Word: watered
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Unless something is done," Sister Pearl tells residents, "more problems are coming. More colonias, more people without water." Her job requires a healthy measure of outrage, something not difficult to acquire in neighborhoods rank with the odor of cesspools and defective septic tanks: in addition to 28,000 people without water in the El Paso area, some 53,000 live without sewer systems. At a crook in the road outside Socorro, the nun pulls the car over and gestures toward a field of white cotton. "The waterlines just stop there. Can you believe it? All these people want...
...woman in a subdivision named Country Green tells of well water so cruddy that it broke her washing machine three times. Outside a small house near by, Francisca Jimenez, mother of eight, casts an eye south toward the Mexican countryside she left eleven years ago. "I was better off there than my children. At least we never lacked for water or sewer." Illness in the colonias is running at Third World levels. In some areas, with nearly every well lying dangerously close to sewage flows, the hepatitis rate is close...
...chief agitator, Ceasar, stays behind the scenes, badgering politicos, gathering IOUs, mapping recruitment drives. "It's easier to talk with a public official," she explains, "when you've got 30,000 signatures behind / you." Ernie Macias, who has been waiting ten years in his hillside trailer for water, says with a chuckle, "Sister knows how to give people hell...
...momentum is with us," boasts Father Ed Roden, a key organizer. "The people rose up; they're getting action." Change never comes nicely, Alinsky's disciples preach. Nor fast. Sister will be content if a few hundred water hookups can be made by year's end. That will be a signal the colonias are on the road to controlling their own destiny...
American Ideas introduces you to Sister Pearl Ceasar, a Roman Catholic nun in El Paso's Rio Grande Valley. Using the precepts developed by the late Saul Alinsky, a Chicago social activist, she is leading a campaign to bring drinking water to impoverished families along the Mexican border...