Written for The Texas Observer legislative blog "Floor Pass."
Manuela Luna’s colonia near Mercedes, Texas is no suburban paradise. Spanish Palms, a small low-income community of 25 people, lacks paved roads, but at least there’s running water, electricity and septic systems on the inhabited lots — basic services absent at many of the hundreds of other colonias along the Texas-Mexico border. Luna pays about $200 a month for her half-acre lot and the mobile home she’s lived in since 1997.
Spanish Palms is a step up from the first colonia lot Luna bought in 1979. Back then, unscrupulous developers haphazardly carved up cheap rural land and sold lots to low-income buyers without the usual legal niceties or the basic services expected in subdivision development.
Luna is worried that legislation filed by one border lawmaker could undo much of the progress she’s seen in her life. Read more.