Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week.
Marco Lopez is a full-time community organizer for La Union del Pueblo Entero, or LUPE. LUPE is a membership organization in South Texas that advocates for community concerns like immigration reform and infrastructure, among other things.
In February of this year, team members from the Daily Yonder and the Rural Assembly, a sister organization to the Yonder, visited LUPE in Hidalgo County, Texas, and met residents who were organizing to provide infrastructure like improved drainage and public lighting. These organizers lived in colonias, substandard housing developments on the Texas-Mexico border made up of predominantly Mexican-American residents. You’ll see references to colonias throughout my conversation with Marco.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Sarah Melotte, The Daily Yonder: For our readers who don’t know what LUPE is, I want to start with an introduction about you and the organization. Can you tell me a general rundown about what LUPE does and who you are?
Marco Lopez: My name is Marco Lopez. I’m the community organizer in the precinct three area of Hidalgo County in the Rio Grande Valley. LUPE is a nonprofit organization that was founded by César Chávez and Dolores Huerta in the hopes to try to motivate community members to win victories in their neighborhoods. We have a history with the UFW (United Farm Workers). They were winning a lot of victories in the fields, like getting rid of pesticides, adding restrooms. They noticed that whenever farm workers were returning to their homes, their infrastructure was really horrible. There was no water, there was no connection to infrastructure like drainage, there was no public light, the streets weren’t paved, things like that. So they started trying to target the infrastructure issues. And currently that’s what we’re doing.
DY: Yeah, that’s a huge issue in rural places – internet access across the board. When we visited, we talked to people who were trying to get street lights in a colonia. Before we get into the specifics of that we should probably start with what a colonia is, for readers who might have never heard the word.
ML: So a colonia is a neighborhood in a rural area that usually doesn’t have drainage like the pipes in the ground. It’s taken a lot of work from LUPE for us to advocate for county governments to add infrastructure requirements to their subdivision rules.
For example, in order to have a neighborhood you used to only need to have roads and drainage. Most people out there have septic tanks, for example.
So they’re not connected to the main drainage that flushes all that blackwater. In 2016 we passed the Texas state law that allows colonials to apply for infrastructure for public light, as long as 75% of the community was in favor.
But we noticed that developers kept building new neighborhoods that still lacked public light. So one of the things we ended up doing in 2018 was convincing the county to change the model subdivision rules to add public lighting as part of their recommendations for developers.
DY: Does that mean that the people who are responsible for responding when neighborhoods want to get access to things like street lights are county commissioners?
ML: Yes. Hidalgo County is divided into precincts. So each precinct has to respond to their constituents. So there is a commissioner court and they meet up every two weeks. And we are allowed to participate and petition the government there.
DY: How do people feel about their county commissioners? Do you think that they feel like they’re being represented well?
ML: There’s always room for improvement. A lot of times colonia residents feel like they’re forgotten.
DY: So what’s your role in that whole process? Is it helping residents get in touch with people, or what does that job look like?
ML: I don’t like to use the word help. We kind of guide. We support the community members with the tools and the networks to participate and coach them so they get what they need. We’ll offer trainings. We’ll provide them maps. We try to connect them and have meetings with the commissioners or their assistant to try to make sure that their voices are heard.
DY: I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit more about the benefits of having street lights. Can you share why that’s important?
ML: I think crime rates go down when people have public light. In a lot of the neighborhoods we would hear that people would see shadows in the ends of their yards or their lots and that would freak them out.
A lot of recreation increased when we added public lights, which is interesting. So a lot of these neighborhoods don’t have access to parks. There’s no parks in a lot of those rural areas. And so a lot of them just play on the street. You would hear a lot of people saying that they were out playing soccer and they got run over. The person didn’t see them. And now they tell us you can see the kids whenever they’re playing in the streets and they can see the cars coming. So it’s definitely very beneficial, not only in the recreation sense, but also in the health sense because we also heard that a lot of community members have gone out and started walking because of the lights.
DY: Do a lot of colonias residents find it hard to communicate with other local leaders who don’t speak Spanish? Does LUPE try to remove some of those challenges for colonia residents who might only speak Spanish?
ML: That’s an interesting question that we actually don’t talk about enough. In 2019 I was mentored by my old boss, Marta Sanchez. I have so much respect for her because she did teach me a lot. But I remember one of the times that I felt very powerless. It was when we were going to the commissioners court and Marta would always convince me to translate. Whatever the community members would say, she would ask me to come to translate for the commissioners. And I would always be like, why are we translating? I don’t get this. We’re in the valley and everybody speaks Spanish. We’re in the state buildings. They should provide the service.
So I had gone to a commissioner’s court one day and Marta was notorious for being there all the time. I took a community member and she spoke in Spanish and she petitioned for the public side. And the secretary to the commissioner was like – Hey, can you translate that? And I remember I got real close to the microphone and I said – No.
And then I went and sat down. And they started shuffling and freaking out. Marta was telling me – Marco, they’re not going to understand if you don’t translate for them. And I was like – Marta, please get rid of this colonizer mentality. We all grew up in the valley and we all have that mentality that we feel ashamed for speaking Spanish, including myself.
So I devised a plan and talked with Marta. One day Marta and I did a training at LUPE with a bunch of community leaders and did the whole thing in English. All the community members who did the training, which was 45 minutes, sat through the whole thing in English. And at the end I asked them if they had any questions. One of the community leaders raised her hand and was almost in tears, asking – Why are you speaking in English? She’s always felt like LUPE was her safe space. And I told her – if you don’t have a problem with the commissioners doing it in English, why do you have a problem here? And then they saw why we did it.
We ended up teaching them about the Civil Rights Act. People fought and died for translations in state buildings and we should be advocating for that kind of stuff in our commissioner’s court. So all of these community members were pissed and it was awesome. We took that energy to the commissioners court and the ladies all spoke in Spanish and told the commissioners that they were discriminating.
Then we got some lawyers involved and started to sue, saying that it was discrimination. Then all of a sudden they bought translation equipment for the commissioners court. So every time they have commissioners court there’s somebody there that’s going to translate. And all of their agendas are in Spanish as well.
[Marco is referring here to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, part of which states that anyone seeking government services has a right to be served in their native language.]
DY: Yeah, that’s a good story. That’s exactly what I was going to ask about next was a successful moment that sticks out in your mind. But let’s talk about the internet.
ML: The internet’s kind of been an interesting one and we’re still trying to advocate for it. Unfortunately our community, between the nineties and now while all the new tech stuff was happening, a lot of our community got left behind.
In 2019 a colonia started asking me about trying to get internet in their neighborhood. They were trying to get Spectrum, so I went to the Spectrum office and asked if they would come to a colonia and talk to community members on how they can petition for Spectrum to go into their neighborhood. And they just laughed and said we don’t do that.
Then 2020 comes and everyone was in panic because the Rio Grande Valley doesn’t have infrastructure for the internet. There was no free wifi. Some of the kids weren’t even going to school because their parents couldn’t figure out the wifi stuff. But we ended up getting a lot of funding from Covid funds like the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. Then I started hearing about colonias getting Spectrum.
In 2022 came the Affordable Connectivity Program and it was a $50 discount the federal government used to offer community residents if their kids participated in a free food program in their schools. Then later they lowered it to a $30 discount for your monthly bill, but the funding is getting cut off.
But the city of Pharr did this amazing program called Pharr.net. They offer the internet for 500 megabits per second for $25. Their intention was to make it accessible for the residents of the city of Pharr. The cheapest plan on Spectrum is like $80 for 300 megabits per second. We’re trying to advocate to see if there’s any way that the county can do some type of program like the city of Pharr.
DY: I think it would be interesting if anything else develops soon. We’d love to stay in touch about it because internet access is really important to a lot of our readers.
ML: We’ll see what happens, man. We’re going to keep pushing and that’s all we can do. We can only ask and see where it goes from there.
This interview first appeared in Path Finders, a weekly email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each Monday, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Join the mailing list today, to have these illuminating conversations delivered straight to your inbox.
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