Municipal Annexation and the Selective Underbounding of Colonias in Texas' Lower Rio Grande Valley

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 US 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.