A Thirst in the Garden

<v Speaker>The sluggish brown skinned river finds its way through the silver <v Speaker>cactus desert, lends its weight to the dams and the lands <v Speaker>of the thirsty eyed men. <v Speaker>The river spare and strange counters dust and <v Speaker>death with tremulous pools for the ?curanderos? <v Speaker>Pigeons. <v Speaker>The river and the people combine the river <v Speaker>swallows time. <v Speaker>So much depends on the snow in Colorado. <v Narrator>Every morning,Maria Sylvia Alanis comes to draw water from the cistern

<v Narrator>in her front yard. <v Narrator>For six years, she, her husband and their five children <v Narrator>have been living alongside a cucumber field. <v Narrator>The house is north of the town of Mission in the lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas near <v Narrator>the Mexican border. <v Narrator>They are poor, as are most farm workers here. <v Narrator>And what one observer has called the last bastion of feudalism in America. <v Narrator>Ricardo Alanis earns perhaps 80 dollars a week when there is work. <v Narrator>But the work is seasonal, so often there is nothing. <v Narrator>The children are malnourished. <v Narrator>Life is harsh and unrewarding for all the Alanis' must <v Narrator>endure, There's something else that makes life dangerous.

<v Narrator>The water that fills their cistern comes from an irrigation canal about 50 <v Narrator>yards behind the house. Part of the elaborate irrigation system which supplies water <v Narrator>to the cucumber field. <v Narrator>The water in the canals makes the land lush and profitable, but it <v Narrator>comes from the Rio Grande River, filthy, untreated water <v Narrator>polluted by the sewage dumped into the river by cities on both sides of the border. <v Narrator>Maria Alanis, her husband and their children do not have <v Narrator>clean water. <v Narrator>Every morning, instead of turning on the tap in the kitchen, Maria Alanis <v Narrator>leaves the house and walks back through the cucumber field to the canal. <v Narrator>She opens a valve which allows the canal's water to flow into the irrigation ditch <v Narrator>between the field and the house.

<v Narrator>The Alanis' have dug a small trench to divert some of the irrigation water into their <v Narrator>cistern They've rigged the screen in front of a small pipe which <v Narrator>runs underground the last few feet to the cistern where the water is stored. <v Narrator>There are many more families like the Alanis', who have to get their water this way. <v Narrator>Perhaps 75,000 to 100,000 people living in scattered <v Narrator>rural settlements known as colonias must haul water in barrels or <v Narrator>use the canal or dig shallow wells. <v Narrator>This situation results in one of the worst sets of health statistics outside of Calcutta.

<v Narrator>Serious diseases such as typhus, typhoid, polio and leprosy <v Narrator>virtually wiped out everywhere else in America, are common in the Rio Grande <v Narrator>Valley. The reason, say many of the local doctors and health <v Narrator>administrators, is the lack of clean water for drinking, cooking, <v Narrator>bathing and cleaning. <v Narrator>This represents the cruelest dimension of life for Mexican Americans in the Rio <v Narrator>Grande Valley across the Missouri Pacific Railroad tracks usually <v Narrator>on the north, sides are Los pueblos mexicanos. <v Narrator>The Mexican towns, many created by law 50 years ago, <v Narrator>together with the colonias. <v Narrator>This is where America's poorest people live. <v Narrator>According to the United States Department of Commerce, the nation's three poorest <v Narrator>metropolitan areas are located here.

<v Narrator>The per capita income is about twenty three hundred dollars a year. <v Narrator>Less than half of the national average in the rural areas. <v Narrator>It's worse. <v Narrator>The reasons for this are a complicated mesh of historical, cultural and geographical <v Narrator>factors worsened by rigid economic realities in <v Narrator>this part of the country. <v Narrator>The economics worked to create a system which not only denies people a chance at some <v Narrator>of the things which make life worth living, it actually works to move them toward <v Narrator>dying. They call it <v Narrator>El valle de las lágrimas,The Valley of Tears. <v Narrator>The whites or Anglos call it the Magic Valley because the valley <v Narrator>has become another one of America's boom towns, ironically, the boom <v Narrator>is based on water. <v Narrator>The Anglo minority, perhaps 20 percent of the population, controls the area <v Narrator>economically and politically. <v Narrator>They also control the water and thus have had a great effect on the beginning of the

<v Narrator>water supply problem. <v Narrator>And what efforts there have been to solve it. <v Narrator>Water has made the lower Rio Grande Valley one of the most productive agricultural <v Narrator>areas in the world. The land was always good and alluvial fan <v Narrator>with rich deep topsoil, with the addition of elaborate irrigation systems <v Narrator>and upriver dams, cultivated land and farm cash income has doubled <v Narrator>in the past 20 years. <v Narrator>There's been a dramatic increase in industrial development as well. <v Narrator>Company after company has been relocating here. <v Narrator>Drawn by low wage scales and trade advantages. <v Narrator>And with an average January temperature of 65 degrees, the valley has been <v Narrator>promoted as and is becoming the new Miami. <v Narrator>Bank deposits and retail sales have doubled in the past five years alone. <v Narrator>Nobody knows this story better than Texas Citrus Cooperative executive Mike Wallace and <v Narrator>lower Rio Grande Valley Chamber of Commerce Vice president Russell Willis.

<v Mike Wallace>Without water, the valley would not exist. <v Mike Wallace>Very frankly, without water, citrus would not exist. <v Mike Wallace>That just needs an adequate supply of water. <v Mike Wallace>And the whole valley is based on this supply of water. <v Mike Wallace>I would assume that without water we would be just scrub country the way it was many <v Mike Wallace>years ago. <v Russell Willis>If you didn't have the water in the lower Rio Grande Valley would be impossible to raise <v Russell Willis>the three, four crops a year that we do. <v Russell Willis>And of course, that's our number one industry and number one source of income. <v Russell Willis>So water is just absolutely essential for the lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas. <v Narrator>But when people like Wallace and Willis talk about water in the Rio Grande being <v Narrator>essential, they mostly mean essential for growing money. <v Narrator>It's taken for granted that people had water that's safe enough to drink. <v Narrator>Many people do not. They live in the colonias, perhaps 75 <v Narrator>to 100 settlements scattered throughout the valley. <v Narrator>Some are unnoticed miles from the nearest town and others are now bumping

<v Narrator>up against the incorporated areas. <v Narrator>The familiar State Health Department signs are never seen. <v Narrator>Along the dusty, rutted roads that lead to the colonias, although a few <v Narrator>of them have been settled for some time now, they first began mushrooming about 25 <v Narrator>years ago. Spurred on by two successive events, the first <v Narrator>was the decline of the Petrona system. <v Narrator>Alexandro Moreno runs colonias del valle, the Colonias Advocate <v Narrator>Organization, formed in 1967. <v Alexandro Moreno>There were many persons who were living out on the farms in housing provided by <v Alexandro Moreno>the patron the owner of the of the farm through time. <v Alexandro Moreno>As he noticed that it was getting too expensive. <v Alexandro Moreno>He began to sell the houses <v Alexandro Moreno>to the people and also to knock down some of these houses and to <v Alexandro Moreno>take pieces of land and subdivide them. <v Narrator>Then in 1953, a piece of high priced engineering came along <v Narrator>the Falcon dam. It increased cultivated acreage and with it

<v Narrator>the demand for farm labor, nickel and dime real estate operators <v Narrator>bought cheap land and sold it to the newly arrived farmhands, exploiting <v Narrator>the migrant workers desire for a piece of land of their own. <v Narrator>The tiny Lots price to sell went for as little as fifty dollars down <v Narrator>and five dollars a month. <v Narrator>Public health director for the Rio Grande Valley, Dr. Paul Musgraves. <v Dr. Paul Musgraves>Obviously, these people seek a place to live and they have done that. <v Dr. Paul Musgraves>And I think to their credit, they have sought a place within their means <v Dr. Paul Musgraves>and their means, of course, is limited. <v Dr. Paul Musgraves>And hence they have congregated in what has come to be known in the <v Dr. Paul Musgraves>colonias, which are not the higher socially [unclear] levels of the <v Dr. Paul Musgraves>valley. <v Narrator>Bill Parrish, general manager of an irrigation district. <v Bill Parrish>I do think that the people who sold them the land failed to explain to them <v Bill Parrish>that there weren't any services suitable for a dense

<v Bill Parrish>residential kind of development. <v Bill Parrish>They didn't tell him about the various taxes that existed and this sort of thing. <v Bill Parrish>So perhaps the people who bought in the <v Bill Parrish>colonias were not as well-informed as they could have been. <v Narrator>That's for sure, that people had to locate their colonias in unincorporated, <v Narrator>unregulated areas that had no water service or sewers or indoor plumbing <v Narrator>or proper drainage. And the situation still prevails today. <v Narrator>Dan Hawkins, who's been running tu clínica familiar, your family clinic since <v Narrator>1971. <v Dan Hawkins>The major single cause of these problems is the water. <v Dan Hawkins>The vast majority of the people living out in rural areas are drinking water, either <v Dan Hawkins>drawn from canals which are used to irrigate the fields and are laced with insecticides. <v Dan Hawkins>And they have bacteria from fecal matter from the cows and the animals out <v Dan Hawkins>there, or from a rain barrel, which is also subject to the

<v Dan Hawkins>same sorts of problems, or from shallow wells, which often run three to five feet and <v Dan Hawkins>may perhaps as deep as 20 feet under the ground. <v Dan Hawkins>The problem is that these shallow wells are often located close to the house and there's <v Dan Hawkins>something else that's located close to the house, and that's the outdoor privy. <v Dan Hawkins>In most rural areas, they don't have running water, so they don't have indoor plumbing. <v Dan Hawkins>And the problem there is, of course, that the bacteria from the fecal matter will run <v Dan Hawkins>through the water table and contaminate the water that's being taken up to be used for <v Dan Hawkins>bathing and drinking and what have you. <v Narrator>Here are results of tests done a few years ago on the water from two shallow <v Narrator>wells in two different colonias. <v Narrator>In both cases, the Hidalgo County Health Department found the water contaminated <v Narrator>by coliform bacteria. <v Narrator>As the health department notes at the bottom of the report, water of satisfactory <v Narrator>bacteriological quality should be free from coliform organisms. <v Narrator>Another means of getting water is to haul it in from wherever they can get it. <v Narrator>Sometimes the drive can be 10 miles or more.

<v Narrator>Three or four times a week they go in battered pickups to a store, <v Narrator>a gas station or a friend's house in town, wherever they can find a source <v Narrator>of clean water. <v Narrator>They haul and store the water in discarded 55 gallon drums, which in <v Narrator>some cases were used to hold the toxic pesticides sprayed on the fields. <v Narrator>If people are lucky, there's a tap along the main road running by the colonia, <v Narrator>like this one in Colonia Balboa, provided by the city of McCallan, where <v Narrator>Pedro Ibanez comes to get water for his wife and three children. <v Narrator>Ibanez is a farm worker who's been in the United States for 20 years. <v Narrator>The last seven as a resident of Balboa get wet. <v Pedro Ibanez>We're lucky that the public water hydrant is this close to our house. <v Pedro Ibanez>Of course, if I had the money, I would buy a house within the inner city <v Pedro Ibanez>for water and indoor bathrooms are already in service.

<v Narrator>Here's a letter from the Hidalgo County Health Department sent to support a grant <v Narrator>application for a Colonial's water system. <v Narrator>The letter says that water is stored in rusty barrels that are open and exposed <v Narrator>to animals and dust and filled with mosquito larva and fecal contamination. <v Narrator>It is impossible, the letter concluded for the residents to practice good personal <v Narrator>hygiene earlier that day. <v Narrator>Ubon News made one of his frequent trips to Dr. Ramiro Caso, who runs a busy <v Narrator>clinic in the McAllen barrio. <v Narrator>This time the visit was to treat Jose Angel, his three year old son, <v Narrator>who's been sick a good deal of his life. <v Narrator>The boy has been to Castro's office with several water related diseases stomach <v Narrator>parasites and skin infections, plus pneumonia and several bouts of flu. <v Narrator>And if there is sometimes not enough water for health, sometimes there <v Narrator>is too much. <v Dr. Ramiro Caso>The outhouses will flood. <v Dr. Ramiro Caso>You actually get a foot or two of water in these colonias and the

<v Dr. Ramiro Caso>outhouses are flooded and you actually get stool <v Dr. Ramiro Caso>outside and these people's yards where kids are playing and people are walking. <v Dr. Ramiro Caso>So actually you have kids actually playing in their own stool and walking <v Dr. Ramiro Caso>through their own stool when you get that kind of situation because of improper drainage. <v Dr. Ramiro Caso>Because of the presence of outhouses, many of the <v Dr. Ramiro Caso>organisms, the infected organisms, bacteria and viral <v Dr. Ramiro Caso>are transmitted through stool. <v Dr. Ramiro Caso>And unfortunately, stool is is the worst <v Dr. Ramiro Caso>contaminant of water that is not properly purified. <v Dr. Ramiro Caso>And that is available in the irrigation canals and places like that where a lot of the <v Dr. Ramiro Caso>colonia people get their water supply. <v Narrator>This environment creates some discouraging statistics. <v Narrator>Infant mortality, one hundred twenty five percent above the national <v Narrator>average. Tuberculosis, 250 percent of the national

<v Narrator>average. Flu and pneumonia, 200 percent. <v Narrator>Typhus, typhoid, polio, leprosy. <v Narrator>All much more prevalent here than anywhere else in the nation. <v Narrator>Still, some people aren't convinced that it's that bad. <v Narrator>The state's director of public health in the Valley, Dr. Paul Musgraves. <v Dr. Paul Musgraves>Well, yes, I. I think that what's been said <v Dr. Paul Musgraves>and written about the colonias has been somewhat <v Dr. Paul Musgraves>exaggerated in terms of health, which is our primary responsibility. <v Dr. Paul Musgraves>If the water these people are drinking, <v Dr. Paul Musgraves>is indeed dangerous. We aren't seeing this reflected in the incidence of <v Dr. Paul Musgraves>hepatitis and the waterborne type gastroenteritis problems that you would <v Dr. Paul Musgraves>expect to see. <v Dan Hawkins>I'm sorry, I don't want to run counter to what a public <v Dan Hawkins>health official is saying, but we see it here in the clinic.

<v Dr. Paul Musgraves>We don't see it in terms of disease or do we see people who are <v Dr. Paul Musgraves>chronically malnourished. <v Dan Hawkins>They don't. They suffer from inadequate nutrition. <v Dr. Paul Musgraves>They are, for the most part, healthy people. <v Dan Hawkins>Probably among the sickest people in the state of Texas. <v Narrator>The problems of the people in the colonias have a historical basis. <v Narrator>They began about 200 years ago when the Spanish chased out the Indians along the Rio <v Narrator>Grand and settle down along the river. <v Narrator>The valley slumbered then until 1984, when the St. Louis, Brownsville and <v Narrator>Mexico Railroad was completed, connecting the valley to Houston and the rest of the <v Narrator>country, refrigerated boxcars now could deliver produce to distant markets. <v Narrator>Land speculators and irrigation companies descended on the valley. <v Narrator>The Anglo dominated businesses turned for the first time to the cheap and abundant labor <v Narrator>available across the border for a few pesos a day. <v Narrator>The men and mules laid the tracks and cut down the mesquite and prickly pear, preparing <v Narrator>the land for a harvest they would never enjoy.

<v Narrator>Later came the traditional land promoters buying up the land and subdividing <v Narrator>it for home sites. <v Narrator>In the 1950s, a new boom began and it began with agriculture. <v Narrator>A new upriver dam provided a sure and steady supply of water. <v Narrator>Newer and more modern packing plants were built to handle the produce pouring out of the <v Narrator>fields. Each town scrambled for industrial parks to attract light <v Narrator>industry and tourism known locally as the winter Texan trade <v Narrator>took off. <v Narrator>The tourists, mostly from the Midwest, now spend all or part of the winter <v Narrator>in the trailer parks scattered through the orange groves, pouring 26 million <v Narrator>dollars a year into the valley's economy. <v Narrator>In the colonias, meanwhile, not much happened, but curanderos <v Narrator>or faith healers operated as they had always done and along with the church, <v Narrator>took hold. <v Narrator>The settlements looking more permanent all the time ,aintain the flavor of the people's <v Narrator>rural origins.

<v Narrator>Then in the mid 60s came the first stirrings of Mexican-American political activism <v Narrator>in the Valley. <v Narrator>In 1966, the farmworkers strike, then school <v Narrator>walkouts, and in 1970, Alejandro Moreno <v Narrator>ran for Hidalgo County commissioner on the Raza Unida party ticket. <v Narrator>Raza Unida had already taken over one south Texas county, and thereafter it became <v Narrator>evident that the Anglo establishment would be in continual confrontation with the <v Narrator>colonias and their leaders. <v Narrator>One of the first of these encounters took place with an irrigation district, <v Narrator>though districts deal primarily with intricate irrigation systems. <v Narrator>They're also permitted under the law to provide drinking water if they choose to <v Narrator>do so. In this case, they did not. <v Narrator>The district sponsored a bill which passed in the legislature. <v Narrator>The new law allowed them to exclude urban property. <v Narrator>In other words, the colonias from their districts. <v Narrator>David Hall is an attorney with Texas Rural Legal aid in Weslaco representing

<v Narrator>the colonias. <v David Hall>Well, they went to two representatives, one in the House and one in the Senate <v David Hall>at that time and sold them a bill designed, as they said, <v David Hall>to eliminate the taxation upon their <v David Hall>poorer residents of the colonias. <v David Hall>And the device for doing that, of course, was to throw them out of the districts <v David Hall>and not remove any political influence that they might have had. <v David Hall>One of the districts admitted that they were concerned about the, quote, <v David Hall>political mischief that the colonias residents <v David Hall>could cause by voting themselves into office and jacking <v David Hall>up the tax rates on a farm property and are paying for <v David Hall>water improvements in their area. <v David Hall>But what it really came down to is they were afraid how these people are going to vote. <v Bill Parrish>No, no, I don't think they don't think that it was <v Bill Parrish>primarily a matter of economics. And, of course, it certainly was unfair <v Bill Parrish>to keep people in the district and not be able to serve them and still have to charge

<v Bill Parrish>them. <v Narrator>Parrish's district went ahead and excluded 40 tracks as urban property, thus <v Narrator>eliminating one way the colonias might have obtained clean water. <v Narrator>Hall appealed the case to the U.S. Supreme Court in April 1976. <v Narrator>Two justices voted to hear the case, but four votes are needed before a case <v Narrator>will be reviewed. The colonias next tried to piggyback on industrial park <v Narrator>development grants. The City of West Lykos application included plans to extend <v Narrator>waterlines, which in part would serve two colonias. <v Narrator>Llano Grande and Agua Dulce Both of which were <v Narrator>excluded by the irrigation district. <v Narrator>But what does the word serve mean? <v Narrator>The city thinks it means a six inch water line running down the main road between <v Narrator>the two colonias. The colonias think it means the six inch main plus <v Narrator>waterlines in front of their homes. <v Narrator>Without these lines, the water main out on the highway might as well be <v Narrator>on the moon.

<v Narrator>Since the residents can't afford to pay for a water system to reach the main road. <v Narrator>In the Rio Grande Valley, disputes like this usually go against the poor. <v Narrator>The April 6th, 1976 meeting of the Weslaco City Commission. <v Narrator>Texas rural Legal Aid attorney Oscar Alvarez. <v Oscar Alvarez>In page two. I'd like to read it says and <v Oscar Alvarez>to provide water services to a rapidly developing commercial area in southeast Weslaco <v Oscar Alvarez>containing two colonias. <v Oscar Alvarez>That's on page two of your application. <v Oscar Alvarez>Now hat to me reads like they're going to get water. <v Oscar Alvarez>It's written in black and white. There was a promise to the two Colonial's that they were <v Oscar Alvarez>gonna get water and it hasn't been done. <v Narrator>Weslaco City Commissioner Hector Fargus. <v Hector Fargus>We normally provide water through <v Hector Fargus>outerways as alleys or streets, whichever the case might be. <v Hector Fargus>The tapping is left up to the property owner, Am I

<v Hector Fargus>correct- Could these have been what was proposed <v Hector Fargus>in the can this grant <v Hector Fargus>request? I think I agree that it's vague- <v Oscar Alvarez>The application said if it's vague, it should be interpreted in favor of these <v Oscar Alvarez>residents, not not against them. <v Oscar Alvarez>They didn't write the application. The city did. <v Narrator>And city attorney Gaines Griffin. <v Gains Griffin>I think the main problem here is caused by interpretation of the word serve. <v Gains Griffin>They serve the colonias, of course, and our grant application, we <v Gains Griffin>did show exactly what we were going to do <v Gains Griffin>with this money. We showed we're gonna have that trunk line out there and we do have that <v Gains Griffin>trunk line out there. And I think the real question here is what more are we going to do, <v Gains Griffin>if anything? <v Narrator>It should be remembered that Although Weslaco and the irrigation districts did not <v Narrator>respond to the need for clean water. <v Narrator>They did not directly create the colonias.

<v Narrator>As we've seen, history, culture, geography and the economic system have done <v Narrator>that. <v Narrator>Dr. Josey Gonzalez, who grew up in the Valley, is the director of Chicano studies <v Narrator>at Southern Methodist University. <v Dr. Josey Gonalez>That the system, in fact, I think creates the culture of poverty and very much the same <v Dr. Josey Gonalez>way that it creates colonies. <v Dr. Josey Gonalez>And we can have colonies abroad or we can have colonies internally. <v Dr. Josey Gonalez>The colonias serve the purposes of this society. <v Dr. Josey Gonalez>They are not benign purposes. <v Narrator>Will the people who live on the valley's back streets ever have clean water? <v Narrator>Maybe rural water systems may give some of them a chance at it. <v Narrator>But even if waterlines are in, the residents of the colonias, half of whom <v Narrator>live below the poverty level, will have to pay for the connections from the street <v Narrator>to their homes in Balboa, only a handful of houses are <v Narrator>hooked up to the city water main because they must have indoor toilets before the <v Narrator>city will connect them. And of course, there's always the border.

<v Narrator>A wave of cheap and willing labor is continually fleeing northern Mexico and its 40 <v Narrator>percent rates of unemployment. <v Narrator>Many of these laborers are illegal aliens. <v Narrator>R. E. Shonenburgher, commissioner for the southern region of the Immigration and <v Narrator>Naturalization Service. <v R. E. Shonenburgher>When you have a large number of illegal <v R. E. Shonenburgher>workers who will work for any under any conditions and under <v R. E. Shonenburgher>for any wage available, it tends to <v R. E. Shonenburgher>greatly displace the people and depress the wage rate, <v R. E. Shonenburgher>the hourly wage rate particularly. <v Narrator>And so the system will continue. <v Narrator>For one side of the water equation, this is fine. <v Narrator>I see nothing but growth and development, and that's not Chamber of Commerce talk. <v Narrator>In all of our surveys that we've run, there's going to be increased industrial <v Narrator>development. That is evident at the present time by the construction programs that are <v Narrator>going on and the expansion of industry. <v Narrator>The growth of the tourism industry. We just don't know how far it's going to go.

<v Narrator>It's just going to go as really as far as we provide for. <v Narrator>For the other side, It is not so fine. <v Narrator>Dr. Ramiro Carso. <v Dr. Ramiro Caso>have to make a basic decision as to what is it that <v Dr. Ramiro Caso>we call a handout and what is it that we do not call a handout. <v Dr. Ramiro Caso>I think that's where the hang up this week. <v Dr. Ramiro Caso>We don't think that that giving medical care to elderly is a handout anymore. <v Dr. Ramiro Caso>We used to think that. I think everybody should have the right to a clean glass <v Dr. Ramiro Caso>of water. I think it should be a very fundamental right. <v Dr. Ramiro Caso>Every American certainly should be entitled to it. <v Dr. Ramiro Caso>Every person should have available to him clean drinking <v Dr. Ramiro Caso>water. <v Narrator>There is a terrible irony in the situation in the fields are both sides <v Narrator>of the water equation. People don't have water for themselves and <v Narrator>their families work on the land surrounded by fruits and vegetables <v Narrator>made possible by the lavish use of irrigation water.

<v Narrator>The expensive irrigation systems of pumps and pipes and canals are <v Narrator>designed and financed and built systems for <v Narrator>purifying and distributing clean water to the people who work in the fields. <v Narrator>By and large, are not, water for plants, <v Narrator>not for people.