kleinbl00, you're much more familiar both with the history of the south west as well as the issue of housing in general. If you have any opinions or insight, I'd love to hear them.
1) colonia must be a Texas term. We just called them slums.
2) The Texas definition of colonia would include my grandparents' house.
income farmworkers and immigrants, would build their homes slowly over time. Since the land was usually in unincorporated areas of a county, unscrupulous developers would rent or sell lots with promises, such as to install running water and electricity, or to hand over the title after a certain number of payments, and then never follow through.
Good thing my grandfather was a plumber.
3) I remember this.
All of a sudden the streets had names and about a third of them were paved. My mother had students (college students) who couldn't get mail because their house was the third one on the driveway on the left past the culvert. But then, over the course of a year in like '85, everyone had an address.
Which leads me to read this:
Yeah, see, Texas hates Mexicans. Arizona's a wasteland. California (Southern California) doesn't have water away from the coast. New Mexico? New Mexico is full of Chicanos whose families have been on their land for 400 years. HIspanics in New Mexico are a much more advantaged, integrated class than they are anywhere else and there was no attempt to pretend slums were anything but slums. Slums were a problem, slums were to be solved, slums were an affront to human decency and while slums still exist, for fuck's sake a trailer park beats the tar out of an unplumbed shack in the middle of dry camping.
I drove past four or five of these slums when I needed car parts or CDs. They're empty and abandoned now. Meanwhile there are a lot more housing developments and thanks to tourism and gambling, a lot more jobs. And all of a sudden people aren't living in ramshackle shitholes made out of stolen plywood. Hey, you wanna see a rippin' example of white privilege?
“That’s a great thing,” he says. “The inherent advantage of self-help housing is it provides homeownership opportunities to people normally locked out of that market.”
IF YOU CAN'T FUCKING SELL IT WHAT'S THE POINT
Maybe you should give a shit about the poor rather than institutionalize slums.
I remember when Ann Richards was defeated. We watched, knowing that the progress made towards humanity by our boorish neighbors to the East would stop and the decline would begin. Now here we are, 22 years later, stroking our chins earnestly about whether or not squatter shantytowns are a good thing or a bad thing.
Fuck you, white guy at Michigan State. Come drive through one of these places and tell me what a great fucking leap forward they are.