Fighting For Water in the Colonias

Tramping softly through the sandy West Texas soil in her paisley skirt and black leather heels, Pearl Ceasar looks more like the first-grade teacher she used to be than the nun-turned-troublemaker she is.

Ceasar is the paid organizer for a church-based citizens group that is struggling to bring drinking water to thousands of impoverished families along the Mexican border. As such, she mobilizes working-class Hispanics who live in unregulated subdivisions called colonias that sprawl across miles of cotton fields in El Paso’s Lower Rio Grande Valley.

This September afternoon Sister is working the back roads of Socorro, a 17th century Spanish mission hamlet, mustering turnout for a meeting with an important politician. In the doorway of a cinder-block home, she embraces a key worker, Anastacia Ledesma, but wastes no time on niceties. “Cuantas personas? Ciento, maybe?” the nun asks in her novice Spanish, inquiring how ) many supporters the area can deliver to the meeting. “Doscientos,” comes the reply. “Ah, muy, muy bien,” exclaims Ceasar. “Four buses. This time we’ll fill four buses.”

For Ceasar, 45, mobilizing the colonias is a lot like the teaching she did in Louisiana and Oklahoma as a Sister of Divine Providence. “We’re only giving people the tools to act — like learning to read,” she explains. “We’re teaching extraordinary things to ordinary people.”

But ten years ago, wanting “to make a difference,” she became an organizer with the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), a community-action effort formed by master social organizer Saul Alinsky. A tough, tenacious workaholic, the nun has gained a sharper insight into the colonia dweller’s plight from her own roots: her Syrian grandparents encountered discrimination in rural Louisiana at the turn of the century.

Sister wants to pack Socorro’s La Purisima Church parish hall to the rafters to send a message to state officials that no one in the 350 ragtag subdivisions will rest until pipes are laid and water is flowing. Already, the El Paso Interreligious Sponsoring Organization (EPISO), for which she works, has made an imprint. Its nagging pressure since 1983 has snared endorsements, a formal commitment of water and a pledge for help in getting a delivery system of mains. But the Government has yet to produce one drop, or funds to dig a single trench, and for many, life’s basic necessity may still be years off.

The irony of hardworking blue-collar families drinking from contaminated wells or lugging five-gallon cans for miles to their kitchens is most galling, of course, to the have-nots themselves. “We keep hearing promises — water pretty soon, pretty soon,” laments Celia Mendoza, who homesteaded here with her husband and two young daughters four years ago. “But most of it has turned out to be a bunch of lies.”

Greedy promoters and government bungling helped mire the communities in their fix. But the root cause was nothing more sinister than the hope of the down-and-out for a slice of the American dream. Since the ’60s, low-income families from El Paso’s barrio, 15 miles to the northwest, have been moving here, lured by the open spaces and the hype of half-acre lots for as little as $1,000 down and $100 a month. Water, they were assured, would be forthcoming. And it was, until 1979, when the influx became such an avalanche that El Paso’s public utility put an abrupt halt to further water hookups.

“Unless something is done,” Sister Pearl tells residents, “more problems are coming. More colonias, more people without water.” Her job requires a healthy measure of outrage, something not difficult to acquire in neighborhoods rank with the odor of cesspools and defective septic tanks: in addition to 28,000 people without water in the El Paso area, some 53,000 live without sewer systems. At a crook in the road outside Socorro, the nun pulls the car over and gestures toward a field of white cotton. “The waterlines just stop there. Can you believe it? All these people want is a basic right. They shouldn’t have to beg for water.”

A woman in a subdivision named Country Green tells of well water so cruddy that it broke her washing machine three times. Outside a small house near by, Francisca Jimenez, mother of eight, casts an eye south toward the Mexican countryside she left eleven years ago. “I was better off there than my children. At least we never lacked for water or sewer.” Illness in the colonias is running at Third World levels. In some areas, with nearly every well lying dangerously close to sewage flows, the hepatitis rate is close to 100%.

Effective as Ceasar is, EPISO’s real successes are the product of its rank and file and of a basic strategy called community action: first sell the downtrodden on their ability to bring about massive change within the system, then inspire them to go out and do it. The tactics are ingeniously simple but hardly new. They date to the 1930s when Alinsky used them in an Irish-American slum behind Chicago’s stockyards.

Making them work with first-generation Mexican Americans who speak little English and are wary of Government poses a particular challenge. “What we are telling people,” says the nun, “is that the system has failed and you must rise to fill the gap. Your vote makes a difference. You must organize.”

Often, EPISO’s workers encounter cold stares and slammed doors. Ceasar encourages them to return. “Once people understand they can change things,” she explains, “the apathy starts to wash away.” Hundreds of one-on-one meetings hasten action. Key volunteers work the neighborhoods on weekends, always heeding IAF’s golden rule: “Don’t do for others what they can do for themselves.”

The chief agitator, Ceasar, stays behind the scenes, badgering politicos, gathering IOUs, mapping recruitment drives. “It’s easier to talk with a public official,” she explains, “when you’ve got 30,000 signatures behind / you.” Ernie Macias, who has been waiting ten years in his hillside trailer for water, says with a chuckle, “Sister knows how to give people hell.”

She shakes off earlier snipings at church activism. “The message of the Last Judgment is clear. We have an obligation to help others.”

At retreats and briefings, EPISO’s lieutenants get a full grounding in the Alinsky doctrine from the no-nonsense nun. She talks of the nature of power and how to “build community” and suggests they read Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals. More to the point are sessions on how to meet a city council member, register new voters and “leverage relationships.” That is, put the screws on public officials.

At EPISO’s headquarters in a drab storefront, she conveys her excitement to a covey of volunteers planning a mass sign-up drive. At one parish, churchgoers will be buttonholed after Sunday Mass. “Can we get the ushers to help us?” she wonders. “You’re the oil that makes everything move,” she tells workers. They laugh. “She teaches us power and strength,” a housewife confides.

“The momentum is with us,” boasts Father Ed Roden, a key organizer. “The people rose up; they’re getting action.” Change never comes nicely, Alinsky’s disciples preach. Nor fast. Sister will be content if a few hundred water hookups can be made by year’s end. That will be a signal the colonias are on the road to controlling their own destiny.