Watering The Desert: Can an ancient water management system save the Southwest?

It’s hotter than you ever thought possible. You should have prepared better for this hike but now you’re out here with an empty water bottle and burning skin. Your legs feel heavy and your head aches, your vision blurs, blood rushes in your ears, you feel nauseous. 

You plop down in the sand under some scrub brush, wiggling to get your head deeper into the dappled shade it provides - any twig between you and the sun is a positive development. 

You tell yourself you can’t stop here but the shade feels good. You close your eyes for what you tell yourself is just a minute… 

You open them to a stock-still jackrabbit a few inches from your face. 

Sunlight filters through the blood vessels in the jackrabbit’s large ears and staring at you are luminous orange eyes that have seen present, past, future, and the yet-to-be-imagined, all possibilities unfurling like the desert landscape at sunrise. 

You stare back into those deranged eyes as the red walls of the slot canyon at high noon undulate around you like a contracting birth canal, ready to deliver you into the world of the dead if you don’t get water soon. 

There’s a rumbling from the sky. The threat of monsoon rains rouses you from the dappled shade of the shrub. To be caught in a slot canyon in a rainstorm leads to a different kind of water-related death. 

The monsoon season is the period of time from June to September in which (hopefully) several times a week the blue summer sky becomes dark, the temperature drops ten degrees, wind bends the trees, thunder cracks, and rain and hail pelt the earth. 

These periodic hard rains replenish the dry earth in the hottest months, recharges streams and rivers and groundwater, reduces the risk of wildfires, sustains local agriculture, and waters the native plants that keep the topsoil from blowing away. 

However, the rains also rush down the arroyos and will wash away any unfortunate soul caught in the concrete canyon. They lead to flooding areas with wildfire burn scars and too many paved surfaces. 

This water, which appears so suddenly, leaves quickly - rushing away to a somewhere that is not here.

Surface water in New Mexico is a fickle mistress, and must be handled carefully - the state’s agriculture, much of which is among small, family growers, rely on it. However, at the same time as the state defaults on our water debt owed to other states, the elite and private equity quietly are sucking up both surface and ground water. 

They buy water rights from small farmers and tap into the aquifer in order to run microchip manufacturing plants, natural gas fracking operations, and water the grass at their golf courses and country clubs (located in the desert). 

They use millions of gallons of water every day and what fraction of that gets returned to the water system is contaminated with heavy metals and forever chemicals. 

While the wealthy can easily leave New Mexico once it’s too hot and the water is gone or unsafe, the rest of us (some of whom have called these lands home for centuries), will have to cope.

The solution, and what many water security activists in New Mexico call for, is polycentric water governance, “where decision-making authority [...] is not held centrally by the state, but instead is divided across multiple, overlapping decision centers” - very much like the acequia system that New Mexico has used for the past 2,500 years.  

Acequia is a term that refers to both the centuries-old Indigenous-Spanish-African irrigation ditches and the democratic community-based governance structure that regulates their use. This is a system that ensures equitable access to water and intelligent water use.

Acequia ditches use gravity to funnel existing surface water (typically river water) to local farmers for agricultural uses, and as a result recharges the aquifers by allowing some that water to soak into the muddy bottom of the ditches. A 10-year study of the acequia system in NM found that flood irrigation also contributed to aquifer recharge.  This seepage also allows acequias to serve as a riparian zone for native and edible plants, and wildlife, mimicking the flood pattern of natural rivers and streams. 

The entire ditch system for a geographic area, from dues to disputes, is managed by the mayordomo or “ditchboss” and the comisarios that assist them. Mayordomos are democratically elected by the irrigators (paricantes) who own irrigable land along an acequia madre (mother ditch or main ditch) who would be the users of the water in the acequia madre. 

According to Sylvia Rodriguez’s ethnography of acequias in Taos Valley, NM, mayordomos have intensely specialized, local knowledge about flood irrigation, the hydrology of a given area, the irrigators, and their crops. State statute requires that mayordomos and comisarios meet in the spring to decide how the water will be divided given that year’s conditions (river flow, snow pack,  weather patterns, expected monsoon duration, number of irrigators, what is being irrigated, etc.). Thus year to year, the strategy for water sharing adjusts based on the prevailing conditions for that year rather than the expectation that the river will have the same flow rate year after year. 

When sharing water, assumptions like those about consistent river flow shortchange the folks downstream and can lead to water debt - like the kind that New Mexico finds itself owing..

Each acequia ditch system, 700 of which still exist in New Mexico, has their own customs around sharing water - often born from the ubiquitous human struggle for water, especially in times of stress, and these struggles shaped by the unique history of each ditch system. 

As Rodriguez details in her book on the Taos Valley acequias, some acequias abide by a system of water sharing (el reparto de agua) where water is allocated based on the amount of land to be irrigated. In other acequias, water is allocated on a timed-release basis (minutes, hours, days). Often there is a combination of the two systems based on the amount of water available in the system overall. 

In my own neighborhood, that is primarily residential with a few hobby gardeners, water is first come, first serve once the acequia is flowing. One call to the mayordomo and these urban parciantes are (usually) able to irrigate their gardens, orchards, or lawns for a particular period of time (minutes or hours). 

Acequia systems prioritize certain kind of land use in times of crisis - animals first, then human food production, then animal food production (usually alfalfa), and lastly lawns. Seniority, wealth, or any other social status does not confer exclusive rights to the water. It is always shared according to need. 

A rich spiritual and moral economy has developed around acequias, where water is a common good for which all are responsible and must protect. An acequia system ties the water access to the land parcel (rather than making water a transferable commodity like under the prevailing water laws of the US) and positions water as a shared and essential resource, not something to be hoarded and exploited for the benefit of the individual. 

One major difference between the acequia system and water rights as they exist in the US is the that the latter adheres to the “Prior Appropriation Doctrine” which says, in part, “water rights may be forfeited if not applied to a beneficial use” - known colloquially as “use it or lose it” water rights. This leads to irrigators using water they don’t need out of concerns of losing their water rights if they don’t use every drop they are entitled to. 

On the other hand, acequia systems encourage parciantes to decline using water they don’t need or to only take what is needed, especially in times of drought or low water availability. 

The participants in Rodriguez’s study affirmed that the vast majority of parciantes share water equitably and participated fully in the acequia system, from the democratic processes to the shared responsibilities like ditch maintenance. 

I’ve seen in my own neighborhood what happens when the rules of the acequia system are violated - a padlock on the gate that the offending parciante opens to allow water to flow into their fields. Cut off from the water, the parched parciante must discuss their indiscretion with the mayordomo to hopefully have water rights restored.

This system of direct accountability is a far cry from our current system where large corporations are expected to self-police and self-regulate their water use. 

If the surface water of New Mexico was placed back in the hands of democratic processes and the acequia system, it would both prevent overuse by corporate interests and the elites, but also ensure that folks have equal access to water regardless of their tax bracket. This contributes to more water staying on the land - in the rivers, on crops, in the aquifer - rather than being sucked into industrial use. Democratic use of water necessarily precludes the exact kind of industrial gluttony that leads to dropping well levels near microchip plants or heavy metal contamination from fracking operations.  

If we could put a stop to the use of desert waters for manufacturing, extractive industry, and stupid frivolities like golf courses, New Mexico might stand a chance of being habitable long into the future. Without making everyone accountable for their water usage - and wastage - we will continue to careen towards a hot, dry future and an uninhabited American Southwest.