The reporting and photography for this story were supported by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/the-color-of-water-colonias/

https://economichardship.org/2022/04/the-color-of-water/

Scattered across California’s San Joaquin Valley are colonias, the unincorporated communities home to some of the Valley’s poorest residents in one of the richest agricultural areas in the world. These communities are overwhelmingly the product of racism and housing discrimination. The history of racial exclusion that led to their existence, however, is not buried safely in the past. Every time a resident turns on a tap to get a drink of water, the contamination of that water, and sometimes the fact that no water comes at all, is a living legacy of exclusion.

Yet these communities are not passive victims of past discrimination. Their organized efforts to win redress in the form of water, sewer service, and even street lighting have forced the state’s politicians to listen up. The resulting legislation may have arrived three quarters of a century after the original exclusion and its consequences, but the colonias are nonetheless celebrating a victory in their long effort to address inequality.

Water access is a critical question in California. Former Governor Jerry Brown declared an official drought in 2014. The state today is even drier, and the declaration is still in force. Teviston, a tiny community established by African Americans in the 1940s, went completely without water for a month last summer when its only well stopped working. Last year, the water table below Teviston dropped 48.9 feet. In Tombstone Territory near Sanger, three wells went dry.

Summer heat in the valley, always fierce, rises to over 115 degrees. Without water, crops would die and workers without work would go hungry. So in California, water access obeys a hierarchy of power that prioritizes agriculture. Growers get the most, annually irrigating 9 million acres with 30 million acre feet of water, or 77 percent of all water directly used by people. Residential and business use comes next, with 8.5 million acre feet consumed mostly in the state’s big cities. Since the 1950s taxpayers have built huge dam and canal systems to service those needs, including the Trinity River Project, the Central Valley Project, the State Water Project, the Colorado River Aqueduct, among others.

The colonias hardly count in this calculation. Until recently, their only water came from whatever shallow wells their impoverished residents could afford to dig. Some of these communities are dependent on wells that are now running dry. Tooleville, for instance, only gets water from its two shallow wells for a few hours in the summer. It sits next to the huge Friant-Kern irrigation canal that funnels water to growers, and can’t touch a drop. Ironically, growers have pumped so much water from the surrounding soil that the canal itself has sunk, cutting its delivery capacity considerably. In parts of the Valley the land itself is slowly collapsing.

The water crisis in these communities reflects a legacy of inequality established when African American people undertook their great migration from the South after World War II. As they sought places to live, they were confronted with exclusionary pacts, formal and informal, in the urban areas of the San Joaquin Valley.

Documentation by Fresno County assessor/recorder Paul Dictos revealed original land deeds that contained patently exclusionary restrictions. “I searched the archives and identified thousands of racially restrictive covenants that acted as the mechanism that enabled the people in authority to maintain residential segregation,” he says. African Americans arriving from Arkansas settled in Lanare, for instance, because they could not rent or buy homes in Riverdale, two miles up Mt. Whitney Highway. One covenant recorded for a Riverdale development stated “Neither said real property nor any part thereof, nor any lot nor part thereof, shall be used or occupied in any manner whatsoever by any Negro, Chinese, Japanese, Hindu, Malayan, Asiatic or any descendant.”

That covenant was later voided, and the California legislature passed the Byron Rumford Fair Housing Act in 1963, which outlawed racial covenants and housing discrimination. By then the damage was done, however, since people were not only excluded from Riverdale and other urban areas, but forced to build or rent homes in the colonias in their periphery. Counties and nearby cities provided no services, including no water mains, sewer lines, or lighting, and for decades no paved streets. “Being excluded isn’t just about where you can’t live, but where you can,” Dictos says.

Wardell Young’s parents came from Arkansas in the early 1950s. “They worked in the cotton, and I was born in Lanare in 1955,” he remembers. “They couldn’t live in Riverdale. They’d hang you there and no one would even know.” Sam White’s parents brought him from Arkansas in 1952. At first there were no wells at all, and through the 1960s residents brought water home in buckets and milk cans.

Riverdale’s deep wells brought up clean water, but the water under Lanare contains arsenic, which occurs naturally in the San Joaquin Valley’s arid, alkaline soil. When Lanare residents dug wells, White says, county authorities minimized the danger. “We’d complain and the county would tell us to boil the water,” he charges. “But you can’t boil arsenic from the water. They say this cuts your lifespan down by two years, and in small doses it can cause Alzheimer’s and rashes. My mother had all that.”

Matheny Tract, just outside the Tulare city limits, also had toxic levels of arsenic in its water for decades. The community was originally a set of ramshackle houses rented by the local rancher to his workers. At a time when Tulare wouldn’t let African Americans buy homes, Edwin Matheny sold them, first to his workers, and then to other Black families.

“My dad came from Arkansas, and found there was work out here,” recalls Vance McKinney. He was 2 when his father went back, and the family stole away at night. “He was a sharecropper, and probably owed money and was afraid of what might happen if the landowner knew he was leaving. When we got here we lived in a shack. You could climb under the floorboards and go into the house that way.”

Living in the city of Tulare was not possible. “My mom said that the city refused to allow them to have any kind of property. The city was fighting them at every turn. You’d try to buy a house, but you had to have papers to prove where you were born, that it was legal for you to be here. But when you left Arkansas you didn’t bring those documents with you because you didn’t know what was going to happen.. It was just like today with the Mexicans.”

Matheny Tract had no running water or sewers for the homes on dirt streets. “We didn’t have those services,” McKinney says, “because we were African American. The county was fighting Mr. Matheny for selling us property.”

Matheny Tract was also segregated. A dry ditch still divides the tiny community. Blacks lived on one side and whites lived on the other. Both were former sharecroppers, and in California both became farmworkers. But as the cotton crop became mechanized, white workers were the first to get jobs driving the picking machines, while Black workers still dragged the heavy bags behind them down the rows. Even the kids worked.

Black kids couldn’t walk to the store through the white neighborhood. Their parents, who’d fled lynching and terror in Arkansas, taught their children not to walk alone. “White kids would beat up Black kids,” McKinney remembers. “It wasn’t just the kids. It was the parents too. If you walked across the ditch they’d shout, ‘Little n—-r, what you doing over this side? You know you not supposed to be here.'”

But once Black people owned homes they began organizing, first to get running water. “Now they had a voice,” he explains. “The Blacks got people together in the church here and started a committee. That’s how Pratt Mutual Water Company came into being. Because you can’t speak if you’ve got nothing.”

Four decades ago Tulare County’s General Plan stated colonias like Matheny Tract had “little or no authentic future.” After the Matheny Tract Committee organized to pressure the state, helped by California Rural Legal Assistance, the state Water Resources Control Board issued an order for the voluntary consolidation of Tulare’s and Matheny’s water systems. When the city still dragged its feet, the state issued a mandatory order and on May 31, 2016, community activist Reinalda Palma turned the tap and city water began flowing through Matheny water pipes. “It’s been seven years of fighting,” she told the Visalia Times Delta. It was the first time the state had exercised this power.

Still, the city refused to connect its sewer system as well. When it rains, the septic tanks in many homes can’t absorb the water, and sewage bubbles up in their yards. That’s particularly bitter, since Tulare’s water treatment plant is right next to Matheny Tract. “When we complained about the stink, the city said they were using the waste to irrigate nearby pistachio orchards,” according to Javier Medina, a member of the Matheny committee.

Today most of the residents of Matheny Tract are Mexican farmworkers. “There’s a lot of discrimination against Mexicans,” Palma says. “They’ve inherited the problems imposed on Black people,” McKinney adds.

Lanare has had much less success, however, in getting Riverdale to extend its water and sewer lines to the colonia. Instead, people pooled their resources, dug wells, and built a water treatment facility to remove the arsenic contamination. Once built, however, it only ran for a few months. Nearly 40% of Lanare’s residents live below the poverty line, with half the men making less than $22,000 per year, and half the women less than $16,000. According to Veronica Garibay, co-director of the Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability, “It cost 3.7 million, and running it would have meant people paying bills of more than $120 a month. No one in Lanare can do that. So the plant became a symbol, a reminder of what could have been.”

Isabel Solorio, Angel Hernandez, Juventino Gonzalez, and others organized to put pressure on the state to provide some help, especially since then-Governor Jerry Brown had signed AB 685 in 2012. The bill states that California recognizes that access to drinking water is a human right. Under pressure, the state drilled two new wells, installed new pipes and meters, and supplied free bottled water during the construction.

After a year, the water was declared free of arsenic, but it’s still smells and leaves a residue on sinks and toilets. Residents won’t drink it, and since the state stopped providing free bottled water, they’re now paying $50-70 a month for drinking water. The local water company went into receivership, leaving people on the hook for a system providing water they can’t drink. “Really, the only solution is a connection to Riverdale, but Riverdale won’t agree,” Solorio says. “The ranchers have pumped the aquifer out. The water table went down to 300 feet in August.”

While fighting for the water, Lanare Community United faced the onset of the pandemic, and hunger and thirst among residents isolated in their homes. “A hundred people got the virus here and three died,” Solorio says. “So we set up the first testing station. We were the first community to begin vaccinations. We got food from the local food bank and the Leadership Counsel, and we fed the people.”

Tooleville is yet another community where the water level in the aquifer, and in the community’s two wells, is dropping because of over pumping by growers. Farmers on either side of the community have sunk 400-foot wells, while Tooleville’s only go down 200 feet. One has already gone dry. According to Jose Luz Mendoza, a board member of the Tooleville Mutual Nonprofit Water Association, in the summer no water comes from the tap at all when growers irrigate during the day. Tooleville’s farmworkers, some of whom pick oranges and grapes for the same growers, have to wait until evening to wash off the grime from work.

In 2001 residents of this unincorporated community began asking the nearby city of Exeter to extend its water lines to provide service. Exeter refused. Unlike many towns of its size in the Valley, Exeter has a predominantly white population, while almost all of Tooleville’s residents are Mexican. According to Blanca Escobedo, former organizer for the leadership council, “In one meeting the mayor said consolidation was a waste of money and he wished Santa Claus was real.” When Tooleville residents attended a meeting in 2019, she says councilmembers asked to be escorted to their cars by security. When the community invited the Exeter mayor and council to tour the colonia, they wouldn’t talk with residents. “They see us as a community of poor Mexicans,” Mendoza says. “It’s a form of racism.”

Faced with this history of exclusion, and the intransigence of cities to redress its human cost, unincorporated communities in the San Joaquin Valley began organizing a decade ago. Staff with California Rural Legal Assistance helped organize committees in many colonias, and later independently formed the Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability. The Community Water Center, based in Visalia, set up the Association of People United for Water (AGUA). Their common goal was to move beyond the declarations that water is a human right to implementing it on the ground. They demanded legislation to force cities and counties to provide the water, sewer connections, and other services they’d historically been denied.

In April of 2017 Solorio’s and Lanare’s water activists began meeting every few weeks at 4 a.m. in front of the dilapidated community center. They’d pack into a car and head down Mt. Whitney highway to Fresno. In front of Garibay’s office they boarded buses with others who’d driven up from Matheny Tract, Okieville, Tooleville, Poplar, and other excluded communities. Up Route 99, they headed to the state capitol.

In Sacramento, they rallied outside the ornate capitol building, and then marched inside to testify in hearing after hearing. Water warriors walked the halls of the legislature, demanding meetings with Assembly and Senate members. They found an ally in Bill Monning, a former lawyer for the United Farm Workers and California Rural Legal Assistance who was elected to the legislature in 2008, and became Senate majority leader in 2014. “Year after year these caravans came to Sacramento and demonstrated in front of the capitol in the scorching heat,” he recalls. “It was a force that could no longer be ignored.”

“Bill Monning and [State Senator] Ana Caballero always came out to talk with us,” Solorio says. “But I saw that on each floor of the capitol building there was a five gallon bottle of water, and that the legislators don’t drink from the tap. They’d tell us that tap water was good, but then they’d drink the filtered water.”

In 2019 they finally won what they’d come for: a law that gave them a weapon to overcome the most serious problem a rural California community can have — no water in the years of the drought. “They made it impossible for the legislature and the Governor to avoid them,” Garibay says. SB 200 provides $1.3 billion over ten years to provide safe, affordable drinking water, prioritizing communities with contaminated or insufficient water, by subsidizing improvements to community water systems or the cost of connections to nearby urban areas. The bill’s first versions would have put a small surcharge on water rates to foot the cost, but a ratepayer backlash led to a different funding solution. The bill now uses money collected from polluters in California’s cap-and-trade abatement system to fund what was presented as water cleanup.

According to Monning, about a million Californians in 130 communities don’t have access to clean, safe drinking water. The vast majority are in rural areas, most populated by farmworker families. “In the farmworkers union I’d drive around and find these pockets of workers,” he remembers. “You didn’t need to be a social scientist to realize the inequality between urban areas and these colonias. The difference was clearly racial. The elite suburbs populated by professionals and white people had good water systems. The farmworker communities didn’t have drinking water.”

Monning retired after SB 200 was passed, but activists saw they needed still more legislation, to force cities like Exeter to agree to consolidation, who refused even when the costs are subsidized. “The most cost effective solution is consolidation, but there’s no will to make the connection,” Garibay says. “That’s true across the board between unincorporated communities and the larger towns near them.” SB 403, authored by Long Beach State Senator Lena Gonzalez, says that the State Water Resources Control Board doesn’t have to wait until a small water system completely fails to mandate consolidation with a larger one. It can proactively respond to a community in danger and order the larger community to comply.

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The caravans and the debate they prompted strengthened the effort to come to grips with the history of housing racism. Three legislators, Kevin McCarty, Rob Bonta, and David Chiu, wrote AB 1466, which “require[s] the county recorder of each county to establish a restrictive covenant program to assist in the redaction of unlawfully restrictive covenants.” Paul Dictos was already doing this in Fresno, and the rest of the state’s recorders will now have until July to set their program up.

The combination of bills is a start in addressing historic racism, Monning believes. “One reason for taking care of the water and sewage problems of unincorporated communities is to redress the racism that was at the bottom of the reason why they exist to begin with,” he says. “The racist implementation of property laws put at risk disenfranchised communities and has been the cause of cancers, birth defects and other environmentally caused illnesses-it’s not theoretical.”

Garibay says the Leadership Council plans to introduce more legislation to address the historical inequities due to racism. “There’s a racial impact from overpumping, for instance. The ground water resource plans filed by the counties fail to protect unincorporated communities. Our idea is a bill that can send a message to growers. You can’t continue business as usual. This is our response to the harsh reality of the history of the valley.”

Her proposal highlights the fact that addressing inequality created over decades is taking place in a context of climate change. The amount of water for human use in California is shrinking. Combating the causes of climate change is equally controversial in the San Joaquin Valley, which for a century has been a center of oil production, and more recently, of fracking. Proliferating dairies make their own contribution to methane in the atmosphere as well.

But as deep is the question of priorities. The water hierarchy’s distribution percentages continue to place small communities at the bottom, and even consolidation brings them into larger urban systems with their own problems of rising contamination and falling water tables. At the same time, the largest crop in California is almonds, whose 1.33 million acres use 3 to 4 million acre feet of water a year.

Is regulating what crops growers can grow a necessary element in coming to terms with racism in the Valley? “How do you build equity in a capitalist system into sound land use planning?” Monning asks. “Planning the strategic use of limited resources and minimizing the use of chemicals makes perfect sense, but the blowback on any such proposal would be phenomenal. They’d say the free enterprise system itself is being threatened.”

In the meantime, Lanare, Tombstone Territory, and Tooleville are still awaiting water from the tap that people can drink. “Putting in sewers, streetlights, sidewalks would also be a great step in getting rid of racism,” McKinney thinks.