Amid Water Conflict in the Cuyama Valley, Art Is Responding
- Mavis Holley
- Dec 26, 2025
- 11 min read
On a warm desert evening in the high desert community of Cuyama, a small group of people congregate at the entrance of a residential neighborhood. As the gathering moves through the area, they sing original songs and chants. Along the way, the group stops at friends’ and neighbors’ doors, inviting them to join in on the festivities. The community is small, but the excitement is high as the group moves through the area.
The celebration draws inspiration from a Puerto Rican parranda, an impromptu musical celebration that brings friends and family together for a good time and incorporates cultural traditions. A group of dust devils, inspired by vejigantes—folkloric demon creatures—weave between the crowd. The neighbors, adorned in cardboard crowns and brandishing repurposed cat litter box water jugs, continued onward until they reached an outcropping, where a play, featuring a conflict between 12-foot cardboard characters, was about to begin. The fictitious dispute represents the most politically contentious issue the small community of Cuyama is facing: water.
Cuyama Valley lies between the mountains of La Panza and Caliente to the north and Sierra Madre to the south, and spans across several Southern California counties. It is home to an unincorporated community of 1,100 people who are spread between three townsites: Cuyama, New Cuyama, and Ventucopa.
Currently, Cuyama Valley residents are mired in an ongoing legal battle over water rights as corporate entities Grimmway Farms and Bolthouse Farms deplete their primary water source, the critically overdrafted Cuyama Groundwater Basin, one of twenty-one statewide. The basin is essential for drinking water and agricultural use.
To address the water disparity in Cuyama, artists from across the country are exploring the issue through this year’s Cuyama Water Justice Fellowship. The fellowship intends to unite the community through art and focus on residents’ connection to their water supply. It is being facilitated by local nonprofit organizations Blue Sky Center and Quail Springs as part of their larger project, “Building the Cuyama Valley Coalition of Water Stewards.”
The recent parranda celebration and play were organized by playwrights Ashley Hanson and Alex Barreto Hathaway, who are no strangers to using creativity as a form of community engagement. The duo is a part of PlaceBase Productions, a theater company that collaborates with rural populations to tell their local histories through musical productions.
The festivities served as a medium to understand the contention behind groundwater usage and offered residents an outlet to express their anxieties and celebrate the vital resource. “Art can bring issues to life in a fun and playful way that gets people excited to be involved and see themselves as a part of the conversation,” Hanson said.
The group came to a standstill upon reaching the site of a play, following a River Saint, a character who thwarts the plans of a divisive character, The Thirsty Monster. When the group reached the destination of the play, they sang “Dust to water, water to dust, it is up to us”—the song called for a collective effort to revitalize the basin’s water supply.
“Sometimes these issues are so daunting, we don’t know what action to take. We don’t see ourselves as part of it,” said Barreto Hathaway. Having an artistic avenue to contribute to the fight for equitable water rights creates momentum for change, he added.
Mayela Rodriguez, Blue Sky Center’s arts program manager, said that the nonprofit aims to gain a deeper understanding of how water scarcity impacts the day-to-day lives of the local community. To ensure that residents are represented in the art projects, a community review panel selects each artist fellow for the program on the premise that they will meaningfully represent the people living in the area.
“It’s done a lot to engage people in meaningful ways, capturing their stories and empowering them to share their perspectives,” Rodriguez said.
Barreto Hathaway and Hanson’s approach to the fellowship is centered on creating joy and emphasizing the appreciation Cuyamans have for their water supply while acknowledging the efforts of small farmers and community members to protect their groundwater supply from total depletion.
“We framed it as a celebration of water and water stewards. So we talked about memories people have with water and the power of water,” Hanson said.
The contention between the water-themed characters is representative of political and social tensions in the community, stemming from an ongoing legal battle over water rights in the valley. Inspiring compassion was the vocal point of the project, even when disagreeing with neighbors and family members, Barreto Hathaway said.
The issue of groundwater depletion was first reported in the 1950s. It wasn't until the 1980s that the groundwater basin was officially recognized as overdrafted. A basin becomes overdrafted when more water is extracted than the basin can recharge naturally. The problem has become more pronounced since Grimmway and Bolthouse began pumping the basin in 1995.
California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) began in 2014 to mitigate water loss across twenty-one overdrafted basins in the state. The act required representatives from Botlhouse and Grimmway to abide by a groundwater sustainability plan, known as the Cuyama Basin Groundwater Sustainability Agency (GSA), for the valley. All water users are required to reduce their pumping by two-thirds by 2040, enabling basins to rise to normal levels.
The Groundwater Sustainability Plan was nearly finalized when, in 2022, Grimmway and Bolthouse decided to join forces and file a lengthy joint adjudication lawsuit used to determine water rights and obligations. It aims to determine the boundaries of the groundwater basin and the amount of water that can be extracted without totally depleting the supply. It also served to make decisions on water rights for companies and residents within Cuyama.
The adjudication aims to expand the water pumping cutbacks equally to not only Grimmway and Bolthouse but to all water users in the valley.
“We have big corporate companies taking up a huge amount of water. And we have smaller farms that are taking up just a fraction, comparatively,” Rodriguez said.
Due to this, if this adjudication passes, farmers will have reduced access to their already low water usage, leading to a loss of their farms and livelihoods.
At the same time, it’s a sensitive subject because Grimmway and Bolthouse employ many Cuyama locals, she added.
Almost 40% of employment within the community comes from agriculture, according to a 2020 Cuyama Water Census report compiled by Casey Walsh, a professor of Anthropology at UC Santa Barbara. The census examined how different households utilized water, as well as the differences in employment demographics between Latino and non-Latino homes.
The report found that more than half of the Latino families in Cuyama have at least one member working an agricultural job, compared to non-Latino households, which only account for 14% of households with at least one member working a farming job.
“There are a lot of income questions,” said Casey Walsh, referencing the census report survey. “The Latino and non-Latino divide characterizes rural California and agricultural zones everywhere in the United States. And so it was something I wanted to keep track of.”
Cuyama is defined as a low-income community. Within the Latino demographic working in agricultural jobs, 73% are part of households earning between $20,000 and $50,000 per year, according to the Cuyama census.
Walsh said he considered these demographics in his report to inspire the community to adopt a more collaborative approach to groundwater management. He added that the water conflict is understood in a way that often overlooks the agriculturally dependent Cuyama population.
One of his objectives in the report is to create change so that both Latino and non-Latino community members are involved in the water decision-making process.
It’s easy for people to be against the big agricultural companies’ involvement with the overdraft of the basin, Walsh said. An issue arises when workers, especially Latino agricultural workers, are not being considered in the narrative.
“Unless their voices are directly represented, we won’t hear them,” Walsh said.
Filmmakers Alexandra Brown and Sean Huntley are addressing this tension in their upcoming documentary as part of the Water Justice Fellows. They are in the process of filming and producing a documentary that follows a variety of different Cuyama residents, chronicling the ways they are uniquely impacted by the critical overdraft of their water basin and the lawsuit against Grimmway and Bolthouse.
The documentary is “observational,” Huntley said. It aims to explore the community’s candid opinions about water usage and provide a glimpse into town culture. The filming process prioritizes capturing lives as they’re happening, rather than creating situations in which people are only responding to prompts created by the filmmakers, he added.
The documentary serves to expand the complex conflict beyond Cuyama, where often, only one angle of the narrative is known to a broader audience.
“It’s easy to talk about things in an uncomplicated way,” Brown said. “Because, of course, from just an ecological perspective, it’s really important that water remains in the town for everyone,” she added.
Outside of Cuyama, farm owners and ranchers have joined the fight against corporate farmers over pumping and gained national attention since uniting in a legal battle against Grimmway and Bolthouse, and organizing a boycott of the companies’ carrots.
The boycott campaign gained popularity immediately after its press release, which was featured in local newspapers, said Jake Furstenfeld, a rancher in a documentary film that follows the corporate carrot protest.
“Two weeks later, we’re getting calls from all this huge press,” said Furstenfeld, referencing the Associated Press and other major news sources.
By reducing carrot sales, the coalition of farmers and ranchers aims to reduce the influence of Grimmway and Bolthouse in the valley and continue their agricultural practices without fear of losing their water supply.
“They deserve to be able to pass this farm on, generation by generation,” Huntley said, referencing local Cuyaman farmers and ranchers. “But there are a bunch of people who live in town who are not owners. They are workers.”
Groundwater overpumping is on track to deplete the entire Cuyama basin, and the adjudication lawsuit has contributed to prolonging Bolthouse and Grimmway’s access to the water supply. Although their operations are slowing, total groundwater depletion remains a threat.
“You’ve got a lot of Latinx and Hispanic farmworkers who have come into Cuyama that really depend on that income,” Huntley added. By encouraging agricultural corporations to leave the valley, farmworkers will be without a living wage.
Tension has arisen both within the local community of farmworkers and commuting workers who live outside the valley. There is uncertainty surrounding layoffs when the adjudication is resolved and water pumping is fully reduced.
“The amount of agriculture is gonna be reduced to half. And in this context, everyone's looking around and saying, ‘Can I still live here?’,” said Walsh.
Addressing the financial and employment anxieties of agricultural workers is challenging because the Groundwater Sustainability Agency meetings do little to facilitate community discussion.
Filmmakers Brown and Huntley attended a groundwater sustainability agency meeting to understand how challenging it is for the community to represent their interests, as part of their documentary.
Groundwater sustainability agency meetings across California have a weak relationship between the entities represented on GSA boards and the voices of communities affected by their decisions, especially those related to agriculture.
The Cuyama board was comprised of representatives from both the carrot-growing corporations and a class of consultants explicitly hired to discuss water rights, she added.
The exclusion of local community members is common across California in conflicts involving water rights. To ensure that Cuyamans are represented in the discussion, creating a model of representative government is important.
Blaine Morris, the executive director of Quail Springs, discussed how the artist fellowship is exploring tensions in water rights within local government.
“It's both sides of the spectrum: the process and the hard parts of exclusionary governance models, amplifying people's voices as well as creating joy and connection,” Morris said. The fellowship was created so that artists can be in conversation with the array of experiences people in Cuyama have when dependent on a water basin in critical overdraft, she added.
Among Latino farmworker communities in Cuyama, a disparity exists. There has been a sustained effort to include the Latino community in the groundwater management process, but it has not yet been achieved.
The Water Census report addressed barriers that Latino populations face. The survey showed that “many more are willing but less able to participate in the process of managing water in Cuyama because of time constraints of job and family.”
Rae Garringer, a podcaster and oral historian, is a Water Justice Fellow who interviewed Cuyama members who are often excluded from discussions surrounding water rights. Oral history is used as a means of connecting with rural people who are often misrepresented by mainstream media, such as news publications.
They produced a podcast called The Battle Over Water Rights in Cuyama, CA, that compiled accounts from several Cuyamans about their relationship with water.
“Rural communities get represented in national media as monolithic, as if there’s this one overarching experience, and Cuyama, just like every other small town I’ve ever been in, defies that simplification,” Garringer said.
In interviews conducted for the podcast, residents working in agriculture were asked what was most impacting the water supply. Several podcast interviewees agreed that Grimmway and Bolthouse were largely responsible for their critically overdrafted basin, but also explained that there was a complex relationship between the economics of Cuyama and rainwater depletion affecting the basin and everyone who works there.
“They’re taking a lot of water to grow these crops, but at the same time, they offer the jobs, so it all depends mostly on the rain,” Raul Monzón said, a Cuyaman interviewed by Garringer.
The Cuyama Valley receives an average of 8.2 inches of rain per year. And this amount is expected to continue declining. Santa Barbara County is categorized as an area of moderate drought, indicating that reservoirs are depleting and water loss is expected to continue. Rainwater has historically contributed to refilling the basin, but is now becoming insufficient due to overpumping and increasingly severe drought conditions.
Throughout California, particularly in the agricultural heartland of the nearby San Joaquin Valley, groundwater overpumping is resulting in dried-up wells and contaminated water, affecting rural, low-income communities like Cuyama.
Other California GSA committees are devoted to sustainability plans because of the SGMA requirement. However, a team of scientists found that out of 108 groundwater sustainability plans analyzed, the majority of plans do not include regulations for wells and ecosystem protection.
The disregard for environmental preservation and vulnerable communities indicates a larger trend nationwide. “I think rural communities are experiencing this current moment of climate collapse and economic pressures of a really intensely changing time,” Garringer said.
Based in West Virginia, Garringer drew comparisons between the gas and coal industries of their home state and the extraction of groundwater in Cuyama. Many rural communities are heavily influenced by a corporate economy that dominates the landscape, leaving few job opportunities outside of a single industry, Garringer said. “The pressures of that industry’s harm on local environments are becoming harder and harder to ignore,” they added.
Rural communities throughout West Virginia have long been exposed to contaminants leaching from industrial corporations. Although industries posed a significant ecological threat, after coal mining dropped by 80%, the region is one of the poorest in the country. Cuyama, similarly, is at risk of environmental catastrophe at the hands of corporate growers, yet many are dependent on their employment for survival.
“I have seen firsthand how organizing against environmental damage from coal industries is complicated by the reality that many people depend on the industry for their livelihoods,” said Garringer.
Cuyama and rural communities like it will continue to contend with the conflicting extremes of employment and environmental destruction in their homes. “People love the place and love the way of life, and love the land and want it to thrive, and also love their livelihood,” they said.
The thing that shapes your entire life, both professionally and your sense of place and community, is at risk of becoming impossible, Garringer added.
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