Cold Anger: A Story of Faith and Power Politics

2. We Are Willing to Sacrifice

2 We Are Willing to Sacrifice La Meza, 1988 Five hundred miles south of Dallas is La Meza, Texas. A desolate little stop on a back road, La Meza is a Rio Grande Valley colonia, a neighborhood of 65 Hispanic families, perhaps 400 people in all. It is just outside of Mercedes, which has a population of 12,000 in the county of Hidalgo at the southern tip of Texas where the Rio Grande flows into the Gulf of Mexico . Here, the world seems to dwindle. Even the low, wide horizon , the orange groves, and the patchwork fields of onions, cabbage, or carrots cannot stop the feeling that you are in a land that shrinks its people, forcing them inward, isolating them from their nearest neighbors, from the rest of America, and perhaps even from themselves. La Meza is directly across the road from the Sunrise Hill Park, a public park with picnic tables, playground equipment, and a sweeping sprinkler system to keep the grass a bright winter green. But unlike the park, La Meza's people, mostly migrant farmworkers, have no green grass. They have no water . Or sewers. Or paved streets. To drink, they must take a waterjug to the Sunset Drive-In Grocery where the paved road by the park begins. At the grocery store, they pay the owner 25 cents to use an ordinary outdoor spigot to fill their water jugs. To wash their clothes or dishes or faces, they cannot afford the 20 / We Are Willing to Sacrifice tap water and so they fill their barrels from pools of water in the irrigation drainage ditches that hold the runoff from nearby vegetable fields. The ditches are full of pesticides and herbicides , and the people of La Meza know that water in the ditches is bad for them, but what else can they do? Water is water. And, sometimes, life itself. Elida Bocanegra and 20 La Meza residents meet the van pulling into the parking lot of the Sunset Drive-In Grocery. Young couples with sniffling children are waiting. One woman holds a little girl of about 2 whose left eye is encrusted with a blackened tumor the size of a lemon. Several older men and women are in the crowd, the men in work clothes standing back and a little apart from the group, their wrinkles and calluses granting them rights to a certain skepticism that they wear on their faces like translucent masks. A boy of 6 holds a small sign, its message hand-lettered in red paint: "Help us Ann Richards. We need water to drink." On this warm day in February, Texas Treasurer Ann Richards and asmall group of state officials come to La Meza on a "fact-finding" mission. l Richards, the witty and attractive grandmother who had made her mark both in Texas and nationally , had been invited to tour the colonias by Valley Interfaith , a coalition of 40 Rio Grande Valley churches representing about 55,000 people who were waging a campaign to call national attention to the plight of people in the colonias. Perhaps Richards' ties to the financial networks in Texas and New York could help. But first, she wanted the facts. Statistically, the four counties of the Rio Grande Valley contain the poorest people in the United States-the highest unemployment and the lowest per capita income in the nation.2 Almost 100,000 people live in the Valley colonias, the 400-plus unincorporated rural communities unique to the gOO-mile Texas-Mexican border. Colonia is a Spanish word for neighborhood , and along the Texas border, the colonias have come to signify a particular kind of rural slum with conditions more akin to Nicaragua or Honduras than the United States of America. More facts: open sewer ditches, unpaved streets, no running water, and in some cases, no electricity. Clapboard houses often have dirt floors and wall-to-wall beds for growing families. Children have chronic dysentery, skin rashes, lice, and hepati- We Are Willing to Sacrifice / 21 tis; dark yellow stains mark their teeth from the chemical-laden drinking water. The Valley has the highest incidence of parasitic intestinal diseases outside of the Third World. Shallow water wells are frequently polluted by overflowing septic tanks. After heavy rains, people in the colonias literally drink their own sewage. It is a public health nightmare. But because fly-bynight developers established these unregulated subdivisions in rural...