A Jumble of Needs: Women’s Activism and Neoliberalism in the Colonias of the Southwest

4. The Place of NGOs in Daily Life

· 179 ·· CHAPTER 4 · The Place of NGOs in Daily Life “¡Conozco mis derechos!” I know my rights! “¡No firme nada!” Don’t sign anything! Their voices carried clear across the parking lot and nearly out onto the interstate, which ran close by the new community center in which the crowd, mostly women, was sitting. They were enthusiastically practicing the proper response to questioning by La Migra. This was just one small aspect of an all-day immigration-rights workshop. If one were to walk past the building and did not know what was going on inside, one might think there was a mass arrest taking place. It was late fall, and more than twenty women and two men had turned out to the first in a series of immigration rights workshops the communityorganizing group (COG) planned. This one took place in the colonia of Del Cerro beneath a breathtaking mural of the cycle of life in the Rio Grande valley (see Figure 4.1). The mural was full of images that really hit home with colonia residents. As the women sat below images of indigenous and Mexican immigrant field laborers on a backdrop of fertile farm lands irrigated by the river itself, they listened to Elena tell them that the day was not about their papers or documentation status but rather about their civil rights. I wondered, as I took in the myriad details of the mural, if the irony of the situation was occupying the thoughts of the others in the room as well. Here we were sitting below a mural that clearly celebrated the contributions of Mexican immigrant and indigenous farm labor while we struggled with how to avoid and document abuses to the civil rights of the same groups. The image was filled with the fruit of this labor on multiple levels, including the crops it depicted in the fields and the rainbow of local crops floating across the sky made up of chile, both green and red, onion, alfalfa, cotton, and pecans. Finally, there was the woman lying in 180 THE PLACE OF NGOS IN DAILY LIFE the field giving birth to a child. It is true; the fields give work and life to farm-worker communities and colonias in the valley. The need for the training that day came from a long string of reported and documented abuses by La Migra. These workshops were an effort to help colonia residents learn how to both defend themselves by using their civil rights and to teach them how to document inappropriate and illegal searches on the part of the border patrol. As solely Mexican communities , colonias were often targeted for searches by the border patrol, and, without a basic knowledge of their civil rights, residents were much more susceptible to harassment. In this chapter, I tie together, through a discussion of the social production of colonias as racialized spaces, previous arguments about the social production of the Mexican working poor on the border, the limits of women’s activism, and the development of colonias. In the process, I add a deeper and more critical account of the role nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) can play in colonia communities as well. Through examples from the work colonia leaders do, the hegemonic production of space through racism and economic and social discrimination comes face-to-face with the counterhegemonic construction of the just and well-developed Figure 4.1. Mural in Del Cerro Community Center, where many local colonia communityorganizing meetings take place. Del Cerro is a colonia housing many immigrant farm workers like those depicted in the mural. THE PLACE OF NGOS IN DAILY LIFE 181 space for which colonias leaders and NGOs strive. As this chapter traces the relationships between the many forces at work in the colonias and their roles in the social production of colonia space, I ask the question, what is the role of NGOs in the development of progressive social change and resistance in the colonias? In response, I argue that the slow growth of social change and resistance in colonias can be attributed, in part, to the growing partnership between NGOs and civil society and the inadvertent outcomes of NGO interventions. This answer is developed through a concrete examination of colonia and NGO practices and moves from these material daily practices to a discussion of social reproduction as it plays out in daily life. Through the use of specific practices as examples...