stuck in the liminal space between indigenous peoples and the Anglo-Americans that arrived after 1848.
The Aamodt case was one of the longest federal court cases in the history of this country. It was also one of the most divisive in New Mexico, pitting neighbor against neighbor and adding binary fuel to the fire of identity. It cleaved water in more defined, cultural ways, separating out Indian versus non-Indian residents. Adjudication in the end treated the Pueblo Indians once again like ex-Mexican citizens. The settlement stemming out of adjudication did not heal these cultural wounds or distinctions. The spark that lit the Aamodt adjudication, the San Juan-Chama Project, continues to have wide-ranging effects on New Mexico’s water landscapes, both legal and physical.
San Juan-Chama Project water now goes to various New Mexican cities, including Albuquerque and Santa Fe, for drinking water, as discussed in the following chapters. Building the infrastructure was easier and took less time than the legal adjudication of those same waters. The Navajo Nation got a portion of these project waters (in 2005), as did the Jicarilla Apache in an earlier settlement (1992). Smaller portions of project water were dedicated to Taos (initially the town), and a small allocation was granted to the Pojoaque Valley for the Aamodt settlement in its final form.
Pressure to find an agreement in the Pojoaque Basin between the parties came from another adjudication lawsuit taking place to the north in the Taos Valley. Aamodt was influenced by the Abeyta (Taos) regional adjudication case, and the tangible connection between the two started with, and still depends on water from, the San Juan-Chama Project. The Aamodt parties were influenced and later connected, socially and hydraulically, by what was happening just to the north of their small basin. Next, I turn to the Taos Valley adjudication procedure (Abeyta) to explain these connections.
3
Abeyta
Taos Struggles, Then Negotiates
Then these guys showed up with survey stuff, walked on the edges of all our fields, and kept talking about a state survey to figure out water use. They had a state vehicle, from the state engineer you know, so a lot of us just decided it was time to meet and start talking. We were doing business with a handshake; [it] was a neighborly way of doing business. But it was clear that had to change if they were going to start watching us carefully.
—ENRIQUE MONDRAGÓN1
The Taos Valley had its own long-standing adjudication lawsuit stuck in legal mire for decades. The Abeyta suit, filed in 1969, simmered in quiet but adversarial litigation mode as the parties “spent the next 20 years trying to gather and build evidence and find data, maps, and historical documents so that we could annihilate each other in court.”2 In the end, however, the parties did not annihilate each other. Abeyta is notable as the first lawsuit to avoid a “normal” full state adjudication and settle out of court. In its settlement process and terms, Abeyta later influenced the Aamodt suit negotiations to its south, providing a form of interbasin social peer pressure to move to settlement. The lessons of Abeyta have far-reaching implications for basins undergoing and awaiting adjudication.
The major streams in the Taos Valley have their headwaters on Taos Pueblo lands. The Pueblo, then, were in a good position to negotiate their ancestral claims with other parties: the nearby acequias, the town of Taos, and mutual domestic water associations. For the small town of Taos, nestled at seven thousand feet in elevation on the eastern plateau of the Rio Grande Gorge, the strong but unquantified claims to water by the Pueblo were terrifying. The Abeyta adjudication began just as the economy and landscape of Taos were shifting away from agriculture. Like the larger city of Santa Fe to its south, Taos was becoming an art-market mecca, and its economy was increasingly relying on water-thirsty tourism. New residential developments, including suburbs, exurbs, and second homes, also demanded more water. With its main water sources—surface stream waters and wells—on the legal table, Taos had a lot to lose in adjudication.
Compared to the Pojoaque Valley to the south, Taos had decent water supplies. Surface water represented nearly 80 percent of water used in the valley, according to a recent water-planning study.3 Irrigators and landowners relied on a large number of domestic wells, which became a key sticking point in the later adjudication. Water conflict, accommodation, and cooperation were nothing new in the Taos Valley. Long-standing disputes between towns such as Taos, Arroyo Hondo, and Arroyo Seco were par for the course from the eighteenth century onward.
Water sharing between the Taos Pueblo and the adjoining acequias was also tested intermittently yet endured into the late twentieth century. Irrigation in the Taos Valley depends on a set of mountain streams, along with other minor streams to the south (see map 6). These streams feed to one of the densest networks of acequia ditches in New Mexico, some seventy-one individual ditch associations. Approximately two thousand parciantes still depend on these acequias today.4
MAP 6. Map of the Taos Valley and its major streams and acequias. Adapted from Rodriguez (2006, plate 1).
Prior to filing the adjudication suit in the late 1960s, Office of the State Engineer (OSE) technicians had already been at work in the Taos Valley, preparing for water infrastructure. State and federal actions on the long-anticipated San Juan-Chama Project to bring Colorado River water into the Rio Grande Basin spurred the need for state water accounting. Tied to these larger plans was a small dam proposed by the state and the Bureau of Reclamation in the Taos Valley, to be called the Indian Camp Dam. The dam would have been close to where the current and smaller Talpa Reservoir is located (see map 6). While originally popular in Taos in the 1950s, plans for the Indian Camp Dam met with real resistance once federal and state project officials proposed a conservancy district to reorganize water governance. Taoseños worried that the project would raise taxes on already poor farmers. Locals also feared a loss of water governance for the area’s acequias and domestic mutual water associations that provide drinking water from wells. The formation of the conservancy district near Albuquerque, decades before, fed these concerns in Taos.
AFTER INDIAN CAMP DAM, THE INEVITABLE
The Indian Camp Dam died because of local opposition to taxation and loss of governance.5 However, adjudication continued as the process had already been triggered by the OSE and the state’s attorney general. After all, a full water accounting was needed for the San Juan-Chama Project and its effects on water rights. The OSE was charged with mapping these lands, waters, and preexisting cultures of waters. It was hard work to envision, much less complete. What is remarkable was the amount of time, precision, and annotation for crops inserted into each map. Each map was made with care yet errors abounded, and the later files are replete with correction maps for boundary sliver issues, ownership changes, and crop annotations that changed over time. Water and water use never stay still, and the maps would have to be constantly updated to be correct.
Mapping, field checking, and aerial photography of all water users and their fields in the valley ensued. OSE field staff came to depend on local irrigator knowledge in Taos. One day in 2011, I spoke with Bob, a retired OSE field technician then in his early seventies. As he recounted his experience in the Taos Valley, what seemed like an expert’s account quickly morphed into a humble narrative of long days, confusion, mistakes, and later corrections at the office in Santa Fe. The work was difficult, and Bob’s realm of expertise depended on local knowledge to execute it in any satisfactory way, as he related.
We needed their help to make this happen. I mean, there was a lot of discussion … I sometimes felt like they were negotiating
