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.
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.
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