Legal politics and emergent water collectives in the Middle Rio Grande

Keywords: Acequia, Water, Empire, Colonialism, US West, New Mexico
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 39

Abstract

New Mexico is notable within the Western U.S. for the prevalence of acequias—a Spanish irrigation system in which communities autonomously manage their water resources, sharing in abundance and scarcity alike (Rivera 1998). A socio-material system constructed and implemented by Spanish conquistadors and still practiced today, this approach to water management offers a communal alternative to the dominant liberal water regime in the state, one based on the doctrine of prior appropriation and private use rights (Rodriguez 2006). Acequias are thus both a technology of settler colonialism and a bulwark against further enclosures via privatization and marketization in a semi-arid and drying region (Perramond 2019).
In the Middle Rio Grande, spanning 150 miles north and south of Albuquerque, colonial enclosure of acequia communities was accomplished a century ago through a technocratic conservancy district that delivered flood control, heightened taxes, and attendant legal takeovers of acequias. The last 20 years have seen a resurgence of acequia organizing in the Middle Rio Grande, centered in Albuquerque’s unincorporated South Valley. Yet their presumptive and discursive challenge to the state’s dominant water regime occurs within liberal empire’s legal and political frameworks, at times reproducing their logics (Schmidt & Mitchell 2014). South Valley acequias thus represent a hybrid commons, working toward expanded rights and responsibilities in mixed property regimes (Turner 2016). This study draws on semi-structured interviews and archival methods to elucidate social and legal strategies for acequia autonomy in the shadow of their historic incorporation into U.S. empire.