After the Deluge
Beyond the news media's gaze, the border towns of Palomas and Columbus also suffered devastating flooding this summer. Especially in Palomas, already hard-hit by border tightening, people are still picking up the pieces.
By Marjorie Lilly / Photos by Nieves Aurora Maloof
Lupe Carmona lifts up one of the thin rugs her mother-in-law loaned her and points to the cement underneath that was nibbled away by floodwaters in Palomas on August 7. The floor still hasn't been fixed, and it's Oct. 15.
Her tin roof broke in the rain, and there's a plastic sheet over it. "It's getting cold," she says. The walls of the adobe house are seriously cracked. The floods rendered her refrigerator and washing machine useless. Carmona's husband, Manuel Saldivar, put his hand against the wall to show how the water had risen by one foot. Their destroyed outhouse got fixed just two days ago; until then, they had been using a bucket.
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Distributing groceries to Palomas
flood victims. (Photo by Nieves Aurora Maloof) |
Their bed was ruined but has been replaced by one with a large wooden headboard. "My employer gave me that bed," she says. She works two or three days a week cleaning house, and her husband works in the fields in Colonia Victoria, earning $8 or $10 a day.
While El Paso and Hatch were being devastated by out-of-control water last August, Columbus and Palomas on the border were also laid waste by a series of floods. The border flooding, though less extreme, has also been less widely reported. Recovery, especially on the Mexico side of the border, has been painfully slow.
Already, Palomas businesses had been suffering a dramatic economic downturn since the National Guard's arrival at the border in July slowed the flow of border crossers. Businesses report having a 20 to 70 percent decrease in sales, and many small informal eateries and grocery stores have shut down. When the town was hit by the floods, it was like a one-two punch.
Water ran down from the Tres Hermanas Mountains in Columbus and flowed from west to east, making the parking lot at the US side of the Port of Entry a small lake. The floodwaters crossed Route 11 to the east side of town, where the water poured south into Carmona's neighborhood. Water also flowed through the Port onto the main street of Palomas. "It ran down the street over one foot high for four hours," says Javier Garcia, owner of the Super del Rio and Farmacia del Rio right near the border.
The Columbus parking lot has been repaired. The drainage area of the Family Dollar parking lot and the US Customs facilities are back to normal. But the restoration of personal property and repairs of houses on the Mexican side is taking longer due to the poverty on the other side of the straggly border fence.
The roads in Palomas are always soupy with mud when it rains, but this year they were more impassible than ever. It never quite dried out in front of Carmona's house, and walking there is difficult. She lives a stone's throw from the border, in the area hardest hit by floods, called the San Antonio sector, to the east of the Port of Entry.
Besides Carmona and her husband, seven neighbors join in, peppering the conversation with urgent stories. A woman named Carmen Magallanes says there had been snakes in the water; other women nod. "Talaco [the mayor] never came to help us," Saldivar says, almost shouting, repeating a common claim. A goat across the street had drowned, someone else says.
Carmona says there had been dead dogs and lots of big bugs in the water, making an O with her thumb and index finger to indicate their size. She shows on her ankles and arms where the skin had broken out and formed welts from contaminated water.
She and Magallanes had carried out a survey of the sector and found that 43 houses had been damaged. They may be considered participants in the Latin American lucha popular (popular struggle): "Abogo para mi pueblo" (I advocate for my people), Lupe says firmly. Omar Carreon, vice-president of the municipio (county) of Ascension, later comments, smilingly, "Those women are feisty."
Carmona walks over to the nearby border and points out two culverts running under the dirt road used by the Border Patrol on the US side. She says this is where the floodwater came from. A couple of hundred yards to the north is a sewage-treatment plant built for a proposed industrial park in Columbus, with a 10-foot wide privately owned channel of water that runs next to it down to the culverts. She believes these were aguas negras (sewer waters) that poured out into their streets and houses.
But it wasn't sewer water. The holding ponds with sewer water never broke, according to Carreon. He says that most of the water pouring from the Columbus side into Lupe's street was from arroyos that drain naturally south. "Most of the water came from the American side, like a funnel. It's the lower end of town, kind of right in the funnel area," he says. "The water didn't all come through the pipes."
The issue involves federal and international laws. "Water can't be intentionally diverted into Mexico or from Mexico," says Terry Kranz, the Field Operations Supervisor at the US Border Patrol. But he also says that there was so much water that the culverts made little difference. Water ran over Route 11 in Columbus despite large culverts under the highway.
A wide array of people worked hard to help flood victims in Palomas during the four floods they had this summer. The players were the presidente of Palomas, the president and vice-president of Ascension, the local tax collector, the mayors of Columbus and Deming, a coalition of human-service workers in Luna County, and Proteccion Civil, an agency of the state of Chihuahua, which did a survey of damaged homes for assistance with repairs.
"When things like this happen, you put politics aside. You try to help as much as you can," says Juana Carreon, a member of the coalition.
People on the border sometimes say that Columbus and Palomas are "one neighborhood." There are tight-knit family bonds at all economic levels. The brother of the mayor of Columbus owns the San Jose Restaurant in Palomas and is married to the sister of Jose Luis Gutierrez of El Tornillo. Gutierrez owns a warehouse near the Family Dollar and two of his siblings own businesses in Columbus. Juana Carreon is from Palomas and is the sister-in-law of Omar Carreon. When they help each other it is almost as members of a family.
But the struggle on the part of Palomas residents to get help did get politicized. When Carmona and her friends felt rebuffed by the mayor during the second flood, they turned to Nieves Maloof of El Tornillo hardware store in Palomas. She is the tax collector for the municipio, and her husband, Jose Luis Gutierrez, was the opposing candidate to the mayor in the last election. "She got in touch with her boss, Secretary of Finance Armando Muniz Cardona, and he sent her assistance—food and blankets and so forth," says Gutierrez.
"They were frightened, they felt alone, they didn't get any support," Maloof says of the victims. When the aid finally came, she says, "I put on my rubber boots and got involved." When an electric transformer went out, leaving more than 60 families without power for two weeks, it was Maloof who personally bought a new one when the mayor didn't respond.
Mayor Sanchez, for his part, says that his office has no budget. All government finances are controlled by Ascension. What he did during the flooding was provide his private dance hall, Terrazas San Vicente, as a shelter for the 100 evacuees. His wife, Maria Luisa Loya, made them coffee, cocoa and rolls for breakfast, paid out of his own pocket. He accompanied and advised Julio Apodaca, the presidente municipal of Ascension, and the Proteccion Civil.
Mayor Julio Apodaca of Ascension, besides personally being involved in the distribution of blankets and bags of food, brought a mobile medical unit providing free medical care and hair cuts twice during the crisis period.
"The water in the streets was fumigated for mosquitoes," he says. But there were few attempts to disinfect walls. Manuel Murillo at the south end of town says a friend in Deming gave him a gallon of pesticide to clean his walls, but others were unaware of the need.
The mayors of Columbus and Deming, Eddie Espinoza and Andres Silva respectively, offered food assistance donated by Peppers Supermarket and Amigos of Deming.
Proteccion Civil of the state of Chihuahua still promises to supply some materials for repairs. But Cristina Valerio Gutierrez, like others from the southern section, says no one from this agency spoke to her, although she has ceilings falling in and cracks in her walls. Valerio cares for children, takes in laundry, and cleans house for a living.
There's still a need for assistance. Lupe Carmona and Carmen Magallanes have carried out a survey in the San Antonio sector to itemize the needs of their neighbors. There's a need for clothes, blankets, mattresses, tables, refrigerators and stoves, among other things.
If readers would like to contribute, they can contact Juana Carreon at 531-2165
or 544-4578. With financial donations, Carreon can buy items cheaply in Juarez,
but in-kind donations are welcome, too.
Marjorie Lilly, who lives in Deming, writes
the Borderlines
column for Desert
Exposure.