Deserted at the Border - The Margin

This story was produced in collaboration with The Margin and Arizona Luminaria. Para leer la historia en español, haga clic aquí.

Alfonso Figueroa and Anel Juarez drove 100 miles from their cobalt-blue manufactured home in Winchester Heights, Arizona, to a hospital in Tucson, where Anel’s OB-GYN had scheduled an appointment to induce her labor.

Countless times, Alfonso made the two-hour drive with his wife for prenatal care. But on this ride, Anel, who was having contractions, felt every pothole on the dirt roads of her community. At least it was under 100 degrees that day.

Just after midnight on September 4, 36-year-old Anel gave birth to their third child, Alaia Isabela. The next day, the couple drove their newborn home, navigating those bumpy roads. Anel supported her baby’s head in the car seat.

“I feel like she gets shaken up a lot because of the movement of the car, because of the road,” Anel said in Spanish.

Alfonso and Anel moved to Winchester Heights from Mexico 16 years ago. Before that, he worked a back-breaking job at a factory for next to nothing. Working on a farm in the U.S. allows Alfonso, 38, to earn more in a couple of days than he did in a week back in Mexico, while Anel stays home with the kids.

He loves his job and is currently caring for 108,000 pistachio trees near Wilcox. When Alfonso returns home to Winchester Heights and looks around, he sees his community in disrepair: “My place back in Oaxaca seemed better than here. I thought this was an abandoned town,” he said in Spanish.

Rows of manufactured homes and trailers, some more sophisticated than others, line the six parallel streets that form Winchester Heights. The dirt roads connect to a soccer field. Nearby, a tienda sells beer and snacks, and roses bloom outside the community center and a small playground. 

For most residents, Spanish is their mother tongue. Instead of Winchester Heights, some call it Perras Flacas, or Skinny Dogs, a nickname for the community's many stray dogs, including pit bulls, said Alfonso, who won’t let his older children, Ashley, 9, and Alfonso (Jr.), 12, play far from home. 

Alfonso and Anel have worked hard to create a home, investing time and money to improve it for their growing family. Their house has a well-kept lawn and fruit trees form a neat line along the front fence. Inside, they hang out on spotless leather couches in front of a large flat-screen TV. 

No matter how much they invest in their home, they alone can’t change the community’s lack of infrastructure. Winchester Heights—a tiny dot on the map of southern Arizona— is a colonia, roughly translated as “neighborhood” in Spanish. It’s home to several hundred people living about 100 miles from the U.S.-Mexico border. Most of its residents are farmworkers on nearby pistachio and tomato farms. Some have lived here for decades with their families, while others are temporary workers. 

There are at least 2,000 colonias dusted along the southwestern border states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California, many of them unincorporated like Winchester Heights.

Most of these communities were established by workers who came into the U.S. during waves of labor migration. Families settled close to the industries where they were employed, sometimes in mountain canyons or in the middle of a desert. Today, around 1 million residents, most of them with Mexican roots, call colonias home.

Climate Risks Affecting Colonias in Southern Arizona 

In the eyes of the U.S. government, when a community is certified as a colonia, it has significant needs— little to no access to potable water and wastewater services, and substandard housing and poor infrastructure. Additionally, "regions with colonias have poverty rates 3 to 9 percentage points higher than other border regions," according to a 2024 federal government report. Getting resources and infrastructure improvements to colonias has always been challenging, and it is getting more difficult now with cuts across the government agencies that fund them. 

Nearly 60% of colonias in the country are at risk of losing their status and funding in the next few years, according to a 2024 report on rural development in colonias by the United States Government Accountability Office. According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)’s outdated rules, the metropolitan statistical areas that colonias belong to cannot exceed 1 million people. Colonias in the Tucson metropolitan statistical area crossed this threshold in 2014.

In July 2025, Texas Congressman Tony Gonzales introduced a bipartisan bill, aiming to protect colonias’ funding by increasing the maximum for the metropolitan statistical areas surrounding colonias from 1 million to 2 million people. The bill, the Ensuring Continued Access to Funding for Colonias Act (H.R. 4498), sits in the House Committee on Financial Services, awaiting further action.

Due to their geographical location, colonias are particularly vulnerable to climate change, with extreme heat, drought, wildfires, and flooding threatening their residents. And federal funding supports repairs to water systems, infrastructure upgrades, and housing. The combination of inadequate water access and poor infrastructure makes people sicker. In Arizona, most of its 58 colonias are in medically underserved areas, where the ratio of population-to-primary care physicians is greater than 5,000 to 1.

Residents of colonias are among the most vulnerable populations in our country, authors of the 2024 GAO report found.

The Margin and Arizona Luminaria visited eight colonias in Arizona, including some that lost their designation. Many of these communities rely on septic tanks or sewage lagoons and receive water from communal wells. Those outside of the well system store water in cisterns or tanks, which exposes it to contaminants. Many residents don’t believe the tap water is safe to drink, so they mostly use it for dishes and bathing. Interviews with 48 residents, local and state officials, nonprofits, researchers, and healthcare providers revealed that all are concerned that compounded stressors to which residents of colonias are exposed are leaving them in harm’s way.

A Legacy of Impermanence  

Arizona’s colonias first emerged in the late 19th century, following the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which created a labor shortage in railroad construction and slowed mining and agriculture. To adapt, companies sought cheap labor from Mexico. Recruited Mexican workers settled in worker camps along the border. Some of these camps, including places like Clifton, two hours north of Winchester Heights, remain colonias today.

One reason these informal settlements endure is the state’s land-use policies. In the 20th century, especially the 1990s, Arizona saw a boom in “wildcat subdivisions,” where developers split large parcels into smaller lots without guaranteeing water access or other essential services. Angela Donelson, co-author of the book “Colonias in Arizona and New Mexico,” has spent part of her city planning career studying colonias and trying to improve conditions in poor rural communities.

“There's roads that are impassable. There's irregular lots, irregular streets, probably issues with electrical connections,” Donelson said. Those irregular homesteading and uneven development patterns are a signature of many wildcat subdivisions, and, in turn, colonias in Arizona.

Since the 1990s, the federal government has taken strides to improve living conditions in colonias. The 1990 Cranston-Gonzalez National Affordable Housing Act established a designated set-aside Community Development Block Grants from HUD and mandated the four states—Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California—to spend up to 10% of their community development funds on projects that benefited colonias. In 1997, Congress made the colonia set-aside funding permanent.

This money is competitive, and HUD allocates it to state agencies annually. In the latest funding cycle, according to the data from the Arizona Department of Housing—the agency administering the funds—the state received just over $2 million to spend on housing and water infrastructure improvement in four counties with colonias.  One of these counties was Cochise, which was awarded $119,372 for housing rehabilitation in up to five colonias, including Winchester Heights.

A Glimpse into Neighboring Colonias

Explore the following colonias to hear from residents and view images from each area.

“It’s never enough,” said Christine McLachlan, the director of Development Services in Cochise County. “Any money we could possibly get would instantly be absorbed. The need is great.”

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) also has targeted funding for colonias through rural development grants and loan programs for water, wastewater, and housing improvements. And colonias are eligible for the funding for “disadvantaged communities” under the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law administered by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Still, without the designated set-aside grants, it will be even harder for colonias to secure the funding needed to improve their living conditions. Colonias will have to compete against a much bigger pool of communities in need. 

“We have a lot of need, but so do other counties, and so it's tough,” McLachlan said.

For the amenities—or ad hoc solutions—colonias do have, residents largely have themselves to thank. In Winchester Heights, residents pulled wild mesquite trees through the dirt, carving out their own streets. In the case of fires, residents are often their own first responders. Alfonso Figueroa shared that he once had to bring a water truck from work to help put out a fire, as there are no fire hydrants in his colonia. Instead, neighbors run to help each other with their own hoses or buckets of water.

Hydrants aren’t the only thing Winchester Heights lacks. Stormwater drainage, streetlights, public access to water and sewer infrastructure, trash removal, health care and schools are nonexistent. Alfonso and Anel’s kids go to a small elementary school 20 minutes away. This unincorporated colonia has no formal governance structure, leaving residents to seek resources and funding on their own with little to no outside support. Coupled with working and raising families, making time to pursue those resources is an unrealistic expectation.

“We don’t know anything,” Alfonso Figueroa said about the funding options. “It makes me sad, because even though there are funds to help the community move forward, nothing gets done.”

This is not only Winchester Heights’ issue. Olga Morales-Pate, the CEO of the Rural Community Assistance Partnership (RCAP), said there’s one common denominator in a lot of colonias: They're managed and operated by volunteers. 

“Most of them are small in size. They lack the financial capacity to afford a paid workforce… You don't have the staff with the right level of sophistication, the right level of training to navigate the regulatory requirements, the funding requirements,” she said. 

The lack of capacity translates into the lack of progress on the ground. In 2015, RCAP, a national network of nonprofits that work to improve living conditions and access to funding in colonias and other rural communities, published a report on the water and wastewater infrastructure needs in colonias. RCAP found that a third, or 604 colonias, housing over 134,000 residents, lacked adequate access to potable water and wastewater management. The 2021-2022 follow-up report showed that conditions in 63 colonias had deteriorated.

“ Having water in Arizona is kind of [a] privilege, but the quality may be terrible,” said Adriana Zuniga-Teran, an associate professor at the School of Geography, Development and Environment at the University of Arizona. Connecting colonias to a public water supply can be prohibitively expensive or logistically impossible due to their remoteness.   

“The horizontal infrastructure, the underground infrastructure–the water and the wastewater–will basically determine a community's ability to build the housing, the medical facilities, the school systems, the grocery stores–everything that makes a community sustainable,” said RCAP’s Morales-Pate. “And that is the one thing that is lacking in our communities.”

Colonias’ Capacity Crisis 

Set in a breathtaking canyon and cut in two by the San Francisco River, Clifton was founded in 1873 after copper ore was discovered in the area. The town is approximately 5 miles away from the Morenci mine, the largest copper producer in the U.S. The historic downtown is adorned with local shops, a museum, an old jail, and a century-old county courthouse. Yet, many of the houses that line Clifton’s canyon roads are crumbling. Paint peels off walls, windows are broken or covered with foil to reflect heat, and some people reside in other people’s backyards. 

Less than half a century ago, Clifton was thriving. Here, in Greenlee County, the residents are whiter and older than those in the Cochise County colonias, and many used to work in the mines. It had schools, an auto shop, and department stores, including a J.C. Penney. Frank Monjaras, 72, used to roam the outdoors as a teenager after his father had taught him desert survival skills and how to shoot a .22-caliber rifle. “My days were spent at the river, running around, riding a bike all day long,” said Monjaras. “I would go out, grab my rifle, box of the .22 [caliber] shells, a blanket, two canteens, can of soup, and hit the mountains up around here, what they call Clifton Peak, Mulligan's Peak, and upriver. I'd be gone all weekend,” reminisced Monjaras

Today in Clifton, hundreds of older residents depend on free meals at the senior center and food pantries. Carolina Cortez, a community health worker with Southeast Arizona Health Education Center (SEAHEC) distributed goods at a food drive in Clifton in September 2025. She rose with the sun to make an hour-long drive, and when she arrived 15 minutes before opening, a line of cars was already waiting. A little over two hours after the opening, the pantry ran out of food. That day, they were able to provide groceries to 108 people, and turned away 32 vehicles. Many of the seniors who come to the food drives retired from the mines.

Monjaras was in his 30s in 1983, when everything changed. That July, the Morenci miners began a year-long strike against the owner, Phelps Dodge Corporation, demanding fair wages. Eventually, they were defeated, and many lost their jobs. In October that same year, the “Great Flood” devastated Clifton, with the San Francisco River rushing through its streets, covering roughly 90,000 cubic feet per second. Following the storm, Frank and his wife Margaret resettled to their house in North Clifton, where they live now.

Over four decades later, Clifton never fully recovered. Businesses left, schools and stores closed, roads cracked, and the houses aged with their owners. Unlike other colonias, Clifton has a government, yet the colonia still doesn't have the capacity to go after competitive grants, a town administrator told The Margin and Arizona Luminaria.

The housing conditions in Clifton upset the Monjaras family, but they don’t surprise them. Their own home needs a paint job and new siding, but they can’t afford it. “It's the money, you know,” Monjaras said. “My wife gets Social Security. I get Social Security. We have to pay our bills, food, you know—take care of ourselves, and what we have left has to stretch out till the next monthly payment.”

Besides, Frank can’t do much fixing on his own. Ten years ago, he got a bad knee infection. As a veteran, the nearest Veterans Affairs (VA) medical center is roughly 41 miles away in Safford. After three years of going back and forth, he developed gangrene. Ultimately, he had to go to Tucson, about 170 miles away, for an amputation. 

Early one afternoon this September, the Monjaras sat in their living room, Margaret, 73, on the couch next to a basket of black and red yarn—the Morenci school colors. A few feet away, Frank engaged in conversation from his wheelchair. They stayed close to their swamp cooler, an energy-efficient cooling unit that infuses moisture into the air. The cooler blew, but didn’t do much else.

“Swamp coolers don't work very well during the summertime. When it's hot, it is hot, and my house will get really hot,” Margaret Monjaras said. Steady air conditioning on a fixed income is a luxury for the Monjaras, but on some days it’s the only way to survive the heat, which reached 111 degrees in mid-August, 2025. “So, we try to do the best we can. In our bedrooms, we have little window air conditioners, which are great. We close the door, turn that on, and we’re nice and cool,” Frank Monjaras added.

The southern border region, where all of Arizona’s colonias are, has more consecutive days with temperatures above 90 degrees than the rest of the country.  Being able to stay cool is a matter of survival. “You're choosing between somewhere this money could go and cooling your space. Which, depending on the time of year, may be a life and death situation,” said Nathan Lothrop, associate director of the Building Resilience, Innovation, Sustainability, and Assistance Center for the Environment and an assistant research professor at the Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health at the University of Arizona.

Heat-related deaths in Arizona have increased by 350% from 2020 to 2024. According to state data, 990 people died of heat in 2023. In the first nine months of 2024, 742 people died from heat-related causes, according to the Arizona Public Health Association's resident epidemiologist, Allan Williams.

On July 20, 2023, a farmworker in his mid-20s and father of two from Yuma County collapsed in the field in the morning, and died before 10 a.m. during the 11 days of temperatures at and above 110 degrees. “No one should be dying, but the fact that someone died at 8:00 a.m. from heatstroke, and who was a young man, it doesn't fit the stereotypes of who is being impacted by heat in the past,” said SEAHEC’s executive director Brenda Sánchez. 

Heat is exacerbating the multidecade drought in the American Southwest known as the “megadrought.” It is depleting rivers, groundwater, and aquifers, thus further compromising water availability and quality for all, but particularly for those relying on water wells, like the residents in Arizona’s colonias and other remote rural communities.

“Even if someone had a heatstroke, if someone was dehydrated… they didn't miss work. They went to work sick because they had to go to work,” said Sánchez. “They don't have sick time; they need to be able to put food on their table. I don't like to use the word ‘resilience’ because I don't think it's resilience. It's life or death for them to be able to, to just survive,” she said.   

When seasonal monsoons or heavy rains come, rain pounds the baked desert ground. Water remains on the surface instead of being absorbed, causing flash floods. If a community doesn’t have adequate drainage, it floods.

The eastern part of Winchester Heights is flood-prone. “When a strong storm hits, all the homes and streets fill with water,” said Jose Rodriguez, 43, Alfonso Figueroa's co-worker and neighbor, speaking in Spanish. Flooding makes dirt roads dangerous. “Those floods have caused accidents, too… Fort Grant Road is where many accidents happen,” he said. 

In Pirtleville, a former colonia in Cochise County that wasn’t included in the Arizona Department of Housing’s 2024 list of designated colonias, water stays for days after a storm and breeds mosquitoes and flies. “It smells really bad,” said Elizabeth Vertrees, 44, who had water in front of her house for a week after the last significant rain. She said the back roads were flooded and she had to go “all the way around” to drive her daughter to school. 

Research shows that historically, people in colonias have been sicker than the rest of the country. According to a 2014 EPA-USDA report, border counties with colonias had significantly higher rates of Hepatitis A, along with water and foodborne illness, compared to the rest of the U.S. In August 2025, according to Cochise County officials, West Nile virus, a disease spread by mosquitoes breeding in standing water, was detected through vector traps near Pirtleville.

“A Colonia Means Something”

When a colonia is decertified, it not only loses critical access to federal set-aside funding, but other grants also become more challenging to obtain. Without the designation, former colonias compete with all localities applying for HUD’s community development funding.

Colonias must continuously demonstrate they meet the criteria HUD established 35 years ago. Naco, a historical frontier community of 800 to 1,000 people in Cochise County, was certified as a colonia in 1995. In 2024, the Board of the Naco Sanitary District, the de facto leaders of this unincorporated community, discovered that Naco had technically lost its status in 2008. 

According to the Arizona Department of Housing, the HUD Office of the Inspector General discovered that due to HUD's own lacking guidelines, Arizona had incorrectly certified most of its border communities as colonias, and as a result received and spent millions of federal dollars on communities that did not meet criteria under the 1990 Cranston-Gonzalez National Affordable Housing Act. HUD officials disputed the findings but agreed to address certain issues identified in the inspector's audit. All Arizona colonias had to apply to recertify within a two-year window, but Naco did not. The Sanitary District Board hopes to get the status back.

“A colonia means something. It has genuine political and financial implications to it. And thus, there's this sort of constant tension with identifying and labeling something as a colonia,” said Lucas Belury, a geographer and University of Arizona Ph.D. candidate researching colonias. 

However, not all colonias are reckoning with the same challenges. Elgin, a scenic colonia in Santa Cruz County, is studded with vineyards, distilleries, and ranches. And Patagonia, a colonia with an arts center, plant nursery, two grocery stores and community members advocating for environmental monitoring and resources. San Simon is another example. The community’s original draw, a railroad track, runs through the northside of its three-quarters of a square mile. With two churches, paved roads, a brick firehouse, and two stores, San Simon’s amenities far outnumber Winchester Heights’ with less than two-thirds the population. Three shiny white tanks flank the San Simon Water District office of board president, Robert “Chuck” Fickett, 76.

In 1985, Fickett took it upon himself to form a water district and update the failing water infrastructure. “Things were deteriorating. There [were] leaks around town,” Fickett said. Recently, after the old well faltered, the water district obtained funds from the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality and purchased a new well, which they plan to connect in early November 2025.

Despite San Simon’s efforts, it still has issues to address. Kathy Clark, who rents a trailer there, is still reeling after losing her home in the 2024 wildfire in another colonia, Bowie. “We had a fire that destroyed everything, and we moved over here,” Clark said. There were no fire hydrants near her home in Bowie, she said. San Simon has none, either.

Like Winchester Heights, San Simon is roughly an hour from the nearest hospital, but here, when people seek medical care, they go see Frances Grill, a family nurse practitioner at a Walker Family Medicine clinic. The clinic was founded in 2003 by Grill and Heather Lentz, now an EMT, and is located within the walls of San Simon High School, complete with two custom-built private exam rooms and a partitioned waiting area.

“We started it because we live here and we found that people really would use it if it was local, but they didn’t want to go far away,” Grill said.

In four hours on a given Tuesday, Grill estimated she would see around 25 patients. She notices the difference access has made. “I think they’ve gotten healthier, actually, because we’re here. … Some of these old ranchers who would never go to a doctor now come here,” she said. Some of Grill’s patients, even those now living in cities like Tucson and Willcox, still drive all the way to San Simon to see her.

When Winchester Heights residents fall ill, they wait for the next mobile clinic to arrive and hope it’s nothing serious. Aida Garcia, a SEAHEC-trained health worker, or promotora in Spanish, and community organizer, worries about the health of her community members, most of whom are seasonal workers.

“Families have to choose: go to the doctor or feed their kids. Sometimes people endure illness because there’s no money and the work is temporary,” she said in Spanish.

Aida has lived in Winchester Heights for 25 years. As a promotora and president of the Winchester Heights Community Center, she is an unofficial community leader who runs the food bank, health care outreach, and maintains the community center on her own.

At 4 p.m. on Friday, September 12, cars lined up in front of the Winchester Heights Community Center for the monthly food drive. Garcia and eight volunteers helped people load their vehicles with supplies, including a few melons, cartons of milk, cereal, and pasta. Forty minutes into the food drive, the wind picked up and lifted the tent sheltering the food off the ground. The volunteers rushed to hold it down. A storm was coming, but cars kept pulling up.

Alfonso returned from work in his pickup truck. During every storm, he worries his home could be destroyed: the roof could blow off or the trailer could tip over. He and his wife spent the last nine years making their slice of Winchester Heights their own. Colonias remain one of the few places where people like Alfonso and Anel can afford to own a home.

“Thank God the house is already ours,” Anel said. 

The couple and their growing family said they will remain as long as there’s water in the wells. But they hope for the kind of improvements that would make their young children’s lives better: like paved roads where thorns and rocks won’t puncture bike tires. 

“We hope someone looks at this community and sees hardworking people—and improves the streets, lighting, everything. So our kids grow up in a clean, healthy, beautiful community,” Alfonso said.

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