Colorado College students and Juan Estevan Arellano walk along the dry Acequia de la Junta y Ciénega ditch, on the lower Embudo River, in February 2014
MAPS
1. Interview locations included in Unsettled Waters
2. Distribution of acequias in New Mexico
3. Locations of completed and pending stream adjudications in New Mexico as of 2017
4. Map of the Aamodt adjudication area, the Pojoaque River Valley, showing the four major pueblos
5. Map of the San Juan-Chama Project
6. Map of the Taos Valley and its major streams and acequias
7. Location map of Top of the World Farms in northern Taos County
8. General location map for the Active Water Resource Management (AWRM) basins currently administered by the Office of the State Engineer
9. Map of the regional acequia associations in New Mexico
10. The official Office of the State Engineer/Interstate Stream Commission map of designated water regions for planning purposes
11. Regional map of the Santa Fe River watershed (Anaya adjudication area)
12. Location and context of the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District within the larger Middle Rio Grande stretch and major works on the Rio Grande
13. Hypothetical future conflicts in the western United States over water resources
TABLES
1. Key points and benefits of the Aamodt settlement (Nambé-Pojoaque-Tesuque Valleys)
2. Key points and benefits of the Taos Pueblo Water Rights Settlement Agreement
3. Costs of adjudication and settlements in New Mexico, 2005–2018
Preface
“Why are you here, exactly?” Tamara asked me on a hot July day in 2011. We stood by the Rio Santa Barbara, a high-mountain New Mexican stream lined with cottonwoods and aspens, with dry meadows and juniper-dotted hills stretching beyond. Tamara had been describing her work as a mayordoma, the water ditch boss in charge of allocating the stream’s trickle to her neighbors’ fields.
By that point, four years into my research, I’d been asked this question many times, and I had the answer: “I’m here to listen and learn.”
“Well,” she said, straightening up a bit, “that’s different.”
Unsettled Waters conveys the voices and concerns of actual people caught up in the legal labyrinth of what are known as water rights adjudications. Water adjudications in the American West are often state-driven lawsuits designed to find, map, and inventory existing water-use rights. Every western state has its own distinct procedure, although many share similar templates.
For all involved in these watershed lawsuits—the irrigators, lawyers, technicians, politicians, and observers like me—adjudication is a complex, adversarial, and sometimes baffling process. Adjudication has been underway for well over a century, longer than New Mexico has been a state, and there is no end in sight. It can also seem boring, as most of the work is conveyed in legalese through administrative court documents. This is partially why the process has often been ignored.
However, as I learned from water users like Tamara, adjudication is anything but boring. Adjudication resurfaces conflicts. It delves into the intricacies of state cartographies, of multiple histories of colonialism, culture, sovereignty, and identity. The process has exposed, antagonized, and rearticulated social relationships over water that are vital to understand in an era of increasing water scarcity and competing demands.
This book is a geographic ethnography that makes use of living testimony, historical and legal archives, and on-the-ground observations from New Mexico. When I moved back to the West in 2005, I was interested in pursuing regional research that reflected my new academic appointment at Colorado College in Southwest studies and environmental science. It all started as a modest project to document how small ditches in New Mexico were coping with water scarcity. It turned into something far more complex than I had anticipated. Adjudication kept coming up in my interviews. I was curious as to what adjudications entailed, why they were taking so long, and what they meant for water users. My small summer project turned into a decade-long study that, like adjudication, still continues. Like the process itself, this book has had to account for the state’s fixation with tracking water users and prior dates of water use and the fact that the process is ongoing and still happening in the present, with an eye toward the future. After all, when New Mexico started this enterprise, the hope was that there might be water left over to allocate.
As New Mexicans made clear from the start, our collective water futures are at stake in adjudications. I listened to water experts across the spectrum, from irrigators like Tamara to the attorneys and state experts who conduct the process. Unsettled Waters is a book for all who care about the future of water, the ways in which states allocate and manage water, and the effects of these largely unseen legal proceedings on water users.
Acknowledgments
I am most grateful to all the water rights holders, irrigators, ditch bosses (mayordomos), ditch riders, water managers, lawyers, engineers, hydrologists, and personnel from the Office of the State Engineer (New Mexico) who generously agreed to share information, insights, and expertise of all kinds. This book is the result of our conversations, and I hope it provokes more of them.
Various chapters and snippets in Unsettled Waters were informed by Melanie Stansbury, David Correia, Juan Estevan Arellano, Darcy Bushnell, Eric Shultz, Sylvia Rodriguez, Stanley Crawford, Miguel Santistevan, Maria Lane, David Benavides, Paul Mathews, David Garcia, and Aaron Bobrow-Strain. I want to single out Maria Lane’s excellent work that is reshaping our understanding of water, science, and the courts during the territorial period of New Mexico. Melanie Stansbury and Darcy Bushnell were vital to my early understanding of the Aamodt case and the multiple outcomes of adjudication in general. Long-time water authors Helen Ingram and Jim Wescoat corrected early misconceptions and filled in gaps. New Mexico water beat reporters Staci Matlock and John Fleck also had useful feedback and insight as I developed the prospectus for this book. Rick Carpenter at the City of Santa Fe Water Division also provided repeated individual and course visits to the infrastructure of that small city.
To the late Juan Estevan Arellano, I owe the most: his lessons and his memory remind us of the values and challenges of small-scale irrigation in New Mexico. His recently released Enduring Acequias appeared before he passed in late October 2014 and will no doubt serve his legacy well. William Doolittle and the late Karl Butzer shaped my early understanding of the value of ancient and historic irrigation systems.
At Colorado College, I am humbled to have current (and former) colleagues willing to share their time, support, and expertise. This work was shaped by conversations, ideas, and inspiration by my colleagues in Southwest studies—notably, Santiago Guerra and Karen Roybal (Montoya).
