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Municipal underbounding is the systematic failure of cities to annex surrounding minority communities. Recent analyses of the phenomenon in the United States have focused on small White Southern towns with African American communities along the jurisdictional fringe. This paper applies similar logic to the study of the exclusion of colonias in the Lower Rio Grande Valley (LRGV) of Texas. These low-income informal settlements, located in the hinterlands of cities, have historically had high rates of poverty, poor housing quality, and insufficient infrastructure and utility service. Using TIGER/ Line files (GIS shapefiles), Summary Files of the U S decennial censuses, and ArcGIS technology this project explores the prevalence of the municipal underbounding of colonias. In order to place the issue of municipal annexation in context, the paper begins with a description of regional demographic and socioeconomic characteristics, municipal growth, and annexation patterns in the LRGV. The paper then explores the extent to which colonias have been selectively excluded from annexation using logistic and autologistic regression. The results suggest that census blocks that contain colonias are less likely to be annexed than are other census blocks; in addition, those census blocks that contain colonias with poor infrastructure appear to have odds of being annexed that are lower still. The paper concludes with a discussion of the policy implications of these findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper contributes to notions of 'hybrid' historical geographies of irrigation by focusing on contested visions for irrigation in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas. Adding to geographical work using biography, notions of performance, and racialized landscapes, the paper analyzes debates between John Shary and Charles Pease. Shary and Pease were protagonists, respectively, of pumping water from the Rio Grande and a gravity scheme reliant on action by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. The pumping system survived; the gravity system was never constructed. However, the debate between Shary and Pease illustrates tensions within the Anglo elite. The analysis focuses on three early-twentieth-century moments. The first is a 1918 crisis in Shary's irrigation company, followed by a 1927 debate between Shary and Pease over the flaws of the pumping system and benefits of gravity irrigation. Finally, the paper focuses on Shary and Pease's constructions of racialized landscapes that subordinated Hispanics as voters to be utilized for Shary's accumulation strategy, or as 'non-water users' that should be excluded from water politics. The paper argues that Shary and Pease projected similarly exclusionary social visions onto the irrigated landscape in spite of their differences on irrigation systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]