Liberal water law against itself: Acequias and legal contestation in New Mexico's South Valley

Abstract

The passage of New Mexico’s water code of 1907 enshrined water as a publicly owned good distributed to individuals via private use rights. This system of water governance threatened the communitarian practices of Hispano and Indigenous irrigators in the state. In the area surrounding Albuquerque, the subsequent institution of the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District in 1923 rationalized management, and absorbed and obviated acequias—community irrigation ditches autonomously governed according to Spanish custom—surrounding the state’s urban core. The dual thrust of these processes was the colonial enclosure of small farmers in the region via legal means. Six decades later, statewide acequia activism and the threat of water transfer to a large development west of Albuquerque spurred a resurgence of acequia life in the South Valley. Drawing on and informing an insurgent Hispano identity, the water struggles of the South Valley acequieros contest the outcomes of liberal water law using the tools of the same legal code that had earlier dispossessed them. This process refashions both acequias and the liberal systems into which they are absorbed, demonstrating that while colonial water law acts as a structure constraining the agency of hydro-social actors, legal-political struggle by these constrained agents dialectically reshapes the legal edifice within which they act. Water law thus appears as both a structuring condition of hydro-social life, codifying colonial social relations, and an object of struggle by which those relations might be remade from within.