Shantytown, U.S.A.: the boom on the border.

Carlos Lopez lowers his circular saw and wipes the sticky sawdust from his forehead. At 10 A.M., the South Texas sun is already hot, the temperature well over ninety degrees. The sweating carpenter is laboring on a one-room structure the shape and sophistication of a large packing crate. The twelve-by-twenty, wood-frame building has one door, one window, and no plumbing. Electricity is drawn through a long extension cord from the home of his sister-in-law. This is the home of Lopez's future. The forty-six-year-old convenience-store clerk says he envisions a time when life will be better. If not for him, then surely for his children.

"What I am doing here, I hope to leave to my daughter," Lopez says of the humble structure.

Welcome to the colonias: the fastest-growing and poorest region in the United States. Lopez is one of half a million people who live in border colonias--unregulated subdivisions that lack piped drinking water, sewerage, electricity, and other basics most Americans take for granted. On the banks of the Rio Grande, about fifteen miles south of Laredo, Lopez's colonia, El Cenizo, named for a hardy borderlands shrub, is one of more than 1,400 colonias that have sprung up between Brownsville and El Paso.

Public officials point to the Third World conditions in the colonias with a combination of alarm and disgust. This year, on the recommendation of Texas Attorney General Dan Morales, the state legislature passed House Bill 1001, a measure that would outlaw the development of subdivisions like El Cenizo unless they could meet all of the infrastructure requirements necessary for legal platting.

The arguments against the colonias sound simple and persuasive: "My position is that any parcel for sale should include water, sewerage, electricity, and plumbing," says Morales. "I don't agree with people that we should have slums like in India in Texas simply because people have no money."

But addressing the plight of border residents is not so easy. Abandoned by the government, exploited by developers, and seeking to make a better life for themselves, colonia residents are doing the best they can on their little plots of land.

Apolinio Chavez, who works as a carpenter when he can and supplements his income with earnings from his tiny grocery store, has lived for five years in nearby Colonia Los Altos. For Chavez and his wife, Magdalena, colonia life is the only life.

"We live here because there is no other way to do it. To buy a home built by a developer in a subdivision costs $50,000. How can you buy something like that when you make $5 an hour?" Chavez asks.

"When we moved in here in 1990, there was nothing--no water, no sewer, no electricity, no telephone. We lived like the first people who ever came to the United States. But little by little, we built our own house. Then came electricity, telephone, and now we have cable television. Through our own efforts, we are beginning to have our own life."

The growing demand for housing in border cities overwhelms the handful of affordable rental homes and apartments. Instead of doing away with border. slums, attempts to outlaw the colonias may actually generate a more desperate situation, says Andrew Homer, chief of staff to Texas State Senator Peggy Rosson, Democrat of El Paso.

"On the border, what passes for affordable housing is colonias," Homer says. "If you shut down the colonias, you will have to do something for housing alternatives, or you will have people stacking up like cordwood in the rental housing in the center of town."

Despite their unhappiness with the colonias, officials have not provided an alternative. U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros promised soon after he took over HUD to do something about the colonias. But nothing came of his proposal. And lawmakers in Texas have turned their attention away from the Rio Grande to projects in big cities further north, like Houston and Dallas.

Colonia residents are not going to disappear. Long abandoned to the handful of ranchers who could endure the heat and isolation, the Texas-Mexico border is booming. Since the late 1960s, impoverished migrants have flocked to cities on both sides of the Rio Grande.

U.S. Census figures show that only Las Vegas surpasses Laredo as the nation's fastest-growing city. McAllen, 150 miles downriver, is the third fastest-growing city, while Brownsville, near the Rio Grande's mouth, is the seventh.

Early on, the flood of poor migrants overwhelmed available affordable housing in border cities. Competition sent rents sky high on squalid shacks and cramped, dirty apartments.

For many, the promise of a better life in the United States turned out to be hollow. Double-digit unemployment persists along the Rio Grande. At $10,757, the per-capita income in Laredo was almost exactly half the $20,800 US. average in 1993. The recent nosedive of the Mexican economy has made things worse, as trade has fallen off and many businesses along the border have closed.

Meanwhile, urban housing stocks in Laredo are so bad, says city-planning director Marina Sukup, "that middle- and upper-middle-class people are paying incredible rents for what would be considered low-income housing in any other place. Imagine where that leaves poor people."

Soon, unscrupulous developers began offering building lots for sale on county tracts, well beyond the reach of planning departments and building-code inspectors in border cities. Vague promises of water, electricity, and other utilities sweetened the appeal of the otherwise unimproved desert land.

The developers sold lots to the housing-starved renters for as little as $130 down and $100 per month. No bank would lend to these poorest-of-the-poor buyers, so the developers carried their own paper, offering contracts for deed. With no deed until the loan was paid off, the risky financing theoretically could cost a buyer his home if he missed a single payment. Bleak as the terms were, tens of thousands of border families snapped up the lots.

For people like Lopez, who was born poor in the Mexican state of Guanajuato, a rude shack in El Cenizo was not so different from what they had known before, and was certainly better than nothing. As finances allowed, colonia residents could fashion their homes one board at a time, improving as they went. And that's what they did. After years of work, many older colonia homes now would fit into a lower middle-class development anywhere in the United States.

"I am disposed to move in here and live as basically as I have to, until I can turn this into what I would like it to be. It is my way of thinking that this is mine," Lopez says. For Lopez and other colonia residents, owning a plot of land and building a house means the beginning of a better life.

For Texas lawmakers and the public-health department, the colonias are a waking nightmare--a recurrent set of problems without solutions.

Many of the developers broke their promises of basic amenities for buyers, or quickly went bankrupt. The colonia residents then turned to cash-poor local governments for water, schools, and health services.

Without clean water and sewerage, colonias are a public-health menace, says State Senator Judith Zaffirini, Democrat of Laredo. Skyrocketing rates of Third World diseases like cholera, dysentery, hepatitis, and tuberculosis along the Texas-Mexico border can almost certainly be attributed to the unhealthy living conditions in the colonias, she says.

Dengue fever, long thought eradicated in Mexico, has reared its head in Mexican border cities, and endemic cases are now popping up in Texas's Rio Grande Valley. The mosquitoes that spread dengue thrive in the open barrels in which colonia residents store water.

Nowhere in America is the housing situation as desperate as the border colonias, says John Henneberger, director of the Texas Low Income Housing Information Service in Austin.

"Colonia housing by anyone's standards is an emergency situation," Henneberger says. "If a tornado hit a Midwest town, the survivors would not be living in such conditions as a Webb County colonia."

But colonia dwellers like Lopez can expect little help from the government, Henneberger says. Despite a well-publicized promise by HUD Secretary Cisneros in late 1993, the Clinton Administration has failed to deliver housing aid to the colonias.

Cisneros, the former mayor of San Antonio and a champion of South Texas Hispanics, vowed soon after his confirmation to change conditions in the colonias. By December 1993 he had prepared a $270 million bail-out package. The AFL-CIO pension trust fund and the Federal National Mortgage Association would provide up to $70 million in mortgage loans, while HUD would push Congress for the remaining $200 million in subsidies and credits.

In a speech to the Valley Interfaith, a colonia advocacy group in the Rio Grande Valley, Cisneros offered homes to the border's poor: "These will be good houses, with running water, more than a thousand square feet, with three bedrooms."

But Cisneros's good intentions ran into the buzz saw of the Contract with America. His proposals were slashed, then slashed again, and finally bled to death on the Congressional floor. With the collapse of the HUD financing proposal, the AFL-CIO and Fanny Mae mortgage money evaporated.

Even low-cost mortgage money may not be a solution for minimum-wage colonia dwellers, says Henry Flores, former director of the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs.

The Texas Legislature approved $40 million in mortgage money at attractive rates for colonias this year. But to date, none of it has been used. The economics of the border's crushing poverty leave most in the colonias too poor to eat, build and maintain a home, and pay debt service, Flores explains. "If you have a family making $8,000 per year, they might need to come up with another $12,000 per year to make the mortgage workable," he says.

The state of Texas had earmarked another $300 million, largely from the Environmental Protection Agency, for water and sewerage projects in border colonias. But most colonias have yet to benefit, says Ronda Tiffin, planning director for Laredo's Webb County. The problem is that until colonia lots are legally platted, they may not receive the aid. And state model-subdivision rules now require paved streets, street lighting, and other improvements before they qualify for platting, trapping impoverished colonia residents in a Catch-22.

Fed up with the seemingly intractable blight of unregulated colonias, Texas is now moving toward abolishing them altogether.

House Bill 1001 prohibits anyone, except those individuals who have already purchased one, from selling an unplatted colonia lot without all of the infrastructure required by Texas development rules.

"We are hoping to put an end to the development of colonias," State Senator Zaffirini says flatly. "We grandfathered existing colonias when we passed the first legislation in 1989. This time around, we were able to plug that hole. I don't know why developers should be allowed to make money without providing services."

Passed over the stiff opposition of the colonia developers' lobby, House Bill 1001 gives Morales the tools to go after the greedy developers themselves, who have fed on the border's poor like vultures on a carcass, the attorney general says.

But opponents of the bill also included a collection of colonia residents' advocates, who have worked hard for their clients to obtain the services the developers failed to deliver. For residents and their advocates, the question remains: if people stop selling lots in the counties, where will the poor live?

"My clients tell me that if they did not live in their colonias, they would be living in the Salvation Army or with relatives," says Amy Johnson, an Austin attorney who represents a Laredo colonia organization called Las Colonias Olvidadas, or The Forgotten Colonias, which opposed House Bill 1001.

Poor though they are, colonia residents want to protect what they have.

"Our life is hard, but it is better than it was in Laredo," says Maria de los Angeles Molina, who lives in Colonia San Carlos, about five miles from the Laredo city limits. After eight years in San Carlos, Molina lives in a four-room wooden house that has electricity and phone service, but no running water or sewerage. Ruts in the dirt road in front of her house fill with water after each rain.

"This property is for our children, so they don't have to struggle like we did, so they don't have to pay rent," Molina says. "Mexican immigrants want to own their own homes, and to have their sons and daughters build their houses nearby," says sociologist Chad Richardson, director of the Center for International Studies at the University of Texas Pan-American in Edinburg. "You can't do that in the overburdened rental markets in the border cities."

Richardson and many colonia residents' advocates say that the nascent communities should be preserved, and officials should find ways to bring basic amenities to them.

John Hinojosa, chairman of the political-science department at U.T. Pan-Am, has studied colonias on both sides of the Texas-Mexico border, and says they resemble the westward movement in the Nineteenth Century.

"Starting with the basics and building towards the future--isn't that what the pioneers did? They moved out to the country, cleared the land, and piece by piece, they acquired the amenities we take for granted today." The alternative, he says, "is to put them into urban slums, where they would live at the mercy of unscrupulous landlords without ever having the opportunity to become property owners. These are people with few options, doing the best they can under the circumstances. Their hope is that their sacrifice now will be worth it for their children. They are not ignorant and they do not need to be protected from themselves: they need to be given more options."

Hinojosa suspects that efforts to shut down colonias have more to do with anti-immigrant sentiment than public-health concerns. The regulations on rural developments passed in Austin apply to the border, but nowhere else, he points out. "Colonia conditions are not unique to the border," Hinojosa says. "You can find them all over Texas, from prairieland shacks east of Dallas to trailer parks in the Trans-Pecos out west. This is strictly a racist effort against poor immigrants."

The real solution to desperate conditions on the border is a combination of higher-wage jobs and an infusion of public funds to provide the services that would make the area livable by First World standards. But so far, federal and state officials are determinedly averting their gaze, wishing visible signs of poverty on the border would disappear, and focusing attention and funds on the cities to the north, even as the border area continues to boom.

What might the border look like ten years after House Bill 1001? Ironically, perhaps a lot like the teeming slums that Morales wants to wipe out. Even the attorney general concedes that the government will have to spend a lot of money to bring existing colonias up to standards as new colonias are outlawed. If the federal government will not do it, it will be up to the state of Texas. But for the foreseeable future, such state spending is about as probable as a July snowstorm.

"In the House, one of the things people have told me is that they feel they have voted for enough colonia bond issues, and it is now time to look after their own constituents," says Henry Cuellar, Democrat of Laredo.

They're already doing that, says John Henneberger from his low-income housing service in Austin.

"Any way you look at it, the legislature is pushing money into Houston and Dallas. The end result is that every study shows that the border is where the need is, but they are not [going to spend] the money."

And the effects?

"Have you noticed the densities in many border colonias lately?" Henneberger asks. "As available colonia lots dry up, you will see families making space for relatives on the lots they already own. Where you used to see only one house per lot, now I see many places that include a second house, or a house trailer in the back as well."