Bottom's Up
Cameron Park is the poorest community in America, a Brownsville colonia where people struggle to get by on little more than $4,000 a year. So why are its residents so optimistic?
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"THIS IS THE WAY CAMERON Park used to be," says 56-year-old Gloria Moreno, tapping her fingernail on a snapshot of mesquite and three-foot-tall weeds, which she pulls from a pile of photo albums documenting Cameron Park's progress since the seventies. "Like this. Like a jungle. There were snakes, there were scorpions, there were tarantulas, and at night you could hear the coyotes go like this: auuuu!" The worst was when it rained, says the self-described traditional Mexican wife who metamorphosed into an unflinching activist. When it rained, the children were scolded by bus drivers for climbing on with dirty shoes and had to scrape off the mud at the school's restroom sinks before entering the classroom. When it rained, the excrement rose to the top of the latrines, where the mosquitoes hovered before buzzing around the colonia and feasting on its residents. When it rained, the neighborhood erupted into a chorus of grunting automobile engines as cars and trucks fell prey to the hidden potholes and the chewy mud, their wheels spinning pitifully until the earth gave or a motor broke. If the rain came at three in the morning, the men emerged from their homes in a frenzied rush to park their trucks on the main road outside the colonia. The next morning, the repercussions: a missing battery, slashed tires.
The activism was born of sheer frustration. In its nascent stages, it was a movement shaped by men in guayaberas and cowboy hats, residents of the colonia who were inspired to action when they began to see county officials and other politicos pop into the neighborhood to drum up political support. Maybe their voice—at least their vote—mattered beyond Cameron Park. They joined forces with Valley Interfaith, a church-based, grassroots community group that was working to raise the standard of living for residents across the Rio Grande Valley. They organized meetings in the colonia, where the community president, Fidel Velasquez, diligently learned how to conduct a meeting. On the walls, they hung white paper and spelled out the rules in Spanish: We shall put our politics aside when the meeting begins; we shall maintain our concentration on the central topic; we shall not digress from the issues to discuss personal problems. But it seemed the politicians never lived up to their end of the deal. The Mexican daily newspapers, which covered Cameron Park extensively in the seventies and eighties, speculated that county officials hoped Cameron Park would not develop into a permanent neighborhood because the Brownsville Country Club was about to be constructed not far from the colonia's western boundary.
Moreno, who moved into Cameron Park in 1977, sometimes stood near the back of the room during those meetings, soaking up the lessons about how to approach and speak in front of elected officials. But when the U.S. Department of Agriculture asked the mother of eight to begin organizing nutrition classes for the colonia's residents, she initiated another kind of activism that catered particularly to the needs of women and children. After the nutrition lessons had been imparted to her neighbors, she began working the rest of the colonia by street, which wasn't easy since there were no street signs or addresses at the time. So Moreno pulled out the map she had received when she bought her property and began tracking her progress with a black marker. When an organization that provided health care asked her to find it some clients, her method became more precise; she filed each household's paperwork in separate envelopes and labeled them for future reference: "White house with red trimmings and three pines."
The huddled political meetings and street organizing began to pay off. In 1994, after residents had made frequent visits to Austin, the Texas Water Development Board and the Brownsville Public Utilities Board agreed to install water and sewer lines. Many of the homes did not meet the codes required for hookup, but state officials decided to proceed anyway. After much prodding, Cameron County began paving the streets, and Texas A&M University's Colonias Program helped build the community center. That center serves as the clearinghouse for a number of other government and nonprofit programs, which deliver their services in Spanish, with cultural modifications if necessary. The colonia's churches—Catholic, Baptist, and Pentecostal—provide another crucial spiritual and social support system. "If Gloria and I want to do something, and if we want everybody to know," Alma Rendon, the center's 54-year-old program coordinator, says, "we call the churches and everybody hears the gossip."
Social services have transformed Cameron Park, but the biggest remaining challenge here, as in all colonias along the border, is housing. Owner-built homes, which are the norm in the community, take years to complete and sometimes don't meet building codes when they are finished. The major obstacle to securing a mortgage is that the poor have a difficult time qualifying for loans because banks require some credit history. Using low-interest loans subsidized by the federal and state governments, the nonprofit Community Development Corporation of Brownsville (CDCB) has built 130 simple wood-frame and brick homes in the colonia since 1997, but this hardly makes a dent in the housing problem. Several years ago Don Currie, the executive director of the CDCB, pushed this idea: that the government loans would go further if they could be bundled with private loans from Valley banks. The CDCB has helped organize the eight-year-old Rio Grande Valley Multibank, a group of lenders that has been making these loans for two years—with nearly flawless results. Unlike traditional mortgages, potential homebuyers do not have to meet rigorous credit standards; they only have to prove that they pay their bills on time and earn enough to meet their monthly payment. The banks protect their own risk by jointly maintaining a reserve fund in case anyone fails to make a monthly payment. Out of 145 mortgages the CDCB has overseen in Cameron Park, only one has been foreclosed on—and this because the borrower died and left no family to take over. "Our main point," Currie says, "was to show that you can lend these people money and they'll pay it back."
ALONG WITH THE DREAM OF owning a home, the promise of an education is the other main source of Cameron Park's optimism. After contending for years with the question of how best to educate the colonia's children—one highly controversial proposal involved pulling them out of the regular elementary school they attended and educating them inside the neighborhood in portable classrooms (thus, the conspiracy theory went, leaving more space in the regular school for the rich kids)—the Brownsville school district, in 2001, finally built them their own gleaming campus, which is staffed by a corps of teachers that is 100 percent bilingual. Despite their faith in their students' potential, however, the teachers at Gallegos Elementary find themselves playing a number of roles beyond that of educator. The children have to be socialized. Some even have to be taught to use an indoor restroom, since they have never seen one. The little ones have to be encouraged to speak in complete sentences—sometimes to speak, period—because their language skills haven't been developed at home. Parents get to "shop" for used clothes that teachers donate, and principal Lucy Green has kept a bag of shoes in her office ever since she witnessed a small girl padding around the school in socks. Her shoes, the girl's teacher later explained, were too tight. "We believe that all children can learn," says Green, a bubbly native of Mexico City. "But there are days when we take a deep breath."
And yet, the success stories are breathtaking. Consider the case of Gaspar Garcia: In 1991 Gaspar was a sixth grader at Vela Middle School with dark skin and soft eyes who had fancied playing the clarinet until the realization struck that his family couldn't afford to buy him one. When he tried to tell the band director that he couldn't join the band after all, the teacher mulled over the problem for a moment and then struck a simple, unusual deal: You stay in my class this semester, and I'll give you an A. Secretly, he thought the child could at least begin by learning rhythms. And so, for the entire first semester, while the rest of the students made awkward sounds with their new instruments, the boy who had none sat clapping out the beats with his thick, bare hands.
Few kids from Cameron Park were in the band or other extracurricular activities in those days. Those who did well in school learned to do so by keeping to themselves and focusing on their work; those who didn't formed a gang they called C.P., in deference to their home turf. At lunchtime, the school cafeteria replicated the class segregation of their outside lives: right side, Country Club; left side, Cameron Park. Yet Gaspar persisted, and in his second semester he was able to borrow a bass clarinet from the school. Every weekday and Saturday morning were spent in the band hall, blowing notes and counting rests and fingering keys. By his first year of high school, Gaspar had made All-State Band, a rare accomplishment for a freshman. The following year—and again the next and the next—he was the highest-ranked bass clarinetist in Texas.
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