While the 2010 United Nations Resolution 64/292 on the human right to water and sanitation is an important development, it is not adequate to protecting the range of claims to a human right to water made by rural agricultural communities and Indigenous peoples. To better grasp what is at stake in establishing universal human rights to water, it is important to understand the different infrastructures and institutions through which Indigenous and rural political and ethical communities distribute water. Colonial hydropolitics play a significant role in displacing and obscuring Indigenous alternatives to dominant colonial state concepts of water rights and urban water distribution infrastructures. The Middle Rio Grande Valley provides a site through which we can understand the processes of colonial hydropolitics and the potential of Indigenous alternatives. Research on different histories, geographies, and anthropologies of infrastructures and institutions of water distribution can allow us to better understand the ways colonial hydropolitics have given rise to contemporary problems of water distribution, which in turn can enable a more robust idea of what shapes a universal right to water can take. WIREs Water 2015, 2:425–431. doi: 10.1002/wat2.1077This article is categorized under: Human Water > Rights to Water Human Water > Water Governance