Local guardians, or mayordomos (such as Nicasio Romero, above) oversee acequias, which create oases wherever they flow. "You have to be a mediator, a counselor and a confidant," says Romero.
AGES AGO AS A COLLEGE KID I WAS HAPPILY DRIVING LOST
through northern New Mexico'S high Sierra landscape of dirt- road villages and piiion-juniper forests when I saw an old farmer lying facedown beside a narrow irrigation ditch.
Unsure if I had stumbled upon a heart attack or siesta, I slowed down and shouted, "You all right?"
No answer.
"Sir, estd bien?"
Slowly, he rolled over on his side and eyed me, bemused.
"Sorry," I replied awkwardly, feeling very gringo. "You looked dead_muerto."
"No, not yet young man," he replied with a laugh, brushing grass from his hat. "I was just napping. I like to listen to the acequia_the ditch. It's beautiful, no?"
I nodded politely. Beautiful? I knew ditches only as mos quito-infested flood-control channels around Houston, where I grew up, or as charmless concrete canals dissecting huge farms and ranches. But that afternoon, my first flirtation in a long romance with New Mexico water, I discerned something quite different.
Barely three feet wide and half that deep, frill with numb ingly cold snowmelt from io,ooo-foot peaks in the distance, the gende acequia (ah-sAKE-ya) rushed along grassy banks and hid beneath tall stands of venerable cottonwoods and lazy wil lows. Dug by shovels, not a seven-ton backhoe, the ditch me andered past backyard plots of beans, squash, chile peppers, apples and alfalfa, and splashed through creaking headgates and past the ubiquitous rusting Toyota pickups on blocks. So slender and overgrown by weeds that it was invisible from a distance, you could trace its course by the green ribbon of veg etation trailing it through the parched valley.
I admit, I was smitten by a ditch. Alas, it has been an unrequited affair because of my wife's reluctance to uproot the kids so that I, too, can take long naps in the sun and grow oddly shaped squash full-time. She's funny that way. But I still sneak out for brief flings, and this past summer I spent some time traveling acequia country, visiting with farmers, histo rians, activists, water merchants and, most of all, the mayordomos. They're the folks whose job it is to maintain the ditches, make sure all acequia users get their share of water and keep the peace among the ditch mem bers, or parciantes, especially in times of drought.
For reasons both practical and sen timental, the families that maintain acequias are similarly smitten by ditches. Built by Spanish colonizers in the i7th and i8th centuries, acequias were once the lifelines of many rural Hispanic communities from Texas to California. But now they are dried
night call inquiring, "\Vhere's my water?"
up, or mere curiosities, everywhere but in northern New Mexico (plus a few places in southern Colorado), where more than a thousand still sur vive. In this proudly ethnic region, where every valley seems to have Apodacas, Montoyas and Martinezes who have farmed the same land since before the Civil War, acequias are community traditions, among the old est public works projects in America. Their local governing commissions, also known as acequias, are perhaps the nation's oldest democratic institu tions.
Once, the mayordomos who direct the ditches' maintenance were almost exclusively Hispanic men with flow ing mustaches, full-time farmers in starched shirts who grew up on the ditches, walking in the footsteps of their fathers and grandfathers. Today,
most mayordomos still have Spanish names and do at least some farming. But their ranks also include urban refugees from California, Anglo au thors and poets, Hispanic activists and, despite the macho subculture, several women. It is an eclectic hunch that easily accommodates a man like Nicasio Romero.
Between Santa Fe and Las Vegas, New Mexico, in the floodplain of the Pecos River, Romero and his wife, Janet, a schoolteacher from New York, settled in the tiny village of El Ancon in 1972, paying 5200 a year for a former hippie hangout with no plumbing and 30 acres. The youngest of eight kids and the first to graduate from high school, Romero picked cot ton with his family near Roswell, New Mexico, as a migrant worker in the 195os; then came college and a U.S. Army tour, during which he translated intercepted phone calls from Havana to Moscow for the Na tional Security Agency.
"I got radicalized during the Viet nam War and moved to Berkeley," says Romero, whose mossy gray beard, round belly and dark oval sun glasses invoke departed rock icon Jerry Garcia. Later came a law school stint and a master's degree in art.
His sprawling yard amounted to a kind of sculpture zoo, filled with, among other things, whimsical iron baseball players and a ten-foot-tall adobe slab embedded with junked electronic devices. ("I put this one on pause,"~ Romero says, brushing dirt from a tape recorder wedged in the slab, "so I called the piece, Pause for the Millennium.")
As he leads me through a damp or chard of October pears, black plums and grapes, his two dogs, Lucky and Rosie, splash through mud up ahead. Romero has opened the gate, or san gria, to his lateral ditch running par allel to the acequia so he can water a field of blue corn. The bitter drought
Activists and farmers have joined forces, filing lawsuits
to preserve threatened ditches.
of two years ago has faded from memory, and these high desert
farm ers are giddy about their full ditches.
The El Ancon acequia still has old- timers on it who say they can judge the severity of a coming winter by the thickness of a stallion's coat. But these viejos are slowly being outnumbered by comfortable Anglos who can live almost anywhere_a former Universi ty of Chicago professor, a psychiatrist, a painter from Switzerland. Most live on rutted gravel roads, usually in re modeled adobe homes or newer self- built ones with metal roofs and fancy energy-saving features, several hun dred yards back from the Pecos, whose waters are diverted for the ditch.
Like all acequias, the El Ancon ditch is gravity-fed. Romero opens a metal headgate off the Pecos, where a presa, or dam, diverts water, and a stream flows slowly downhill into the acequia madre_the mother ditch. On a large ditch, with So or 90 members, water might take six to eight hours to reach the last user if the soil is un usually dry. Many a mayordomo has received a panicked late-night call in quiring, "Where's my water? It's my time to water."
Each acequia member, or parciante, is allowed to take a share of water, or derecho, corresponding to the amount of land he or she holds. Every ditch is different, but a half-derecho parciante might be entitled to irrigate for two hours on Tuesdays and Fridays, while a full-derecho parciante could use four hours on Wednesdays and Saturdays. "This is not a precise gal lons-per-minute deal," one mayordo mo explained.
When the rivers are full, so are the acequias, and the mayordomo's job largely involves clearing limbs and trash from headgates every few days and listening to stoop-shouldered women talk about their apple crops. For this, the acequia's three-person commission pays a mayordomo as lit-
de as nothing, on a smaller ditch, or up to about $400 a month, on a larger one.
But when water is scarce, as is often the case in a region that aver ages just over a foot of precipitation annually, parciantes must conserve and share, and the mayordomo must enforce their ancient honor system, making sure those at the top of the ditch leave enough water for those at the bottom. That's when the mayor domo must plead and cajole, and sometimes threaten parciantes with fines, or worse. It's not so common these days, but some vintage ditch bosses used to pack a pistol when set ting off on their ditch walks. Now diplomacy will usually suffice. "You
have to be a mediator, a counselor and a confidant," Romero tells me. You must always treat everyone equally, but every mayordomo learns quickly who he can completely trust and who must be watched to see that they don't open their gate at two in the morning."
Fortunately for mayordomos, it is very difficult to
hide a soggy field of alfalfa if everyone else's crops are toasting.
Neighbors learn to be nosy on an acequia. But Romero manages a
relatively small ditch and says he rarely has problems_at least
not with humans. "Beavers and gophers are what cause real
havoc," he says. "The beavers work at night and can
cut
down a three-foot-wide cottonwood. They're awesome. They'll dam
the ditch so that the water goes over the sides. Then you have
to rebuild it. Gophers just bore holes right through the sides."
There's no telling what Juan de Ofiate thought of gophers, but in 1598 the Spanish governor led a party of colonizers from central Mexico to the frontiers of New Spain along the upper Rio Grande above today's Santa Fe. In their diaries they mar veled at how the small Indian villages they encountered, which they called pueblos, or towns, already had fairly advanced irrigation systems, reminis cent of the Arab-engineered systems the Spaniards had known in Iberia. ("Acequia" comes from the Arabic as saqiyah, for canal.) Two years later, near what is now the town of Es pafiola, Ofiate used some 1,500 Indi an laborers to build the first perma nent acequia. According to University of New Mexico professor Jose Rivera, acequias were usually the first things built in any new Spanish settlement, even before churches.
These little ditches are an anachro nism in the age of multihillion-dollar irrigation projects that can be seen from outer space, yet in New Mexico the humble rivulets have inspired fes tivals, poetry and the 1988 Robert Redford movie The Milagro Beanfield War, based on a John Nichols novel. Acequias stir bitter legal battles, unite and divide communities, carry sacred water to Indian pueblos and create new rural economies and sustain an cient ones, while their protectors re sist the thirsty suburban sprawl that threatens to suck the ditches dry.
Few New Mexico villages are more attuned to these issues than tiny Dixon, home to seven acequias, about 40 miles north of Santa Fe. As in Taos and Santa Fe, the real estate bonanza here has sent land prices soaring_the cost of an irrigated acre in the Dixon
Valley has risen sharply to $40,000 or more_and has persuaded many old- line Hispanic families to sell.
From his backyard filled with 25 varieties of heirloom-apple trees, may ordomo and journalist Estevan Arell ano, 55, told me his father had sold a four-acre tract just next door for s8,ooo in 1964. "They're now asking $350,000 for it," he muses, having grown inured to the shock.
Those who do remain on their land find themselves joined in preserving the acequias by newcomers like Marie Coburn, a red-haired cabaret singer from Oakland_think Bette Midler in overalls_who came to town 14 years ago and remodeled a territorial-style house with three acres on an acequia. Eventually she started growing zin nias, globe amaranth, yarrow and cockscomb to supply dried flowers for her wildly distinctive wreaths and carnival-style masks, creations that became a big bit at the Santa Fe farmers' market.
Quietly, Coburn and others became part of a promising trend in northern New Mexico_small farmers and bou tique gardeners putting land back into production and actually making a liv ing. In doing so, they help keep the acequia alive by irrigating_a matter of no small consequence, since, accord ing to New Mexico law, landowners who fail to irrigate for five consecu tive years can lose their water rights. (If the law were ever enforced, say several state water experts, perhaps as many as half of northern New Mexi co's landowners would lose their water_though not without sparking a small revolution.)
By the late 90s, Coburn's status as a hardworking small farmer with no influential enemies qualified her to be nominated for the post of mayordo ma of her Dixon ditch, the 98-mem ber Acequia del Llano. "I was quali fied," Coburn says with a laugh, "because I said I would do it."
One of her Hispanic parciantes confided to me that he thought a strong female like Coburn was actu ally better for the ditch because stub born macho males would be less in dined to physically intimidate a woman. As for Coburn, "I never in timidate," she says with a chuckle. "I would rather use peer pressure.
One thunderous summer afternoon I joined Coburn as she walked along the Rio Embudo to clean out the headgate of her acequia. "This_eee eeeyuck!_is the hard part," she grunt-
ed as she leaned into the rushing Em budo to wrestle out a six-foot cotton wood limb. Her scuffed hiking boots and khaki work pants were thorough ly soaked. Beads of sweat flew off her freckled nose. During one memorable storm, she recalled, she had left her home six times to clean out the head- gate so the ditch would flow freely. "Sure, I wanted to stay in and stay warm," she said, "but it's those times that you are forced to go out in the rain in the middle of the night that you have time to think and see the acequi
as in ways that most people never do." In one bleak drought in 1996 she
had to limit her parciantes to 30 min utes of water a week, trusting every one to cooperate for the common good. They did, and that simple act of community sacrifice was repeated throughout all of northern New Mex ico that summer. "It was inspirational to me," says Coburn, "that people could actually share such a valuable resource. It gave me hope."
For the farmer who limps along on marginal land that's been in the fami
ly for generations, the acequia makes possible a life that otherwise could not be afforded. The ditches allow thousands of families to grow enough alfalfa, oats and corn to feed cows, pigs and chickens. "If we have meat, we can survive up here on very lit tle," one Hispanic farmer in his ~os told me. "We built our homes. Our kids are grown. The cars are paid for. But if we didn't have the ditch, food would cost too much, and we'd all have to find jobs at Wal-Mart."
It is an article of faith for those families: water is inseparable from the land. The ditch is very nearly a mem ber of the family, a living connection to ancestors and an independent rural way of life that slips farther away with each new generation.
The acequias are under serious pressure, much of it coming from water brokers and from developers, who quietly come to town and seek out families willing to sell their land or their water rights. The incentives are compelling, since in some desirable villages north of Santa Fe, rights to an acre-foot of water_~~,8~i gallons, the amount needed to cover one acre with one foot of water_are going for a one-time fee of $30,000 to $40,000, while below Albuquerque the same amount might cost only $4,000.
Although the transfer of water tights can be maddeningly complex, the ba sics of such transactions are simple.
Let's say an acequia farmer in Dixon irrigates one acre of land. The state has determined that in this section of the Rio Grande basin a single irrigat ed acre is entitled to two acre-feet of water annually. (A family of four in Albuquerque uses about 200,000 gal lons of water in a year, while nearby, golf courses often use a million gallons in a single summer day.) The Dixon farmer, whose ditch eventually feeds into the Rio Grande, can then sell the right to this water to a buyer on the same river drainage system.
Mayordomo Estevan Arellano checks the acequia
that will water his orchard.The practice of trading in water as
a commodity,
Some water brokers advertise their services. Others are more discreet, scouring newspapers for obituaries and notices of bankruptcies and di vorces. "They find out who's finan cially vulnerable," says Paula Garcia, director of the nonprofit New Mexico Acequia Association. "It's not hard to find who wants to sell."
It is, after all, the American way:
willing seller meets eager buyer. But as more farms and ranches give way
to day spas and rust-colored adobe mansions_New Mexico lost 3 percent of its farmers from 1992 to i997_the Hispanic rural culture that has nur tured the acequias for 400 years be gins inexorably to unravel.
Not everyone, though, sheds a tear. "The acequia system is doomed," says water broker Bill Turner, who over sees the Albuquerque-based company Westwater Resources. He is also a member of Republican New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson's task force on water. Within ~o years, the ace quias will largely be all gone. But change is good. Communities live and
observes one activist, is "like selling sunshine."
die. That's the way of the world." A former Peace Corps worker in Cyprus, Turner has studied water sys tems all over the world and refuses to romanticize the acequia culture. "Most of these villages are a welfare or sub sistence economy," he says. "Many young people are not content with
their lives. I don't want to see them imprisoned in their communities.
Not surprisingly, Paula Garcia views Turner as a "spokesman for the dark side." She and other acequia loy alists see his unwavering allegiance to the market economy as shortsighted and destructive. And these are always volatile issues, influenced as they are by Hispanic resentment of Anglo en croachment. The Anglo proportion of New Mexico's population grew about 8 percent from 1990 tO 2000.
In some Hispanic communities, the stigma attached to "selling out" is so pervasive that older residents will
speak with brokers like Turner only in secret. I've got about a dozen people who have contacted me in the last month," says Turner, "but I can't tell you a thing about them, not even the county they're from. It's too sen sitive. One older man told me that if his wife knew he was talking to me she would divorce him."
As for Garcia, she knows firsthand what it's like to grow up on a poor New Mexico ranch where survival depends upon water, and the pressure to sell out hangs in the air like the smell of clamp hay. A graduate student at the University of New Mexico, Gar cia grew up on family land in Mora County, northeast of Santa Fe, where more than 8~ percent of the county's 5,200 residents are Hispanic and near ly 40 percent of its children live in poverty. "Every so often," she says, "people drive by and ask my grand father if our land is for sale. I've never actually been there when that has happened, but if I ever am, they will regret having crossed my path."
Making what they hope will not be a last stand, some farmers and activists believe acequia culture can be saved with legislation requiring a majority vote of parciantes before any water rights can be sold, and by nurturing farmers' markets and the burgeoning organic produce industry.
Yet as long as so many of us see
water as a mere commodity and not as a social resource to be shared, acequia loyalists have good reason to fear for their culture. "When I tell older peo ple in these communities that you can actually buy and sell water rights, they can't believe it," says Garcia. 'They say, 'You can do that?' It's anti thetical to everything they are about. They say it's like selling sunshine." X
Brure Seicraig. a writer based in Austin, Texas, ran be reached at selcraig@swbell.net. Photographer Glenn Oakley works out of his studio in Boise, Idaho.