Texas shantytown is poorest place in America

CAMERON PARK, Texas -- In many ways, things are better than they were just a few years ago in Cameron Park, a cluster of shacks stretching for miles near the Mexican border.

Gunfire no longer erupts at sunset. Families are more likely to stay put when fathers leave for months to pick crops in Michigan or North Dakota. The new pavement means children can walk to the bus on rainy days without having to wrap garbage bags around their shoes. Televisions are powered by electric lines rather than car batteries. There are stoves and refrigerators -- some of them even indoors.

Yet national census figures show there is still a long way to go.

Among places with 1,000 households or more, Cameron Park is the poorest spot in America.

It ranks dead last in median per-capita income, at $4,103 a year. About 6,000 people live in the unincorporated community near Brownsville. Many of them are migrant workers and factory hands, and many of them are from Mexico.

"Extreme Third World conditions," said Cameron County Judge Gilberto Hinojosa. "You can pave the streets and put lights and police patrols and parks, but you still have to deal with the fact that many remain poor, and because so many are undocumented, it's difficult to provide them with programs."

Their poverty has been worsened by economic trends that hit the least-skilled hard. The textile industry that employed many with working papers has disintegrated -- the Levi's, Haggar and Horace Small factories have all announced closings. Drought has meant fewer agricultural jobs in the region.

In Cameron Park, only 19.3 percent of people age 25 or older have a high school diploma or better. The state average is 72.1 percent.

Border phenomena

Some 1,800 colonias, or shantytowns, that developed without services like water or sewers, have emerged along the Texas-Mexico border.

They started in the late 1960s and early 1970s with landowners offering mostly poor Mexican immigrants land on easy terms.

Cameron Park was one of the first. In 1968, a plot went for $300, paid at a rate of $7 a month. By 1977, it was $1,200, at $20 a month. The plots lacked water, sewers and drainage, but it was a chance to own land. Preliminary dwellings sprang up in a weekend.

In recent years, the plight of the colonias has drawn the attention of county, state and federal officials, who have made campaign stops and passed laws to fix substandard conditions. A constitutional amendment passed in November authorized up to $175 million in state bonds to build or improve roads and drainage. And the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has offered low-cost financing to build homes.

"I saw firsthand when there's three inches of rain and children don't go anywhere and the water stagnates, bringing mosquitoes and opportunities for disease," Gov. Rick Perry said in supporting the measure.

When social worker Alma Rendon first visited in the early 1990s, the colonia was full of outhouses, and pots and pans collecting rainwater for washing.

Now most of the homes have indoor plumbing.

Also since the early 1990s, a program through Texas A&M University has enlisted people in the community to tell neighbors about such services as counseling or vision care. At a community center, families are matched with food stamps and other public assistance programs.

There are English classes, and a new computer center is under construction.

It has been against the law since 1995 to sell unimproved land for housing. But the colonias keep on growing, and those who sell their land have profited, with plots now going for as much as $18,000.

Houses have developed over time into a hodgepodge of styles, some pastel Mexican stucco, others pale brick. Most are in some stage of construction, with half a roof, windows without panes, an uncompleted second floor.

Teresa Serna has been working for 19 years on her dream house -- a five-bedroom rose stucco with balconies and elaborate door moldings. It is yards away from the wooden trailer where she lived 30 years ago as a 15-year-old newlywed from Brownsville's sister city of Matamoros, Mexico.

But for every home like Serna's are three or four rusted 20-by-6-foot campers with large families crowded inside.

Several times developers have come to the community, offering to buy the land, raze it all and build new homes. They got laughed away.

"It's part of the mindset they brought with them from Mexico," Rendon said. "A person doesn't have anything unless you have property and your own home."