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My colleague based here in Los Angeles, Jose Del Real, has spent months reporting on how small farming communities in the Central Valley lack access to clean drinking water.

Here's his dispatch from Lanare, near Hanford:

Two things immediately struck Eulalia “Lala” Carbajal when she arrived in Lanare, Calif., in 1954, from Coahuila, Mexico.

There was no running water anywhere in the small farm settlement, 20 minutes southwest of Fresno. And almost everyone but her was African-American. Those two facts, she would come to realize, were deeply intertwined.

“When I arrived, there weren’t even any houses or anything. There was a family that lived here, but they lived in just a tent. I suffered,” said Ms. Carbajal, 85. “There was no water, nothing.”