Toolville, California – Toolville is a tiny colonia, or unincorporated and informal settlement of about a hundred families, in the rural San Joaquin Valley, just a couple of miles outside the small town of Exeter. Over recent years, Toolville residents have discovered dangerous concentrations of nitrates in their water supply, which is pumped from the aquifer below the homes. As in many San Joaquin Valley communities, overuse of the water table, especially by giant industrial farms, has led to a growing concentration of fertilizer and other ag chemicals in the water that remains.
Toolville’s residents are all working-class people, many of them farm workers. They can use the water from their taps for washing dishes and clothes, but have to buy bottled water for drinking and cooking.
Eunice Martinez, a leader of the community’s effort to gain safe drinking water, looks warily at a jar of water drawn from the tap. Her mother, Margaret, holds their pet Chihuahua at a table where they keep a case of small bottles of drinking water. Across the street from the Martinez house, Natalie and Paco Rojas play in their yard. The health and development of children especially can be harmed by Toolville’s contaminated water.
In her home by the state highway, Cindy Newton-Enloe, who helped start Toolville’s effort to gain safe drinking water, stores her water in big thermos containers and then boils it for tea on her old-fashioned stove.
Valeria Alvarado is a Mixtec immigrant from Oaxaca, and lives in a trailer with her husband, son and three daughters. Her husband is a limonero, or lemon picker, but work is very slow because of the recession. The family has almost no furniture, and struggles to survive from day to day. Valeria washes her dishes in water from the tap, which is pumped from the ground, but buys her drinking water in five-gallon bottles. She stores them in her empty living room and outside the trailer under the porch.
The hills behind Toolville are the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas (Snowy Mountains), and most of the year they’re covered in dry brown grass. At the base of the foothills runs the Friant-Kern Canal, part of the great California Water Project. Its system of dams extends throughout the San Joaquin Valley, channeling the Sierra Nevada runoff into canals, reducing the valley’s former rivers into often dry watercourses, and lowering the water table. The canals provide water exclusively to growers for irrigation. Although the Friant-Kern Canal behind Toolville could supply the community’s water with hardly a noticeable reduction in its flow, Toolville and water-starved colonias like it can’t get access to a single drop.
As many as half a million people live in California’s 220 unincorporated communities, or colonias. Toolville’s water rights movement got the help of California Rural Legal Assistance’ project for Disadvantaged Unincorporated Communities, supported by PolicyLink.
Text and photos © copyright by David Bacon.
David Bacon is a writer and photographer. His new book, “Illegal People – How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants,” was just published by Beacon Press. His photographs and stories can be found at https://dbacon.igc.org.
Truthout Is Preparing to Meet Trump’s Agenda With Resistance at Every Turn
Dear Truthout Community,
If you feel rage, despondency, confusion and deep fear today, you are not alone. We’re feeling it too. We are heartsick. Facing down Trump’s fascist agenda, we are desperately worried about the most vulnerable people among us, including our loved ones and everyone in the Truthout community, and our minds are racing a million miles a minute to try to map out all that needs to be done.
We must give ourselves space to grieve and feel our fear, feel our rage, and keep in the forefront of our mind the stark truth that millions of real human lives are on the line. And simultaneously, we’ve got to get to work, take stock of our resources, and prepare to throw ourselves full force into the movement.
Journalism is a linchpin of that movement. Even as we are reeling, we’re summoning up all the energy we can to face down what’s coming, because we know that one of the sharpest weapons against fascism is publishing the truth.
There are many terrifying planks to the Trump agenda, and we plan to devote ourselves to reporting thoroughly on each one and, crucially, covering the movements resisting them. We also recognize that Trump is a dire threat to journalism itself, and that we must take this seriously from the outset.
After the election, the four of us sat down to have some hard but necessary conversations about Truthout under a Trump presidency. How would we defend our publication from an avalanche of far right lawsuits that seek to bankrupt us? How would we keep our reporters safe if they need to cover outbreaks of political violence, or if they are targeted by authorities? How will we urgently produce the practical analysis, tools and movement coverage that you need right now — breaking through our normal routines to meet a terrifying moment in ways that best serve you?
It will be a tough, scary four years to produce social justice-driven journalism. We need to deliver news, strategy, liberatory ideas, tools and movement-sparking solutions with a force that we never have had to before. And at the same time, we desperately need to protect our ability to do so.
We know this is such a painful moment and donations may understandably be the last thing on your mind. But we must ask for your support, which is needed in a new and urgent way.
We promise we will kick into an even higher gear to give you truthful news that cuts against the disinformation and vitriol and hate and violence. We promise to publish analyses that will serve the needs of the movements we all rely on to survive the next four years, and even build for the future. We promise to be responsive, to recognize you as members of our community with a vital stake and voice in this work.
Please dig deep if you can, but a donation of any amount will be a truly meaningful and tangible action in this cataclysmic historical moment.
We’re with you. Let’s do all we can to move forward together.
With love, rage, and solidarity,
Maya, Negin, Saima, and Ziggy