Landscape ArchitectureLucas Belury

This research project examines how residents of Rio Grande Valley's colonias – informal and predominantly Mexican and Mexican-American settlements along the Texas-Mexico border – have fundamentally transformed the American landscape through their innovative responses to flood vulnerability. Through the Mexican/Mexican-American cultural practice of "rasquachismo," colonia residents serve as craftspeople and architects of their environment, elevating mobile homes with found materials, hand-cutting drainage paths, and repurposing construction materials to create incremental housing improvements. These grassroots modifications, combined with the community's legacy of activism dating back to the Chicano Movement, represent a distinctive reshaping of the American built environment that challenges traditional infrastructure development. This research illuminates how some of America's most vulnerable residents have adapted and transformed their physical environment through necessity and ingenuity, creating a unique architectural and infrastructural landscape that reflects both the challenges and resilience of borderland communities.