Shattering the stillness of a frigid January moonlit sky, the sunrise’s amber aura glimmers over the Tinajas Altas mountain range — giving way to a sandscape of semi-succulent shrubs.

The sun’s increasingly insistent rays animate an otherwise desolate desert corridor that links the city of Yuma, Arizona, to the San Luis Port of Entry along the U.S.–Mexico border. White school buses shuttle Mexican agricultural workers to Arizonan farm acreage, home to America’s heartland of winter leafy greens. Just a few miles west is the Colorado River, the region’s historic lifeblood — a lifeblood that is so under threat that the Bureau of Reclamation declared its first-ever federal shortage for the basin on Monday.

(Editor’s Note: The interviews for this story took place from fall 2019 to spring 2020 as part of the author’s Ted Scripps Fellowship at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for Environmental Journalism. The story was supported by The Water Desk, an independent journalism initiative based at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for Environmental Journalism.)