My commissioned article in The American Historical Review, "From Absence to Abundance: How Las Colonias Made Their Place" (September 2024), integrates colonias into new studies of the U.S. welfare state. I use a South Texas city’s annexation of a nearby colonia during the mid-1970s to explore how border communities have been excluded from the traditional U.S. welfare state. As my essay shows, Texas colonias are often dismissed as pockets of rural scarcity, but they have endured and succeeded, in large part, due the sheer creativity of their residents, who fiercely enacted new political formations and fashioned new vernacular geographies—a practice that can transform the study of the American past as well.