All the Agents and Saints: Dispatches from the U.S. Borderlands

16 2 The Rebel Depending on whom you ask, Lionel Lopez is either Jiminy Cricket—the “conscience of South Texas”—or else the region’s most­unrelentingpest.Asienna-skinnedmanwithbroad-rimmedglasses,hegelshis hairbackandrazorshismoustachestraight.Sixty-sixyearsofsunlinesburrow into his face. When I climb into his Ford F-150, he flicks off the norteño music jangling on the radio before grinning. “Are you ready to go to Mexico, mija?” We won’t be traveling within 145 miles of the border today, but Lionel is being metaphorical here. He means that in less than twenty minutes we’ll be witnessing poverty so desperate, it will seem we departed the United States long ago. We glide past the million-dollar mansions and palm trees lining Corpus Christi’s ritziest street—Ocean Drive—and then ride Cesar Chavez Memorial Highway out of town. Estella’s poisoned well has curled my fingers into a note-taking position. Miracle trees are a matter of faith, but contaminated water can be proven by science. When I started asking around for resources, people directed me to Lionel. He is said to know this swath of Texas better than anyone. “Back when I was a firefighter, we used to ride around in the ambulances a lot, and I saw the conditions people were living in out here,” he says. “I saw their shacks. I saw their dirt roads. I saw their suffering.” Upon investigation, he learned that many were residents of colonias, the unincorporated communities that began cropping up in the borderlands in the 1950s, when developers foisted off cheap plots of land lacking running water, sewage systems, electricity hookups, fire hydrants, and paved roads to low-income (and largely Tejano) families. Such communities have not only proliferated in the sixty years since but also migrated north to areas surrounding Corpus, Austin, Houston, even Dallas. The secretary of state’s office has counted nearly 2,300 colonias housing more than 400,000 Texans, though Lionel thinks there are several times as many. The Rebel  17 About thirty years ago, Lionel asked his wife, Juanita, if he could take a bag of groceries to some residents he met on an ambulance run. Although they were squeezing nickels to support their own five children, she agreed. That bag evolved into turkeys at Thanksgiving. Toys at Christmas. Ice during heatwaves.Soon,thetwowereorganizingclothingdrivesforthecoloniasand teaching classes about nutrition and other life skills. Gradually, they noticed how unhealthy the residents were, compared with their neighbors back in Corpus. Diabetes was rife, as was asthma. Scores of babies had birth defects. Many people were dying of cancer. And when the colonias flooded each year during the rainy season, outhouses and septic tanks did too, causing outbreaksofinfectionsanddiarrhea .Childrenhadtotrudgethroughrawsewage to catch their school bus each morning. Housewives lost their toenails. That’s when the Lopezes got political. They started ringing the state’s chief environmental agency, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ), demanding that area creeks and water wells be tested for toxicity. They petitioned the Texas Water Development Board and South Texas Water Authority for the installation of fire hydrants or at least cisterns. They lobbied lawmakers for sanitary sewage systems. They even founded a nonprofit called the South Texas Colonia Initiative to make their requests more official. Yet time and again, they clashed with the same foe: the odometer. Many federal and state programs finance projects only for colonias closer to the border, as geography is a key component of the government’s definition of a colonia. “We are in no man’s land out here,” Lionel says, shaking his head. “Our people are the forgotten ones.” On the outskirts of Robstown, Lionel hangs a left at the Exxon gas­station and rumbles down a county road. The land here is so level you could shoot marbles across it, but in time some flat-topped hills crest the horizon. “The little kids call this their mountain,” he says as we draw near. In fact, it’s a hazardous waste dump with an Orwellian name: U.S.­Ecology Texas. In 2010, it was processing some 78,000 containers of waste a year—including petrochemicals, agricultural chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and certain radioactive materials—and injecting the remains deep inside a multilayer landfill liner system. It is owned by U.S. Ecology, Inc., the same company that under a different name shuttered a similar plant in Winona, Texas, in 1997, after more than 600 area residents filed personal-injury lawsuits against it. Among their grievances: scores of two-headed or stillborn...