THE OTHER
AMERICANS
“When we’re dealing with substantial reductions in our budget,
and we’re dealing with having
to meet a growing demand,” Vilsack said, “the challenge for us
is to determine where we can
do the most good with the least
amount of money.”
Reyna, the Texas attorney who
introduced me to the De La Os,
says that’s a philosophy that’s
deeply familiar to residents of the
border colonias.
“We send all this foreign aid to
other countries to help them develop water resources, and yet there
are people living right here without
potable water,” he told me. “They
live on American soil. They live in
Texas. They live right here, smack
in the middle of the United States.
It’s really very, very sad to see. I
wish we had a magic wand to fix all
this, but we don’t.”
Since the late 1990s, the De
La Os have been improving their
trailer home, inch by inch, dollar
by dollar, with their own hands. A
lack of affordable alternatives drove
them to this place, and the bare
wood framing, floppy panel floors,
exposed insulation and unfinished
wiring suggest years of sweat equity
for a family that has lived—without government help, they say—on
HUFFINGTON
10.21.12
$10,000 to $15,000 a year.
Until Rogelio, 69, took ill last
year, they earned that money, with
help from their American-born
daughter, working in the canneries of Wisconsin or harvesting
beets and potatoes in North Dakota and Minnesota. When harvest
season was over, they returned
to Texas and took jobs in sewing factories or construction sites
around Laredo. For most of this
work, the family earned about $8
an hour, Elia said.
At the family’s kitchen table,
Elia serves her guests tall glasses of distilled water, which she
draws from a jug. It is a welcome
treat on a day when the outside
temperature is now upwards of
105 degrees. I ask the couple if
they’ve ever felt taken advantage
of, or abused by a social order
that, from the outside, seems very
much stacked against them.
Elia quickly answers no, and so I
follow with another question: Does
she consider her