“Take the whole family to Marfa, Texas, ‘the Jonestown of Minimalism.’ See Donald Judd’s bed! Eat food all the same color! Scare the locals! Win a date with John Chamberlain!”
Text from John Waters’ Visit Marfa poster from 2003.

Marfa was my last stop on the Kinne trip. A small town in the Big Bend region of West Texas, three hours south of the major east-west Texas Interstate, the region could be best described as isolated. You know you’re getting close to this 1.6-square-mile town when, if you’re driving from El Paso along US-90 (which you probably are since El Paso International is the region’s nearest airport), you see amongst the desert scrub, derelict oil derricks, lonesome cows, and sagging half-dead towns a squat, free-standing Prada store along the highway—an entirely unwelcome site along one of the greatest drives in the country, through a hauntingly empty lunar landscape sporadically interrupted by violently vertical low mountain steppes. While the window display of this Prada outpost is stocked with bejeweled leather handbags and four-inch peep toes, this isn’t any Italian couture outlet. Rather it is a 2005 art installation, a wink-wink one-line joke that is trying to say something about the current state of Marfa as a nexus of art and commerce. You see, art came to Marfa, and the Pradas weren’t far behind.

Ok, here’s the best story ever told about Marfa as written by the incredible Molly Ivins. It’s certainly apocryphal, but like all rumors and Texas tall tales, hints at a deeper truth. The booming oil-soaked West Texas towns were drying up in the severe recession of the early 1980s, a time in which poverty and unemployment were threatening the existence of a region that was built on the outdated, newly-modernized, and moved-away twin pillars of ranching and oiling. That is, except for Marfa. Thanks to a transplanted New Yorker, the minimalist sculptor Donald Judd*, Marfa had a back-up revenue stream— minimalist art, and lots of it—that was starting to lure a steady flow of nascent tourist dollars into the town. Word spread through the region that people from miles around, all over the country even, were starting to show up in Marfa with open wallets. And some of these new visitors were sticking around, fixing up old buildings, maybe even adding a coffee shop here and there. Before you knew it, Marfa wasn’t an old dying town, but a thriving one. As Ivins tells it, West Texans all over were intrigued by these new foreign visitors and wanted more of them, and a familiar sight started occurring at economic development town meetings in the region: “some old rancher is apt to stand up – big old rough hands curlin’ up the brim of his cowboy hat with embarrassment over having to speak in public, of course – and inquire earnestly, ‘How do we get them gay people to come?’”

*Among the many things the taciturn Judd disliked in his life, being referred to as a “minimalist” was a big one. He preferred to call himself an “empiricist.” He also rejected the term sculpture because of the implied sense of carving.

Now, some 25 years later, here is Marfa resident Christina Dreyfus quoted in the May 6th, 2007 Fort Worth Star Telegram: “With all of the new people coming, it seems to me that the place is going more and more for the tourists and retirees….The regular Joes on the street can’t afford it anymore.” For practical purposes, everyone knows what gentrification is. As usual, though, there’s more to it than the simple story of what is occurring in places like the Lower East Side and downtowns all over the country. Look at the case of adobe homes in Marfa. An original adobe structure is typically seen as difficult to maintain due to the poor state of wiring, lighting, and eroded material efficiency. Most residents are much happier in a balloon framed, wood-siding house, if not a simple pre-fab trailer, and see the decaying adobe as a blighted nuisance. But, of course, to an outsider, adobe is authenticity personified, a rarity, something to be prized. No one wants to tell their friends in San Francisco that they own a clapboard house in Marfa. In the West of the imagination, adobe is king, and homes that were appraised at $40,000 are selling for upwards of $300,000. Priced out are the 36 percent of county residents who live below the poverty line, which has led to low-wage workers commuting long distances to Marfa, a town whose population hovers around 2,000.

It’s inevitable that this juxtaposition of Marfa over time will lead to unavoidable and overly sentimental questions of the proper means by which to achieve civic renewal. The trope that what came before is certifiably better, that finding superiority in someone else’s traditions is morally more correct than embracing the new is certainly annoying in its own self-regard. But, before we go any further, let’s acknowledge that those questions regarding the value of art, gentrification, the economic and political implications of tourism, and race are bound up in an extremely complex and difficult mass, and get into a whole subjective field of issues that try to resolve what’s best for other people and what produces a vibrant and healthy environment. However, it’s impossible to fight the sentiment that the new Judd congregations are fundamentally out of synch with the idea of West Texas as a bastion of authenticity against the trendiness and fleeting fashionability of the art world. This can only be further reinforced by the steady stream of Hollywood celebrities that have been flocking to Marfa, chasing down the next Santa Fe, Taos, or Sundance, in a perverse distortion of Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier theory,” constantly finding and despoiling the last towns untouched by Wal-Marts and Applebee’s, while happily paying the astronomical prices that have driven the cost of everything from real estate to Blue Bell ice cream to staggering levels. This leads to one of the strongest reasons to denounce urban renewal, which is the range of civic activities destroyed by the removal of communal physical spaces caused by the homogenization of the town when all but the rich are pushed out. The neighborhood cafés, feed stores, and groceries that have been supplanted by coffee shops, art galleries, wine bars, and organic markets are a manifestation of the notion that locality begins with social life. Longtime cafés popular with locals have been forced to move off of the main street, segregated from the artist class. It had been eight years since I was last in Marfa, and the changes that have taken place in that time can only be called extensive, best personified by the Thunderbird Motel—what had once been a comfortably run-down (and eminently affordable) place to stay had morphed into a $150-a-night boutique hotel—which could most accurately be described as renovated in the South Austin style, which is off-putting in a generic Dwell kind of way.

A temporary, nomadic population of vacationing, summer residents, lifestyle tourists, and MFA interns, a group whose closest attempt at civic engagement came when they banded together to stop a planned big box development that was within eyesight of the Chinati Artist Foundation. An attractive, affordable residential and commercial development that one can’t help but assume the 36 percent of Marfa residents that live below the poverty would have preferred to a contemporary art mecca. Gentrification produces a shallow architecture that produces as poor neighborhoods as blight – suffering from a lack of citizenship and homogeneity between rich and poor, but in this case leads to an anti-development stance that keeps the town in a perpetual state of acceptable rusticity. It’s a tough equilibrium that has to be maintained to prevent the town from slipping into the anywhereness that causes the influx of monied residents to occupy an inherently anti-democratic stance as they exert undue influence on development in spite of the majority’s best interests. So many monied elites, in fact, that one local cattle rancher succinctly described the current state of Marfa as: “Filling up with triple A’s — artists, assholes and attorneys.”  This finally leads to the ostensible focus of this entry, the one man who altered Marfa to such a widespread extent, and was neither urban planner, architect, nor developer, but rather artist: Donald Judd.

John Waters’ satiric take on Marfa is funny for many reasons, most specifically the bubble lettered exhortation to “See Donald Judd’s Bed,” which you can in fact see. (I personally chose to forgo this portion of the tour, but by all accounts, Judd’s bed appears a comfortable nest among a scattering of decidedly non-minimal western kitsch furnishings.) It’s a perfect example of the subversion of minimalism’s aesthetic objectiveness and impartiality into a dedicated cult of personality and a triumph of the pseudo-spirituality found in zealots of minimalist objects. One can’t help but make the comparison that this is Elvis’s Graceland for the Whole Foods set. Not only is Waters referring to the man, but the designed object of the bed. In his later years, Judd turned to designing furniture with a simplicity that shared much with his art. The object of the bed becomes a shrine to minimalism’s end-point as merely good design, and the reason the quiz “Ikea or Donald Judd?” is now so difficult.

By all accounts Judd was an asshole, but he made an honest effort to assimilate into the secluded ranching community he found in Marfa when he moved from Manhattan in 1971. He always hired local workers and paid a good wage. But the gulf between outsider and local was too vast, and even Judd himself, the harbinger of the aesthetes, was unsatisfied with what he had wrought. In a continuing, and ultimately futile quest for the frontier, he left Marfa for a ranch further south near Terlingua where he spent the majority of his last years. He could never own enough land or buy enough property to attain whatever plateau of assimilation he strived for, and the Chinati Foundation was left to manage his vast holdings and artwork in Marfa. The Chinati Foundation is where I found myself on the morning of my 10 o’clock scheduled meeting time to rendezvous with a group of strangers and view Judd’s installations, as well as a number of other artists with whom he was friends and whose work he championed, including Dan Flavin and John Chamberlain.

Here’s the thing: it’s all about how you experience the art. I think this holds especially true with land art. Amidst reports of 20th century museum goers who have wept in front of paintings, art historian James Etkins set out to objectively classify a number of factors that would induce an optimal setting to produce “strong encounters with works of art.” Among them are seemingly obvious admonitions: go alone, don’t try to see everything, take your time, and minimize distractions; as well as more vague concepts: be faithful, pay full attention, and do your own thinking. The reason these bear mentioning is that the Chinati Foundation disregards all of them. Firstly, being part of a large group is a prerequisite for touring the grounds. There are probably some instances where moving through a museum as part of a group of strangers is a good thing, but here it is questionable—especially when the tour begins with a mother of three bored-looking kids asking the volunteer guides how many exhibits we have to see. The fact that this exchange takes place literally in the shadow of a Donald Judd pretty much sets the tone for the entire day: a harried herding through a number of repurposed buildings, and disapproving looks from the rest of the group for slowing them down in the Dan Flavin rooms.

Chinati is smart enough to start the tour with their best—Judd’s 100 untitled works in mill aluminum (1982-1986). The boxes have a certain refinement and elegance about them that is impossible to deny. Judd was a master of minimalism, a movement that is too easily and lazily derided for being ‘boring’ or ‘bland’ (think Carl Andre). No one could repudiate the careful time and skill that went into crafting the field of aluminum boxes into a successful example of less-is-more. But it is the boxes’ mere beauty that, to me, denied them true power. Notions of the sublime and picturesque were first codified in Edmund Burke’s 1756 essay in which he set out to differentiate that which is simply beautiful as opposed to that which is truly great or sublime. Beautiful objects are those that are “comparatively small,” “smooth and polished,” while the sublime object should be “vast in their dimensions…rugged and negligent,” “the great ought to be dark and gloomy…solid and even massive.” To put it another way, the Lightning Field is sublime, Judd’s boxes are just precious. DeMaria’s field of poles is physically and mentally disorienting, you can get lost within its vast scale, and the humming of St. Elmo’s glow at the tips hints at the latent electrical energy contained within the poles. In New Mexico, the polished steel of the lightning field is left exposed to the elements in the desert hardpan, giving the whole field a muscular vulnerability, while Judd’s boxes seem weak, entombed within the sterile, repurposed shell of a former army barrack.

The shell also works against the implied perception of the infinite field. However the qualities of a limitless industrial material like milled aluminum only enhances the notion that these boxes are a swarm of a whole that is beyond comprehension, like “sections cut from something infinitely larger,” as Judd stated in his Specific Objects in Complete Writings. It is standard to discuss the critic Michael Fried and his critique of minimalism’s perceived theatricality when talking about Judd—specifically his aluminum boxes. In Fried’s view, Judd’s use of such coldly industrial materials in a banal array denies the viewer the safety of a recognizable ‘art’ object and therefore requires the physical participation of the viewer to activate the work. Chinati would seem to be denying this interpretation by regulating that groups tour the boxes at approximately 10:45 every morning. The summer sun in west Texas is still relatively low at that hour, and, in rejecting the opportunity to experience the metal as it changes with the day’s light, Chinati ignores the theatricality of the objects, instead reinforcing the notion that the Judd boxes need neither viewer nor gallery. They need only the space of the military barrack—the golden light of dawn and the harsh high noon sun are inconsequential to the reading of the work. Again, a comparison to Lighting Field is in order. Where de Maria required the visitor to spend 24 hours with the work, Chinati asserts that 15 minutes in harsh, unchanging light is sufficient, and one is left to only wonder at the brilliance that could be seen in the golden glow of a Texas sunrise. Walking amongst the mute stainless boxes, I was reminded of the sunrise in New Mexico, and Marfa can only pale in comparison to that powerful experience.

Judd’s latent power comes to the fore in the 15 large-scale concrete works scattered across a field of tall prairie grass at the edge of the Chinati grounds. Here the viewer is free to move about at their leisure (the cubes are not part of the official Chinati tour), alone in the landscape. The cubes are varied, massive, and fighting a battle with the environment. The struggling chutes of weeds peeking from between the joints of the slabs produce the feeling of vulnerability and a more symbiotic relationship with the landscape. Alone on the isolated West Texas plains, with only the architectural scale cubes for companionship, you briefly forget that you’re in the middle of a small town full of people struggling to live their lives. And you suddenly have faith that art can be great. Judd said “Art has a purpose of its own,” and you can’t imagine it existing anywhere but here. And if a Wal-Mart threatened to appear across the highway in this last untouched paradise, it would be an abomination worth fighting against. But Judd also said that “society is basically not interested in art,” and he was wrong. The last 25 years in Marfa prove him wrong. Regardless of society’s interest, art is there driving the market. In the end, one is again reminded of another box, the box of the Marfa Prada along the highway. Because the Judd boxes aren’t really empty, they are selling another product for consumption. The product that is for sale within the concrete bunkers or the cool, steel boxes aligned in a row like a showroom, is no less real than that which is imprisoned within the ersatz Prada store up the road. Only what Judd is selling is less tangible, more elusive, but still real: a lifestyle imbued with authenticity, good taste, and affluence. I could feel the pull, the easy choice, but ultimately it was something I couldn’t afford.

And with that, I drove back east.

You can see that Donald Judd literally has his name all over the town of Marfa.

We were back in El Paso – again – for a few days, getting an oil change at the desert end. The warning sign states that “as part of the city’s water conservation efforts, this site is irrigated with reclaimed water. Do not drink water from irrigation system.”

Two neighbors are meeting at the terminus of their properties and inspecting a damaged rock wall that divides their lots in Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall.” The narrator is playful, almost goading and pushing the neighbor into articulating the necessity of rebuilding the wall. These are the last five lines of the poem:

He moves in darkness as it seems to me~
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

That second guy, the one moving in darkness, the recalcitrant and plodding neighbor, a blind slave to the cliches of the father, that guy is Michael Chertoff. As reported in the Washington Post of August 2007, El Paso Mayor John Cook stated: “Most people in Washington really don’t understand life on the border …They don’t understand our philosophy here that the border joins us together, it doesn’t separate us.”

The context of Cook’s statement was a lawsuit filed by the City of El Paso, El Paso County, the El Paso County Water Improvement District No. 1, and the Ysleta del Sur Pueblo, among others, against the Department of Homeland Security. In 2005, Congress tasked DHS with the “the expeditious construction of barriers” to construct the border wall and granted Chertoff power to void any federal law that would prevent that expeditious construction. Thirty-six laws protecting environmental quality, historical resources and native American sites were waived. El Paso believed the waivers were detrimental to the health of the region and found them unconstitutional. In September 2008 a Federal District Judge granted the DHS’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit. El Paso lost, and the fence was quickly rushed to completion before a January 31, 2009 deadline. With the damage already done, in June of 2009 the US Supreme Court denied the city and county’s appeal. The court upheld that Congress had legitimately granted Chertoff the power to dismiss any law that could potentially deny his given mandate.

Except in matters of national security, Mexico City and Washington, D.C., are remote and disengaged from the workings of the border. Today it is largely up to the local governments and organizations along the border region to resolve persistent local urban problems in the area, such as zoning and water rights. The border region has frequently been defined as a “third space,” with competing government agencies, and NGO’s occupying this new territory. However, the lawsuit showed that no matter how far removed, the Federal Government can still trump local concerns.

Even in an administration bursting with hubris, when defending the border wall Chertoff stands out as a fount with a number of choice quotes. Among them being, in defending security at the border from El Paso concerns: Chertoff claimed the city “had no idea how difficult it is here at the border.” And considering the detrimental repercussions a steel border would have for economic and cultural future of the conjoined twin cities of El Paso and Juarez, Chertoff stated that in response to DHS actions that, “We don’t want to destroy the border in order to save it.” (Even hearing a government official obliquely reference Bến Tre logic in a domestic setting is both ridiculous and pretty frightening.)
But in the end, Chertoff is no different than the neighbor in Frost’s poem, unable to comprehend the inane necessity, but nevertheless pushing forward with all expeditious concerns, all the while ignoring the difficulty of justifying its existence does not preclude actual construction. As an essential infrastructural component, the wall was rushed to completion and now stands as a thin monument to fear and paranoia.

Succintly summed up, and quoted in BreitBart, the border fence “is a political initiative meant to satisfy conservatives in Congress who have played to fears about all immigrants being terrorists, criminals, and living off the dole,” El Paso County Attorney Jose Rodriguez, the point man in one of the lawsuits, fumed.

Immigration had become a national security priority. Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez grow at an annual rate of 6.3% and 5.3%, respectively. Most of this growth is attributed to immigration from within Latin America. It is estimated that over 33% of the cities’ populations originated from outside the state of Chihuahua. Of those that emigrate from Tijuana and Juárez, 95% go north, to the United States. This has created a nomadic class of people, with aspirations for a better life elsewhere. The Mexican side of the fence is less a home, and more of a strategy for escape, which in turn creates an American side ‘under siege,’ – the U.S. builds increasingly higher walls and more gated communities.

A quick note about the second photograph: say what you will about Border Patrol Agents, they’re nothing if not efficient. Less than two minutes after pulling off the road, and about 30 seconds after taking a picture I was boxed in by two white trucks. A cursory glance showed that I was not a Mexican, and a more thorough glance showed that there were in fact no Mexicans stowing away in the trunk.

This would be one of many inadvertent interactions with the Border Patrol. They’re ubiquitous, most notably in the compulsory check points scattered all along the highways of the southwest. Typically they’re pretty casual, and I can’t help but think that there’s always some half-concealed disappointment at my glaringly non-immigrant, Caucasian-ness. And it’s important not to confuse the Border Patrol with their stern-eyed, grim faced cousins – the Custom Agent. Those guys don’t joke around. But the Border Patrol is different. Even odds are they haven’t been on the job that long – the number of active agents has doubled since 2001. What makes them even more interesting, and endemic of all border complexities, is that they’re typically Hispanic. Which means that statistically they themselves are less than two generations removed from being Mexicans living in Mexico. This is something I’d like to ask this guy about. I’d also like to ask whether they ever experience a sense of futility in what has to be a frustratingly obvious system that expends such vast sums of man hours, time and money just to briefly detain illegals in over-crowded processing centers, then deport them back across the border as part of a never-ending cycle of catch and release. And while they’re certainly fraught with complex issues of identity, nationalism and duty, issues that I can’t begin to understand, those are all of the things I wanted to ask about. But standing under the border wall floodlights along a dark, lonely road, I couldn’t muster the courage.

But, on the other hand, a really good indicator of the economic health of El Paso is found in census data which shows that the city’s poverty rate tops 27 percent, and the median income hovers significantly below the national average of $48,000 at around $35,600. El Paso’s population is also over three quarters Hispanic, while a quarter of the population is foreign-born. Really, however, neither indicator provides an adequately clear picture of the unique trans-national partnerships that allow the border region to work, and prosper.

Actually, the best indicator of the economic health of El Paso can be measured by the extent of the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers’ progress in erecting a border wall along the Rio Grande, dividing El Paso and Juarez. In a last ditch effort in the fight for its own economic and cultural self-survival, the city of El Paso sued U.S. Homeland Security to halt construction of the wall. In January of this year, the Supreme Court denied their appeals. They lost.

If you’re a fan of talk radio, or are familiar with the rancorous fulminations over the very existence of legal and illegal immigration – part of that broader, more general right wing fear of the “other” – it must come as a surprise that El Paso is one of the safest cities in the country, not to mention the happiest. El Paso is the third safest urban center (after Honolulu and New York) with only 18 murders in 2007 in a city over 700,000, and was recently ranked by Men’s Health Magazine as the second “happiest” place in America. The title of number one happiest place in the country went to Laredo, Texas, another border town north of the river. That El Paso is safely ensconced in an embrace of jocularity across a shallow river from blood-soaked Juarez is another indicator that in spite of seemingly contradictory evidence, the border provides a delicate alternate model for economic growth, one that is beset by constant danger by overblown concerns of national security and ever-higher barriers.

How does it work? When former Juárez mayor Gustavo Elizando states that the only way “the cities in this region can make it, is to forget that a line and a river exist here,” he is referring to an economic co-dependence. El Paso and Juarez have generated a series of overlapping economic and functional circulation realities between the cities that circumvent the traditional gatekeeper role of boundaries. Culture, family, a never-ending supply of labor pass back and forth in an asymmetrical relationship of twin cities, one twin richer, the other bigger, that leads to a mutual beneficence. However, there is a constant danger that the pass will be choked off, doors will close, and the cities will drift.

In a Reason Magazine article titled “The Miracle of El Paso,” the author argues that El Paso defies the belief that poverty leads to crime not in spite of “its high proportion of immigrants, it’s safe because of them.” By 2050, racial and ethnic minorities in the U.S. will outnumber non-Hispanic whites; one out of every four will be Hispanic. With population increase comes greater political influence. El Paso provides a handicapped preview version of what in the future will become a political and cultural reality, one that is, and was, avoidable in the post-2001 rush to close the borders. A premonition of the mutual benefit to be had in monetary and spirit well-being that come from accepting that culture, economics and politics are entwined and nurturing the open, cross-pollination of people and ideas – that the lowering of the wall – can allow everyone along the border to thrive.

That belief is losing. The wall is winning.

(clockwise from top-left): Suburban Extended Stay, Midvale, Utah; Super 8 Motel, Las Cruces, NM; The Dixie Inn, St. George, Utah; El Paso West Travelodge, El Paso, Texas; Arcosanti, Mayer, Arizona; Mission Valley Resort, San Diego, California

“No.” He said. “You can get used to anything. But it’d be nice for my kids.”

He was short, born in Mexico (as I later found out), sported a well manicured Pancho Villa mustache with a friendly smile underneath. His name was Carlos, and I took his waving as a sign I could resist the urge to jump back in the car and quickly drive the 30 miles back to El Paso. I walked over, and after brief introductions we started talking about life in the Colonias – the unincorporated improvised settlements at the Eastern edge of El Paso city limits – specifically this one, named Dairyland after the nearby dairy farm.

Aging trailers, abandoned crumbling masonry structures, plaster and tin – this is what affordable housing looks like in El Paso County. Priced out of the identical middle class housing developments that are forever encroaching further out into the desert or higher up the Franklin Mountains, where they perch atop artificially created plateaus, the Colonias are individual, jury-rigged and like the rest of the region, they’re expanding. As journalists from the University of California at Berkely found out, 80,000 people in El Paso County live in Colonias, members of the more than 400,000 Texas-wide Colonia residents.

While the homes are temporary, the numerous late model trucks and suv’s attest to the nomadic situation the colonia residents find themselves in. The homes themselves are fast, quickly assembled out of a mix of available materials and limited only by the skill level of the builders (from cinderblock, to balloon framing, to corrugated metal), or the cost of a pre-fabricated trailer; however, it is the vehicles that are permanent and reliable. This is a largely migrant population. This generation has travelled a great distance to attain a small measure of the American Dream, born in Mexico or more rural areas of the southwest, they made the trek to the border region because of the promise of abundant jobs. And the jobs were plentiful – until NAFTA.

There’s ample debate about the effect of NAFTA on maquiladora growth, with pro-business groups believing NAFTA actually stymied maquiladora growth. However there is no question that the goal of NAFTA was to allow corporations to easily and cheaply create goods in Mexico, and ship them north – duty-free – for assembly. In a cruel twist, the well-paying factory job Carlos crossed over from Mexico to find, and kept for 10 years, left him behind, and jumped the river into Mexico. This is only one link of the chain of exodus that companies are chasing to find the lowest legally allowable hourly wage. While a factory worker in Mexico can expect to earn somewhere in the ballpark of two dollars an hour, a Chinese worker will do the same for less than a dollar an hour. To a multi-national corporation the math is simple, and according to Voice of America news, 170 factories and 100,000 jobs have been lost to China from the Juarez region. For Carlos, rather than follow his job back across the border for a fraction of what he was earning, he has been struggling as a day laborer, helping build middle class homes in the desert around Horizon City, a planned town just north of Dairyland. However, now that is starting to dry up, and oddly enough, in a reverse Depression-era migration pattern he says he’s thinking about leaving for Oklahoma, but he also said he’s proud of his home here. A home in a Colonia is still a home and he worked hard to get it.

The 2000 census put El Paso’s population at 563,000. A U.S. Department of Defense study from July 2009 projects the county’s 2012 population to balloon to 994,000. The El Paso Times stated in their July 20th headline: “El Paso Braces for Spike in Growth.” While some seemed to welcome the implied respectability that a seven figure population affords.
“I can’t wait for us to hit 1 million. I think it will give us the respect we deserve,” native El Pasoan Claudia Solis said. “I just hope we are ready for all the new people. I don’t want us to be in trouble.”

The newspaper seems to know better and implicitly understood the necessity to “brace” before the deluge of growth overwhelms El Paso infrastructure that may be lacking in viability to support the future 1 million El Pasoans and the ceaslessly growing population of over 2 million in Ciudad Juarez.

The growth of the Colonias runs in parallel to the growth of the region. This area is already being carved up via dirt roads into proposed subdivisions that are a parody of their West El Paso counterparts. Yet while the west El Paso developments follow along the massive Heizer-esque gas and water line, out here in the Colonias the county has no authority over land use questions. The Texas legislature attempted to control the growth of Colonias by passing “the Colonias bill” in 1995 that required developers to provide basic infrastructure, including water and sewage, as well as utilities on any land sold for Colonias. However, developers were able to easily skirt the law by selling the land as commercial use, explaining the ubiquitous “commercial land for sale” signs that I saw dotting the desert landscape.
Which brings us back to water.

Water to the El Paso/Juarez region is supplied by two main sources, the Hueco Bolson and the Rio Grande River. Both sources are shared by both parties in a tentative partnership – a common theme in the border, what Michael Dear calls a “third nation.” Where issues of hyper-security and segregation between the sister cities also must co-exist in a symbiotic relationship of integration and mutual interdependence. However fragile this arrangement is, it is in no way equal when it comes to water use. Juarez with double the population uses per-capita half the average gallons per day of water as El Paso. There are no green lawns in Juarez. With unprecedented border growth, the Hueco Bolson is predicted to be tapped dry by 2020. El Paso is taking steps to bring water in from the Antelope Valley 80 miles to the East.

People in Dairyland get their water from only one place; a man with a truck comes by every month and fills up their various containers for storing gray water. Adjacent to nearly every home is the industrial black cylinders with thousand gallon capacity that store water. They frequently fill with algae, require constant cleaning, and are inefficient on a cost per dollar equation. Drinking water is another issue, and has to be brought in almost daily from Horizon City. It’s a tedious and often frustrating situation. But like Carlos said, he got used to it. It’s part of the inherent contradiction of the Colonias, he weighed his options, and saw that the opportunity for home ownership outweighed the drawbacks.

So, the heart of the problem is really one of growth and infrastructure. In Juarez, migrants from all over South America are pressing up against the border fence, drawn to the promise of plentiful NAFTA jobs, and after realizing they’d been duped, the jobs went to China, they’re attempting to cross over in the hopes of something better. In El Paso, a low cost of living and the designation of second happiest place in America is creating internal population growth as more latinos start families. Yet this spike in growth is obviously straining the infrastructure of the region. Limiting growth is equated with limiting cultural and economic revitalization in a region desperate for respect. Yet opportunities exist for new solutions outside of trucking in more water from ever greater distances. The border region could become the global leader in sustainable development, water treatment and distribution, rainwater reclamation. Solutions that would give people something to be proud of besides the number of inhabitants –an achievement which shouldn’t really count anyway if 15% of that number is kids that don’t have a flushing toilet.

Selling land as being for commercial use allows developers to avoid laws requiring infrastructural support for residential Colonias

Colonias taking cues from suburban development being parceled via dirt roads.

Development in west El Paso stretches out into the desert along water and gas lines.

Current city/desert edge.

Green lawns

Creating a number of drainage issues.