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Like most of the homes in this ostensibly planned subdivision, the De La Os’ trailer, with its exposed beams and jerry-rigged wiring, is a work in progress. The family is blessed with electricity — still a luxury for some impoverished communities along the Texas-Mexico border — but they lack running water. For this residents queue up, sometimes for hours, at a county-run spigot a couple miles away, where they fill huge plastic drums of varying shapes and vintage with foul-smelling water that officials describe as potable. Elia and Rogelio, like most residents, won’t drink it, preferring to visit a private, for-profit water vendor in Laredo, or nearby Rio Bravo, for jugs to slake their thirst.

The De La Os were not born here and they have not yet sought full citizenship, they say, in part because they’ve struggled with the language. But they’ve learned enough to find steady work as seasonal agricultural hands in states across the Midwest, and they have been permanent, legal and taxpaying residents of the United States for more than a dozen years. They take great care to say that they are proud of their home, and that they are grateful to have gained a foothold on the American dream. But Elia, 64, also shares that, growing up in Mexico, she once imagined that dream rather differently.