The Other Side of Coachella

As a California resident, I’m no stranger to the mass migration to Indio, California every April. For two weekends, the Valley transforms into a carefully curated world of glitter, celebrity sightings, desert sunsets, and social media posts for Coachella. Friends of mine spend months planning outfits, coordinating group photos, and debating how early they need to arrive at stages to get the perfect view of their favorite artists.

Growing up in California, Coachella always felt less like a music festival and more like a cultural phenomenon of luxury and escape. But beyond the festival grounds and resort entrances exists another side of the Valley that rarely appears on Instagram feeds: communities living with contaminated drinking water and decades of environmental neglect.

When thousands of attendees leave the festival, local farmworkers who take overnight shifts clean the festival grounds, where they collect piles upon piles of trash left behind by concertgoers. This community, cleaning up the cans and plastic on the concert floors are Indigenous Purépecha migrants from Michoacán, Mexico, who came to Southern California seeking agricultural work. Cleaning up Coachella and other concerts in the Valley is actually their second job, while their main focus is sustaining California’s agricultural economy by harvesting grapes, citrus, and other crops in one of the most productive farming regions in the country. These farmworkers spend hours laboring beneath extreme desert heat to help feed communities far beyond the valley itself.

Yet many of the workers live in communities without reliable access to safe drinking water or infrastructure. In some communities, large families share small mobile homes where residents described sewage leaks and unsafe water systems with levels of arsenic present. Community members have described foul-smelling water, rust-colored sinks, and fears about bathing children in contaminated water. Families in some eastern Coachella Valley mobile home parks have described avoiding tap water entirely, relying instead on cases of bottled water for drinking, cooking, and even brushing their teeth during periods when arsenic levels exceeded federal standards. Others have lived near overflowing sewage pits and standing wastewater while enduring temperatures well above 100 degrees. Some families even drive miles each week to refill large water containers because they no longer trust their household water systems. Residents in parks like Oasis Mobile Home Park have raised concerns for years about the safety of their water and deteriorating infrastructure before significant federal intervention occurred.

Much of the eastern Coachella Valley relies on groundwater wells, where arsenic naturally occurs in the desert aquifer system. While arsenic contamination is not unique to the region, the ability to safely remove it depends heavily on infrastructure, funding, and political investment. Larger complexes, like the Coachella festival or golf course resorts, can often afford treatment systems, but many smaller mobile home parks in the eastern valley have struggled for years with underfunded infrastructure. In wealthier parts of the valley, water insecurity is rarely part of daily life, but residents have spent years navigating the emotional and financial burden of not trusting the water in their own community.

Despite investigations, lawsuits, emergency orders, and media attention, meaningful progress for water quality improvements has moved painfully slow. Government agencies have repeatedly acknowledged unsafe conditions in mobile home parks across the region. The EPA has issued emergency orders after arsenic levels exceeded federal drinking water standards, requiring operators to install treatment systems and provide bottled water to residents. Even after treatment systems are installed, many residents continue living with uncertainty surrounding the long-term reliability of their water infrastructure. Temporary bottled water deliveries and short-term compliance measures have frequently replaced lasting investment in the communities themselves. The crisis in the eastern Coachella Valley is not the result of a lack of awareness. State and federal agencies have known about unsafe conditions for years. What persists is the lack of meaningful environmental protection for communities that are economically essential to California, yet politically overlooked.

The eastern Coachella Valley challenges the image California often projects about itself. The state is frequently associated with environmental leadership, sustainability campaigns, and climate progress. Coachella itself has become part of that image: a place where luxury, art, and desert aesthetics are transformed into a global brand. But the existence of communities without reliable access to safe drinking water shows how uneven environmental protection is distributed. The same region capable of sustaining luxury tourism and billion-dollar agricultural industries has struggled to provide basic infrastructure to many of the workers who make those economies possible.

Jordan Ross

Jordan Ross is a rising junior at Duke University, majoring in Environmental Science and Policy with a minor in Economics. Originally from Los Angeles, California, she is passionate about advancing clean energy solutions and environmental policy, with a particular interest in environmental law and energy regulation. At Duke, Jordan serves as a Green Devil Intern with the Office of Climate and Sustainability, where she mentors first-year students and supports career-focused sustainability programming.