Dreams on Hold
How a SNAP Delay Ripples Through One South Texas Household
Josie Del Castillo is a figurative painter whose work reflects the multilayered experiences of growing up Mexican American in the border city of Brownsville, Texas. Her paintings draw deeply from the everyday realities of life along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Her work has been shown in Los Angeles and New York, and she was a finalist in the AXA Art Prize 2019 Exhibition at the New York Academy of Art’s Wilkinson Gallery. Her solo exhibitions have been featured in the “Top Five” show lists on Glasstire, a leading authority on contemporary art in Texas.
Del Castillo, who told The American Scholar in 2023 that she “never really saw a difference between the two countries” until she was older, grew up in the duality of a binational and bilingual culture. But that’s not the only dichotomy she inhabits. Despite her success as a painter, her tireless work in the local art community, and her part-time job as a lecturer at the University of Texas–Rio Grande Valley, Del Castillo says she takes home $1,100 a month.
“You need to have a very strong exhibition history, do community outreach and development, produce your artwork, and have years of experience,” Del Castillo said about how she invests her time in an effort to eventually land her dream job as a full-time tenured art professor.
“It’s not just the time you spend in class,” Del Castillo said. “You spend time with students to get their shows ready and make preparations. I also model for some of the drawing classes when I can. I came in at 10:00 a.m. today, and I’m still here at 6:00 p.m.”
Del Castillo makes her budget work by living at home, paying her family a modest rent and closely watching her spending. She also relies on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, to make ends meet as a single mother while pursuing her career goals.
“I believe in and have a lot of passion for this region and the arts in the valley,” Del Castillo said. “This is my home and where I want to invent my future and my career, so I’m dedicating my income and my time right now.”
Del Castillo’s experience using assistance programs to rise above the economic conditions of previous generations speaks to the reality of many people in the Rio Grande Valley.
“A lot of people here that don’t have full-time jobs, they have to have a part-time job, or they get a side job,” Del Castillo said. “The full-time job I want is difficult to get. You have to compete with talented people from all over the country for those positions.”
The Harvard University project Opportunity Insights tracks the average adult economic outcomes of children by the neighborhood where they grew up. Its analysis found that for households in the lower three-quarters of the income distribution in Cameron County, where Del Castillo lives, inflation-adjusted income rose only 4.2 percent from the generation born in 1978 to those born in 1992.
The numbers show a razor-thin margin of social mobility, or the ability of individuals to improve their economic and social position. Del Castillo said assistance programs like SNAP have made it possible for her to pursue financial stability and achieve a better quality of life.
Nationally, 70 percent of SNAP recipients are children, elderly, or disabled. Of the other 30 percent, more than half are working, earning a monthly income of $1,059 on average.
But in November payments to SNAP have been delayed by a government shutdown that began over a disagreement on health care benefits in the Senate. On Monday, a federal court ruled that, unlike programs that rely on appropriations, entitlement programs like SNAP and Medicare must be funded even during a government shutdown. The Trump administration responded in a filing that it would not use resources outside the SNAP emergency funds it had been holding on to.
Those emergency funds will cover only about half the benefits that should be sent out in November, and delays of weeks or months are expected. Many families in Texas who receive benefits at the beginning of the month are already missing benefit payments.
Del Castillo began tightening her food budget last week, skipping more expensive cuts of meat and being more flexible about what she selects for her daughter and herself. “I got my last payment at the end of October, so I don’t know how long the next one will take or if it’s coming,” Del Castillo said. “Normally you try to get the best you can. Brands don’t matter, but you usually try to get the best quality you can, the meat with less fat.”
The administration sent out a notice this week to grocery stores informing them that they were not allowed to offer discounts to anyone based on their membership in SNAP.
Any lapse in food assistance would hit the Rio Grande Valley especially hard, with child food insecurity rates topping 31 percent in counties like Starr, according to data from Feeding America, a nationwide network of food banks. In September more than 140,000 households across the region’s four counties were enrolled in the program, Texas Health and Human Services confirmed.
While Texas HHS does not disclose how many of those approved actually received or used funds in a given period, about 330,000 people make up the households approved for SNAP in the Rio Grande Valley.
Research shows that social assistance programs not only improve social mobility during adult life but also have long-lasting benefits beginning in early childhood in low-income communities.
Even just a few thousand dollars of help a year during childhood can have a measurable impact, said Heather Hahn, associate vice president for the Urban Institute Center on Labor, Human Services, and Population, a nonpartisan policy research organization based in Washington, D.C., last year on a UIC podcast. Urban’s research shows that future earnings for these children are higher, and they are less likely to need assistance as adults, representing a multigenerational benefit to programs like SNAP.
But Hahn said that the impact they’ve measured goes beyond economic effects as well. “Compared with growing up in poverty, when children have financial security and they have their basic needs met, they have enhanced brain development,” Hahn said. “They have better educational outcomes and skills, and better health.”
Del Castillo said she first signed up for SNAP when she became pregnant in 2022, hoping to offer her daughter those benefits while she continued to work.
“I want her to have her carne, her pollo, her tortillas, her fruits and vegetables,” Del Castillo said. “Instead of just eating Maruchan and going cheap, because I’ve lived like that and grew up like that. I can’t imagine her eating cereal all day. Especially when they’re little, they need their nutrition.”
The decision by the current administration to not fund SNAP is but one example of the vile nature of the so-called MAGA movement. A complete lack of care, mercy and love for our fellow human beings. This injustice will not be forgotten even after they are forced to do their job. This young lady's experience is just one of millions across the country. But each of the people impacted deserves better.
As a SNAP recipient today I relate… but more importantly I love that painting she poses with. Wow. Through the decades of raising my daughters as a single mom sans child support, I always fell just above the line. Too poor to flourish but too rich to qualify for assistance. We lived in apartment complexes and were lucky to have sympathetic neighbors. My kids were latchkey kids, like many others. Every now and then I’d come home from work and learn that someone had left a couple of bags of groceries for the kids.