The New Yorker:

When the water runs out, there are no good options. One of the poorest regions in Texas faces an uncertain future.

By Rachel Monroe

The smell that comes from a sugar mill operating at full capacity is malty and industrial, something like fermented molasses. “Normal people don’t like it, but, for us, it’s the smell of a sugar mill running. So I love that smell,” Cain Garcia told me last month, with some wistfulness. Three months earlier, Garcia’s employer, the Rio Grande Valley Sugar Growers, Inc., the last remaining sugar mill in Texas, had announced that it was shutting down its operations for good. Texas’s sugar industry, at one time the third biggest in the country, had effectively collapsed, a casualty of the increasingly dire water situation along the Rio Grande. The river’s two main reservoirs in Texas are at historically low levels, and cane farmers, unable to irrigate their water-intensive crops, are plowing them up.

As the factory manager, Garcia had to let the mill’s hundreds of employees know that they were losing their jobs. He spent the spring giving tours of the mill to prospective buyers from Guatemala, Bolivia, and Canada, some of whom were interested in dismantling it and selling it for parts. “I’m not going to lie to you, tears were coming out of my eyes,” Garcia said. “I took it so hard. That place has been my home for twenty years.” The Valley is one of the poorest regions in Texas, and the economic impact of the mill’s closure was only starting to sink in. “A lot of people are still in shock. When you drive to this place every day, and it’s so enormous, you never think it’s going to close,” Garcia said. “Seeing this place empty is heartbreaking.”

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