Alejandra Fierra lives with her husband in the Hueco Tanks colonia, where they bought land in 1987. They still don’t have access to running water or a sewer system. When her children were growing up, she would pour water from a well into a tub and wash them, one, two, three, in the same water. She does the same for her dishes. She gets a delivery of a 2,500 gallon water tank for bathing and washing, and buys bottled water from Walmart for drinking and cooking.

In Montana Vista, a colonia some 22 miles east of El Paso, the septic tanks of the 2,400 families who live there frequently overflow, creating rivers of sewage in their backyards. In the summer, the smell can be horrific. Tina Silva, a resident and activist, lives here in a spacious one-story adobe house surrounded by a stone wall. She raises chickens and a giant pig in her backyard, where a rusted out car sits, half painted, in the sun. She loves her home and her neighborhood, but she doesn’t understand why it has taken so long to put in a sewer system. “We’re human beings. We pay taxes. Somebody needs to listen to us,” she says. Various politicians have promised her they’d help get the money to install services, but it’s never actually happened, Silva told me.

Part of the problem is that no one wants to take responsibility for paying to install these services. The developers who sold the land promising water and sewers are long gone. And for many the thinking—at least according to Escobar—is that if the homeowners wanted to buy land without access to running water, that’s their problem.

It may seem obvious that the homeowners who bought cheap land without access to water and sewers should be responsible for installing access to services. But that isn’t realistic either. More than 40 percent of colonia residents live below the poverty line, according to a 2015 report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. The median household income in colonias is less than $30,000 per year. And the conditions in the colonias are troubling. There are water and mosquito-borne illnesses, high rates of asthma, lice, and rashes. One doctor told the Texas Tribune that rates of tuberculosis in the colonias are two times the state average and that there is a lingering presence of leprosy.

In 2012, the Texas Department of State Health Services issued a nuisance determination in Montana Vista documenting the health problems the septic tanks were causing, which meant the El Paso Water Utility could receive a grant for more than half of the project costs. In December, the Texas Water Development Board agreed to provide a $2.8 million grant to El Paso Water Utilities so that the utility could start designing the sewer system. But it will cost an estimated $33 million to build the system, and that money has not yet been secured.