January 2003
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?
HE CALLS THEM HIS "ONE thousand acres of excellence." In the northeastern corner of this border city, just four miles north of Mexico, Bill Hudson has reinvented Brownsville in a way Brownsville never dared imagine itself. Using tile, stone, and stucco, the cheery blue-eyed native converted property his grandfather had purchased in 1937 into an upscale and as yet unfinished residential and retail development known as Paseo de la Resaca. There are now restaurants, shopping strips, and an events center, and when all is said and done, Brownsville will also count some two thousand new homes and a man-made waterway framed by a nine-mile hiking and biking trail. "This is six years ago," says Hudson, who looks and dresses like a Southern gentleman but is fascinated by Mexican border culture. He points at an aerial shot of a brown wasteland hanging on his conference room wall and snickers. "Nada." For Hudson, Paseo de la Resaca is more than a development; it is a symbol of what could happen all along the Texas-Mexico border if only its people were willing to think big, to dream. In his view, the biggest challenge the border region faces is not drugs or immigration or low wages but what he calls "a deficit of spiritual capital, which is reflected in a resignation to mediocrity."
But even as Brownsville basks in this new identity, Paseo de la Resaca is not the only development in this part of town where people have come with visions of upward mobility. Rubbing against Hudson's excellent acres, in the shape of a slightly flawed parallelogram—and at a markedly different point on the economic spectrum—lies Cameron Park. This neighborhood of 4,895 residents is, according to the 2000 U.S. census, the poorest place in the country. The ranking is based on the median income per capita for communities of one thousand or more households. If the middle-American tries to make it on $21,587 a year and the middle-Texan lives on $19,617, the Cameron Park resident squeaks by on just $4,103. For most of the people who live here, this is the beginning of the American experience. "This is the starting point in Brownsville," says Father Mike Seifert, a quick-witted, highly philosophical missionary with the Marist Brothers who has worked in Cameron Park since 1996. "This is the place you land when you cross the river."
From Paredes Line Road, the thoroughfare that links it to the rest of the city, Cameron Park looks like your typical working-class neighborhood on the border. You see trees (mesquite, mostly), businesses (from tax services to tire shops), chain-link fences, and lots of life. But take a drive down its skinny streets, a confusing network of paved roads with names unfitting for its Mexican population—Gregory, Nannette, Jeffrey—and the poverty begins to seep into the picture. A grand home here and there may have six bedrooms and three baths and be worth up to $150,000. But next to a two-story stucco with ornate Mexican windows will sit a trailer that sags mournfully—or maybe two, or maybe five, sometimes squeezed onto a single plot of land, sometimes spilling out useless junk. The most interesting dwellings are the hybrids, where a wood-frame house that's been painted only on the front sprouts from a one-room mobile home. Cinder blocks, rebar, and gravel stack up on empty lots until the owner can afford all the material necessary to start a home or add on to one. Decommissioned cars decay in front yards. On one lot a horse passes the day tied to a scraggly tree amid a tangle of brush and old tires. Children—little ones in diapers, big ones with blaring car stereos—are everywhere, and for each family that lives comfortably, there is another whose kids sleep side by side on couches and floors.
Cameron Park is a "colonia." The Spanish term refers literally to a "neighborhood" or a "settlement of homes," but along the Texas-Mexico border, it carries the stigma of fierce deprivation. Along the border it translates to rutted roads, crumbling homes, no running water. Along the border it means that the community is not incorporated, that it exists in legal limbo, really, because no government entity wants the responsibility of providing basic services. Colonias began to crop up in the sixties, when wily developers started selling plots of raw land that were cheap but had no infrastructure: no paved streets, no water and electricity hookups, no sewer lines. The lots were typically sold under contracts for deed, meaning that the buyer did not get title to the land until he made his final payment. By 2000, when critics of George W. Bush made conditions in the colonias an issue in the presidential race, the number of colonias in Texas had grown to almost 1,500.
The origins of Cameron Park date to 1964, when a thin, bespectacled man with a white mustache named Edward Dicker began selling off hundreds of 7,200-square-foot lots for as little as $300 each. That was well before Cameron County officials passed building codes in the early seventies that required new subdivisions to provide water and sewer services. But even after the new restrictions were passed, Dicker continued to sell. In 1979, when a Mexican journalist asked him who had authorized the sales, he replied defiantly, "Me. They're mine."
The floodgates were open. People who had crossed over the border from Mexico flocked into the neighborhood, where they squeezed into acquaintances' homes or rented trashed-out trailers while saving up to buy their own plot of land—their own little chunk of the American promise. The men took jobs as shrimpers, welders, day laborers, construction workers, or housepainters. The women became maids, home health aides, or seamstresses, or they participated in the informal economy, selling blankets, jewelry, and used clothing. Cameron Park stretched out until it became a city of sorts, one that has now displaced Indian reservations and Southern rural towns as this country's most glaring illustration of economic deprivation. After the census made Cameron Park's status official, journalists arrived from Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Germany, pressing residents on what it's like "to live in the poorest place in the nation." They cited the alarming numbers: Four fifths of the colonia's dwellings are substandard; more than a third still lack indoor plumbing.
And yet, these poverty statistics obscure the fact that Cameron Park is, in its own way, a success story, a down-and-out version of Paseo de la Resaca. Like Bill Hudson's Brownsville, the Cameron Park of today looks nothing like its former incarnation. As the largest of the county's 119 colonias, it has in the past eight years demanded and secured the attention of elected officials, with some $8 million in public funds having gone into making the place a symbol of what can be done in these poor settlements of the border: paved roads, water and sewer hookups, and soon to come, even curbs, gutters, sidewalks, and streetlights. How to show in a quantitative survey that Cameron Park has a bustling community center that offers a whole slew of social services? How to brag that there is now a Boys and Girls club, a sheriff's substation, a small health clinic, and a park? How to describe the shops lining its western boundary, which offer everything from birthday cakes and flowers to rotisserie chickens and tuxedo rentals? The signs of empowerment are everywhere. Undocumented immigrants speak of legalization, the documented speak about the importance of voting, and religion has taken root in the homes, where neighbors gather weekly to relate spiritual readings to their own material needs.
In other words, how to explain to demographers and statisticians and newspaper reporters that poverty is a relative thing—to rationalize why, amid the doom and the tragedy, optimism thrives?
