Bobby Cervantes

Scholarly and popular accounts of the US-Mexico border, one of the most contentious geopolitical divides, often depict nearby communities as caught between clashing nations. Yet, such framing obscures both countries’ far-reaching policy collaborations that have structured vast inequality as a condition of local life. This project historicizes the thousands of chronically under-resourced Texas border communities (las colonias) where today a half-million people live in one of the greatest concentrations of American poverty. Through property records, oral histories, and government archives, it explores how mid-twentieth-century landowners devised extra-legal schemes targeting Mexican migrant workers. It further contends that over the several decades when the once-small migrant settlements transformed into ready-made housing markets, the United States and Mexico initiated broad economic liberalization policies that accelerated colonia construction. Ultimately, the project explains how workers, landowners, and state actors made the Texas colonias a transnational institution of poverty and profit in the modern US-Mexico borderlands.

“Las Colonias: An American History” is the most extensive historical account of the chronically poor, predominantly rural Texas communities on the US-Mexico border. Among the most extreme concentrations of poverty in North America, las colonias have grown briskly in the shadows of the US Southwest’s cities since the 1940s. While California, Arizona, and New Mexico also have colonias, Texas leads in number and size: more than 3,000 colonias are recognized in its southern and western border counties. Nearly one million Mexican-Americans, a working-poor and intergenerational society, live in these subsistence-built communities that often lack basic services on plots purchased via exploitative contracts. Yet, their colonias represent a degree of social sovereignty and property ownership that eludes many poor Americans, especially in racialized and migrant populations. Drawing on property records, oral histories, and binational government archives, the project explores how twentieth-century landowners devised extra-legal schemes targeting Mexican migrant workers. It further contends that as once-small migrant settlements transformed into ready-made housing markets, the United States and Mexico initiated broad economic liberalization policies that accelerated colonia construction. Overall, it reveals how las colonias in Texas have become the exemplar of transnational Latino poverty and profit in the modern US-Mexico borderlands.