[of a city]', and a colonia proletaria is a shantytown. In Spanglish, the English-Spanish mix, colonia began to be used to refer primarily to Mexican neighborhoods about thirty years ago. A 1977 study uses the term colonia to describe rural desert settlements with inadequate infrastructure and unsafe housing stock. Since these Hispanic neighborhoods were less affluent, the word also connoted poverty and substandard housing. In the 1990s, colonias became a common American English name for the slums that developed on both sides of the Mexico–United States border. The history of the word colonias in the United States, and its interpretation through politics, suggests that places called colonias are not to be perceived as natural or prosperous communities. In many parts of Texas, Spanish-language terms are often used to frame and highlight a class difference. The term colonia is an essential symbol for public policy in the United States, and this Spanish name is a critical component for constructing public and policy attention, underscoring the settlements' differences and labelling them as racialized and distinct places, which has a powerful way of constructing and reinforcing marginality. Definition Section 916 of the Cranston–Gonzalez National Affordable Housing Act (1990) (NAHA) defines colonias as any "identifiable community" determined by objective criteria that include the lack of potable water and adequate sewage systems, the lack of decent, safe, and sanitary housing, and which were in existence before the passage of the Act. According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the term colonias has a specific meaning within the U.S., referring to a community within the rural Mexico–U.S. border region with marginal conditions related to housing and infrastructure. Other definitions and criteria for a colonia are used by the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the Texas Code. History Researchers traced the first colonias in Texas to the 1950s and early 1960s. These appeared as an informal housing solution for low-income predominantly Hispanic wage-earners through a model referred to by scholars as the "incremental approach". Due to the rise of the maquiladora industry—foreign-owned factories in Mexico creating goods for export—the border population quickly grew and in 1965 created a housing shortage for these workers. The overlap of four variables attributed to the development of colonias: high demand from a population of low-income wage earners meeting a low supply of affordable housing, a supply of low-cost and fruitless land, the absence