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· 203 · Epilogue Seven Years Later On a hot summer evening, we walked along the edge of a cotton field and then down another hard-packed dirt road that skirted the back side of someone’s lot. As I got that familiar feeling of almost trespassing that one has nearly all the time in a colonia where many lots simply bleed into each other and the street, Flora explained that there was a very old señor living back here in a tiny trailer under a tree. Well, his mattress was under the tree, there was not enough room in the one-room travel trailer, the kind usually pulled by a truck, for a bed and a table. While we were out walking , she explained that she wanted to take the opportunity to check up on him. At this point we had walked nearly the entire length of Los Montes, and Flora knew pretty much every lot and every family in the colonia. She told me she had met this gentleman when she went door-to-door earlier that year to get signatures for the new road project. He had lost his home and was squatting on a shady bit of land under a tree. The owner of the lot said it was OK for him to stay there, but, if the county found him living out in the open like that, they would certainly make him move out and into a shelter. For an older man like that, losing his independence would be crushing . Flora knew this, so she tried to check on him and help him stay where he was without drawing any attention to him. As we came around the hedge and his “home” came into view, it was a slightly different scene for a colonia. It was not the usual rundown mobile home; it was more of a campsite with a mattress and a chair set up under a big shade tree, and it was really very peaceful. Yet like many other colonia homes, it only held the bare minimum. And unlike the typical campsite, this would not be packed up anytime soon, and he would not be going home to a hot shower. As a leader, Flora is an activist, an organizer, a community builder, and a friend. She is also a social commentator and an astute one at that. She exemplifies the politicization possible, but not common, on the individual scale for community leaders in the colonias, a politicization she herself acknowledges does not exist at the community scale. 204 EPILOGUE How We Got Here This project, like many others, began as one thing and turned into another. When I left for New Mexico for the first time, my primary concern was to discern why it was women and not men that took positions of leadership in the colonias and what role nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) had in this process. Once I had spent time in the colonias with the leaders, it became clear there was no single process by which women became leaders .Itwasmuchmorecomplicatedthanthat,andNGOswerebynomeans the only actors in the web of relationships that led certain women to take on leadership roles in their colonias. I also began to realize with time, and much of this hit me after my initial fieldwork, that these amazingly powerful women who held so much potential to politicize their communities were caught in a system that undermined their work. The same, of course, had to be said of the NGOs. This was a deeply disturbing realization at first. I was disappointed because I had seen the work of NGOs and colonia leaders as entirely positive up until that point. But then I realized that I had to see this as an opening, an opportunity, to contribute something to the communities in which I had done this research. So far very little had been asked of me by the communities themselves, and I was looking for ways my work could be used beyond the basic reports to funders. I saw the opportunity to examine this discrepancy and produce a possible explanation as a way to give the communities and NGOs something very different and possibly valuable and also create a study of a highly disabling process. As we have seen, in the colonias, the nearly ceaseless efforts of women leaders with the help of NGOs create much-needed infrastructure . In this process, some women leaders become politicized, but the vast majority of colonia residents show little interest in community organizing...

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