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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The story of Gaspar is dramatic evidence that lives in the colonias do get better, even little by little, and that when they do—and this is perhaps the biggest enigma about Cameron Park—some people insist on staying put. It would seem that Gaspar, now an extroverted, exceedingly polite 22-year-old with worlds to conquer, would be ready to leave Cameron Park behind. But the opposite is true. "I come to my senses when I come home," he says, creasing his forehead and offering a broad smile. He has one more year of music school left at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where all of his expenses are paid right down to his clothes and shampoo and where he still plays a borrowed instrument—this one, however, a silver-plated Selmer bass clarinet worth some $10,000. He has performed abroad and been invited to attend the world's most prestigious bass clarinet conservatory, in Rotterdam, next year, whose director—in Gaspar's exuberant words, "the greatest bass clarinetist who ever lived!"—sends him postcards from his global travels: "This could be you in five years if you come with me."
But during his summers, Gaspar returns to Brownsville and rings up groceries at the local H-E-B. He admits to me that he is considering passing up the chance to attend the conservatory, because his real desire is to come back to the border to teach disadvantaged kids, to use music to impart a profound lesson he himself learned and came to believe in: that poverty is not binding, that there is an entire world beyond the rigid boundaries of Cameron Park in which you can choose your own place—even if the place you settle on is, ultimately, the same place you started. "I've been in some very fancy places to play," Gaspar says. "I can act the part. But when I come back here, this is me. I appreciate a lot of these things. What some say is nothing, I think is a lot. I could never let go of that house we grew up in; there are so many memories. We're still there, but we have come a long way. As a family. As a community."
IMPROVING THE STANDARD OF LIVING in colonias is a project without end. For every person who builds a new house or just an indoor bathroom, who lands a higher-paying job or celebrates a college graduation—for every person who manages to leave the tightly circumscribed world of poverty behind—another one arrives to start at the bottom. The large percentage of people who are barely getting by explains why the census numbers, despite so much progress, remain dismayingly low. Too many stories resemble that of Miriam Lopez, 37, a petite round woman with small, dark eyes, thick hair, and a burning desire to see her children escape poverty. A native of Tampico, she followed her husband to the United States only to have him abandon her cold in Cameron Park. She now lives with her three kids inside a room no bigger than a cozy kitchen, which is attached to the back of a handsome, two-story stucco home with neat landscaping. The owners, who are not related to her, do not charge her any rent. But even with no monthly payments beyond a small telephone bill, there is never enough money to do seemingly simple things, like buy her growing daughter a sweater when winter arrives.
Her incentive to work is this: a $50 bill at the end of the week, which is to say at the end of cleaning, cooking, washing, ironing, and baby-sitting full-time for another family. The government gives her $100 a month for her two youngest children, ages seven and ten, who are U.S. citizens. In the best-case scenario—and life never does seem to make its best case—she would earn $3,800 a year for a family of four. She daydreams often of returning to Mexico because she is utterly alone here, and bursts into tears when she confesses this to me. But Miriam remains in Cameron Park because she insists that her children be bilingual and well educated. There is only one snag in her otherwise neatly conceived plan: Her eldest son—a shy, long-legged boy of fourteen who likes to watch documentaries—is undocumented and soon will come of age. "If he can't get his papers fixed, my heart is going to break in two," Miriam says, choking up as we spend a muggy afternoon on rickety chairs outside her one-room shelter. It contains a gas stove, a mini-refrigerator, a folding dining table, one set of bunk beds, a small television, and an antiquated Macintosh computer she bought used so her children could learn to type. "Because what is he going to do when he graduates and he's not legal?" she continues. "Work in the yards? I don't want that." Like other undocumented residents of Cameron Park, Miriam and her family live nearly invisibly, slipping out of the colonia only when necessary, because the Border Patrol is notorious for patrolling the neighborhood's fringes.
FOR CAMERON PARK'S MOST IMPOVERISHED residents, the list of challenges does not stop with a lack of money. Family members are in jail. Teens are getting pregnant by the dozen. People are trudging around with diseases and no health insurance. Drug dealers come and go in their shiny trucks. And then there's the stuff that makes you shudder: physical and sexual abuse of wives and children. "There's a pornographic side to life in a colonia," says Father Seifert. "You have to wonder if that amount of sex abuse would be happening if people had three- or four-bedroom homes, where a thirteen-year-old could have her privacy." Though all of these social ills occur nationwide, they seem particularly urgent in the colonias, where poverty runs so deep. "The things you have to do to get out of it—go to the church to ask for help, go to the food bank—they're humiliating things for a people who come from a culture that's inherently proud," Seifert says. "It creates an incredible amount of stress."
If Cameron Park needed reassurance that, for all its problems, life here will keep getting better, it came in June 2001, when Governor Rick Perry chose the community center as the site to sign a bill that provides up to $175 million to build or improve colonia roadways and drainage along the entire border. ("How can we expect children of the border to reach for the stars," he recited, "when they can't even get out of their neighborhoods because the streets are flooded?") During the fall election campaign, Tony Sanchez rolled in on the Tony Express bus to deliver a bilingual campaign speech, tejano music pumping in the background. These events testified to the effectiveness of a voter registration drive launched by Seifert and others in 1997. In the 2000 presidential election Cameron Park posted a 46 percent voter turnout. In the most recent Democratic primary—which in the Rio Grande Valley typically decides who will be the county's leaders—the colonia had the fourth-highest turnout of the county's 87 precincts. The showing is no coincidence. Since colonias are in the jurisdiction of the county, the county judge is the elected official with the most influence over their living conditions. (The incumbent, Gilberto Hinojosa, was considered a big friend of Cameron Park's, so the residents did everything they could to help him get reelected.) In Cameron Park, to vote is to establish directly the terms of your life.
The ultimate test of how far the neighborhood has come will be whether the City of Brownsville, which has created a doughnut hole on its map by annexing all of the land surrounding the colonia, ever decides to take it in too. It is doubtful that this will happen anytime soon. Cities annex only areas that can provide enough tax revenue to pay for services like maintaining the streets and providing police and fire protection, and Cameron Park lacks the tax base. Time and again, city officials have sniffed at the idea, but they always conclude that the cost of providing services is too high. The colonia thus remains under the care of the county, which has neither the authority nor the funds to do what a city can do. Some residents say they would rather not pay city taxes anyway, while others point out that annexation would bring garbage collection, animal control, bus service—possibly even a post office and a fire station.
One person believes with certainty the day will come. "This will be a prime neighborhood fifty years from now, prime neighborhood," says Bill Hudson, tapping at the parallelogram on his aerial map. "Cameron Park is gonna get better and better and better. It is not the bombed-out, burned-out permanent slum, and it's mostly because of the people. They are decent people." While Paseo de la Resaca may provide Brownsville's vision, this colonia will continue playing the essential role of absorbing the border's—and Amercia's—deepest poverty. As Hudson's neighbor Seifert candidly puts it: "Thank goodness for Cameron Park."
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