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Welcome to Horizonte, a weekly series where we take a look at important issues through a Hispanic lens.

I'm your host, Catherine.

Aniya.

The Rancho Feliz Charitable Foundation has a proven record of building housing and expanding access to education in Agua Prieta, Mexico, just across the Arizona border.

The Phoenix based foundation started its work back in 1987, when founder Gil Gil and Water and his brother Troy got lost.

They ended up in Agua Prieta and discovered a community in need.

Joining me now is the founder of Rancho Feliz, Gil Gil and Water.

Nice to have you here.

Gil, it's great to be here.

Katherine.

Thank you.

Thank you.

So you end up lost with your brother and Agua Prieto.

But I should say which borders Douglas, Arizona.

Right.

What exactly were you both trying to do?

Well, it was.

It's interesting because we had just come off this incredible river trip a month long.

We rafted the entire green River.

It's like, you know, Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, and we're sitting down for Thanksgiving dinner, and we just going, you know, this doesn't feel right because we knew a mere four hour drive.

There were people without the basic needs of the human condition.

So that's when we decided to get a couple thousand dollars worth of staple goods, drive down to Nogales, distribute them.

We were going to Nogales.

My brother's a funny guy.

We missed the turn and ended up in Alwar Prieta.

I'd never heard of it.

Dirty water.

Population over 100,000 people.

Describe to me what you saw and how that maybe changed any preconceived notions or assumptions you may have had about what life is like along the border?

Well, I'm not sure.

I knew Mexico and I knew there was poverty.

But to me, once you take a step across, like even today, this is why we take these volunteers down.

And once they step across, they go from $18 an hour, $16 an hour minimum wage, an hour to $14 a day.

How do you raise a family on $14 a day?

How do you survive?

Well, it's tough, and it's that wealth and equity that just kind of slap me in the face.

I'm going, this just you.

It's fouled to your basic sense of social justice.

It's wrong.

It's just wrong.

And the interesting thing is we can do something about it.

So tell me how you went from.

Okay, we can do something about this.

Rancho Felice and actually doing something about it.

Well, it's interesting to me because people, when they see Rancho Felice say automat.

Oh, that's the charity that helps Mexicans.

Well, no, my contention is no, that's the charity that helps Americans by creating a venue where they can be them better, their better selves in serving the less fortunate.

So that's what happened.

Over time, I noticed our crowds were getting bigger and bigger.

And I'm thinking, wait a minute, this is a two way street.

We're feeding their stomachs, but they're feeding our souls.

Talk to me a little bit about the work that you do with the foundation because it's volunteer driven, correct?

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

And it's it's the basic necessities, the human condition.

How about access to education?

These people, they.

You talk about a glass ceiling.

You born in the boroughs of Iowa and see how far you get.

But when we provide education, it's phenomenal.

One of our young men, born in a dirt shore shack is now floored.

Shack is now working for Rolls Royce out of Berlin.

I mean, you educate a child and you have completely open their lives, their children's lives.

It's a geometric progression.

How about housing?

How about having a place where you can live, where you don't have to go out in a ditch to go to the bathroom?

This is going on four hours from here.

And so we do we, we provide housing, we provide education.

Food.

We've distributed over 3 million meals.

That's a, that's, that makes a difference.

It really does.

We've had over 28,000 American volunteers cross the border, stay in our facility and feed their souls by helping the less fortunate.

You have described, the charity as, quote, renegade charity and not about charitable handouts, but about reciprocal giving.

Can you tell me how that reciprocal giving works?

How that that idea works?

Can I tell you a quick story?

Sure.

I was down in the barranca to Cobra in Copper Canyon, Chihuahua, Mexico, when we would sponsor races for the Tarahumara Indians down there and I befriended.

They run 100 miles in these sandals.

I befriended one, a guy named Philippe and bought him a knife up here in Phoenix.

I was so excited to give it to him.

I got down in there in the bottom of the canyon.

I found him.

Lovely people.

Look what I have for you.

And.

Oh, he looked at the knife and he opened the blades and I went to do something.

I came back and the knife was on the log he was sitting on, but he was gone.

I go Felipe forgot his knife, so I grabbed it and went running.

After I said, Philippe, you forgot your knife.

And then older Tarahumara grunt named Gregorio tested.

Oh, Mr.

Gil, in our culture, you did a very bad thing.

Did a bad thing.

I gave the guy a gift, and he says yes, but you didn't tell him you were going to give him the gift, and he had nothing to give you back.

And that's when I understood that welfare is misguided.

Compassion.

Welfare doesn't work.

Every one of our programs there has to be reciprocity.

So I create a way for him to give back because here I am.

Oh I'm the benevolent gringo.

And look at you.

You're the lowly receiver.

It's that uneven exchange of energy that is detrimental to the human dignity.

Before I get into some of the work you have seen as a result, have you been criticized in that respect about.

Oh, you know, this is the Great White Hope, right?

Yes.

And how do you respond to that?

Well, just by our conversation we're having right now, even our food distributions, we used to go out, we feed, you know, 4000 people at a time and they're waiting and they're, you know, they've got that shuffling.

And then they come up and they get, oh, thank you.

And they get their bag of food on the hours you have to pick up.

Even if you're 85 years old, you can pick up a plastic bag, discarded plastic bags.

You have to pick up a minimum of 25 discarded plastic bags to receive a bag of food.

They earned that food.

Instead of this, they're stranding people see it.

They can see the difference.

Because we have not stolen their dignity.

We have allowed them to contribute to the charitable transaction.

And it puts Gill Gill on water, the giver and then the receiver on an unequal plane, which we are.

We're all human beings.

You know the difference between me and those people down, their luck?

I was born in the United States of America.

They weren't.

That's the only difference.

Give me an example of some of the life changing work that you have seen as a result of this reciprocal, giving.

Okay.

What what what kind of life changing, work or whether it be by the, by the volunteers or, you know, by the families who are receiving.

Right, a new home.

Yes.

You know, tell me about how that looks and how that feels for you.

It feels like me and you sitting here.

It's not again.

It's not.

I'm the giver.

You're the receiver on our housing program.

So they get a house?

Yes, but we put a performance loan on it.

No interest.

We're not going to make money off of poor people, but they have to make payments for five years towards their home.

It's not a big payment, but they're contributing if they're children's child has a scholarship, they have to contribute to that scholarship and the child has to donate one weekend a month to help with community projects to maintain his scholarship.

Nothing is free.

Jim Armstrong runs our educational program.

It is.

If I had to pick one program that makes a difference.

It's just education.

When you say they have to, support that scholarship, how does that work?

Well, if you're if you're, in high school, a freshman in high school, and you're getting a receiving a scholarship there, we call them the mercados.

They're the scholarship receivers.

They've got their own t shirts.

And one weekend a month they go out and do community service.

They volunteer, they earn their scholarship.

And what is probably the biggest, I would say highlight or, success story in your mind because you've been doing this for 40 years, 40 years and so.

Well.

And I mention this guy here, there's a guy down there named Reyes, Augusta and his wife Marie, and they came to our to to jump the line to get a better life.

But then he saw an ad for our vecinos neighborhood.

We created a master planned community of 42 homes.

And if you qualified, then your child was automatically, eligible for a private scholarship.

He had three children that equal $7,200 a year in tuition.

That was more than the man made right now.

His one son and his son works for Rolls Royce.

As I mentioned, his daughter is, a doctor in an hour and his other daughter is an attorney.

And so this is a family that came from a dirt floored shack.

And Kabaka hoping to jump in the United States.

And it outlines our basic philosophy, provide people the opportunity now welfare, to live with dignity in their own country.

And they don't want to illegally immigrate.

They don't want to leave their food, their families, their tradition.

They don't.

But they can't survive on $14 a day.

So we provide opportunity, not welfare, for them to live with dignity.

Does Mexico support your efforts?

No.

This is all strictly from your volunteers.

Yep.

And of course, charitable donations.

We got a dirt road in front of the facility.

I begged the city of our prayer.

Please pave this road.

The dust is bothering our our our students and our volunteers and they won't.

They won't even paved the damn road.

So I wish, I wish that wasn't my response.

But I got to be honest with you that that's the way it is.

I don't know if they're jealous.

I don't know if because we're doing what they should be doing.

I don't know what it is.

You know, our ultimate goal with Rancho Felice is to put ourselves out of business.

Of course.

Yeah, because you're helping more people.

Absolutely.

Let's talk about your book for a minute.

Hope on the border, you write about what it means to live and work along, the 2000 mile quarter.

You don't believe in open borders, but you are not anti-immigrant.

So what do you think is misunderstood most about, what's actually happening on the ground?

Well, this black or white open wall or no wall, blah, blah, blah.

I mean, it's not a black and white situation.

We have to recognize that we need immigrants.

I think we in the United States go, go and discuss where I live, go to dinner.

It's an extra half hour wait because they can't get help.

We're aging out.

Our average population, our age is 40.

Mexico.

It's 30.

They've got this younger generation, but they can't come in Unvetted between 2021 and 2023, 13 million people wandered into our country.

We didn't know who they were.

We had no background on them.

It costs $600 billion to transport them to, New York, Chicago and all that.

Now then, this is the this is the horror with our our situation now we're saying, oh, we changed our mind.

You got to go back.

It's going to cost $1 trillion to move them back out of here.

Instead of looking after our own political interests, why don't we make our policy decisions based on what's good for the human being?

These are human beings.

Exactly.

Is this part of the reason why you wrote the book?

Because it is.

Has been 40 years since you've been doing this work.

Why now?

Well, I've accumulated, we've made a lot of mistakes.

As you can imagine.

It's not a simple deal.

You try and build something in Mexico with the fluctuating peso and all the the various, problems with acquiring material goods and and labor and things like that.

It's not an easy process.

So we've learned a lot over 40 years.

We know how to structure our programs now.

So they work.

And that's the bottom line to this.

So I thought that I would like to write that.

I'd love to see what we've done replicated.

You could replicate our program anywhere on this 2000 mile border.

I want to refer people to your website, Rancho felice.com.

If anybody's interested in finding out more how you can support the organization, volunteer.

Your book is also sold wherever books are sold and on Amazon and on Amazon.

As you told me earlier, you can get it the next day.

That's right, that's right.

But I appreciate you sharing.

You know, what you've been able to accomplish in the last 40 years?

Well, Catherine, I'm passionate about this.

We're all in this together.

None of us really know why we got to help each other and what you've given us.

Or me a format here the last 15 minutes to to tell the story that what we're doing down there.

And hopefully other people will come join us, because I'll tell you what.

You feel like a million bucks.

You you really do.

I appreciate your passion.

Thank you for sharing it.

Thank you.

Good to meet you and good to see you.

Hope to see you down there.

Thank you.

And that's our show for now.

Thanks so much for watching for what is on that Arizona PBS.

I'm Catherine and I will see you next time.

Bye.

Hey, way back that way.

Better.