ANTHONY, N.M. – Nestled among shady pecan orchards, Gadsden High School was eerily silent one recent morning, save for the murmurs of an eight-person team preparing 275 meals in the cafeteria. The lunch: a cold turkey sandwich with marinara sauce and a fruit cup. The breakfast: a muffin. 

Ironically, the team’s workload has lessened in the months since the pandemic took hold. Before the Gadsden Independent School District closed its 28 school buildings in March, the workers had been responsible for whipping up 1,000 lunches a day — and that was just for the high school. 

It isn’t that the need has disappeared. Far from it. The problem, rather, is access. “We’re very spread out, and families with working parents are having issues getting to the schools,” explained Maria Guerra, head of the district’s nutrition program. “There’s no one to pick up the meals.” 

Even in pre-pandemic times, this small city in southern Dona Aña County struggled. About 50 percent of its school-aged children live in poverty, and the school district is authorized to provide free lunch to every one of its 14,200 students. 

When the COVID-19 crisis swept the state, hunger grew, spurred by job loss and remote learning that made it difficult for families to take advantage of the program. Diana Gonzalez, a 36-year-old single mother of six with four school-aged children at home, doesn’t own a car. Once a month, she hitches a ride with a friend to pick up a food basket prepared by school district social workers. It lasts about two weeks, she says, leaving her to otherwise rely on food stamps to feed her kids. 

“It’s been tough having enough food while trying to stay home,” said Gonzalez. But, owing in part to the help from the school, “thank God we’ve had enough.” 

Food banks have stepped up their game to fill the gap for needy families like hers, as have nonprofits like Concilio Campesino del Sudoeste (Farmworkers Council of the Southwest). Based in nearby Las Cruces, it has distributed some 3,000 pounds of food to families around Anthony over the past two months. “With the pandemic, our volunteers have become essential workers,” said Lizbeth Mata, the organization’s community coordinator.  

Much of the food comes from the Anthony Youth Farm, where a 16-year-old in a black hoodie has become one of the more senior workers after a three-year apprenticeship. Monique Hernandez balances a full high school schedule and a second job as a caregiver for seniors with her work at the farm, on the outskirts of the city, picking and packing vegetables between virtual classes. She plans to go to college and dreams of becoming a doctor — one who comes home to serve her community. 

“I want to be able to become someone great in life and come back to my community,” she said. “Because if we don’t stay together, who’s going to have our backs?”

Meanwhile, she weaves her way through rows of squash, watermelon and green beans. “These will be ready tomorrow,” she says, pushing aside a yellow flower to reveal a bright green zucchini. Normally, she explains, she would have picked the vegetable already. Now she’s letting all the crops grow larger, hopeful that another half inch will help some family stretch their food a little longer. 

To Monique, whose only farming experience was a summer helping her parents pick pecans, this work is personal. She often brings food home for her parents and five siblings, and anything extra goes to family in Juárez, 25 miles to the south and across the border. 

“There’s a pride in having grown that food and in being there every step of the way,” she said.  “Eating it or seeing it go to someone who needs it is a great reward.” 

Lines at food pantries “a thousand cars long”

Bordering Texas and Mexico at the southern end of the state, Dona Aña County is mostly farm- and ranchland, speckled with small towns. Anthony, which straddles the Texas state line midway between Las Cruces and El Paso, is emblematic of the region’s rural outposts: a downtown strip, comprising a few blocks sprinkled with gas stations, quick loan companies, and the occasional taqueria, quickly gives way to vast fields of pecan orchards and dairy farms. The majority of residents work in the service industry or agriculture, and many are Spanish-speaking immigrants. 

Dona Aña is the largest producer of crops in New Mexico, accounting for a quarter of the state’s non-livestock output. It has the third-most farms and the highest number of farmworkers in the state. Yet, even while farming is one of the few industries in the county that has thrived during the pandemic (there’s been a 52 percent rise in gross income from 2019, according to New Mexico Economic Department), that growth hasn’t necessarily been reflected in the lives of locals. Unemployment claims skyrocketed to 10,000—up from 2,000 at the same time last year— and Feeding America, a national hunger relief organization, estimates that overall food insecurity in the area has risen about 5 percent, to 21.3 percent of the population. 

In a nutshell: Those who produce food for the rest of the state and nation have struggled to feed themselves. 

In normal times, Anthony Youth Farm’s main mission is to provide extra income and mentorship to local teens like Monique. But during the COVID-19 crisis, the farm’s three acres have become a source of emergency food for a hungry community. 

Alma Maquitico, one of the farm’s adult supervisors, described lines at local food pantries that are “a thousand cars long.” The handouts are often limited to dry goods, and a well-rounded supply of fresh fruit and vegetables can be hard to find. 

Irma Garcilazo has learned that lesson.

Originally from Durango, Mexico, the 55-year-old got her U.S. citizenship about five years ago; her husband, Leonardo, is undocumented. He spent three months in a detention center earlier this year after a raid on the factory where he worked. Garcilazo almost sold their home in a trailer park to pay the $10,000 bond for his release, until a friend stepped in and loaned her the money.

Food has always been at the center of Garcilazo’s life. Her mother was locally famous for her chiles rellenos, and Garcilazo brags that she won her husband over with a plate of tacos. Before marrying Leonardo, she worked in restaurant kitchens for 19 years; she still makes menudo for her kids, grandkids, and anyone else lucky enough to stop by her house on a Sunday. She is now earning $100 per week butchering meat to help pay back the $10,000 loan. 

She has helped her family survive this difficult year by pooling food stamps and driving her beat-up Lincoln to various food banks. One pantry recently filled her box with large bottles of ketchup and bags of Sour Patch Kids candy — problematic for a type 2 diabetic like Garcilazo. 

“It can be hard to eat the right things,” she says. Almost a quarter of her large dining room table is devoted to pills to handle her diabetes and hypertension. As she heats up some leftover menudo and butters slices of bread in her small kitchen, she worries about getting Leonardo’s weight back up after his detention. “I didn’t recognize him,” she says. “And he’s still too thin.” 

The undocumented community, which by most measures forms the backbone of Anthony’s agricultural economy, is almost certainly the city’s most vulnerable population. According to a 2016 study by the New American Economy, a national immigration research organization, almost 60 percent of farmworkers and 42 percent of animal production workers (such as dairy farmers) in New Mexico are immigrants; of those, an estimated 20 percent are undocumented.  These laborers are typically ineligible for government assistance such as food stamps, unemployment, and COVID-19 relief funds; some are barred from food pantries because they lack government-issued IDs. 

Just off Lincoln Street across from St. Anthony’s Catholic Church, the Women’s Intercultural Center is one of the nonprofits that serve this vulnerable population, offering everything from citizenship classes to guitar lessons — and now it serves as a food distribution hub. Its director, Mary Carter, a no-nonsense former city planner, describes her town as a place where people are used to living “close to the bone.” For many, making do with less is a way of life: “People here are resilient. They will always find a way to survive.”

Anthony “has the strongest peer support network I’ve seen,” she adds. “If you need a ride, someone will give you one. If you need food, someone will help you get it.” 

Garcilazo is a regular at the center: She attended English and citizenship classes there and has known Carter for over 15 years. Now she lines up most weeks to pick up chicken and vegetables. Despite her family’s challenges, Garcilazo insists she has struggled far less than others. 

“So many people have problems with food,” she says. She often shares what she gets with friends who don’t have cars, acting as a one-woman delivery service for her neighbors: “I pick up the food for them and spread it around.” 

ANTHONY, N.M. — On a spring day during the coronavirus lockdown, Fernie Herrera set up an outdoor stove in his spacious backyard. He unfurled the awning on his camper — parked under the pine tree that towers over the family house — and invited his kids and grandkids over for a campout. 

If it weren’t for the pandemic, Herrera might have been out fishing or hunting rabbits. Instead, with his daughter and her three children, he ate steak and potatoes inside the camper as if they were camping in the woods. 

“With the pine tree there, that was our forest,” he said. After his daughter left with the kids, his son’s family arrived, extending the day’s activities while being mindful of the state’s prohibitions against large gatherings.

In Southern New Mexico, the lockdown has drawn its share of criticism. Some officials have attacked the state’s mask-wearing mandates as a violation of their God-given rights. But Herrera — a former fire chief who serves as a city trustee and plans to run for mayor — stands behind Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s efforts to flatten the curve: “I support masks,” he said. “I support social distancing. Because, you know, in my 74 years of life that I’ve been around, I have seen pandemics. I have seen polio. I had polio when I was in fifth grade.”

Herrera is aware of the economic setbacks that go along with lockdown. Even in good times this quiet border town — whose population hovers just under 9,400 — has only a handful of businesses. They include one gas station and a single convenience store whose two refrigerators are stocked with the basics: cheese, eggs, milk, orange juice, soda and a small selection of vegetables. Anthony is home to Diablo Fireworks, which calls itself the state’s largest fireworks store, but more typical businesses are the lunch trucks selling burritos and tortas, sidewalk fruit vendors, barbers, and financial service offices peddling unsecured loans.

Set amid the dairy farms and pecan orchards of southern Doña Ana County, the city has had some success in attracting young working families to the scores of affordable new homes cropping up around town. But economic growth is always an on-again, off-again affair here. As work life ground to a halt with the lockdown, gross tax revenues and other income plunged. The city government took a hatchet to its $2.7 million budget, cutting spending to just over $1.8 million. 

“The health crisis has affected everything,” said City Manager Oscar Dominguez. In 2019, Anthony finished the fiscal year with a $760,000 surplus. This year, even with massive cuts, it will operate with a $1.08 million deficit. 

The future, Dominguez said, is “looking bleak.” 

Ever since its incorporation 10 years ago, Anthony has strained to gain an economic foothold. 

The median household income here is $23,378, and slightly more than 45 percent of its 9,400 residents live below the poverty line, according to U.S. Census data from 2018. Many locals commute to jobs in restaurants and hotels in Las Cruces, half an hour to the northwest, or in El Paso, Texas, about 30 minutes to the southeast. Others work in construction, heavy industry and agriculture.

Herrera is a third-generation Antonian whose grandparents owned a small farm outside town. He has never forgotten the effect that his bout with polio — the coma, paralysis and six-month recovery — had on his family. His father was a farm laborer, his mother a homemaker who cared for five young children. When disaster struck in 1956, the Herreras relied on the generosity of neighbors to keep gas in the family car so they could drive to Las Cruces, where 10-year-old Fernie lay hospitalized.

Polio outbreaks were common in the 1950s. During the epidemic of 1952, nearly 60,000 children were infected around the U.S., and more than 3,000 died.

Herrera’s family is taking the pandemic seriously. His grandson Adrian Arias, who just graduated from high school, told him: “I’m only 18 and I’m just barely going into the world. I don’t want to get that thing and be handicapped or die.”

Almost equidistant between Las Cruces and El Paso, the community that is now Anthony once hosted 16th-century travelers along the historic Camino Real connecting present-day Santa Fe and Mexico City. About 20 miles from the Mexican border, Anthony remains a quintessential border town. Nearly a third of its residents are immigrants, and most retain ties to Mexico; indeed, 84 percent of residents speak Spanish at home. 

Until its incorporation in 2010, the city was designated as one of New Mexico’s 171 colonias — small, unincorporated border communities that typically suffer from a lack of basic infrastructure. Anthony has modernized considerably over the years. Between 2000 and 2010, its population increased by 18 percent; its rate of growth is among the fastest in the state. But with growth comes a challenge: If, as expected, its population eclipses 10,000 in the 2020 census, Anthony will lose state funds earmarked for colonias and other small cities with populations under 10,000.

The assumption is that a growing population means a growing tax revenue base to replace state assistance. Pre-COVID-19, the city was taking steps to grow those revenues.

Mayor Diana Murillo-Trujillo’s administration had developed plans to stretch the city’s border northward toward Las Cruces with the hopes of attracting travelers and new businesses — perhaps even the town’s first-ever motel. In January, when the Dos Lagos Golf Course shuttered, the city saw an opportunity and bought the 50-acre property for $3,139,500. The city envisioned selling off parcels for housing development while leaving plenty of room for a new park and recreation center. 

Those plans are now on hold.

Between February and May, unemployment rose from 6.3 to 8.5 percent in Doña Ana County. Among New Mexico’s 33 counties, it has the fourth-highest number of COVID-19 cases: 1,233 as of July 7. Since the county registered its first case on March 1, it has seen a steady uptick and 10 deaths. At a meat processing plant in Santa Teresa, 13 miles from Anthony, 57 workers were infected in May and June. On July 6, Doña Ana County registered 85 new positive cases – its largest single-day increase since the outbreak began. 

The surge is even greater to the east in Texas and to the south in Mexico’s Chihuahua State, where 539 people have already died in Ciudad Juárez. So far, there has been none in Anthony. But the encroaching pandemic threatens the little city’s hopes for economic growth, the stability of its working class and immigrant communities and the dreams of young residents who strive to bring college degrees back to their community.

In 2018, the state Department of Health identified Doña Ana County as the third worst place in New Mexico to be a child. Half of its children live below the federal poverty line, and so many go hungry at home that area schools serve free breakfast and lunch to nearly all students. Poverty contributes to high rates of teen pregnancy and inadequate prenatal care. The majority of 911 calls are for domestic violence.

Nearly half of Anthony’s population is under 18, but for years the city longed for a modern public playground. Built as the fulfillment of a campaign promise by the mayor, Lil’ Adams Park finally opened two years ago in Adams Ball Park at the center of town. It has two red slides and a jungle gym that’s shaded by a big green awning. During the recent stay-at-home orders, the playground sat empty behind a quickly erected gate wrapped in tattered yellow caution tape. 

A project that would have allowed the city to build a flood retention basin in the park was thrown off track in June when the state rescinded a $1.5 million grant because of budget shortfalls. For the time being, ballplayers must put up with a field that ponds whenever there’s a heavy rain. Next year, the city will reapply for the grant, which would also protect low-lying houses, some of the oldest homes in Anthony, from getting washed out in the next 100-year flood.

One Monday afternoon in late June, Sol Corral sat idly behind a plastic partition in her empty beauty salon in a deserted strip mall. She stared at her phone.

Corral, 63, has operated Sol’s Beauty Salon for 14 years. During the lockdown, she sat at home feeling depressed as her business sat dark for three and a half months. One day, she stopped by to check on the potted plants, which didn’t help her mood: “There was so much dust, and it looked so sad.”

On June 21, when the state allowed salons to reopen, she unlocked her doors and was greeted by a rush of customers. That lasted two days. On the first Saturday after reopening, she only had four customers. 

“They are afraid,” she said. 

So are her two stylists. Because of the virus, they aren’t yet willing to return to work. 

Corral owes three months in back rent. Her landlord told her, “I’ll wait for you.” Still, she worries. With her workstations sitting empty, she thinks about selling her spare chairs and unused equipment to cover the overdue rent.

Shortly after lunch, two women came in for haircuts. Corral had them wash their hands and asked them to check their temperatures with the electric thermometer she now keeps at the front desk. She slid a transparent face shield over her surgical mask and led the first customer to one of the workstations. She picked up her scissors, and the two began chatting as she got to work.

As the coronavirus spreads across the Southwest, it’s anyone’s guess what the next few months hold in store for Anthony, the one-time colonia that’s tried so hard to modernize and grow.

In the weeks leading up to the reopening, the community was “cabin fever-struck,” according to Herrera. Now “they’re trying to go out there. They’re seeing that their friends or neighbors are not just keeling over and dying, even though they hear it on the TV that there are people dying every day.”

Herrera fears that as the town reopens, there will be serious health consequences: “People that work in El Paso, they’re going to the restaurants and movies and whatever; they’re going to get contaminated. They’re going to come back, pass it on to their families or their friends.”

He worries about his daughter, an emergency room nurse in El Paso.

“She says, ‘Dad, we have two floors of the hospital with people that are dying.’ She’s afraid,” he said. “She’s got three kids. And she’s a single mom. She says ‘Dad, if I get it? I’m broke. I mean, even though I’m a nurse, you know, if there’s no money coming in? What can I do?’”