The Spanish word "colonia" means a 'colony' or 'community'. In Mexican Spanish, it is specifically a 'residential quarter 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.