PROYECTO AZTECA, San Juan, Hidalgo County, Texas

Proyecto Azteca [The Aztec Project] is a housing and community movement founded in 1991 by members of the United Farm Workers to aid low-income American farm workers and their families by helping them build quality affordable homes. For many years, Mexican families who immigrated to the Rio Grande Valley area along the Texas-Mexico border in pursuit of better economic opportunities have been settling into colonias. These unincorporated makeshift communities of shacks often lacked the most basic utilities such as electricity and running water. Poor immigrant families were also victims of unscrupulous land developers, who sold them parcels of flood-prone, non-productive agricultural land.

Aristeo Orta, a construction worker at Proyecto Azteca Gelatin silver print © Danny Lyon 1999	Noe Galindo, Colonia Jessups, near Monte Alto Gelatin silver print © Danny Lyon 1999

Proyecto Azteca initiated a program to provide safe and comfortable housing for the families of farm workers living in colonias. Founded on the principles of self-help, sweat-equity, and grass-roots activism, it provides inexpensive tools, materials, and construction supervision to teams of qualifying families who work together to help build each other's homes. Proyecto Azteca also benefits farm workers by offering low-interest loans or operating on a no-interest cash basis, allowing those who don't have bank accounts, or who mistrust institutions, to finance their own housing. This endeavor has built 127 houses in the past nine years, constructed mostly by and for the farm workers of this border community.

Photographer Danny Lyon, also a writer and filmmaker, is well known for his frank and lyric portraits of people in a particular place and time, which have included civil rights and Latino subjects. His images show a construction supervisor working on a home, a resident farm worker in a cabbage field, a young man standing outside of a new home in his colonia, and a broad view of the Rio Grande Valley.

Interviewer Daniel Rothenberg teaches at the University of Michigan and has written about the world of migrant farm workers. His interviews present personal stories of community leaders and Mexican Americans who have lived in marginal colonias. Some tell not only of their experiences building homes with Proyecto Azteca, but also of their broader experiences as immigrants, finding their place in a new culture. They speak of their new community as both a physical place and as a cultural place, in which they can nurture their cross-cultural identities. quotation from an interview

http://www.creativephotography.org    This page last updated September 24, 2000.   oncenter@ccp.arizona.edu