Once a month, the residents of Matheny Tract, one of hundreds of poor and largely Latino enclaves tucked deep in California’s Central Valley, gather in the shade of a neighbor’s carport, chihuahuas dozing at their feet. The subject of their meetings is always the same: water. As long as they’ve lived here, the water that comes out of their taps has been contaminated with arsenic and other chemicals; they refuse to drink it, and the very act of taking a shower can make them feel unclean.

“It tastes like watered-down bleach,” says Reinelda Palma, a longtime community leader whose house hosts the gatherings. “I don’t even wash plates with it. My biggest worry is that kids drink it.”

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“Matheny Tract is a kin of Flint,” says Michelle Wilde Anderson, a Stanford law professor who has studied both places and has written extensively on infrastructure. “Both are older communities in which we’ve failed to invest in basic needs.”

Like hundreds of unincorporated communities nationally, the Tract has been “mapped out of democracy,” in Anderson’s words. Residents under county jurisdiction don’t vote in city elections; they don’t receive municipal services, and their low property tax base contributes to their being overlooked. Many of these communities lie just beyond, and some within, the boundaries of cities that are happy to provide safe drinking water to brand new subdivisions—even ones outside their jurisdiction that they plan to annex—while ignoring impoverished areas in their midst.