#TEVISTON is trending because it has no water, but not about it’s highly relevant BURIED HISTORY as a BLACK TOWNship that was long denied access to water, like other black farmworker enclaves in the Calif San Joaquin Valley that sprung up from 1860-1940s. https://t.co/vEvbL5pl42
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Teviston, Calif., was once an all-black community in the Central Valley that did not have running water.
How Racism Ripples Through Rural California’s Pipes
In the 20th century, California’s black farmworkers settled in waterless colonies. The history endures underground, through old pipes, dry wells and shoddy septic tanks.
By Jose A. Del Real
Published Nov. 29, 2019
Updated Nov. 30, 2019
TEVISTON, Calif. — Bertha Mae Beavers remembers hearing stories as a child about the promises of California, a place so rich with jobs and opportunity that money, she was told, “grew on trees.” So in the summer of 1946 she said goodbye to her family of sharecroppers in Oklahoma and set out for a piece of it.
For decades she labored in the Central Valley’s vast cotton and grape fields, where eventually her children joined her. Looking back, Ms. Beavers, who turned 90 this year, has sometimes wondered why she left home at all. It was all the same trouble, she said.
Amid a vast migration during the early 20th century, tens of thousands of black people like Ms. Beavers came to California’s farm country from far-off states in the Cotton Belt and the Dust Bowl.
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