boom depended on labor that was abundant, low-paid, and often precarious.
From 1942 to 1964, the Bracero Program brought Mexican workers to the U.S. to fill WWII agricultural labor shortages. Researchers who study colonias repeatedly link their postwar growth to this period when chronic housing shortages for farmworkers gave way to the emergence of informal settlements when formal housing wasn't available.
After freezes in 1949 and 1951 devastated Valley citrus, more land opened to speculation and subdivision. Large tracts of former agricultural land were split into small lots and sold to families who couldn't access traditional mortgages.
The pivot is simple: First, land is sold as agricultural opportunity; then, it's resold as affordable housing access. The missing piece is the expensive one: infrastructure.
Governing the Gaps
Hidalgo County Precinct 4 Commissioner Ellie Torres has represented more than 400 unincorporated communities since 2019. She described them as rural places marked by "low social economic capacity" but also by "progress," and said she prefers to call them rural communities because "colonias kinda still tends to have a negative connotation."
Torres traced their origins to developers selling "the worst of the lands… the flood zone," often with "minimal standards… no connectivity to drainage… no paved roads… no street lights." She points to 2018 subdivision rules, requiring paved roads, drainage, and lighting—as a pivotal change.
One of her key efforts is the county's streetlight program. In Texas, if 75 percent of property owners in a community sign on, the county pays for the infrastructure and residents split the annual light bill through their property taxes. Such infrastructure investments in turn provide life changing stability and increased quality of life for residents of colonias.
After seven years in office, Torres measures the scale of the task through the slow work of basic services. Her team runs about 24 community cleanups a year. "We've been here seven years," she says, "and we're not even halfway through our list."
The Uneven Reality
In Texas, "colonia" doesn't automatically mean "poor." Though colonia originated as a planning and legal label for border-area informal subdivisions that typically developed without some basic services, conditions vary widely today. Some colonias remain high-need, especially where drinking water or wastewater service is still unserved or underserved, while others have been upgraded over time. Even within a single colonia, households can sit at very different income levels.
Tierra Dorada Colonia in Mission is a clear example of that range. Hidalgo County's official colonia list includes Tierra Dorada, yet real estate listings there look like a conventional subdivision, with homes marketed with city sewer services, paved roads, and newer construction in the neighborhood.
But in other colonias, the gaps are stark. River Road Colonia sits outside city limits and, like many unincorporated colonias in the Rio Grande Valley, doesn't have routine municipal waste management. There's no countywide curbside trash pickup for residents in these areas, which means households have to pay out of pocket for a private hauler if they want weekly collection. When trash service depends on what a family can afford, waste doesn't disappear; it piles up, gets burned, or ends up dumped on the edge of roads and drainage ditches.
In La Frontera Colonia, water is not only a question of infrastructure but of exposure and cost. Long-running concerns range from PCB-contaminated fish in the local canal and reservoir system to household testing that has found arsenic and uranium in drinking water sources in nearby communities—risks that keep the idea of "safe water" uncertain for many families.
For residents like José, that uncertainty becomes a monthly expense: He buys large water tanks just to have something dependable to drink.
Building Power from Within
LUPE (La Unión del Pueblo Entero), a Rio Grande Valley grassroots organization founded in 2003 and headquartered in San Juan, works by going directly into colonias for house meetings where residents lay out a long list of needs and then decide what to prioritize first.
Amber Arriaga-Salinas and Marco Lopez describe their role in guiding that process. They ask people what they are willing to take on, then train these residents in practical advocacy skills like public speaking, teaching who controls what, and step-by-step rules for applying for public lighting. They avoid the paternalist language associated with "aid" in favor of truly empowering local advocates.
"What do you need the most for your colonia?" is often expected to yield one answer—water, drainage, streetlights, paved roads. But one response heard in the colonias was simpler: "Can you put speed bumps so the kids stop racing?"
In places defined as much by what they still lack as by what they've gained, needs don't line up neatly. For some residents, the most urgent fix is not the next major infrastructure project, but a small intervention that changes how a street feels.
Housing from the Ground Up
Oliver De La Garza became executive director of Proyecto Azteca in October 2025. The nonprofit was founded by the United Farm Workers to help farmworkers build affordable homes through "sweat equity": families contributed labor, learned construction skills, and finished the interiors themselves.
Today, the organization runs two programs. One offers 30-year mortgages with 0 percent interest and no down payment. The other, funded by the state, builds homes for free in designated colonias.
De La Garza says federal support has steadily thinned: Where Proyecto Azteca once built 25 homes a year with more than $1 million in funding, it now receives about $300,000. But the bigger problem isn't the money, it's who qualifies. Federal housing guidelines still allow mixed-status families, if the lead applicant is a citizen or legal resident. But the message from Washington has shifted. Applications that meet the guidelines have been put "on hold." "We have not been able to approve any families," De La Garza said. "Zero families."
Other organizations fill different gaps. Proyecto Desarrollo Humano runs community gardens. In Salida Del Sol Estates, residents organized a bingo fundraiser to help a neighbor detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and sent to Mexico.
Fear as Infrastructure
Since the wave of ICE worksite arrests and raids began in the Rio Grande Valley, some businesses have kept their doors shut or shortened hours, a visible sign of how enforcement ripples through local commerce. Local reporting has described customers staying home and employers struggling to keep crews staffed, as fear spreads beyond the people directly targeted and into routine transactions.
Torres frames the immigration climate as something that reaches beyond legal status and into everyday life. Even as a U.S.-born, seventh-generation resident of the Rio Grande Valley, she says she feels exposed to profiling—"because of the color of my skin"—and worries that an encounter with ICE "could happen" to her too.
That fear shows up in small, measurable shifts. Torres says her office used to see lines forming outside the building as early as 8 a.m. for health fairs; now attendance has dropped sharply. The most troubling change, she adds, is seeing people "afraid for themselves and more so for their parents"—turning routine errands, school days, and community meetings into moments threaded with anxiety.
When the Water Stays
In late March 2025, historic flooding swept the Rio Grande Valley, breaking records in Hidalgo and Cameron counties. In flood-prone colonias, with inadequate infrastructure, the damage was severe.
In Green Valley Farms Colonia, the water stayed two weeks. Yadira's home was left structurally compromised. County officials classified it as unlivable and said she had to demolish it before they'd restore electricity. She completed the demolition, and then took paperwork to the planning department showing she was on a priority list for replacement housing. They told Yadira it wasn't enough to reconnect the power. Now she's raising five children in a donated trailer on the same lot, buying fuel to run a generator.
A coalition of grassroots groups and university researchers applied for a major Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) grant created by the Inflation Reduction Act—the Environmental and Climate Justice Community Change Grants, which fund community-driven projects up to $20 million. The proposal, led by ARISE Adelante and Proyecto Azteca with researchers from the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, aimed to bring solar panels for backup power, water improvements, and a disaster shelter to the colonias. It was moving forward, and then the administration changed, and responses stopped. Dr. Marla Pérez-Lugo and Dr. Cecilio Ortiz-Garcia, researchers involved in the effort, say the application has slipped into limbo, part of a broader pattern of EPA environmental justice grants being canceled or frozen in 2025.
The Same Questions, Different Settings
Further up the border, beyond the Rio Grande Valley, the same questions about basic services and follow through surface in a different setting. In Webb County near Laredo, officials broke ground in 2024 on a $7.5 million waterline project for the colonia of La Presa, funded through federal COVID-relief dollars, promising piped water for a community that has long relied on hauled supply.
But resident Carlos Salas said the reality at his home has not changed, as he still buys water to fill a storage tank. He reads the gap between announcements and impact through politics, blaming Democrats for years of inaction and arguing the current administration deserves time. He also pointed back to local power, saying that even when decisions are made in Austin or Washington, "it's not going to be reflected here unless residents organize and push local officials to deliver."
State policy has largely followed a simple logic: prevent new colonias from being created without services, and keep investing—where funding allows—in basic infrastructure for those that already exist.
Despite a common political narrative that frames colonias as "outsider" communities, longstanding state reporting has emphasized that many residents are U.S. citizens, with some households mixed-status and wide variation in work, stability, and opportunity from one colonia to the next.
How does a place become permanent in the lives of the people who live there, while still feeling temporary to the systems around it? That question runs through every colonia conversation, every petition for streetlights, every flooded road that blocks an ambulance.
For now, the people of the colonias continue to build what they can, petition for what they need, and navigate the gap between what the map says and what the ground shows—one street, one storm, one generation at a time.
