The Forgotten Americans: Poverty In Colonias

Introduction Many people are not familiarized with colonias, what colonias are, how they are built or even how they got to be a colonia. There are 1,500 colonias along the U.S-Mexico border, many of them are located in New Mexico, California, but most of them are located here in the state of Texas (“The Forgotten Americans”). In Texas most of the colonia residents are Hispanic with it being 64.4 percent (Chahin, Children of the Colonias). According to the article Free Trade and the Environment: A Case Study of The Texas Colonias by F. Andrew Schoolmaster, Colonias are poor little communities that are outside and part of the Counties. Their owners who bought the land at a cheap price and are built of wood mostly build many houses that are

Challenges in education include dropouts. Referring to Jaime Chahin’s article (The Forgotten Americans: A Voice for Colonia Residents) the school drop out rate is close to 50 percent. One of the main reasons why the drop out rate is so high is due to the poverty in the colonias. Colonias are poor communities where people have to live day by day, and parents don’t even have the money for school supplies and uniforms to send the kids to school with, when this happens most young adults need to get a job in order to help sustain their family. This young adults don’t have good attendance in school due to work, leading to them dropping out (Chahin, 321). With this kind of situations it’s hard for young adults to attain a high school diploma or even finish secondary school, over half won’t finish high school and only 1% will go to college (“The Forgotten Americans”). In the 1990’s the high school dropout rate was around 17.3 percent (Harmon 2000) due to the fact of young adult working instead of going to school (Chahin 320). The students who have the most challenges in school are migrant children because their parents work during harvest season. When the harvest season starts parents have to leave up north and with them their kids as well, by leaving children have to leave school behind and leave early and when getting to their new home children have to start school late in the school year (“The

Transportation plays a big role on why students don’t go to school, or won’t finish school. Jaime Chahin on his article “The Forgotten Americans: A Voice for Colonia Residents interviews a female whose age is 15 years of age. This girls let’s Chahin know “I also would like for our school to have money for better cafeteria food and better bus transportation. Like myself, many students walk home. It is tiring and sometimes unsafe.” This is an example of the lack of transportation for young adults to their school, but we can also see their willingness to go to school by walking in an unsafe environment. Schools seem to be far from the colonias. Students have to walk long distances in order to get to their school, a male of age 14 was interviewed by Chahin who told him “A bridge that goes over the arroyo would be ice so that when it rains, cars can drive over it instead of through it.” We can see here that sometimes school buses or other kind of transportation cannot make it to the colonias due to the infrastructure of the roads. Yet, even though the transportation is bad most of the kids seek a refuge in their own school, they forget about their colonia problems and poverty in school (“The Forgotten