Acequias: Trust and Hydrosocial Territory

Abstract

Acequias:Trust and Hydrosocial Territory Sylvia Rodríguez (bio) This essay originally appeared in Sustainability and Water Management in the Maya World and Beyond, edited by Jean T. Larmon, Lisa J. Lucero, and Fred Valdez Jr. Louisville: University Press of Colorado, pp. 200–227, 2022. It is republished here with permission. Acequias And Moral Economy New Mexico's acequias belong to a family of hand-dug, gravity-flow, small-scale, farmer-managed irrigation systems found all over the world. Some are historically related, but others are not. Despite their differences in terms of environment, geography, climate, regional and national setting, language, and culture, these systems all seem to operate in strikingly similar ways. This alignment has led one anthropologist to propose that their common operating principles are the result of a rare process of convergent evolution, whereby the same form emerges independently in different places and times, because it is highly adaptive (Trawick, Reig, and Salvador 2014). Such systems—which are found, for example, in the Andes, Mexico, Spain, Switzerland, China, India, Nepal, the Philippines, Africa, and Bali—have proven to be sustainable and resilient within their respective ecological settings, whether arid or humid. Nevertheless, many have disappeared under the onslaught of modernization, while those that still exist struggle to survive in the face of myriad adverse political, economic, social, demographic, environmental, and climatic forces. This chapter examines the dynamic interface between acequia governance and the broader hydrosocial regime and territory in which it is embedded. My discussion explores the question of acequia sustainability [End Page 582] in light of ethnographic, historical-, comparative-, political-, and ecological systems–modeling perspectives. This analysis moves from microsocial to macrosocial levels and back again, focusing on how the tension between local and regional water politics has evolved through time. Acequia Agriculture And Governance The term "acequia" refers to both the irrigation canal and the association of parciantes who own and operate it. The association consists of farmer-rancher parciantes, or water right and landowners who share a common presa (stream diversion) into a hand-dug acequia madre ("mother ditch") from which linderos, venitas, sangrías (laterals) convey water to individual properties. Their basic canal structure and operating principles derive from Islamic-Iberian rules, technology, and practices introduced to the semiarid upper Rio Grande valley by Spanish colonial settlers who occupied mercedes reales, or grants of land awarded by the Spanish Crown, starting in the late sixteenth century. Acequia agriculture extended riparian habitats, transformed regional ecology, and created the northern New Mexican landscape seen today. Acequia irrigation was integral to the agropastoral economy that persisted into the twentieth century and survives today in reduced and modified form among rural and semiurban Nuevomexicanos. Even though few parciantes today subsist entirely or even primarily on agriculture, acequias remain the organizational backbone of many rural Nuevomexicano communities. The moral economy model of community irrigation management posits a system of principles and values that supports and guides cooperative, independent economic practice. Drawing on ethnographic research in highland Peru and Valencia, Spain, understood in light of Elinor Ostrom's work (1990), Trawick identifies nine operating principles common to all small-scale, farmer-operated irrigation systems: autonomy, alternation or turn taking, contiguity in distribution, uniformity, proportionality, transparency, boundary maintenance, direct feedback, and graduated sanctions (Trawick 2003; Trawick, Reig, and Salvador 2014, 88). Like their Islamic-Iberian forebears and modern cognates in Valencia, New Mexico's acequia irrigation systems exhibit these attributes. [End Page 583] Parciantes Parciantes are obligated to pay dues, contribute labor to the cleaning and maintenance of acequia infrastructure, observe the customs of water sharing, and annually elect a mayordomo (ditch boss) and three commissioners who oversee ditch management and governance. Labor contribution and water allocation are proportional to the amount of acreage a parciante irrigates. The mayordomo allocates water proportionally to parciantes in good standing on the basis of equity and need, supervises communal labor on the ditch, and resolves disputes over water. Commissioners include a secretary, treasurer, and president. Acequia communities define themselves as place-based, territorial, and linked through time by kinship, spatial contiguity, and a continuous round of sacred and secular calendric and life-cycle rituals. Today...