Water for the People: The Acequia Heritage of New Mexico in a Global Context

By Enrique R. Lamadrid and José A. Rivera

Water for the People features twenty-five essays by world-renowned acequia scholars and community members that highlight acequia culture, use, and history in New Mexico, northern Mexico, Chile, Peru, Argentina, Spain, the Middle East, Nepal, and the Philippines, situating New Mexico’s acequia heritage and its inherent sustainable design within a global framework. The lush landscapes of the upper Río Grande watershed created by acequias dating from as far back as the late sixteenth century continue to irrigate their communities today despite threats of prolonged drought, urbanization, private water markets, extreme water scarcity, and climate change. Water for the People celebrates acequia practices and traditions worldwide and shows how these ancient irrigation systems continue to provide arid regions with a model for water governance, sustainable food systems, and community traditions that reaffirm a deep cultural and spiritual relationship with the land year after year.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Release date: Apr 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9780826364647

Book preview

New Century Gardens and Landscapes of the American Southwest

Baker H. Morrow, Series Editor

Whether practical gardening guides, best plant guides, landscape architecture showcases, or blueprints for urban ecology, books in the New Century Gardens and Landscapes of the American Southwest series address the challenges novice gardeners and skilled practitioners alike face with prolonged droughts, limited water supplies, high-altitude climes, and growing urbanization. Books in this series not only provide practical landscaping advice for backyard gardeners, they dive deep into ecology, built environments, agricultural history, and the emerging discipline of urban ecology. The New Century Gardens and Landscapes of the American Southwest series tackles the environmental questions that many communities in the American West confront as we all work to create healthy, dynamic, and inviting outdoor spaces.

© 2023 by Enrique R. Lamadrid and José A. Rivera

All rights reserved. Published 2023

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Lamadrid, Enrique R., editor. | Rivera, José A., 1944– editor.

Title: Water for the people: the acequia heritage of New Mexico in a global context / edited by Enrique R. Lamadrid and José A. Rivera.

Description: Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022016256 (print) | LCCN 2022016257 (e-book) | ISBN 9780826364630 (paperback) | ISBN 9780826364647 (e-pub)

Subjects: LCSH: Irrigation canals and flumes—New Mexico. | Irrigation farming—New Mexico. | Sustainable agriculture—New Mexico. | New Mexico—Social life and customs.

Classification: LCC TC930. W38 2023 (print) | LCC TC930 (e-book) | DDC 333.91/31609789—dc23/eng/20220912

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022016256

LC e-book record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022016257

Founded in 1889, the University of New Mexico sits on the traditional homelands of the Pueblo of Sandia. The original peoples of New Mexico—Pueblo, Navajo, and Apache—since time immemorial have deep connections to the land and have made significant contributions to the broader community statewide. We honor the land itself and those who remain stewards of this land throughout the generations and also acknowledge our committed relationship to Indigenous peoples. We gratefully recognize our history.

The Center for Regional Studies at the University of New Mexico generously contributed to the publication of this book.

Cover illustration by Isaac Morris

Designed by Isaac Morris

Composed in Arial, Times New Roman, and 1906 French News

A todos los activistas acequieros del pasado, presente, y futuro, en Nuevo México y el mundo entero.

To all the acequia activists of the past, present, and future, in New Mexico and the whole world.

¡Que vivan las acequias!

Contents

PRELUDESurviving Apocalypse

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION José A. Rivera and Enrique R. Lamadrid

BENDICIÓN DEL AGUA Olivia Ramona Romo

I. ACEQUIAS DE NUEVO MÉXICO

II. ESPAÑA Y MÉXICO: PATRIMONIOS ANCESTRALES

III. NUEVO MÉXICO Y EL MUNDO

Figure 0.1. Artist Pola López at the black hole where a mature Ponderosa Pine was turned to fine ash just days before. Photo by Michael Benanav, Searchlight New Mexico.

Prelude

Surviving Apocalypse

In 2022 the people and acequias of the front range of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in northern New Mexico suffered the cruelest of springs. Cultural landscapes many generations in the making were scorched almost beyond recognition by the Hermit’s Peak–Calf Canyon wildfire, the largest conflagration in New Mexico history. It charred more than 341,000 acres (533 square miles) of forests and ranches, destroyed over 400 homes, and displaced over 18,000 people who were forced to evacuate for weeks. A century of fire suppression and questionable management by the US Forest Service led to the buildup of fuels on the forest floor and in the thick, overgrown understory. The corrective practice of prescribed and managed burns may work on paper and in ten-year plans, but erratic winds, extreme drought, and poor communications with hotshot crews created the perfect and most destructive of firestorms.

Renowned investigative journalist Alicia Inez Guzmán described the Crowning Fury of the fire in a widely published online article. Where it burned the hottest, majestic ponderosa-pine forests were destroyed from crown to underground roots. Celebrated painter Pola López mourned the loss of 160 acres of family land protected from developers with a perpetual conservation easement. But legal status offers no shield from fire. A precious streamside forest and stands of grandfather trees above the valley were incinerated. It was Armageddon, exclaimed Travis Regensberg, a Las Vegas contractor who took in his bulldozer to clear fire lines around buildings (Guzmán 2022).

People have been quick to blame the Federal Government for mismanaging what had been communal land grants prior to the United States’ armed takeover of this northernmost province of Mexico in 1846. After La Floresta, another name for the US Forest Service, was established in 1907, traditional gathering of firewood, timber for vigas, and forest products was severely restricted. In Las Vegas, San Miguel County Commissioner Janice Varela expressed a widely held belief that despite the federal expropriation, the forests still belong to the people: We locals, we feel like, hell yes, it’s our forest … we let the Forest Service manage it and we let everybody in the world come here, but it’s our forest. We have ownership from our proximity to it, from our history and cultural connection to it, from our heart (Guzmán 2022).

Figure 0.2. Acequia del Rito Griego y la Sierra (registered 1865), Chacón’s famous waterfall acequia before the fire. Photo by Miguel A. Gandert.

As our anthology goes to press, preparations are frantically being made for the next stage of the tragedy—flooding from the monsoon rains of summer. Soils and root systems that absorbed and filtered whole watersheds are now calcified and hydrophobic, shedding water like concrete. Municipal water supplies of towns and cities like Las Vegas are in danger of contamination and clogging from ash flows. Highways, buildings, and bridges will be threatened by mud and debris. Mora Valley residents are shoring up homes, outbuildings, and corrals with sandbags. Volunteer groups have organized to protect community wells, government buildings, businesses, and other infrastructure located in the flood plain. In just a few weeks, over thirty acequias in the valley were frantically mapped with GPS precision, so they may be recovered. As hopefully as they can, people are bracing themselves for the long-term consequences of this calamity. Unfortunately, disaster profiteering has become a part of the picture as well. Within weeks after the fire was contained, real-estate speculators made offers to families whose ancestral homes and land were totaled. Despite these traumas, three key words often heard in conversations on acequias have become especially meaningful in 2022: vulnerability, resiliency, and querencia, the ancestral connections to and love of place.

Descriptions in this book of acequia landscapes from before the fire are especially poignant now. Chapter 5 is entitled The Waterfall Acequias of the Mora Valley and opens with a vivid description of the verdant landscape created when an ingenious water system cut through thick forest to divert water east from the Río Grande to the valleys of Mora and rivers that eventually flow into the Mississippi. Everyone marvels at this feat of historic engineering. Above the village of Chacón in the upper reaches of the valley, it jumps the subcontinental divide, and suddenly, like a whitewater exclamation point, a nine-hundred-foot cascade comes into view, tumbling down from a high ridge. It looks out of place, since there is no geological notch to contain it. It is not a natural waterfall. It is the Acequia del Rito Griego y la Sierra. About a third of the forest was consumed above Chacón, but the flames stopped short of the village. The iconic acequia has stopped flowing. Its gates up on the ridge were closed for the winter, and access to the national forest site for spring cleaning was prohibited. Other acequias in the area are flowing with pitch-black water. But clumps of green are already emerging on the banks, and with them the strength of the people.

Acequias across the globe divert rivers and some even mine water to create oases. But the arid mountainous areas from northern New Mexico to Perú, Chile, and Spain, from Nepal to Afghanistan and Iran, depend on snowpacks and glaciers that release water gradually in springtime to the valleys below. Global warming, drought, and early melt-offs have created existential challenges to acequias everywhere. We hope the cruel lessons of careless forest management from New Mexico can be shared with world communities faced with uncertain futures and dire impacts on acequia culture and landscapes.

Sources

Guzmán, Alicia Inez. 2022. Crowning fury: Anger toward the Forest Service has been smoldering for a century. Raging wildfires brought it roaring to life. Searchlight New Mexico: Independent Investigative Journalism, June 8, 2022. https://searchlightnm.org/crowning-fury and subsequently reprinted in the Albuquerque Journal, Rolling Stone, and the Guardian US.

Figure 0.3. Many Mora acequias are discharging black sludge after the fire. Photo © 2022 by Sharon Stewart.

Preface

The first acequia stories emerged more than six thousand years ago, after the invention of agriculture and as people began diverting water to settle the deserts of the planet. We acknowledge the sanctity of water, the ancient ethics of water sharing, and the millennial perseverance and ingenuity of acequia cultures everywhere. They have survived empires, dictators, and wars and always kept the kernels of democracy in the same pouch as their ancestral seeds. The gardens, orchards, fields, and grazing lands of New Mexico thrive on the ancestral lands of Puebloan peoples and the Athabascan peoples who joined them. The Iberian and Mesoamerican peoples who colonized this region added their knowledge of water and their plants and animals, and they further transformed the landscape. Everyone still shares water from the same streams. The authors in this volume tell these more recent stories with permiso y respeto, with permission and profound respect, for their origins.

We thank the antepasados for the knowledge they have passed on to us. The list of exceptional acequia leaders, men and women, comisionados and mayordomos would fill many, many pages. We do remember two recently departed acequia scholars who shared their research with us so generously: Juan Estevan Arellano of Embudo, New Mexico, and Anselmo Arellano of Las Vegas, New Mexico. We walk in their footsteps.

The idea for gathering these stories began in 2014, when we documented the historic visit of twenty New Mexican acequia leaders and scholars to Valencia, Spain. We were honored guests of the fabled people’s water court there, the Tribunal de las Aguas de la Vega de Valencia, and the Consejo de Hombres Buenos de la Huerta de Murcia, which were celebrating the fifth anniversary of their inclusion on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. We witnessed the events conducted at the pórtico of the grand Catedral de Valencia and the special Acto de Hermanamiento that bonded our New Mexico Acequia Association with sister groups in Spain. We were invited to document this visit in the pages of Green Fire Times: News and Views from the Sustainable Southwest by Seth Roffman, the editor in chief. New Mexico’s premier newspaper on the multicultural project of sustainability has published numerous articles over the years on farming, conservation, acequia politics, seed saving, cultural relations, and related topics. Roffman dedicated two full issues to New Mexico acequias, and those articles form the nucleus of this book.

Journalism is foundational, but by nature ephemeral. Baker Morrow of the University of New Mexico’s landscape architecture program asked us to put this illustrated book on library shelves and into the hands of community members, students, and researchers through his New Century Gardens and Landscapes of the American Southwest series at the University of New Mexico Press. We thank him for his encouragement to connect the living water landscapes of New Mexico to all those that make the arid lands of our planet bloom. We trace our own lineage back to northern México, to southern Spain, and to Yemen. We found culturally green irrigated landscapes across the world still under traditional management, including in Nepal, Perú, the Philippines, Argentina, Chile, and Persia/Iran. Of the seven hundred acequias of New Mexico, we chose exemplary stories from the valleys of Taos, Valdez, Embudo, Santa Cruz, Mora, Cuba, La Bajada, Placitas, and the middle Río Grande in Albuquerque.

When our proposal was accepted, acquisitions editor Sonia Dickey facilitated the lengthy process of peer review, editing, and approval by the faculty-controlled University of New Mexico Press committee. We thank Sonia for her guidance and detailed and critical reviews at each stage of the manuscript’s development and production by the stellar design and production staff at the press.

On the home front, we thank Carlota Domínguez Lamadrid and Trini Baca Rivera for their patience over the two years of volunteer labor spent on home computers, searching through archival sources, communicating with contributors far and wide, editing the manuscript, and selecting more than ninety photographs. Generous donations from the editors and from UNM entities provided support for archival fees, indexing, and events. ¡Sinceras gracias a todos!

Introduction

José A. Rivera and Enrique R. Lamadrid

The acequias of New Mexico have taken their place of honor in the global company of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s Intangible Cultural Heritage Traditions and Cultural Landscapes.¹ In their vigilant defense of water and its democratic governance, acequias worldwide have demonstrated their millennial sustainability and made the arid zones of our planet bloom. If you encounter a verdant landscape in New Mexico, chances are good that you have entered an acequia landscape, which is culturally green rather than naturally green, since water is so scarce.

By the turn of the twentieth century, speculators and boosters were swarming to New Mexico to acquire as much land as possible by whatever means they could. They were largely successful but left the functional water systems in place since water is so closely tied to land. In 1907, the Water Code was passed, which separated land from water and made water rights a commodity that could be bought and sold. In the twenty-first century, water is defended with as much determination as land was, but with a hard-fought understanding of how to succeed. To the membership of the New Mexico Acequia Association, "el agua no se vende, el agua se defiende" (water is not for sale, water is to be defended).

In 2014, the New Mexico Acequia Association (NMAA) was awarded the highest honor of the Tribunal de las Aguas de la Vega de Valencia and the Consejo de Hombres Buenos de la Huerta de Murcia. The Tribunal de las Aguas in Valencia, Spain, is the world’s oldest continuously operating water court, founded in the year 960 during the Spanish Muslim caliphates of Abd al-Rahman III and al-Hakam II. When officers of the NMAA and a group of University of New Mexico and New Mexico State University scholars, including Sylvia Rodríguez, José Rivera, Enrique Lamadrid, Sam Fernald, and Steve Guldan, were invited to the ceremony in Valencia, the Green Fire Times requested a cover story. One thing led to another, and folklorist and acequia activist Enrique Lamadrid and his son Armando, an international acequia scholar, were invited to guest edit the entire February 2015 edition. That special issue built on the success of another special edition (January 2014) on acequias and some additional articles published earlier. New Mexico has a long tradition of bilingual cultural journalism, and these publications were celebrated for their clear and concise articles. Without a general public that clearly understands how acequias benefit everyone, their future in New Mexico could be in jeopardy.

We soon realized that these articles could serve as a road map to a more complete volume on New Mexico acequias in a global context. The University of New Mexico Press has an illustrious list of published works on acequias and water in the bioregion of the Río Grande, and Water for the People links history, hydrology, and activism for readers. The global acequia tradition still present in New Mexico is very old and is reflected in the terms used in the Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese, and Sicilian languages: acequia, séquia, acéquia, and saia, respectively, all derived from the Arabic word al-sāqiyah ( irrigation channel). These terms are even older than we initially realized, having been incorporated into Arabic from the Sabaean language, the tongue of the biblical queen of Sheba and the kingdom of Saba’ at the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula, today’s Yemen.

Throughout the centuries, acequias of the world have overcome profound historical conflicts and competition over water use. They have survived because of their sustainable principles of cooperation, water sharing, equity, and transparency; their internal mechanisms for conflict resolution; and above all, their local autonomy in decision-making, adaptation, and solidarity. In New Mexico, the acequias are unique for their retention of gravity-flow irrigation practices utilizing earthen zanjas hand-dug on the land, which in turn require the continuity of old-time rituals during the annual limpia (ditch cleaning) in the springtime, a duty that bonds the irrigation community year after year and reaffirms its cohesion and a deep cultural and spiritual attachment to the land (querencia). The physical design of the New Mexico acequia system (the tangible features) coupled with its cooperative maintenance (the intangible features) perpetuates long-term sustainability. In other regions of the world, some of these old technologies and the attendant customs and traditions have been lost or modified as part of the modernization of irrigation infrastructure.

This book features garden and field landscapes of the upper Río Grande as examples of ancient acequia technology diffused from Iberia to the Americas, based on a long and rich world history of irrigation that has integrated Iranian, Mesopotamian, Greco-Roman, Arabian, Berber, and Sabaean water cultures. This hybrid Iberian model of irrigation was melded with the irrigated agricultural practices of Indigenous peoples already existing in the Americas in places such as Perú, Mesoamerica, and the high-altitude deserts of northern New Spain, inhabited by Puebloan cultures, which is now the US Southwest. In the case of the upper Río Grande, the verdant landscapes created by acequias in the late sixteenth century and later have continued despite many past obstacles and the threats of economic modernity, urbanization, private water markets, and now conditions of extreme water scarcity due to cycles of prolonged drought and the emerging impacts of climate change.

In effect, acequias are water landscapes from centuries ago that are still in use and serve as examples of sustainable design. What lessons can we learn from them? And equally important, what can we do to sustain them? Of our twenty-five chapters, eleven are adapted from articles and sidebars published in special editions of the Green Fire Times. The rest are new research and reflections by international community-based activists and scholars with an eye on New Mexico and the world. Specific chapters feature the global acequia heritage in Yemen and Iran, Valencia and Murcia in Spain, Perú and Nepal, Mendoza in Argentina, Chile, the Río Conchos communities of northern México, the Ilocos region of the Philippines, and the valleys of New Mexico.

Olivia Ramona Romo, la poeta de la tierra from Taos, begins our volume with an invocation, a bilingual poem on heritage, family, landscape, and the sanctity of water. At center stage is a traditional water ceremony that links New Mexico with similar family rituals across the world. An adult asks a child for a glass of water. The child returns with the water, politely waits for the adult to drink it, and asks for a blessing. The lesson is respect for both water and the knowledge of the elders.

Part 1 features stories on the acequias of New Mexico, which divert water from the rivers Jémez, Embudo, Hondo, Mora, and Santa Fe and the Río Grande. A chapter by Luis Pablo Martínez Sanmartín, Thomas F. Glick,