Seven miles east of McAllen’s palm-studded city streets, the interstate off ramp slides past the sprawling branch of a popular Texas supermarket – HEB (Here Everything’s Better) – and a drive-in bank. Swinging under the highway and heading north on Alamo Road, the shopping malls and car showrooms recede at the first traces of the colonias – the ramshackle but largely unseen towns that are home to hundreds of thousands of Latinos across the Rio Grande valley of southern Texas.

A mechanic’s sign declares “credit no problem”. Vibrant green fields of coriander or cilantro, a staple of Mexican cooking, accentuate the dilapidation of the road. A small square building with a corrugated iron awning marks the corner with East Trenton Street. A wooden, hand-painted sign is nailed to one of its walls: “Trenton’s Second Hand Store”. Doors, sinks, windows and mosquito screens are propped in a jumble on the grass in front. Buyers stop by to pick up the parts for colonia houses, constructed piecemeal as their owners find the money.

East Trenton Street leads to only one place, Colonia Muñiz, the poorest Latino community in the country and among the lowest-income towns in the US. It is home to a little more than 1,100 people who live on a rectangle grid of six streets surrounded by fields. None of the houses are large. Some are simple wooden structures; others were made with cement. The limits of their territory are marked out by chain-link fences, except for a handful evidently owned by more prosperous families, which include one property with Roman-style columns guarding the front door and a decorative wall around the garden.

It is in Colonia Muñiz that Theresa Azuara, 64, landed 22 years ago after dragging her seven young children from Mexico and across the Rio Grande river, 15 miles to the south. Among them was Maria, who made the journey at just seven years old and still recalls it with horror. “It was very bad crossing the river. It was raining. I was saying ‘I don’t want to go, Mom.’ The mud was up to my chest. Big mosquitoes. I was really scared. I was crying ‘ I don’t want to walk, Mom.’ And so she carried me,” said Maria, now 29.

The family settled into the colonia that became a haven and a trap. “The US has been good to me,” said Azuara. “It has been good for my children. It has not been as good as if we were American, but better for them than Mexico. That’s why I came. For my children. We are poor, but it is better to be poor here than in Mexico. But it is not better to be Mexican here.”

Colonia Muñiz is the third stop for a series of Guardian dispatches about the lives of people trying to make a life in places that seem the most remote from the American Dream. According to one measure, the US Census Bureau’s American community survey 2008-2012 of communities of more than 1,000 people – the latest statistics available at the time of reporting – the median household income was just $11,711 a year, putting it among the four lowest income towns in the country, and has since fallen to $11,111. Nationally it was $53,915 in 2012.

In Colonia Muñiz, more than 60% of households fall below the poverty line, including all of those headed by single mothers with children at home. About a third of the workforce is unemployed, although even for those with jobs their work is often seasonal and fails to provide a steady income.

The town is in Hidalgo County which, according to Texas official statistics, has a poverty rate six times the state average. Hidalgo also has a high number of children living without health insurance and failing to complete a high-school education. The town is not very different from the hundreds of other colonias where about one in four of the 1.3 million residents of the Rio Grande valley live in what one civic rights group described as “third-world conditions”. But it is distinguished from America’s other lowest income communities by a good proportion of its residents lacking the legal right to live in the US.

This lack of papers has left one generation after another unable to take a shot at that American Dream, because it is almost impossible for those without legal residency to find anything but low-paid and insecure work. That was until Barack Obama changed the future for Azuara’s children in an instant three years ago, with a presidential order that is transforming lives throughout the colonias.

The colonias

The colonias – the name derives from the Mexican Spanish for the residential area of a town – are a creation of mid-20th century developers who bought up cheap land of little use for agriculture, sometimes because it was sitting on a flood plain, and carved out plots for housing. The great bulk are in Texas where more than 2,000 colonias, home to about 400,000 people, are stretched along the state’s 1,200-mile border with Mexico. Almost half of those are to be found in Hidalgo County. But the scale of their population has not prevented their marginalisation to the point of near invisibility.

Because few in authority wanted responsibility for colonias populated mostly by poor Latinos, many without the right to vote, they largely went unregulated. The Texas state government took little interest as the plots were sold off without access to clean water or electricity, with no paved roads or sewerage systems. Mostly they were sold to Mexican migrants working as crop pickers. The buyers were in no position to complain. Too poor to be of interest to the banks, their only sources of financing were the developers themselves. Lenders operated a system of selling land and sometimes rudimentary housing at interest rates of up to 25%, but with a twist. The buyers had no title to the property until years later, when all payments had been made. If they missed a payment they could, and often did, lose everything: the land, the house and the money already paid.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Theresa and Emilio Azuara outside their home in Colonia Muñiz where Theresa arrived with her young children 22 years ago. Photograph: Sean Smith for the Guardian

That practice has been outlawed in recent years but large numbers of colonia residents still live with the legacy of exploitation. For some the only source of drinking water is to buy it by the drum or bucket. Half of all homes do not have clean water from a tap or connection to the sewage service. Even where sewage systems exist, the local authorities often refuse to hook up homes that do not meet building standards because the owners are too poor to make the necessary improvements. Texas health department figures show that the colonias have a higher rate of diseases such as hepatitis A, dysentery and cholera. Tuberculosis is twice as common along the border as it is in the state as a whole.

Theresa Azuara, a short woman with thick dark hair and a perpetual smile, was born in Veracruz, a port city on Mexico’s east coast. When she came to the US she left behind her eldest daughter, who was already married, and three children she had buried after their deaths in infancy. Azuara was keen to underline that her family had survived entirely through their own labour. As undocumented immigrants or “illegals”, as they are derisively called by many of those who advocate mass deportation, they do not qualify for the benefits available to US citizens and legal residents in low-income families.

America's poorest white town: abandoned by coal, swallowed by drugs Read more

She has neighbours who claim food stamps and housing grants but there are others in the street who share her struggle. A good number of families in the colonias are a mix of undocumented and legal residents or citizens. Sometimes the divide is across a marriage or between parents who came from Mexico and their children born in the US (giving them automatic citizenship), meaning at least one person in the household qualifies for benefits. But Azuara has had nothing from the state. She has worked at two of the few jobs she can get without papers, although both are dependent on demand. About half of the year has been spent in the fields picking crops. Once they were old enough to work, her children joined her.

“I started working in the fields when I was 12 years old,” said Maria Azuara. “It’s hard. A lot of dirt. You get really tired. You start early. You wake up early. You work at night. It’s the ugliest job you could ever have and my mom has 20 years working in the fields.”

When there is no picking to be done, Theresa does piece work in a laundry. She’s paid $3 for folding 100 stacks of clothes. Most days she works from 7am to 4pm, bringing home a bit more than $200 a week, with her husband, Emilio, if they’re both working. But the previous few weeks had been lean and she had earned $60 on average doing a bit of cutting in the fields.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Photograph: Sean Smith for the Guardian

There is no public transport to the colonia and for years Theresa had no car so she trekked to work. “Here we have the freedom to walk,” she said with a mocking laugh. Now her daughter has a car. But Texas does not issue driving licences to undocumented immigrants. “God is my licence. My insurance too,” Theresa said.

Theresa, who does not speak English, tries to pick her employers with care after being ripped off by a few who refused to pay for her work because they calculated she would not go to the authorities for fear of being deported. “Over in McAllen two years ago, some men took us to a field to cut papaya. But they used us. They took advantage. They didn’t give us money for petrol. They didn’t pay us for the work. Nothing. It was two weeks’ work,” she said. She said she accepted exploitation as part of the price of being in the US illegally until she started to attend meetings of La Union del Pueblo Entero (Lupe), a group founded by César Chávez, the renowned farmer, worker, organiser and cofounder of the United Farm Workers of America union.

Juanita Valdez-Cox established Lupe in the Rio Grande valley, a short drive from Colonia Muñiz, and is its executive director. She said the organisation saw a steady stream of people exploited by unscrupulous employers. “There are cases and cases of people, undocumented mainly, who are not paid for their work. It’s not just farm workers. We get restaurant workers. We get hotel workers. A lot of the cleaning in the hotels is done by undocumented [people]. A lot of the cooks and dishwashers in restaurants. A lot of construction hires – undocumented. The roofers and cabinet makers,” she said. “So many times they can work up to a month and the owners of the construction business then just refuse to pay them. We had one against a church which didn’t pay construction workers. They didn’t get paid by the priest.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Workers are frequently the target of immigration patrols while picking crops. Photograph: Sean Smith for the Guardian

Working in the fields carries other dangers. Theresa Azuara is ever alert to the sound of the border patrol’s approach. “I get so scared my blood pressure goes up and down. When I see immigration coming to the fields I freeze and pray they won’t come near me,” she said. “They ask me, do you have papers? I would say, no, and they would say, get on the truck. The last time was 2011. December. They dropped me off over the border at 11am. I was back in the US by 3am [the next day].”

She was not always deported. Sometimes border patrol officers applied their own criteria. “Three or four times I was able to save myself because I told them I work hard and I’m not a criminal. Six or seven years ago, immigration stopped and asked me, what do you ask the government to give you? I said, nothing. I don’t make the government give me anything. No food stamps, no cheques, nothing. I said I get my money with sweat. He didn’t take me,” she said. “The ‘Anglo’ officers are sometimes more considerate. The Mexicans born here are more strict. I think it’s because they consider us an embarrassment.”

Theresa has been deported 10 times and has always made it back to the US within days and sometimes hours. This ritual is not without its complications, including the loss of work. “When we got home from school there would be a little note on the door,” said Maria. “The border patrol took your parents. Go inside. Don’t come out.” Theresa smiled and said: “I have very good neighbours. They would tell the children that they took your mother to Mexico and now we’ll take care of you guys. And they did.” Maria did not smile. “It was scary. You go to school thinking maybe your parents won’t be there when you come home and maybe they won’t come back,” she said.

Living in poverty

Proyecto Azteca, a housing organisation founded by the United Farm Workers of America union and rights groups, describes colonias as having “third-world conditions”. “Every community in the United States has pockets of poverty. When you look at the colonia community it’s different from the rest of the US because there are so many people,” said its director, Ann Cass.

You go to school thinking maybe your parents won't be there when you come home, and maybe they won't come back Maria Azuara

“We don’t have public transportation. We do not have a [state-subsidised] public hospital. The closest hospital we had was up in Galveston, but they closed their doors after hurricane Ike. In the 1980s we pushed to have the county and the state help us with infrastructure because most all of the colonias were not on the grid; they didn’t have potable water; they had outhouses for the most part; the streets weren’t paved. Kids couldn’t go to school if it rained because the buses wouldn’t go down the roads.”

Things began to shift two decades ago after the Texas state legislature dedicated funds to upgrading the colonias, but required any new development to provide infrastructure. Change did not come swiftly. Colonia Muñiz struggled for years to get street lighting. It was finally installed just two years ago. Other colonias are still waiting. Cass said that planning laws in McAllen, the largest city in Hidalgo County with 136,000 people, were for a long time intended to keep poor people confined to the colonias, where they could be ignored.

“McAllen at one time zoned for low-income people, back in the 70s. They want low-income people to maintain their municipal buildings and their golf courses and to work in their hotels and restaurants, but they do not want them living in their city. So where else are people going to go but to the colonias to purchase land and to build a home?” she said.

Poorest town in poorest state: segregation is gone but so are the jobs Read more

“One of the cities to the west of McAllen, you’re not allowed to build a house if it’s under 2,500 sq ft. Essentially it’s a way of saying we do not want low-income people living in our community.” Valdez-Cox lived in Georgia, a former Confederate state with a history of brutal racism, before she moved to Texas. “I moved here from Atlanta in 1980 and I found the systemic racism here far worse than what I had ever experienced in Atlanta, but it’s very subtle,” she said.

Cass said attitudes had improved, but only up to a point. The local housing authority ran into resistance when it tried to move low-income families out of the colonias and into northern McAllen. “The commissioner in McAllen said he did not want ‘those people’ living in north McAllen and those children going to ‘our schools’ in north McAllen,” she said.

Prejudice against Latinos in general and the undocumented in particular is alive and well, as Donald Trump has so ably demonstrated. But it has also evolved. “In the 70s, kids were not allowed to bring tacos to school for lunch,” said Cass. “McAllen was run by Anglos. The mayor, the police chief, the council were all Anglos. Now it’s all Latinos. But still only two out of 10 people here vote. Austin [the seat of the Texas legislature] is not going to pay any attention to us until we can change that.” The Democratic party has long rued the low turnout among Latino voters in Republican-controlled Texas. Cass thinks it is in part tied to a sense of alienation and being unable to change their circumstances. “I named it ‘learned helplessness’: ‘It’s always been this way, I shouldn’t expect anything different’,” she said.

The piecemeal improvement in physical conditions in the colonias is welcome but it does not alleviate the other burdens of poverty, particularly for the undocumented. Census figures show that more than 40% of the residents of Colonia Muñiz are covered by public health insurance because of low income or age. But only US citizens and legal residents receive that benefit or qualify for subsidised insurance under Obama’s health reforms.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Theresa Azuara. Photograph: Sean Smith for the Guardian

Theresa Azuara is left out. She cannot afford insurance and so must pay up front for treatment along with 36% of the other people in Colonia Muñiz, according to the census. Even a simple visit to the doctor costs about a week’s earnings from the fields. “When I get sick I have to go on working,” she said. “I went to the doctor once. He just made me lie down. He never gave me pills. But when I got the bill I freaked out because it was a lot of money. I was thinking, what did the doctor do for this money? Did he dress me in gold? So now I don’t go to the doctor even if I get sick. I just wait it out.

When I get sick I have to go on working Theresa Azuara

Azuara is coping with high blood pressure for which she is not receiving treatment. Although hospitals do not ask immigration status, some people risk arrest by using false identification, such as social security numbers, which medical establishments require. Cass, who cofounded the Family Health and Resource Center in McAllen to provide medical and mental health services with volunteer staff, said Theresa’s experience was typical. “We have 300,000 adults in this county who do not have health insurance. They’re the undocumented,” she said.

What happens if they get sick with a chronic disease? “You end up dying,” said Cass. “We had a family member of someone here who had stomach cancer. He liquidated all of his assets. He got chemotherapy for a certain amount of time and then he ran out of money and his treatment stopped. He lived without treatment for maybe two months. He got really, really sick. Now the hospital regards him as an emergency and the law says it must treat him. He goes into ICU for two weeks and he dies. I’m angry because that two weeks in ICU cost a hell of a lot of money that if they had spent it on his treatments, maybe he would have lived.”

Yet the US medical system is a paradox for the poor. The legal obligation on hospitals to treat people in an emergency, whether or not they have health insurance or money to pay, prompted Venicia Vallejo to make the difficult journey across the Rio Grande with young children, 24 years ago. “I crossed with my three kids without my husband. My seven-year-old son couldn’t walk because he was sick. I decided to cross the river because they told me the kid would die. He had something very wrong with him. I don’t know what it was,” she said. “People told me if I came to the US they wouldn’t let him die. Here they operated and saved him.”

Vallejo settled in Colonia Muñiz. “I worked in construction and in the fields. They don’t ask for your papers. They don’t ask you to speak English. Construction work you do from 7am to 7pm, seven days a week,” she said. “It has been difficult. The US, this is poverty. I don’t have the same benefits as other people here because I don’t have papers, but in Mexico it’s much worse. In Mexico, if I had soup and beans to feed my kids it was awesome. The kids went hungry some days. We didn’t have enough money for food because of the bills. Here the kids do not go hungry. Here there is a lot of clothes they throw away and in Mexico people didn’t have enough clothes. It’s worse in Mexico but still difficult here.”

One of the difficulties is the medical system that saved her son but will not save her sight from glaucoma. “The pay is so low, it doesn’t cover the medical stuff. I need an operation on my eyes. The doctor told me if I don’t have the operation I will go blind. Because I don’t have insurance I can’t do it. It’s $2,500 for each eye,” she said. It used to be that Mexico was part of the survival strategy for the poor and undocumented living near the border. Medicines were cheaper on the other side. So was seeing a doctor, buying cigarettes and fuel, and shopping for price-controlled foods.

“Ten years ago we were like one community, back and forth,” said Cass. “Then [the authorities introduced] the requirement you had to have a passport. Then it was the border wall. And now it’s the [drug cartel] violence in Mexico. We had a lot of people – gringos, winter visitors included – who would utilise the Mexican healthcare system because it was cheaper. Prescriptions are less expensive. You walk across the bridge, there’s dentists lined up to take care of you. But now people are afraid to go. Now we’re finding medications being sold under the table at the flea markets here. There are doctors, dentists moved across the border and operating out of their homes but they’re practising without a licence. They’ve been threatened. The cartels are working very much like the mafia did. You have to pay someone to be protected.”

According to the census, about half of the residents of Colonia Muñiz were born outside the US. It doesn’t say where, but anywhere other than Mexico is exceptional in the colonias. Neither does the census show how many of the foreign-born residents are undocumented but Valdez-Cox said her organisation estimated that about one-third of people living in the colonias did not have legal residency.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Guillermo dropped out of school at 17 to work picking crops, but has recently passed vital exams. Photograph: Sean Smith for the Guardian

All of Theresa’s children are “illegals” and, without residency papers, they faced a future similar to their parents, struggling to find regular well-paid work, with no social benefits and limited expectations. It was a prospect that ate away at their motivation to work in school. What was the point in an education if they couldn’t use it? Maria said it was a common sentiment among students in schools across southern Texas, who were acutely aware that they did not have the same opportunities as their classmates, no matter how hard they worked. She said her children lost the heart to work for qualifications they could not use. “They lost interest because people would tell them, ‘Why would you graduate if you can’t even get a job because you don’t have papers?’ I would have to force them to school but still they didn’t want to go,” she said.

Maria, who stopped going to school at 15, said it started with her older brother who worked hard, passed his exams but was then blocked from a university scholarship because he was not a legal resident. “When he went to get the scholarship, they asked him for the social [security number]. He didn’t have it so they stopped the scholarship,” she said. “My older sister was like, what are we going to do? We’re never going to be someone in this country. So we dropped out of school, me and her. We went to work in the fields. She got married.”



Cass said lack of opportunity was a major contributor to a kind of educational apartheid in which students with citizenship or legal residency in the colonias had greater opportunities than in the past – but those without papers got left behind. “We’re finding more and more going to college. However, the statistics remain that one out of two kids out of kindergarten will not graduate high school,” she said. According to the census, 75% of the population of Colonia Muñiz has less than a high-school education.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Maria Azuara. Photograph: Sean Smith for the Guardian

In her 20s, Maria worked for a family, caring for their children and helping with the homework. She was paid $50 a week. “Then they started treating me like the maid, asking me to make food and do the cleaning and washing. I didn’t have a choice. If I didn’t do that I’d have to go back to working in the fields,” she said. “That was my future. We never imagined Obama was going to do something about it. Never. We used to wonder what we were going to do with our lives. Just take care of kids.”

In June 2012, President Obama issued an executive order allowing undocumented immigrants who arrived in the US before they were 16 to stay and be given a work permit. The measure, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, popularly known as Daca, does not provide permanent residence or a path to US citizenship but it does remove the threat of deportation, at least so long as Obama is president and his successor or the courts do not overturn the order. Just as importantly, the president’s order gives Maria and an estimated 2 million other people the right to work in the US, opening a path out of the fields and low-paid, insecure jobs. “Obama changed all of our lives just like that,” said Maria.

Approval under Daca is not automatic. Applicants have to have lived in the US continuously since 2007 and have no criminal record. They also require a high-school diploma or its equivalent. That set off a stampede back to the classroom. Maria returned to study part-time while working, and passed her high-school equivalency exam on her third attempt. There was only one remaining obstacle.

“You have to prove you were here in 2007. My sisters have kids so they could prove they were here. I was thinking, what can I do? I had a phone but it was pay-as-you-go. The only thing I had to prove I was here was a police ticket. Then they wanted to know what the ticket was for. That it wasn’t for drugs or something like that. It was a ticket for driving without a licence. I proved that and then I got my permit in two weeks,” she said. “I have a social security number. I have my [driving] licence. I have my ID. I have my credit card. Right now the border patrol can come over here and I’m cool.”

Daca has been life-changing for Azuara’s children. Today, one of her daughters is an English teacher and two others work for charities. One of her sons has a job as a bus driver in Florida. The last child still living at home, Guillermo, recently passed his high-school equivalency exam at the age of 23. He had dropped out of school at 17 to work picking crops. “I just thought all my life I’m going to work in the fields. That was going to be life. I didn’t think I could do anything. If you don’t have social security you don’t qualify for nothing. A lot of my friends were in the same situation. Right now they’re back in the school,” he said.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Guillermo, Theresa and Emillio’s son, counts the day’s earnings with his parents. Photograph: Sean Smith for the Guardian

For Guillermo, who speaks good English, along with the rest of his siblings, the lack of residency papers meant he did not feel American even though he has lived in the US almost all of his life. “I saw myself as Mexican because of the situation. I went to school since pre-kinder here but I came from there. I saw my friends go up north to work and come back with money and I’m like, if I had my papers I could go too and work but I can’t,” he said. “I would like to go work on the oil rigs or for college and study electricity. Now I can apply to college to get a degree and a better life. I have friends working in Utah building playgrounds for schools and parks. I told them I qualify [for Daca]. They’re like, get it and come work for us. You’ll get work with us.”

A block to the north, the Cardenas siblings, who live in a clapboard house, faced the same obstacles but remained in school. Elizabeth, the eldest at 24, started studying to become a registered nurse even though she would not have been able to work in the US. She thought she might have to seek work overseas but that would have meant leaving her mother and risking not being able to return. “If I don’t have my social security number, there’s nothing for me. But it’s hard to leave. We belong here together.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Cardenas family are photographed in their home. Three of the siblings work in the fields with their parents, picking oranges from October to June. Photograph: Sean Smith for the Guardian

Her sister Veronica, 22, is training to become a dentist. Their younger brother, 18-year-old Louis, wants to be an engineer. They all stuck through high school but getting a higher education has been a financial struggle. Under Texas law, as undocumented residents they qualify for the minimum state aid to go to college but no federal loans or grants. All three work in the fields with their parents, picking oranges from October to June. The money goes to pay off the cost of the land and the house. There’s not much left for college. There are also the practical issues, such as not being able to open a bank account. Now all three qualify for Daca. “I came here when I was four years old,” said Louis. “This is the only place I know. The American Dream is to become someone and I think we have a shot at it.”

The American Dream is to become someone, and I think we have a shot at it Louis Cardenas, 18

Vallejo is grateful to the president because her family had been divided by the right to live and work in the US. “I have five children, three from Mexico and two from here. The two from here are free. They applied for college. The ones from Mexico couldn’t do what they wanted,” she said.



The president’s order unleashed a wave of people seeking help from Lupe, which offers free assistance with immigration applications. “Obama brought out a huge number of young people who are now able to continue their college education,” said Valdez-Cox. “We have young people who have their bachelors and their masters but couldn’t get employment because they didn’t have a social security [number] so they couldn’t contribute to the economy.

“We were amazed at the number of people who came here to apply who have not one master’s but two master’s who couldn’t work. Now they have employment and they have an opportunity for the family because they can contribute good wages to the family and help the parents. It has changed things completely. The parents are still in the same situation but there’s income coming into the family that they didn’t have.”

There is always a crowd at Lupe seeking legal advice or help with immigration issues. The offices of Proyecto Azteca, which helps people in the colonias to build and own their homes, are close by. The housing programme brings groups of people together to work constructing each other’s houses, providing oversight and finance. Proyecto Azteca provided the financing to build Theresa and Emilio Azuara’s home, a clapboard structure in lime green that feels more spacious on the inside than it looks from the front. The Azuaras pay $230 to finance the mortgage from Proyecto Azteca, half of the rent they previously paid. The organisation has built more than 700 homes in 130 colonias.

The proliferation of civic groups is a striking feature of the colonias, compared with other poor areas. There is a solidarity rooted in common struggles for farm workers’ rights, over immigration and against racism. Cass said there was also a greater sense of family unity than was found in some other places. “You won’t find people living on the streets like you do in other communities. That’s just a horrifying thing for them to think that they have a relative who has not got a roof over their head. Consequently we see three or four generations all living in a small house because they’re not going to let their loved ones on to the street.

“I think that’s very positive but unfortunately it adds to other emotional and physical challenges. Incest is up because of the concentration of people living in the same house,” she said. “Here in the valley we have the highest rate of teenage pregnancies in the US and multiple teenage pregnancies, but the contrast is we have the best outcomes of babies born to teen mothers than any other place. The babies are born healthier. The moms are healthier. My only explanation is that the family rallies around the girl and keeps her healthy.”

Infant mortality is about half of the rate in poor white areas of eastern Kentucky and one third of some black towns in Mississippi. Close family ties make the separation of the border even harder. Theresa dare not visit her ageing mother in Mexico for fear of not being able to return. The frontier is less porous these days and she is older and less agile at getting across the river. Vallejo is also unwilling to risk the journey in case she cannot get back. “I have family in Mexico. That’s the sad part, that we cannot go there,” she said.

Azuara judges her life in the colonias by comparing it with how the past two decades would have been in Mexico. For all the hardships, she said the US had been good to her. Above all, it had provided a better life for her children – the reason she carried them across the Rio Grande in the first place. Maria and her siblings say they regard themselves as Mexican but do not know Mexico. They cannot imagine living there yet neither are they fully part of the country they have lived in most of their lives.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Young people in Hidalgo County order nachos and cheese. For many the American Dream is a reminder of their complicated relationship with the US. Photograph: The Washington Post/Getty Images

In much of the US, the American Dream is often regarded as a birthright. For many who live in Colonia Muñiz, it is a symbol of hope but also a reminder of their second-class status and their complicated relationship with the US. “As a child I didn’t feel good because I wished I was an American but I’m not,” said Maria. “What Obama has done is good and I’m proud the United States has helped us. It is a good country. But I want it for my parents too.”

That may yet happen. Under a more recent presidential executive order, undocumented parents of US citizens and legal residents can now also apply for protection from deportation and a work permit. That includes Vallejo, who has two children who were born in the US. The order does not cover the parents of those who have applied under the earlier order, such as Maria. But her brother in Florida now has permanent residence, a green card. That should open the path for Theresa and Emilio if politics doesn’t get in the way.

The programme is on hold after Texas and 25 other states launched a legal action to challenge the president’s authority to issue the order, although more than 100,000 permits were already issued before the legal intervention. Theresa is waiting. She has a wood burning oven in her backyard on which she cooks Mexican food. “I want to be able to put up a sign in front of my house: tamales for sale,” she said. “I cannot do it now. Immigration may see it and come and ask questions. But one day I will do that, thanks to Obama.”