January 11, 2007 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Photograph by Tyrone Turner
South Texas is dotted with pockets of poor, unincorporated neighborhoods near the Mexican border known as colonias. Their residents, mostly Latinos, live in poverty and isolation, lacking good medical care, decent housing, and even utilities such as water and sewage treatment.
Searching for a way to help, the Center for Community Health Development at Texas A&M University at College Station turned to a Latino cultural tradition — the use of promotoras, or trusted laypeople who help their neighbors solve problems.
The center trained 16 promotoras to go door-to-door in the colonias clustered around the towns of Alton and San Carlos, and help families gain access to health care, transportation, and social services.
The promotoras are women from the colonias themselves, which helps them earn the residents’ trust. “They’re case managers, community developers, and health educators all rolled into one,” says James N. Burdine, director of the community-health center.
They face some big challenges: Their clients often live in shacks surrounded by trash and broken glass, and many suffer from serious health problems. And some of the residents are unauthorized immigrants.
“These folks feel so far down the political infrastructure that almost anything they need seems out of reach,” Mr. Burdine says.
One goal of the promotoras, therefore, is to help people learn how to relay their needs to government officials. For example, they recently helped colonia residents near San Carlos negotiate with county officials to get trash picked up starting at the beginning of this year, Mr. Burdine says.
The promotoras project started in 2001 with a $3.8-million grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, in Princeton, N.J. It won another grant, for $2.9-million, from the foundation in 2005 for a second three-year phase.
Here, two promotoras meet with a family in the Las Frutas colonia.
