The dust settled in the church in the way dust settles in the desert — drifting down endlessly, layering the floors, pews and wooden inscriptions along the walls and sanctuary. A light May rain, which came in chilled bursts, lifted and pushed the desert grit only slightly through the open church door. Then it all settled again, as if nothing had changed.
Rancher John Chambers, in a wide-brimmed hat and loose crocs, waited inside for the rain to end. His dogs, all five of them in various sizes and colors, waited with him, under the pews and on his lap. The short-legged, long-bodied mutt called Low-Rider looked on anxiously as thunder cracked. The town of Candelaria hardly knew rain, but that was the way of West Texas for the last three decades. A spattering of sprinkles was nothing when the land was all dry as bone.
For his entire life Chambers had worked the ranches in Candelaria, a tiny unincorporated colonia at the Mexican border. Before him, his parents worked and before them his grandparents worked. For years it had been a thriving ranching community, alive with both people and cattle. Now, the land sits dead silent, unable to return to a time when there was water.
Climate change is already leaving its mark all across the United States. There are stronger storms, rising sea levels, enormous wildfires and warmer forecasts, and in West Texas, which lies in the northern Chihuahuan Desert, there is relentless drought.
The land has been in a sustained megadrought since the year 2000, bringing some of the driest days in hundreds of years. The rain, which had for decades poured annually without delay, ceased to arrive. The creeks dried up and the ranching industry, which was already seeing increased costs in cattle production, struggled to stay afloat. Towns like Candelaria slowly emptied out, leaving behind a string of ranch hands and far fewer cattle. Today, the land is unlikely to bounce back, according to climate experts, despite natural climate variability. Instead, the days in West Texas will grow hotter, it will rain only sporadically, and the droughts will become more intense.
Like the climate, the political landscape has changed as well. The increased immigration enforcement at the border is a source of fear for both legal and undocumented residents, and critics have expressed concerns over the advancing border wall’s impact on water supply. Border life as it was before, with its fluidity between Mexico and Texas, is no longer and perhaps, residents believe, will never return.
For Chambers, despite this change, West Texas is in everything — his dusty hair, his sundyed skin, his worn boots. He has been working as a ranch hand at a property about 10 miles from Candelaria for years now and cannot imagine ever leaving. He knows the roads and distant mountains too well to give up on this life.
As the rain clouds faded, he and his dogs walked out to the truck, the sun out and the dust already kicking back up. He, like all the days before, still had work to do.
All Dried Up
Stretching east from just outside El Paso is a 200-mile strip of the Rio Grande River that is completely dried up. The water begins in the Colorado snow melt of the San Juan Mountains and ends in the Gulf of Mexico at the eastern edge of Texas, where — but for a brief moment — it disappears underground, leaving behind nothing but sand and dirt and rock.
This piece of river is the Forgotten Reach. Historically, the water from the melted snow and rain would fill the river, but since the early to-mid 20th century, the construction of the Elephant Butte Dam in New Mexico and an overallocation of water for farmers in Colorado, New Mexico and the area around El Paso disrupted the natural cycle. The river began to dry up.
“It’s not that we don’t have water, it’s that we are putting water first to crops and then water to people,” said Samuel Sandoval Solis, a professor and cooperative extension specialist in water resources at University of California, Davis. “Yes, it’s a problem with water, but I think more importantly, it’s a problem with priorities.”
Near Candelaria, the water from the Rio Grande disappeared years ago. Carissa Chambers remembers it when she was growing up in the region. There was a lot more water everywhere back then. Now she’s a geology student at Sul Ross University in Alpine, Texas.
The Rio Grande was the major source of water for agriculture back then, she said. Farmers and ranchers could pull their water from the river and it would be enough for the business. Now, she said the water comes from a variety of different sources, including pulling from creeks and pumping from groundwater.
In Candelaria, there are six main ranches spanning around 6,400 acres, but larger ranches farther out, including the one that her father, John, works on. The owners are absent, she said, living in Texas cities like Dallas or Houston, leaving hired ranch hands to work them.
“This whole area was ranched and partially farmed and now there’s just a couple spots,” Carissa Chambers said. “Those who are still able are people that still have money, good generational money, and are able to still keep those ranches. But before, it used to be that every single person used to be able to ranch pretty much.”
For ranching her father pulls from Capote Creek, which flows down from the Chisos Mountains. However, the creek is now at a trickle due to the persistent drought. The creek used to flow from the mountains to the Rio Grande, but now it doesn’t even make it half way. Instead, the waterway is dry, just sand and dirt.
The drought has made the water situation worse, and while these conditions can be part of a regular climate pattern — with rainy years and dry years — climate experts are concerned over the intensity and duration of this period.
“Climate change has affected the drought. It’s warmer, makes things dry out faster,” said John Nielsen-Gammon, Texas state climatologist. “But we don’t have a good handle on how much rain people are going to be able to count on in 20 or 30 or 40 years. It could be more than what we’ve had in the past decade, could be less.”
Ranchers say that the drought in the last couple decades has made the earth so cracked and dry that it’s harder for the ground to absorb the water — even in case of massive rainstorms. In 2008, a rain event in the area flushed the river with water for several months, but it eventually returned to drought condition — if not worse than before.
“There’s not the natural sponges that used to be here to slow down the water,” said Kevin Urbanczyk, professor of geology at Sul Ross University. “So when it does rain, it kind of just runs down to the river pretty quickly.”
The extent of the damage over the years is harder to calculate, however, especially for groundwater. There has been no official recordkeeping until recently, Urbanczyk said, just local anecdotes. For example, another professor of geology at Sul Ross, Jesse Kelsch, said she has noticed that her groundwater well in Alpine has dropped maybe 20 feet in the past 18 years.
Urbanczyk said local officials are trying to find the funding to clearly track water levels through a monitoring network like those in other cities in Texas, such as San Antonio, where the Edwards Aquifer Authority has had a thorough network for decades. Monitoring can help officials better regulate water usage if needed.
“We’re clearly seeing declines in aquifer levels in Alpine, Brewster and Presidio County, so much so that we use those water levels to come up with what we want future conditions to be,” Urbanczyk said. “But I don’t have a crystal ball. We just hope it doesn’t decline to the point where there’s no groundwater left.”
A Changing Landscape
Just above Candaria, at the top of a rocky hill, a single U.S. Army truck sits next to the local cemetery. To Chambers’ immense frustration, the exhaust from the constantly running truck blows over his parents’ graves.
“I’ve asked them repeatedly to move,” he said. “But nothing has changed.”
The military is there to look through a large telescope focused on the nearby border. It’s just one of many changes that have taken place in the past year and a half since President Donald Trump took office again. Border Patrol agents drive back and forth by the single road through Candelaria, to the town of Presidio just about 60 miles east.
The community in Candelaria has now shrunk to about 30 or 40 residents, down from around 100 since Trump was reelected, according to locals. Carissa Chambers said she believes it’s because of the increased immigration enforcement. Before the election, she said the remaining residents would be on their porches at dusk, chatting and playing music that echoed throughout the desert. Now, it’s silent.
Just recently this year, ranch hand Rene Peña was taken by Border Patrol on his way back home from a brief trip to San Antonio del Bravo, just over the line in Mexico. Typically, it’s West Texas culture to travel back and forth between border towns in the United States and Mexico for family, shopping or work, said Carissa Chambers. He was picking up groceries.
Peña left behind his wife and young son and his father, Sergio — another ranch hand in the area. Only recently, in late summer, was he released from detention.
“It’s not sustainable to be here if you’re also being threatened, watched,” Carissa Chambers said. “We aren’t doing anything wrong here.”
More so, residents have expressed concerns over the border wall, which is already rising along the Rio Grande in Eastern Texas after the Trump administration waived numerous environmental and historical preservation laws, such as the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Water Act. These concerns have reached national audiences, highlighting the impact the wall would have on Big Bend National Park — a mountainous landscape stretching just over 800,000 acres across the border.
The construction of the steel frame and creation of “man camp” operations for temporary worker housing could use millions of gallons of water. For example, at the height of building a border wall in Arizona, the operation extracted at least 700,000 gallons of water a day, according to public information documented by the Center for Biological Diversity.
Throughout border communities, signs protesting the wall sit on street corners, along highways, in coffee shops and pasted on windows. Outside one coffee shop in the town of Terlingua, a large sculpture of the wall stands out front with the words “Stop the Steel.” Due to community outcry, the construction is paused at least until the end of September.
There are water sustainability programs across the region, including at Sul Ross University’s Meadows Research Institute, with practices like sustainable water usage, landowner outreach and the development of a groundwater data dashboard. But some communities will never be the same.
When Chambers thinks of how Candelaria has changed, he creates a claw with his hand and mimes ripping his heart out. He thinks of years ago, when his mother passed, the entire town had come together — the ranch hands, the families, their kids — to make so much food for the funeral. It was as he remembered, or as he liked to remember.
“We’re losing a culture here,” he said. “I mean, the water dried up.”
