By Michelle Martin
Staff writer

Las Cruces, N.M.—Ruben Nunez stood under a bright blue sky, a light breeze ruffling his hair and creating eddies of dust around his feet.

As loose dogs wandered by and a pony peered out from a shed made of packing crates, Nunez began the story of las colonias, small communities of Mexican immigrant workers in the Texas and New Mexican border country.

By the U.S. Department of Housing and Human Services definition, a colonia lacks one or more basic services, such as running water, paved roads, sanitary sewer or electricity. In practice, most of their people—often legal U.S. residents who have been in the area since before the 1986 amnesty—live on their own plots of desert, inhabiting mobile homes in varying states of disrepair. Area residents say they look like Third World countries.

“Welcome to the United States,” Nunez said.

This is where the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, the U.S. bishops’ domestic anti-poverty program, started its Breaking the Cycle of Poverty tour. Traveling from colonias within sight of the Mexican border to urban neighborhoods in Albuquerque, the three-day event showcased how the campaign helps poor people develop resources within themselves in New Mexico, the state with the nation’s highest poverty rate. Some 17.7 percent of its people—and 28 percent of its children—live below the government’s official poverty line.

Catholics in the Archdiocese of Chicago traditionally give generously to the campaign’s annual collection the weekend before Thanksgiving. In 2001, they gave $835,495, of which 25 percent stayed in the archdiocese for local grants.

In 2002, 12 projects in the archdiocese received $318,500 in grants from the national fund, and the archdiocesan office made $185,000 in 11 local grants, according to Elena Segura, archdiocesan CCHD coordinator.

While many Chicago-area projects benefit greatly from the campaign, Bill Purcell, director of the Office for Peace and Justice, said local parishioners are called to care for poor people everywhere.

“CCHD allows Catholics to practice the universality of being Catholic,” Purcell said. “Catholics in Chicago can help the poor in Chicago, but with our abundant resources we are also to practice stewardship by sharing our abundance with the poor in other dioceses.”

That abundance goes to projects in areas such as economic development, affordable housing, and, most of all, helping low-income people make their voices heard.

Most tourists to Las Cruces—the nation’s top small metropolitan market according to Forbes—never see the colonias. Their residents work at invisible kinds of jobs, laboring in the chile fields and pecan orchards or building and cleaning the new homes that sprawl out from this boomtown.

The colonias residents ended up where they are by grasping at their share of an American dream, the dream of living on their own property. The names of the colonias reflect that dream. They could be subdivisions anywhere in the Southwest: Las Palmeras, Montana Vista.

Nunez worked in the fields for 10 years before staff members at the Diocese of Las Cruces contacted him in 1990 about organizing community members. Based on the results of a survey of local needs, the diocese expected to deal with more work-related issues in the agricultural Rio Grande valley. But the organization that became the not-for-profit Colonias Development Council found that people were more interested in filling community needs. The effort has long been supported by Las Cruces Bishop Ricardo Ramirez.

“It gives you great faith in what people can do, in their potential,” said Bishop Ramirez, who has led the diocese since it was created in 1982. “It is one of the finest things we’ve done in the diocese. … We can’t stop praising what is happening. Prophets come from the frontier, creativity comes from the frontier. Creativity comes from the desert.”

CCHD has made 12 grants totaling $390,000 to the council, money for staff members like Nunez, who identify and develop leaders from within the community. Those leaders, in turn, teach their friends and neighbors how to advocate for themselves.

Father Robert Vitillo, CCHD’s executive director, said the campaign works on a simple premise: Poor people know best how to get out of poverty, and they must make the decisions. Since it began in 1970, CCHD has required that all the projects it funds must have a board with a majority of low-income members. CCHD helps them tap the wells of their own resources—a more effective, and cost-effective, strategy than handing them a drink of water.

Local organizers from the colonias say it works.

“Some people just kind of wait for everything to fall from the sky,” said Manuela Mendez, an organizer in Montana Vista, through a translator. “We kind of accommodate ourselves to the situation. If a neighbor doesn’t have something, we help them out. But that doesn’t change the situation.”

Mendez, 51, learned how to deal with county and local utility officials through years of fighting to get a water line to her mobile home.

Most recently, she and her husband, Lorenzo, sought a permit for son Raul, 30, to put a second trailer on their acre property, to house himself, his wife and their four children. They are among 10 people who live in the Mendez’s trailer.

After months of filing applications, it came down to a county official asking to be invited to dinner—with Raul’s wife, she said. The dinner never happened, but they did receive a permit.

Asked what she sees as the most pressing need for the colonia, Manuela Mendez did not list basic services or better working conditions. What they thirst for, she said, is respect.

“People are worth what they feel other people are worth,” she said. “People’s dignity is connected.”

His own work as an organizer helped Nunez learn to demand respect, he said.

“Before, I was scared to ask (local officials and growers) for anything,” he said. “Now they are afraid when I come. The farmers, they used to treat me like one of the workers, tell me, ‘If you don’t want to work, leave.’ They don’t say that anymore.”

In Salem, the older and larger colonia where Nunez lives and where he first started organizing, the streets are paved, water flows from the faucets and most homes have their own electric lines instead of extension cords strung from trailer to trailer. More trailers sport TV satellite dishes—the only way to get any television reception here—and some residents have started small businesses packing chiles for local growers.

Las Palmeras, a colonia south of Las Cruces, now has running water and sewer pipes have been installed in the ground, although not yet hooked up—both improvements demanded by residents.

Blanca Gonzalez, a member of the development council’s board, recently moved with her mother and two children into a new, three-bedroom home there, built with the assistance of a non-profit affordable housing developer.

When Gonzalez, now 36, first moved to Las Palmeras in 1992, her older child was nine months old, and she had to carry water from a neighbor’s well. Open trenches carried sewage to cesspools.

Now Gonzalez, who cleans houses, worries a bit about how she will pay the $45,000 she owes on her house over the next 20 years, and dreams of starting a business, perhaps something to do with sewing.

“It’s a much better life,” she said. “Thanks to God.”

In addition to basic organizing, the development council has branched out to help other groups. It administers the new Columbus Child Development Center, the brainchild of five women from the colonia of Columbus, four miles from the Mexican border.

For $7 per child per day, families have a safe, enriching environment for infants through pre-teens. The center is open from 5 a.m. to 8 p.m. to accommodate workers’ hours, and children receive nutritious meals and snacks at no extra cost. It is housed in a new building, built with the help of a $50,000 grant from CCHD.

Maria Hernandez, mother of 10, said that when the women, who call themselves Mujeres en Progresso, began working toward their goal, they were discounted.

“They said we couldn’t do it,” she said. “Because we had no education.”

The women took classes in everything from child development to food safety—and were criticized by other community members for missing work.

Now, standing in the spotless main room of the center, Hernandez said it’s hard to believe they succeeded.

“I feel like I was dreaming for five years, and I’m just now waking up,” she said.

Reality isn’t a dream. The center can accommodate 32 children, but has only 17 enrolled, said director Brenda Villegas. While $7 a day might be a bargain for day care, it’s still too much for many field workers.

“If they have two kids, that’s $14 a day,” she said. “In a slow time, they might only make $14 a day.”

So children continue to be left in cars parked at the edges of fields, or locked in their homes, 4-year-olds in the care of 6-year-old siblings. Meanwhile, the women try to spread the word and help the children they do have. When the center opened seven months ago, the first student, Ariana, now 3, was not toilet-trained and was afraid of people not her family. Now she smiles and poses for pictures with her friends.

The New Mexico Community Development Loan Fund takes some of the credit for these successes.

The Colonias Development Council and the child development center received some of the 526 loans— for a total for $15.3 million—the fund has made since its inception in 1990.

The fund provides access to capital for non-profit enterprises and small businesses that cannot qualify for commercial loans, said executive director Vangie Gabaldon. To keep its loan success rate at 94 percent, where it stands now, the Albuquerque-based fund also provides free technical assistance in business planning and other areas to clients and potential clients.

Over the years, the fund has made loans to several CCHD-funded projects across the state, but it could not have gotten where it is without receiving CCHD funding itself, Gabaldon said. In 1995, the fund received a $15,000 planning grant to help its leaders figure out what direction it should take, and it received $50,000 a year from 1997 to 1999 to hire two people to help provide technical assistance to non-profits and other businesses.

Unlike banks, loan officers consider social values—like jobs and affordable housing—when they make their decisions. For example, many low-income families are finding themselves pushed out of their neighborhoods as housing prices rise and wealthier people move in—a situation that also has played out all over Chicago.

The Sawmill Community Land Trust, with the help of $35,000 in national and local CCHD grants, uses an innovative system to keep homes affordable. The houses are sold to the residents, but the trust retains ownership of the land underneath them. As part of the lease on the land, residents agree to accept only a portion of their homes’ appreciated value when they sell, thus keeping the homes affordable for the next buyer.

Two of the 22 families who bought into the first phase make between 80 and 100 percent of the median income for the area, or about $42,000 for a family of four, said Ken Baldizar, the project’s executive director. Most of the rest have incomes between 50 and 80 percent of the median. The residents bought their homes—which have a median value of $126,000—at prices between $57,500 and $125,000.

Now the trust is planning for Phase II, with 87 dwelling units.

Lourencita Chavez, who works at a Honeywell plant, lives in a two-bedroom townhouse with her son, Steven, 18. The neighborhood is nice, she said, with no problems with the neighbors.

“When we need to be close, then we are a close community here,” she said. “We gather with the old neighborhood (whose residents started the project). They welcomed us in here, and they’ve been good to us.”

A favorite success story for Galbadon and for Joan Leahigh, the CCHD director for the Archdiocese of Santa Fe, is Southwest Creations Collaborative, a non-profit that started in the San Jose Church parish center in Albuquerque.

The company—which has benefited from about $200,000 in CCHD grants over the past 12 years—manages to cover the wages of its 24 employees and production costs with the income from contracts to do cutting, sewing and production work for designers and other manufacturers. It looks to outside funding for much of its outreach to employees, including English classes, health classes and links to local clinics.

From the start, the project has offered low-cost child care to its employees to make it possible for them to work. Now the women—who earn a minimum of $7.50 an hour and up to $17.50 for managers—pay 25 cents an hour for their children to attend the on-site day care center.

The women who work at Southwest Creations have an opportunity to learn new skills and to make more money as their skills develop. They also can learn the ins and outs of running the business, as employees fill seven of the nine seats on the board of directors.

“We’re not afraid of our conflicts,” said executive director Susan Matteucci, who started the company after moving to Albuquerque from Chicago with her husband. “We operate like a family in many ways. We’re raising each other’s kids. … We know we can deal with things if we can deal with them out in the open.”

Meanwhile, the Southwest Creations is offering its expertise in alternative forms of economic development to other area non-profits, including a group that fights domestic violence by teaching women marketable skills.

Leahigh calls the collaborative a “transformation site,” and an example of how the church can become involved in everyday life.

“You have to use the faith and everything we’ve learned and put it into action,” said Leahigh, noting how CCHD projects like Southwest Creations fulfill both corporal and spiritual works of mercy. “What CCHD has given me is an opportunity for mutual evangelization. … You have to have a little bit of faith in people, and that’s what CCHD brings to the discussion. When we care about the periphery, it always comes back to us and it we all benefit.”

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