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Bottom's up: Cameron Park is the poorest community in America, a Brownsville colonia where people struggle to get by on little more than $4,000 a year. So why are its residents so optimistic?

Article Excerpt
HE CALLS THEM HIS "ONE THOUSAND ACRES OF EXCELLENCE." IN THE NORTHEASTERN corner of this border city, just four miles north of Mexico, Bill Hudson has reinvented Brownsville in a way Brownsville never dared imagine itself. Using tile, stone, and stucco, the cheery blue-eyed native converted property his grandfather had purchased in 1937 into an upscale and as yet unfinished residential and retail development known as Paseo de la Resaca. There are now restaurants, shopping strips, and an events center, and when all is said and done, Brownsville will also count some two thousand new homes and a man-made waterway framed by a nine-mile hiking and biking trail. "This is six years ago," says Hudson, who looks and dresses like a Southern gentleman but is fascinated by Mexican border culture. He points at an aerial shot of a brown wasteland hanging on his conference room wall and snickers. "Nada." For Hudson, Paseo de la Resaca is more than a development; it is a symbol of what could happen all along the Texas-Mexico border if only its people were willing to think big, to dream. In his view, the biggest challenge the border region faces is not drugs or immigration or low wages but what he calls "a deficit of spiritual capital, which is reflected in a resignation to mediocrity." [paragraph] But even as Brownsville basks in this new identity, Paseo de la Resaca is not the only development in this part of town were people have come with visions of upward mobility. Rubbing against Hudson's excellent acres, in the shape of a slightly flawed parallelogram--and at a markedly different point on the economic spectrum--lies Cameron Park. This neighborhood of 4,895 residents is, according to the 2000 U.S. census, the poorest place in the country. The ranking is based on the median income per capita for communities of one thousand or more households. If the middle-American tries to make it on $21,587 a year and the middle-Texan lives on $19,617, the Cameron Park resident squeaks by on just $4,103. For most of the people who live here, this is the beginning of the American experience. "This is the starting point in Brownsville," says Father Mike Seifert, a quick-witted, highly philosophical missionary with the Marist Brothers who has worked in Cameron Park in Cameron Park since 1996. "This is the place you land when you cross the river." [paragraph] From Paredes Line Road, the thoroughfare that links it to the rest of the city, Cameron Park looks like your typical working-class neighborhood on the border. You see trees (mesquite, mostly), business (from tax services to tire shops), chain-link fences, and lots of life. But take a drive down its skinny streets, a confusing network of paved roads with names unfitting for its Mexican population--Gregory, Nannette, Jeffrey--and the poverty begins to seep in the picture. A grand home here and they may have six bedrooms and three baths and be worth up to $150,000. But next to a two-story stucco with ornate Mexican windows will sit a trailer that sags mournfully--or maybe two, or maybe five, sometimes squeezed onto a single plot of land, sometimes spilling out useless junk. The most interesting dwellings are the hybrids, where a wood-frame house that's been painted only on the front sprouts from a one-room mobile home. Cinder blocks, rebar, and gravel stack up on empty lots until the owner can afford all the material necessary to start a home or add on to one. Decommissioned cars decay in front yards. On one lot a horse passes the day tied to a scraggly tree amid a tangle of brush and old fires. Children--hale ones in diapers, big ones with blaring car stereos--are everywhere, and for each family that fives comfortably, there is another whose kids sleep side by side on couches and floors.

Cameron Park is a "colonia." The Spanish term refers literally to a "neighborhood" or a "settlement of...

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