THE OTHER
AMERICANS
a haphazard cluster of residences
a few hundred yards off the main
highway. As I linger at the side
of the road, a yellow school bus
inches past, taking care not to
savage its struts on a path rutted by poor drainage and cycles
of fierce, mud-churning rain and
baking prairie sun.
Reyna calls from the side of a
tidy trailer where he is chatting
with its owners, Elia De La O and
her husband, Rogelio. The couple
invites us inside.
Like most of the homes in this
ostensibly planned subdivision,
the De La Os’ trailer, with its exposed beams and jerry-rigged
wiring, is a work in progress. The
family is blessed with electricity—
still a luxury for some impoverished communities along the Texas-Mexico border—but they lack
running water. For this residents
queue up, sometimes for hours, at
a county-run spigot a couple miles
away, where they fill huge plastic
drums of varying shapes and vintage with foul-smelling water that
officials describe as potable. Elia
and Rogelio, like most residents,
won’t drink it, preferring to visit
a private, for-profit water vendor
in Laredo, or nearby Rio Bravo, for
jugs to slake their thirst.
HUFFINGTON
10.21.12
The De La Os were not born here
and have not yet sought full citizenship, they say, in part because
they’ve struggled with the language.
But they’ve learned enough to find
steady work as seasonal agricultural
hands in states across the Midwest,
and they have been permanent,
legal and taxpaying residents of the
U.S. for more than a dozen years.
They take great care to say that
they are proud of their home, and
that they are grateful to have gained
a foothold on the American dream.
But Elia, 64, also shares that, growing up in Mexico, she once imagined
that dream rather differently.
“I never thought there were
people living like this, like we’re
living here, in the United States,”
she says. “We always thought,
‘This is the United States—it’s
the United States, it’s the best.’
We didn’t think when we came
here that we would live like
kings, but we didn’t imagine
there would be places like this.”
From the borderlands of Texas
and the cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta to the reservations
of the Great Plains, there are many
places like this, and they have remained as such, generation after
generation—all of them easy to
find. While much has improved
since this sort of grinding poverty
was first identified as a national
disgrace more than 40 years ago,