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LOS ANGELES — It all started with a gut check earlier this year, on the side of Highway 8, which runs right through California’s agricultural Imperial Valley. When journalists write about rural America, I thought to myself, we tend to focus on white, blue-collar voters, on truck-stop diners or on farm owners. Rarely are farmworkers — mostly Latino, Spanish speaking, and often undocumented — at the center of our storytelling.

What might we be missing?

With this in mind, I began to research the lives of farmworkers in California today. It is unfortunately no surprise that the vulnerabilities are vast: high rates of sexual assault endured by campesinas , widespread poverty and dangerous pesticide exposure, to name the most intractable. But something very elemental kept coming up as well, often casually : the struggle many farmworkers face getting enough clean water to drink, cook and bathe at home.

Certainly that couldn’t be right, I thought, not in the wealthiest state in the wealthiest country on earth, and not in 2019. Were there really any such communities without potable water today? If so, why?