“A month or so ago, this was all doo-doo water from septic tanks,” Lionel says, snapping photos with a disposable camera. “Kids swim here in the summertime, and they get sores all over their bodies. Livestock drink it and get sick. Some people even fish here.” He shudders.
At Lionel’s urging, scientists at Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi tested Petronila Creek for bacterial contamination and discovered its levels to be between seven and eleven times the regulatory limit. They started working with the TCEQ to determine the cause. As we walk along the bank, a crop duster flies overhead. Lionel grimaces. “They spray pesticides right down on the colonias. We’ve been fighting that forever.”
As we head back to the truck, I realize that myriad culprits could have poisoned the wells of Estella and her neighbors. The range of possibility is staggering, as is the bureaucracy they’d need to navigate for help. No wonder she turned to a talking tree for solace. It might be the only one who listens.
Inside the truck, I search for something explaining Lionel’s devotion to this mission: a political button, say, or a rosary. A bundle of sage. Anything. But the sole adornment is a lanyard dangling from the rearview mirror that reads “South Texas Colonia Initiative” beneath his grinning photo.
“I go to church,” he concedes, “but that’s not it. When you see something like this, you just have to do something about it. If we don’t help each other out, who will?”
LIONEL WAS BORN the third of six children on a ranch twenty miles outside Corpus. His moral compass aligned early. “All of us Mexicans went to school at the ranch while the Anglos went to another school. We didn’t question it until we got older, when we realized we had to go to the bathroom outside and they didn’t.”
He met Juanita at a dance at the local Catholic Youth Organization. (They liked each other’s glasses.) They married a week after she graduated from Carroll High School, and Lionel soon found a job at a door company. “All the Mexican workers there were treated badly, and they went to Lionel for help,” Juanita later tells me. “He was able to speak up for himself, whereas other people were afraid they’d lose their job, and they needed their job. Lionel has always been pro-union; he has always been like a rebel.”
Lionel joined the Corpus Christi Fire Department in the early seventies and worked there for twenty-three years, until the night a meatpacking plant caught fire. The chief needed two men to combat the flames from inside, and Lionel volunteered. “Everything was okay until the bell on my air pack started ringing, which meant I was running out of oxygen, so I turned to tell my partner we needed to go, and there was this huge orange ball rolling toward us. I had never seen nothing like it before. It moved like in slow motion, until all of a sudden—blam!”
He awoke to find himself pinned beneath a metal door. His buddies were standing on top of it, searching for him. By the time they dragged him to safety, he had sustained injuries to his head, spine, shoulders, and knees, and many of his teeth had crumbled. The pain was so great, he retired soon after, but rather than relax with his family—which includes five children, thirteen grandchildren, and a great-grandbaby on the way—he ramped up his work with the colonias.
I am surprised to learn from Juanita that Lionel’s mother used to live in a colonia. (He never mentioned it.) Juanita thinks this is what seeded his involvement. After successfully petitioning for a new drainage system to be installed on his mother’s property, he helped her neighbors do the same.
“And after that, he started getting the streets fixed. He wanted to have it all done before she passed away, but … he didn’t.”
Nowadays, she says, her husband rises early each morning and drives either to a colonia to knock on doors or to city hall to pound on doors. Juanita stays home to field phone calls and e-mails and line up his appointments. He hands out “a million” business cards each week, she says, so keeping track of everyone is a full-time job. She prepares a hot meal every night, but he rarely savors it: the phone rings throughout the evening, and he insists on answering. “I always say, ‘Wait, Lionel, finish eating first,’ but he says no because it could be important. People know they can call about whatever thing at whatever hour and he’ll be there.”
THE LANDSCAPE IS TURNING FERAL NOW. Nopales crest the rooftops. Mesquite trees fuse into the brush, forming impenetrable walls. Oak trees canopy overhead. A skilled hunter could live off game alone out here: deer, turkeys, javelinas, and nilgais roam wild.3 But while the view is scenic, colonia residents seem keen on obstructing it. They seal their windows with aluminum foil, with blankets, with planks of wood. They fortify their yards with fences.
“It’s like everyone is hiding,” Lionel observes.
Up ahead is a colonia called Country Estates West. Its road has all but disintegrated. Lionel slows to fifteen miles per hour to navigate its cavernous potholes. We pass by families living in aluminum shacks, in barns, in campers, in anything offering walls and a ceiling. A disturbing number of homes appear to have been torched. There are no fire hydrants out here; if something ignites, it vanishes. Nearly everyone has a guard dog chained on a very short leash. Upsettingly skinny, they howl as we ride past.
After a time, we come upon some white men standing in a clearing. One charges our truck with his fist in the air. He is twenty-something years old, sun-cooked and curly-haired. In a gruff Texan brogue, he demands why we’re on his property. His party surrounds us. One man has a gun in his front pocket. All my instincts say to throw the Ford in reverse and split. Lionel opts to hop out and proffer a business card instead. “We came to ask about your water services.”
The eldest man reads the card aloud. Perhaps fifty years old, he has white and blonde hair and a belly protruding over dirt-encrusted jeans. Something appears to have clawed the left side of his face repeatedly.
“Colonia? I ain’t ever heard of no colonia,” he says.
Lionel summarizes his work, then introduces me as a writer. All four men stare at me with eyes glossy pink. Hands trembling, I reach for my notebook and click on my pen. The forest grows quiet.
“Well, welcome to the bayou!” the older man breaks the silence. “What can I tell you?”
The younger men retreat into the woods to “shoot a hundred rounds” as the man shows us his homestead. He owns 2.3 acres here and 3.1 on another lot. His son sleeps in a nearby camper featuring a Confederate flag in its window; he sleeps in an 8- by 10-foot wood hut. “This whole area floods once or twice a year and turns into a great big lake. We have to climb up top our truck and wait till the water goes down. Last time I got sick with worms and had to chew tobacco till they went away. Once, the floodwater came and it was full of diesel fuel. I was sick for three years.”
He and his son used to work at the prison, but he got injured and his son got fired. They live off his disability now, which averages $12,000 a year—enough for auto expenses, property taxes, and a diet of canned soup and sandwiches, but not enough for heat. Those scratches on his face are from trying to shave this morning, when temperatures dipped into the thirties.
I ask if he’s married, and his lower lip quivers. She’s “right at death’s door,” he says, because she’s “real obese” and has diabetes. He himself has had colon problems and three ruptured hernias. His chief concern is for his son, though. “If I die, he’ll die. He’s got attention deficit disorder and hyperactive disorder. He went to college but it didn’t work out but one semester. He had to write a thesis on how evil the white man was, and the teacher gave him a zero because he wrote the white man was good. If you can’t think like a liberal in college they just throw you out. If you want to know the real world, you best listen to talk radio.”
We clearly should be going now, but Lionel keeps asking questions. Do you have a septic tank? Do you have access to clean water? Is your wife receiving appropriate medical care? Only after Lionel has surveyed the lot and tested the water pump does he seem satisfied. We all shake hands, and the homesteader accompanies us back to the truck. “I wouldn’t go talking to my neig
hbor if I was you,” he warns. “He’s a loner and he don’t like nobody on his property. He can be sort of mean.”
Once we are safely locked inside his truck, Lionel chuckles. “So that was the Country Estates,” he says as we hightail it back to the main road. “And I’ve seen worse than that.”
I ask Lionel if he ever gets scared out here, and he does, but not of surly residents. No, it takes more than a loaded man to unsettle him. He worries about the “big guns,” the local and state officials who disapprove of his work and the henchmen he believes are sent out to stop him.
“They have broken into my truck many, many times and stolen cameras and recording equipment. They call my phone and say I had better stop. Sometimes the sheriff will follow me all the way from the colonias back to my house in Corpus. I keep braking so that if they hit me, it’s their fault. That is why I always go alone,” he says, then casts a sideway glance at me. “I don’t want nobody to get hurt.”
IT’S 3 P.M. AND LIONEL has yet to break for lunch or even coffee. At my insistence, he pulls into a Robstown restaurant called Rolando’s. As soon as we are seated, waitresses swarm our table—not to take our order but to issue their own, in a flurry of English and Spanish. One suffers from blood circulation so poor, her leg has turned purple; another has a mother on kidney dialysis. Can he help? Lionel bounds back to his truck and returns with pamphlets about a free prescription drug program. After offering to enroll them, he promises to arrange for transportation next time they visit a clinic.
Over heaping plates of carne guisada, rice, and beans, Lionel rattles off his goals for the upcoming year. He wants a septic tank for every family and a fire hydrant in every colonia. He wants more creeks tested for toxicity. Above all, he wants a community center from which to better organize his constituency. To accomplish all that, however, he’ll need a squadron.
“We’ll need grant writers. We’ll need carpenters. Electricians. Plumbers. Toxicologists,” he sighs, then rolls up a corn tortilla. “But who is going to do all that work for free?”
This is the key difference between writing about a far-flung community and your own. The decision to wield a pen rather than, say, a hammer gets increasingly hard to justify. At various points over the years, I have vowed to stop trying to describe things and start trying to change them, but each time, I’ve concluded that words are the only tools I know how to use. So rather than meet Lionel’s gaze, I (shamefully) sneak a sip of horchata instead. Who besides him, indeed?
NOTES
1. In 2010, I called U.S. Ecology Texas to inquire about the 2008 leak. A spokesperson said, “It was not chlorine gas. We don’t even have it in our facility. It was bleach.” While it is true that beach is not chlorine, it does contain sodium hypochlorite. When mixed with acidic chemicals, bleach can release chlorine as a gas.
2. H-E-B is a mega-grocery store chain named after its proprietor, Howard Edward Butt. In the state of Texas, if you need anything from aluminum foil to pears to lawn chairs, this is where you’ll find it—and, in many towns, the only place.
3. A little lesson on the flora and fauna of South Texas: Nopal is the Spanish term for the prickly pear cactus, whose pads make a fine breakfast when sautéed with eggs. Javelinas are wild tusked boars who emit such a foul odor, they are sometimes called skunk pigs. Nilgais are five-hundred-pound antelopes that were imported to South Texas from India more than a century ago. Skittish creatures, they are more commonly seen in menus than out in the brush.
3
The Venerable
THE SUN IS JUST BEGINNING ITS EVENING MELT ACROSS THE HORIZON. The sky turns lavender; the sorghum fields glow crimson. A maguey1 undulates its aquamarine leaves like a desert octopus. Somewhere along Chapman Ranch road, not far from Bishop, Greg pulls over. “I want to show you something,” he says.
The land before us is overgrown with weeds as high as our knees. We wade toward a cinder block house abandoned long ago. Spiderwebs mend the shot-out windows. Braids of vine slither up one wall; black and green mold creeps down another. Greg points out a paint-splattered pattern and grins—and, just like that, what was previously an eyesore becomes an aesthetic. We circle around the house, marveling at the plant life burgeoning from the rooftop and the wooden door, distressed just so.
Out back is an old warehouse, equal parts rust and tin. We slip in through a door cracked open. Inside is an arsenal of tractor tires. Some are as tall as me. Greg emits a low whistle, then throws a rock at a tire suspended from the rafters above. Suddenly, there is movement—a chaos of buff and white. Owls! Two—no, three. Five. Eight! The kind that look like they’re wearing opera masks, swiftly exiting their balcony nests. Soundlessly, they circle above our heads. Their wingspan is immense, upward of three feet in length. They render the rafters almost invisible. For a thrilling moment, I see only black eyes and white feathers. Then they swoop out the door behind us.
My paternal grandmother collected owls. Every summer, when Dad and I drove to Kansas for a visit, I would rush to her bedroom to admire her latest acquisitions. Conditioned, perhaps, by years of Winnie-the-Pooh cartoons, I thought her porcelain figurines signified a fine intelligence. Once I learned to put pencil to paper, we started a written correspondence that lasted until her death my senior year in high school. After the funeral, when Mom, Aunt Jolene, and I sorted through her jewelry boxes, the piece I claimed was a silver owl with green glass eyes that dangled from a chain. It hangs now above my writing desk, a tribute to the woman who first encouraged my efforts there.
The sight of owls swirling overhead, then, engulfs me in her reassuring presence—something I haven’t felt in years.
I am eager to share this story when Greg and I gather in Santa’s living room a few nights later. Many of her paintings feature the women in her family, so I know she’ll appreciate it. At the first mention of owls, however, Santa gasps. “Lechuzas?! That’s a bad omen.” She goes on to explain how, in Mexican folklore, witches turn into owls in the dark of night to cast their spells more discreetly.
This, in essence, is why I moved to Mexico when I turned thirty a few years ago. As a “Chicana writer,” I felt obligated to know such cultural markers as whether owls should be feared or revered. For months I roamed the countryside, talking to everyone whose path I crossed, aspiring not only to learn the language of my maternal family but also to absorb some of their mindset as well. I came to realize that internal culture-clashes are actually an intrinsic part of the Mexican experience—a legacy of blending colonial and indigenous bloods (or, in my case, Pennsylvania Dutch and Tejano). One grandmother’s spirit animal is almost by definition another’s demon.
So while Santa’s revelation doesn’t launch me into identity crisis mode—as it would have, pre-Mexico—my existential divide widens a bit. And since I’ve already reached a vulnerable place, I might as well venture further.
“We went to see the talking tree,” I announce.
“And?” Santa asks.
“It didn’t say a thing.”
“It was too cold,” Greg jokes.
Nobody laughs.
Santa looks me over thoughtfully. Clad in one of her trademark huipiles, or hand-embroidered Mexican blouses, she is nestled in the cushions of her couch, her wire-rimmed glasses perched professorially on her nose, her thick black hair rippling down her back. Because her art has traveled with me to so many places—because her Virgen de Guadalupe has been one of the first images I have seen upon waking and the last I have glimpsed before resting—Santa has become a tether of sorts. Though she is constantly suggesting books to read and people to meet to deepen my knowledge of the borderlands, she is herself my most definitive resource.
“What are you looking for, Stephanie?” she asks.
Stories? Faith? Fusion? I take so long to respond, Greg does it for me. “She’s looking for a miracle.”
Santa smiles. She knows just where I should go.
A BLOND BRICK ROAD leads to Mother Julia’s Solemn Place of Prayer in Kingsville,
Texas. Following it through a yard freshly trimmed, I recognize Santa’s contribution here. Upon the building’s facade is a giant mural of a nun shrouded in indigo yet outlined in white, so that she appears illumined. One hand rests on a Bible; the other curls on her lap. She is surrounded by red and purple pansies. Bereft of laugh lines or wrinkles, her face seems timeless. She could be thirty, forty, sixty. Mother Julia, I presume.
I peek in the chapel’s doorway. Strands of Christmas lights and rows of poinsettias deck the altar, as do mechanized Barbie angels who move their arms and turn their heads in unison. The surrounding pews could seat dozens but don’t. Only one spot is occupied, by an elderly nun who is praying. Seeing me, she crosses herself, rises from the kneeling bench, and strides over to greet me. Even in padded black Reeboks, she stands only five feet tall. A mole hovers above her lips; white wisps peek beneath her habit.
“When you enter a shrine for the first time, mija, you must kneel down and pray,” Sister Maximina says, guiding me to a pew. “Don’t ask for wishes but for graces. God doesn’t count, so you can ask for as many as you want. Pray first, mija, then we can talk.”
Despite my struggles with faith, rattling off Hail Marys and Our Fathers moments before sleep was a ritual for much of my life. Once I started traveling, though, I realized my prayers had not developed since the pattern set at age seven. In the context of the new cultures I was exploring, my old recitations seemed vapid. Rather than reconfigure my practice—or, better yet, value it as a cultural rite of its own—I gave it up altogether. Now that I’m back in the borderlands, however, prayer seems to be an important link in reestablishing my connection here. There’s just something about South Texas’s epic heat, its desert dust, its diametrically opposing forces that sends you seeking intervention. Recitation feels like a natural soundtrack to this landscape, as if you are singing along to its repetitions. Hail Mary full of grace: sorghum, sorghum, tractor, oil well. Our Father who art in heaven: cotton, cotton, cactus, oil well.
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