U.S. border colonias are peri-urban settlements along the U.S.–Mexico border. Residents often face substandard housing, inadequate septic and sewer systems, and unsafe or inadequate household water. As of 2015, an estimated 30% of over 5 million U.S. colonia residents lacked access to clean drinking water, suggesting health complications. This scoping review identifies a very limited existing set of research on water and sanitation insecurity in U.S.–Mexico border colonias, and suggests value in additional focused research in this specific context to address health challenges. Preliminary health data indicates that due to water insecurity, colonia residents are more likely to contract gastrointestinal diseases, be exposed to carcinogenic compounds from contaminated water, and experience psychosocial distress. These widespread health issues in colonias are exacerbated by historical and ongoing socioenvironmental injustices in the U.S.–Mexico border region and their relation to the poor health outcomes.
This content will become publicly available on April 22, 2023
Water insecurity in the Global North: A review of experiences in U.S. colonias communities along the Mexico border
Since the late 1970s, the term “colonias” (in English) has described low-income, peri-urban, and rural subdivisions north of the U.S.-Mexico border. These communities are in arid and semi-arid regions—now in a megadrought—and tend to have limited basic infrastructure, including community water service and sanitation. Recent scholarship has demonstrated how colonias residents experience unjust and inequitable dynamics that produce water insecurity in the Global North. In this review, we explain why U.S. colonias are an important example for theorizing water insecurity in the United States and beyond in the Global North. Tracing the history of water infrastructure development in U.S. colonias, we show how colonias are legally and socially defined by water insecurity. We draw on the published literature to discuss key factors that produce water insecurity in U.S. colonias: political exclusion, municipal underbounding, and failures in water quality monitoring. We show that water insecurity had led to negative outcomes—including poor water access, risks to physical health, and mental ill-health—in U.S. colonias. We present four possible approaches to improving water security in U.S. colonias: (1) soft paths & social infrastructure for water delivery, (2) decentralized water treatment approaches, such as point-of-use, point-of-entry, and fit-for-purpose systems; (3) informality, including infrastructural, economic, and more »
- Award ID(s):
- 1759972
- Publication Date:
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10328278
- Journal Name:
- WIREs Water
- ISSN:
- 2049-1948
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
Abstract -
Colonias are self-built neighborhoods of mostly low-income families that lack basic infrastructure. While some funding from the state government has built roads and provided electricity, water and sewage systems are still lacking for many of the estimated 400,000 colonias’ residents in Texas. Of those that do have tap water, the supply is either inadequate or of questionable quality. Some colonias residents have access only to off-the-grid water supplies, and residents collect their water from community wells, or, if fortunate, from a personal well. Many of these wells are self-built and therefore shallow. In Nueces County, the groundwater in several colonias has been reported to contain arsenic, while poor sanitation practices (i.e., self-built septic systems) and heavy rainfall events in the region compromise the microbial quality of the groundwater. The naturally occurring arsenic in the aquifer and microbial contaminants from flooding events mean that the only available drinking water source in these colonias is contaminated throughout the year. In this research, datasets on water quality in nine colonias in Nueces County were collected both in wet (after a major rain/flooding event) and dry (no significant rainfall for four weeks) periods. The water quality analyses included traditional microbial quality assessment (total coliforms,more »
-
The colonias in Texas along the Mexican border are self-built neighborhoods of low-income families that lack basic infrastructure. While some funding from the State of Texas has built roads and provided electricity, water and sewage systems are still lacking for many of the estimated 400,000 colonias’ residents. Of those that do have tap water, the supply is either inadequate or of questionable quality. These communities have suffered from waterborne disease, such as cholera epidemics, over the past few decades. This research is the first to collect a comprehensive dataset on water use, socio-economic parameters, and actual water quality in selected colonias in several counties in Texas. A quantitative statistical model has been developed using structural equation modeling, that relates social drivers for water use and management with actual water quality. Water quality parameters measured in these communities include traditional microbial indicators (total coliforms, E. coli, and heterotrophs), pH, hardness, free and total chlorine, and metals (arsenic and lead). The model explores relationships among latent variables relating water, health, and living situation to assess potential impacts of a water treatment technology in these low-income households. The study provides quantitatively reports for the need and desire of adopting a point-of-use treatment system,more »
-
This article argues for a more rigorous engagement with intersectionality within political ecologies of health. Building on the work of feminist scholars who explore the co-production of social and ecological differences, I examine how health improvement schemes that target practices of natural resource use concentrate value (economic and ecological) and health dividends in particular bodies at the expense of others. As part of this intervention, I draw on long-term and ongoing ethnographic research in north-central Sri Lanka. This region is an endemic zone for a mysterious and deadly form of kidney disease (CKDu) as well as the site of frenzied health improvement intervention. Specifically, and in response to scientific studies that link kidney disease to agrochemical use and drinking water, an increasingly diverse range of actors, from different branches of the state apparatus to private industries and civil society organizations, have invested heavily in reconfiguring the region’s water supply infrastructure and agrarian landscapes. Through an analysis of resident testimonies, I demonstrate that the burden of subsidizing these new “healthful” practices of water provision and agricultural production is unevenly experienced, as are residents’ abilities to adopt and maintain them over time and space. More crucially, I illustrate how schemes designed tomore »
-
In the aftermath of an extreme natural hazard, community residents must have access to functioning food retailers to maintain food security. Food security is dependent on supporting critical infrastructure systems, including electricity, potable water, and transportation. An understanding of the response of such interdependent networks and the process of post-disaster recovery is the cornerstone of an efficient emergency management plan. In this study, the interconnectedness among different critical facilities, such as electrical power networks, water networks, highway bridges, and food retailers, is modeled. The study considers various sources of uncertainty and complexity in the recovery process of a community to capture the stochastic behavior of the spatially distributed infrastructure systems. The study utilizes an approximate dynamic programming (ADP) framework to allocate resources to restore infrastructure components efficiently. The proposed ADP scheme enables us to identify near-optimal restoration decisions at the community level. Furthermore, we employ a simulated annealing (SA) algorithm to complement the proposed ADP framework and to identify near-optimal actions accurately. In the sequel, we use the City of Gilroy, California, USA to illustrate the applicability of the proposed methodology following a severe earthquake. The approach can be implemented efficiently to identify practical policy interventions to hasten recovery ofmore »
