CHAPARRAL

The colonia of Chaparral — the largest unincorporated community in New Mexico, just north of El Paso — is “bursting at the seams,” as state Rep. Sarah Silva put it.

The 2020 census put the population of the fronteriza community, established around 1960 with just a handful of makeshift houses and mobile homes, at a little over 16,500, but its true population could be up to 30,000, said Silva, a Las Cruces Democrat.

One community organizer estimated about half the residents are families with mixed citizenship status. Many undocumented immigrants are afraid to leave their homes, the organizer added, noting the close presence of federal immigration enforcement agents at the Otero County Detention Center on the outskirts of Chaparral.

With no local government overseeing the growing, sprawling community, Silva is its only direct representative.

Residents say the current setup of Chaparral — which straddles two counties, Doña Ana to the west and Otero to the east — is untenable. They point to a lack of law enforcement and infrastructure, and a slew of unaddressed problems: an excessive junk pile-up, animal control issues, unmitigated flooding and delayed emergency response.

It is one of many colonias established along the border with Mexico as an affordable alternative to the traditional housing market. Many have lacked paved roads, electricity, adequate water, sewer, decent housing or code enforcement, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Services in Chaparral have increased over the decades, but residents want to see more improvements.

A proposed $10 million public safety facility in Otero County would help ease some of the residents’ concerns. It would include a sheriff’s office substation and an ambulance bay, with space for the fire department, animal control and road maintenance crews. It is scheduled for a December groundbreaking.

However, the facility wouldn’t change the structure of the colonia, whose motto is “a community that works.”

Some residents are pushing for incorporation. Others are skeptical of whether that’s the best route to a better future — largely due to fears about higher taxes.

Jorge Aguirre, a Farmers Insurance agent in Chaparral who lives in Las Cruces, described the community as “scattered” and “free-range.”

“They’re very resistant to the idea of being taxed more,” he said. “But what I have seen is that a lot of people demand the services of urbanization. They want all the things that the city can provide … and so there’s that conflict.”

The lack of infrastructure prevents new businesses from opening, he noted, meaning there is not a lot of tax revenue to cover the costs of running a city.

Since there is little industry within the colonia, many residents are truck drivers and oil-field workers who commute to El Paso and Las Cruces, Aguirre added.

Chaparral is also home to the Flor y Canto convent, founded in 2001. Residents say the Sisters of Assumption — affectionately referred to as “las monjitas” — are a fixture of the community and have become vocal advocates for the colonia’s immigrant population.

Growth of a ‘colonia’

In recent years, government assistance in New Mexico — the only state to offer free college tuition and childcare to residents — has attracted young families, mostly from El Paso, seeking affordable costs of living and a wider swath of land.

The state’s high rates of poverty are magnified in Chaparral, which had a median household income of $24,900 in 2020, less than half the state median of $52,285 that year, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Families seem to be moving from El Paso to Chaparral to take advantage of New Mexico’s free universal childcare program, launched a year ago, Silva said — though, she noted the evidence is only anecdotal. Local childcare providers’ waitlists have grown since November 2025, she added.

Brisa Navarrete recently moved to Chaparral from El Paso with her three children. She’s still unpacking boxes, she said, adding her children love having more space to play and are happier at school.

Amid the fresh crop of young families, some longtime residents are nostalgic for when the colonia was small, sleepy and left alone.

What started as a few dozen residents multiplied to more than 2,000 colonias from Texas to California, though official socioeconomic data on these communities is scarce.

A 1990 federal law, the Cranston-Gonzalez National Affordable Housing Act, formalized their existence and provided avenues for funding. New Mexico in the 1990s also tightened its subdivision rules in an attempt to address the missing infrastructure in colonias.

Chaparral residents within Otero County lines still use septic tanks, while some in Doña Ana County are connected to a sewage system. Doña Ana commissioners in September approved almost $16 million in financing to expand the system.

John Colquitt, 86, and his family are responsible for much of Chaparral’s development. His grandfather owned a ranch and his father, Prescott Kellum Colquitt, began subdividing it after the drought of the 1950s. They realized they needed to put in water infrastructure — starting with around 10 household connections. There are now over 5,500 connections to Lake Section Water, Chaparral’s private water company, Colquitt said.

As the years went on, the colonia received increased services: a volunteer fire department, public transportation, community centers, road improvements and schools, Colquitt recounted from his office, built in 1971.

Colquitt in October 2025 was approached by Meta to supply water to its data center just across the state line in El Paso, but he stopped doing so in May after complaints from residents that it was lowering their water pressure and affecting the water quality.

Public safety issues

Jeannie Warren moved from El Paso to Chaparral in 1970. The lack of code enforcement makes people’s yards unseemly, she said, with pile-ups of junk and trucks. Another big issue, she added, is Doña Ana County’s vacant sheriff’s office substation in the community — it has been closed since 2022. The proposed Otero safety facility would include a sheriff’s office substation, so it could fill this gap.

In the meantime, Warren has taken up surveillance herself.

“We have cameras … all around our house, so every time something happens in our neighborhood, [our neighbors] are right there at our front door asking: ‘Can you check?’ ”

With little official policing, the colonia also relies on community policing through Facebook groups. Navarrete said the first thing she did when she knew she was moving to Chaparral was join them. Posts in late October ranged from a warning about a suspicious man to family-friendly Halloween events, she noted.

Though her family is content in Chaparral, Navarrete is not a fan of the wild dogs roaming around, which make her children scared to walk to the school bus station. The closest animal control facility is in Alamogordo, about an hour and a half away.

The volunteer-led and sparsely staffed fire station on the Otero side also means fires in the empty lots near her house are often not addressed immediately, she added.

So far, Otero County has secured $5 million for construction of the new public safety facility, thanks to legislative capital outlay from Silva, Republican Sen. Jim Townsend of Artesia, Republican Rep. John Block of Alamogordo and the developers behind the massive and controversial Project Jupiter, a data center in Santa Teresa, who contributed $1.5 million in gross receipts tax revenue through their community benefits agreement.

James Perez, 52 — a longtime Chaparral resident and local business leader who moved to the colonia in 1983 and has since opened a DJ and lighting production company, a food truck, a cannabis store and a family-owned coffee shop — said the facility would be “actually amazing.” Currently, break-ins “never get resolved, even though there’s DNA, there’s fingerprints; it just gets buried,” he said.

He believes the facility would lead to a beefed-up law enforcement presence and improve response times.

“We depend on the volunteer fire department. … If two people are having a heart attack at the same time, one might not make it,” Perez said.

Mahmood Hurab, a Chaparral landlord and retired pharmacist drawn to the colonia‘s rural feel and larger lots, sees it as “easy math”: With safety, services and activities, Chaparral could attract more residents and become the next Las Cruces, he said.

But Aguirre cautioned against an increased police presence.

“I am happy that they are investing in the community … but we ask too much of our cops,” Aguirre said. “We ask them to solve every social problem, and it is a lose-lose because everybody gets disappointed that the cops cannot solve it, and the cops are also disappointed that people want too much of them.”

Split on incorporation

Talks of incorporation in Chaparral are not new. But this time feels different, said Christopher Erickson, an economics professor at New Mexico State University.

Erickson is part of a $100,000 state-funded study of the colonia that started in late October. The governance study — which will be ready by the end of June 2027 — is aimed at creating a better-informed electorate that can decide if incorporation “is the best way to provide the services the community wants, or if there an alternative,” he said in an interview.

It is also charged with assessing how to attract businesses to Chaparral, Erickson added.

Colquitt, who is considered a defacto leader of Chaparral, isn’t sure if incorporation is the colonia’s best option.

“What we hear is the greatest challenge is that the people here don’t have complete control of their own destiny,” Colquitt said. But he wonders if the community could generate enough revenue to cover the costs of incorporation.

At a bilingual meeting in September, Silva mapped out potential governance pathways for Chaparral: The county line could be moved so the entire colonia is in Doña Ana County; the community could incorporate as a city; Chaparral could create its own county — which Silva said would be “demasiado caro,” or too expensive; or it could maintain the status quo.

She passed out colorful Post-it notes to around 40 attendees and fielded a slew of questions at the Delores C. Wright Community Center, a facility Doña Ana County intends to expand. They jotted down their worries; most fear tax increases and the loss of Chaparral’s small-town feel. But they expressed hope about increased access to public services and improved emergency response times.

The closest county seat is in Doña Ana County’s Las Cruces, only 37 miles from Chaparral, compared with 73 miles to Alamogordo, the Otero County seat. Many residents are deterred from traveling to Alamogordo for services due to a Border Patrol checkpoint on the route, according to a memo prepared by Otero County Attorney R.B. Nichols.

Under state law, Chaparral’s distance from the county seats fits a requirement for moving the county line. But the process is difficult. Petitioners on the Otero side would need signatures from at least 51% of the qualified voters living in the part of Chaparral that would move. A court would then review the petition, and commissioners would order an election to follow.

However, Silva noted state law does not clearly say who would vote on the measure: all of Otero County or only Chaparral?

Nichols’ memo noted no court or attorney general opinion has settled the question, which should be clarified before Chaparral’s residents attempt to undertake the process.

For Chaparral to become its own town, only voters in the community would weigh in. The process includes two steps: Voters would need to incorporate as a town on the Doña Ana side and then annex the Otero side, or vice versa.

“You tried this in 2006. No pasó el voto … it didn’t pass,” Silva said at the Sept. 10 meeting.

The same fears of tax increases and heightened government oversight led residents to shoot down the proposed incorporation of a city within Chaparral on the Doña Ana side 20 years ago.

Moving the county line would unify the community under one county government but wouldn’t create a town, and incorporating would create a town but wouldn’t move the line.

Meeting attendees seemed to lean toward the first option: placing all of Chaparral in one county.

Close-knit community

Regardless of the form it takes, Perez, a longtime Chaparral resident and local business leader, believes local government is needed.

“I saw how Chaparral was growing physically, but I didn’t see it growing economically,” said Perez, who moved to Chaparral in 1983. “Now the [economic] growth is at a phenomenal level, and I think what we’re lacking is the leadership.”

Jala Zavala, a former high school teacher who has lived in Chaparral for almost all of her 42 years, said now is not the time for incorporation.

She thinks the community needs better services before it can take up the “legal battles” that come with incorporation.

“We’re just not in that place out here. We have too many people that are low-income, who cannot afford the tax increase. We have a lot of people that are just straight-up undocumented,” Zavala said. “For someday, maybe, but as of right now, it’s not something that we need to be worried about.”

Despite the challenges, many see Chaparral as a place worth staying.

Perla Diaz, dressed in a jumpsuit at a Halloween event in Chaparral, cradled her baby bump while talking about the close-knit, warm community she has long been a part of.

Diaz, who is originally from Juárez but has lived most of her life in Chaparral, decided to raise her child in the colonia, though the baby’s father is from Texas, partly because of New Mexico’s childcare policies.

“We stayed here because it’s peaceful. It’s cheap. Everybody recognizes everybody,” Diaz said.

Julia Gentin is a reporter for The Las Cruces New Mexican, The Santa Fe New Mexican and Searchlight New Mexico through a partnership with Report for America, a national service program that places journalists into local newsrooms. She covers the Southern New Mexico region. Learn more about Report for America at reportforamerica.org.

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