The Imperial Valley represents one of California’s most important regions of industrial agriculture. Corporate agricultural production interests have been able to successfully cultivate and exploit it through a gigantic irrigation system fed by the Colorado River and the All-American Canal – specifically engineered for this purpose and which attained sad notoriety through the Mexican migration movement. The system’s run-off flows through pipes, pumps and canals leading to an artificial lake that is approaching ecological as well as economic disaster, just as the bordering regions of Mexico.