Information about SNAP is being carried to colonias.
By Lynn Brezosky
Updated 12:10 a.m., Wednesday, August 22, 2012
San Antonio Express-News


In Hidalgo County, Sonia Garcia, 33 (right), serves lunch to her family in the North San Carlos Colonia. She and her husband have five U.S.-born children and receive $739 in benefits each month.
Photo: Kin Man Hui, San Antonio Express-News / ©2012 San Antonio Express-News


EDINBURG — Linda Medrano and Elida Perez set out each day with clipboards, stacks of brochures, and practiced eyes for spotting chronic yet often treatable ailments.

As promotoras, paid part-time workers tasked with bringing health care basics to the rural poor, their destinations are the colonias of Hidalgo County — unincorporated Texas-Mexico border communities divided into low-cost plots and populated largely by immigrant families.

Of late, the mix of literature that promotoras carry has included applications for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), known here as “estampillas,” Spanish for food stamps. The push, fueled by state and federal grants, mirrors a nationwide initiative to enroll as many eligible Americans as possible in an effort to leverage their buying power.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, every $5 in new SNAP benefits generates $9.20 in community spending.

Raising participation by just 5 percent equates to 1.9 million more people purchasing $1.3 billion worth of food.

Those sales allow retailers from Wal-Mart to mom-and-pop fruit stands to add to a nationwide tally of $2.5 billion in new economic activity, the USDA said, a sum that includes the cash food stamp recipients can divert to nonfood items.

On average, $1 billion in SNAP food spending generates 3,300 farm jobs.

Since 2008, the USDA has raised benefit amounts, streamlined the application process, given the program the friendly “SNAP” name, and focused heavily on outreach, splitting the cost of promotional efforts by the states that administer the program.

A 261-page “toolkit” is stocked full of talking points, sample media campaigns, logos, and radio scripts to not only help get out the word, but also to take the shame out of food assistance.

Key to the message — available in 35 languages — is that SNAP not only provides a means toward adequate nutrition, but it's also economic stimulus.

“It's a major push for everyone involved to get people signed up,” said Omar Rodriguez, spokesman for the Food Bank of the Rio Grande Valley, where outreach includes signup tables at a nearby H-E-B. “It's money that's available, kind of like the way scholarships are available. If you got denied in the past, maybe the situation is different now.”

For Medrano and Perez, it means working food stamp enrollment applications or six-month renewals into door-to-door visits that may also include talks on diabetes and school vaccinations.

They help complete the documents and fax them from their office, saving applicants what in the past may have been an intimidating trip to the nearest welfare office.

“We've been able to enroll a lot more people,” said Marisol Bravo of Migrant Health Promotion, which coordinates the promotoras.

Nationwide, food stamp enrollment is at an all-time high, up 70 percent since 2007, with one in seven Americans swiping benefit cards at a national cost of $81 billion in 2012, more than double the $39 billion federal outlay in 2008.

If soaring costs alone weren't enough to incense some conservative lawmakers, aspects of outreach have been.

“Will the USDA cease handing out awards for recruitment workers that overcome people's ‘mountain pride'?” U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., said in a July 13 statement calling for a top-down review of the program. “Will they stop training workers on ‘overcoming the word no'?”

In Hidalgo County, Sonia Garcia, 33, explained how she and husband, Alberto, paid $200 a month for their lot and have for the last year or so been building their home, bit by bit. There are no blueprints; Alberto has in his years working odd jobs “seen it done.”

Like everyone else at home that day on Zeke Avenue, when the promotoras visited, the Garcias, who are undocumented, are on Lone Star, the debit card for SNAP. They have five U.S.-born children and receive $739 in benefits each month.

Swiping her Lone Star card to buy her children Mexican pastries at La Reynera Bakery Supreme, in one of the fast-growing pockets of rural Edinburg, Jessica Ramos recalled a childhood in which her parents worked hard for little money. Accepting food stamps was difficult, she said.

“My father was in the service for 38 years,” she said. “I don't remember my mother ever walking around with food stamps. It all came back to pride. If she had to go sell jewelry or Avon to buy shoes for back to school, she would.”

Ramos was inquiring about public medical insurance after being laid off from a nearby school district when she first considered accepting assistance, which she now sees as a way to bridge the gap as she sets up a home-based day care.

“They said, ‘Well, you qualify,'” she said.

Asked if many customers paid with Lone Star, bakery owner Sylvia Orduńo said “almost everybody.”

Indeed, several owners of the Valley's smaller grocery stores, bakeries, and meat markets said they couldn't stay in business without accepting Lone Star.

Diana Atilano, the 24-year-old manager of the Mercado Super Store & Meat Market said about half her business comes from food stamps. She said she knows the stamps are crucial to her store's bottom line, but questioned why the benefits can be used for junk food and said some customers pull their Lone Star card from a designer handbag.

Meanwhile, elected officials in Washington will continue to debate the food stamp program as the Sept. 30 expiration of the farm bill quickly approaches.

U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Laredo, a member of the House Agriculture Committee, said what used to be an easy, bipartisan bill to pass now is being held up by debates with those elected under the tea party platform to cut government spending.

“I think food stamps, that type of assistance, should be provided only to people that need them, and that's it. There is a need at that particular time,” Cuellar said. “But we got to think about that; a lot of food that is provided is bought from the ranchers and farmers, they win also.”

One Old Vet

Enrollment effort helping boost buying power of food program - San Antonio Express-News