Shantytown, U.S.A.: the boom on the border.

• Author: True, Philip

Carlos Lopez lowers his circular saw and wipes the sticky sawdust from his forehead. At 10 A.M., the South Texas sun is already hot, the temperature well over ninety degrees. The sweating carpenter is laboring on a one-room structure the shape and sophistication of a large packing crate. The twelve-by-twenty, wood-frame building has one door, one window, and no plumbing. Electricity is drawn through a long extension cord from the home of his sister-in-law. This is the home of Lopez's future. The forty-six-year-old convenience-store clerk says he envisions a time when life will be better. If not for him, then surely for his children.

"What I am doing here, I hope to leave to my daughter," Lopez says of the humble structure.

Welcome to the colonias: the fastest-growing and poorest region in the United States. Lopez is one of half a million people who live in border colonias--unregulated subdivisions that lack piped drinking water, sewerage, electricity, and other basics most Americans take for granted. On the banks of the Rio Grande, about fifteen miles south of Laredo, Lopez's colonia, El Cenizo, named for a hardy borderlands shrub, is one of more than 1,400 colonias that have sprung up between Brownsville and El Paso.

Public officials point to the Third World conditions in the colonias with a combination of alarm and disgust. This year, on the recommendation of Texas Attorney General Dan Morales, the state legislature passed House Bill 1001, a measure that would outlaw the development of subdivisions like El Cenizo unless they could meet all of the infrastructure requirements necessary for legal platting.

The arguments against the colonias sound simple and persuasive: "My position is that any parcel for sale should include water, sewerage, electricity, and plumbing," says Morales. "I don't agree with people that we should have slums like in India in Texas simply because people have no money."

But addressing the plight of border residents is not so easy. Abandoned by the government, exploited by developers, and seeking to make a better life for themselves, colonia residents are doing the best they can on their little plots of land.

Apolinio Chavez, who works as a carpenter when he can and supplements his income with earnings from his tiny grocery store, has lived for five years in nearby Colonia Los Altos. For Chavez and his wife, Magdalena, colonia life is the only life.

"We live here because there is no other way to do it. To buy a home built by a developer in a subdivision costs $50,000. How can you buy something like that when you make $5 an hour?" Chavez asks.

"When we moved in here in 1990, there was nothing--no water, no sewer, no electricity, no telephone. We lived like the first people who ever came to the United States. But little by little, we built our own house. Then came electricity, telephone, and now we have cable television. Through our own efforts, we are beginning to have our own life."

The growing demand for housing in border cities overwhelms the handful of affordable rental homes and apartments. Instead of doing away with border. slums, attempts to outlaw the colonias may actually generate a more desperate situation, says Andrew Homer, chief of staff to Texas State Senator Peggy Rosson, Democrat of El Paso.

"On the border, what passes for affordable housing is colonias," Homer says. "If you shut down the colonias, you will have to do something for housing alternatives, or you will have people stacking...