Water

“Sin agua, no hay vida.” This traditional saying, which translates as “Without water, there is no life,” reflects a fundamental New Mexican reality.

The most valuable commodity in New Mexico is not gold. Despite early explorers’ fanciful tales of Indian cities whose streets were said to be paved with gold, very little in the way of precious metals has ever been discovered here.

Nor is land the most treasured commodity. The fifth largest state in the United States, New Mexico has vast expanses of land—an arid sea of crackled clay and sand punctuated by island-like evergreen-clad peaks reaching down from the southern tip of the Rocky Mountains near Santa Fe.

The most prized gift of nature in New Mexico, without a doubt, is water. The average precipitation in five representative cities and major towns near the Rio Grande—Taos, Los Alamos, Santa Fe, Albuquerque, and Las Cruces—is 13.25 inches a year. This is not a great deal of moisture. But according to the common meteorological definition of a desert (ten inches or less), New Mexico is not a desert at all. The state receives about the same amount of rainfall as Los Angeles and three times as much as Las Vegas. However, it is not simply a lack of rainfall that makes the landscape so dry.

Several factors besides rainfall combine to give New Mexico’s terrain its desert character. At lower elevations, almost all the annual precipitation comes during the two-month monsoon season, from early July through August. In the winter, most snow falls on the high mountains, accumulating until the spring thaw, when it runs off into flash-flooding arroyos, swollen creeks, and raging rivers that are dry the rest of the year. The water rushes away down sunbaked slopes with little time to soak into the earth. Although much of the water is captured in large reservoirs along the Rio Grande and Chama rivers, this water is not available for use by either rural or urban New Mexicans. It is reserved for downstream big agriculture in Texas.

As a result, water is a surrealistic commodity in New Mexico. The water captured in man-made lakes is only available for fishing and boating. As far as drinking water or irrigation water are concerned, it might as well not exist. On the other hand, legal water rights claims often relate to “dry water”—water that in fact does not exist.

For many reasons, New Mexicans already face the kind of freshwater problems that will become more acute around the globe in the near future: conflicts between urban and rural users, conflicts between indigenous users and post-colonial governments, and conflicts of law about how water rights are defined, to name just a few.

acequia at Dixon’s Apple Orchards

New Mexico’s small farmers live on the forefront of all these issues, and sometimes the unpredictable rainfall can make their lifestyle tenuous. In the years 2002 through mid-2006, the worst drought since weather records began struck New Mexico. Precipitation declined to less than half the seasonal norm, and the normally semiarid landscape became one of the driest deserts in the United States. Streams and acequias dried up, and small farmers were forced to install drip irrigation to survive. Trees died by the hundreds of thousands. Cities like Santa Fe imposed draconian water restrictions that banned all outdoor uses of water, including gardening, landscaping, and even car washing. Yet suburban housing development continued unabated, taking it on faith that the rainfall would return one day.

And it did. In July and August 2006, after a dry spell when no trace of moisture had fallen in eight months, drenching storms came and lasted for two full months, breaking records for rainfall. Acequias, the traditional irrigation ditches that crisscross the farmlands, backed up and flooded crop fields. Hardest hit were the chile fields around Hatch in southern New Mexico. This and other areas of the state were declared federal disaster areas because of flood damage.

Be careful what you wish for . . .

Acequia Culture

From the Middle East to the New World

Acequia is the Spanish version of a Yemeni word for “irrigation ditch.” Like many aspects of life in Spanish colonial New Mexico, such as adobe brick homebuilding, acequia technology flowed here from the Middle East by way of Spain. More than water delivery systems, acequias became the basic building blocks of rural society, linking New Mexico’s farmers to those who came before across vast expanses of distance and time. Today in the United States—except for a handful of historic curiosities at some restored Spanish mission churches in Texas and California—acequias exist only in New Mexico.

When the first Spanish farmers arrived in New Mexico four centuries ago, they found that the Pueblo Indians were diverting water into their fields from earthen reservoirs by means of irrigation ditches that looked very similar to the ones their families back in Spain had used. The essential difference was that the acequia system of old Spain and Arabia used gates to let water onto one farmer’s property and then the next, while the Indians worked all their cropland communally. Both systems allowed water to be shared equitably in a climate where water availability was often unpredictable or scarce. As the settlers knew, the acequia system had been working in the Middle East since biblical times.

The first Spanish farmers came to New Mexico for the same reason as the English-speaking Pilgrims, who founded their smaller colony thousands of miles away on the continent’s east coast a generation later: to escape religious persecution. Since AD 711, Spain had been occupied by the Moors—Islamic North Africans whose armies had invaded across the Strait of Gibraltar. The Moors, as well as the Sephardic Jews who migrated into Spain in search of vacant land during the centuries that followed, were educated in ancient Middle Eastern agricultural methods dating back to around 8000 BC. Efforts by Christian armies to reconquer Spain began almost immediately and continued in different provinces, with varying degrees of success, for nearly eight centuries.

Spain was finally united under the Catholic monarchs Fernando and Isabel in 1492. The end of the war against the Moors freed up funds to finance exploration and colonization efforts. Just seven months later, the king and queen commissioned navigator Cristóbal Colón (known in his native Italy as Cristoforo Colombo and later, in the English-speaking world, as Christopher Columbus) to lead an ocean expedition across the Atlantic.

Neither religious tolerance nor the separation of church and state was recognized in European nations at that time. Jews and Muslims living in Spain after the reconquest were required by law to become Roman Catholic converts or to leave Spain. Those who stayed, including an estimated one hundred thousand converted Sephardic Jews—a large percentage of the country’s total population at that time—were called conversos (converts), or, more pejoratively, marranos (swine), a double entendre mocking their dietary prohibition against eating pork. Despite persecution in some provinces of Spain, conversos often held on to past positions of wealth and power, which fostered further resentment. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Spanish Inquisition—a court originally designed to prevent the “heresies” of Protestantism—turned its attention to the problem of the conversos. In a series of trials, Jewish converts were charged with privately practicing Judaism, prosecuted for heresy, and publicly burned at the stake in the Inquisition’s notorious autos-da-fé. By the time of the colonization of Mexico, secret Jews had become the main focus of the Inquisition. Extortion by neighbors, along with the church’s confiscation of land, property, and money as part of the punishment for those convicted of heresy, made Spain a dangerous place for conversos—wealthy aristocrats and subsistence farmers alike.

The solution for many was to leave Spain, booking passage for remote areas of the Spanish-speaking New World. In places like New Mexico, the church was represented by Franciscan missionaries. Preoccupied with bringing the Gospel to local Indians, the Franciscans had no interest in whether Spanish farmers had sincerely relinquished Judaism or not. Fray Angélico Chávez (1910–1996), a renowned New Mexico historian best known for his genealogy of the origins of New Mexico families during the Spanish colonial period, asserted that more than half the settlers who came to New Mexico in the 1600s—including his own ancestors—were of Jewish descent.

New Mexico’s Semitic roots matter because the Spaniards who conquered the New World on behalf of Spain were predominantly military men, nobility, and bureaucrats. They knew little of farming. Under the feudal system in Mexico, army commanders and government functionaries were rewarded for their service with land grants while the actual work of growing crops and livestock was performed by the same native people who had always lived on the land. But in the remote land of New Mexico, the situation was different.

How Colonial Farmers Came to New Mexico

At the end of the sixteenth century, the king of Spain decided to establish a northern outpost that would serve as a buffer between Mexico, then known as Nuevo España, and the vast, largely unknown lands to the north. The colony would protect Mexico from invasion not only by nomadic Indian tribes but also by English-speaking adventurers. Although no British colony had yet been established anywhere in the Americas, the recent defeat of the Spanish Armada meant that it was only a matter of time. Having decreed the colonization of Nuevo Mexico on the northern outskirts of the desolate Chihuahua Desert, the crown offered leadership of the expedition to the highest bidder. The winner was Juan de Oñate, a silver baron in the town of Zacatecas, New Spain. One of the richest men in the country, Oñate was the grandson-in-law of conquistador Hernán Cortés and his mistress, La Malinche, Aztec king Moctezuma’s daughter. Oñate was to organize the expedition at his own expense, buy all needed provisions, and recruit colonists. In exchange, he would receive a large tract of land, including “ownership” of all the Indians that lived on it.

When Oñate’s expedition set out in the year 1598, it consisted of about 130 farmers, mostly conversos, and their families, along with 200 soldiers and ten Franciscan missionaries. They brought 1,100 cattle, 4,000 sheep, 1,000 goats and 300 horses—the first livestock to be raised on New Mexican farms. Before that, the Pueblo Indians had kept dogs and turkeys, but there is no evidence that they used either one for food. Turkeys were raised as a source of feathers for ceremonial decoration and blanket weaving, and dogs were apparently used only as hunting companions and household pets.

Oñate, though a rich businessman, proved to be a poor leader. Hoping to find a route up the Rio Grande to the mythical Straits of Anian—a passage thought to connect the Mississippi River with the Pacific Ocean—Oñate brought a full complement of sailors and shipbuilding equipment, but he did not bring enough supplies for his farmers, soldiers, and priests, who were forced to appeal to the local Indian pueblos for food and blankets to survive the unexpectedly harsh winter.

Oñate established his capital, San Gabriel, at the confluence of the Rio Grande and Rio Chama north of present-day Española, and parceled out small plots of farmland called suertes (Spanish for “luck”) along the riverbanks to his farmers through lottery-style drawings. Those whose small farms thrived would be rewarded with up to five additional suertes, creating farms called multifundias. The finest small farms in New Mexico were honored as joyas, or jewels, and today it is common to find rural back roads named La Joya.

After establishing San Gabriel, Oñate set out on a six-hundred-mile exploration that spanned from Oklahoma to the Gulf of Mexico, leaving the colonists unsupervised and unprotected. The Spanish farmers seemed to get along well with their Indian neighbors, working together on an extensive acequia system to irrigate the new farms. Oñate and his soldiers took a tougher approach to subjugating the Indians of the Southwest, however. In one particularly notorious February 1599 incident, he found seventy Indians at Acoma Pueblo guilty of battling with a small contingent of his men. As punishment, he ordered all Acoma men over age twenty-five to have their right feet cut off and to serve as slaves for twenty years; males age twelve to twenty-five had their right feet amputated but were not enslaved. (Almost four centuries later, when a bronze statue of Oñate was erected at a visitor’s center near the site of his original capital, vandals came in the dead of night with a cutting torch and removed his right foot—a lasting reminder of that colonial atrocity.)

Many more instances of Oñate’s cruelty to Indians followed, endangering their friendship with small Spanish farmers, whose lives became increasingly difficult and isolated. Deserters from the failing colony, mostly adventurers disgruntled because they had found no silver or gold, carried stories of the bad conditions in New Mexico back to Mexico City, where the Spanish viceroy ordered Oñate to stand trial for the atrocity at Acoma, wrongfully executing Indian and Spanish prisoners, and adultery. As the viceroy and the king of Spain discussed whether to terminate the Nuevo Mexico colony, the Spanish farmers and missionaries carried on without a government. Eventually, a new governor, Pedro de Peralta, was appointed, with instructions to abandon the old capital and establish a new one farther south at the site of present-day Santa Fe, which has remained the capital ever since.

But the farmers who had put forth so much effort to irrigate and work the land clung to their suertes in the north, and this area—from the confluence of the Rio Chama and the Rio Grande north to Velarde and Dixon—remains the foremost center of small traditional farming in New Mexico today. The Spanish farmers of northern New Mexico, like their Indian neighbors, continued to rely on themselves, growing local crops and assimilating new crops imported from Mexico, living independently and sustainably, avoiding contact with the colonial government.

More than two centuries later, after Mexico won its independence from Spain, the rural people of this area staged an unsuccessful rebellion trying to win their independence from Mexico. Soon afterward, when Mexico ceded New Mexico to the United States in settlement of the Mexican War, unidentified people from the same area assassinated Peralta, the first American territorial governor. Their way of life changed very little until the 1940s, when World War II meant the drafting of most young male Hispanics and Pueblo Indians into the military and the presence of the huge, top-secret government research base at Los Alamos introduced a new cash economy to northern New Mexico.

Traditional Farm Heritage

The Descendent

“We’re buying back some of the land that belonged to us.”

—Eduardo Velarde

Eduardo Velarde grows peaches, apples, plums, apricots, and nectarines on his farm in the rural northern New Mexico village that bears his family’s name.

Recounting his family’s legend, Eduardo Velarde says:

When Don Juan de Oñate first came on his expedition, my tenth- generation-back grandfather was his personal secretary. For his valor, they deeded him 52,000 acres, and he got to pick what he wanted. Then back in 1870-some, they took it all back, because it was a gift from a foreign country, and the United States doesn’t recognize foreign gifts.
But something, I understand, called the Homestead Act—President Taft signed it, and he deeded this piece of land to my grandfather. It’s about six acres since they cut the highway. It used to be about ten acres, and then when they made the four-lane in the ’60s they cut a bunch out. We’re buying back some of the land that belonged to us, and a lot of our relatives still have a lot of the land.
The acequia on this particular orchard is the Chicos Ditch. The other ones are on Garcia and Medio and there’s another one down there, I can’t remember the name. They’re all gravity flow from the Rio Grande. Ninety percent of the ditch is still in the original place where they dug it out. From what I understand, my relatives got a lot of Native Americans to help dig it out around 1608 or 1610, somewhere around then.

The Traditionalist

“Making foods and sharing them with your neighbors . . . sharing water . . . sharing labor . . . all these are things of the past.”

—Estevan Arellano

Estevan Arellano works an ancestral farm in the Embudo Valley, which has been in his family since 1725. Arellano is also a lecturer, journalist, and Spanish-language author. He is the translator of the first English-language version of Gabriel Alonso de Herrera’s Obra de Agricultura, a 1513 farming instruction manual used by Spanish colonists in the New World, now published under the title Ancient Agriculture (Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, Publisher, 2006). His farm has orchards, vineyards, and mixed fields grown in the traditional way of the first Spanish settlers. He also raises churro sheep, the original sheep the Spanish brought to the New World, and corrientes, the original cattle. He has been searching for the descendants of the original pigs that came from Spain but has not been able to find any. He recalls the early twentieth century and the changes that have taken place in northern New Mexico farming during his lifetime.

We would trade our fruits and vegetables by cambalache, which means barter, for other crops or for hunters’ meat like elk or venison. It was something like today’s CSAs [community-supported agriculture], except that we mostly dealt with relatives. Once, I remember, we traded a truckload of apples for a truckload of piglets. Those pigs will eat whatever you can’t sell or whatever falls on the ground. Now, today, I keep churro sheep. They eat apples, too.
We also used to sell from the back of a pickup truck or go house-to-house in Taos, but when we’d do this, we would mostly get Anglos who wanted to buy apples in one-pound bags. We Hispanics had larger families, so we sold to each other by the bushel.
You have to understand your own microclimate. People move in from outside the acequia culture and don’t understand it. This makes for a clash of cultures with outsiders, because they think they know more about sustainable agriculture, permaculture, and all that. It offends the local people, who have been farming the land for as much as four hundred years. How much more sustainable can you be?
In those days the farmers lived by certain principles. One of them was convicte de comida, which meant making foods and sharing them with your neighbors—anything from butchering an animal to making biscochitos. This is fading away as people shop individually at stores instead. Then there was apartamiento de agua, the Arabic concept of sharing water, and cooperación, or sharing labor. All these are things of the past. Los Alamos brought a cash economy to northern New Mexico, and then everything changed. People are too busy working or going to Indian casinos.

Farming has also changed in that many people have switched over to drip irrigation, often considered better in times of drought because it requires less water. But Arellano says this is an illusion. There would be enough water if the acequias were better maintained.

The banks of acequias were used as roads or trails between villages. Today we can’t do that because they’re overgrown with Russian olives, cottonwoods, and Chinese elms, so a lot of water is lost from the acequias. A single Chinese elm consumes two hundred gallons of water a day. And with all the vegetation, you can’t find the gopher holes that leak water out of the ditch. Priests used to parade along the acequias to bless them on San Antonio’s feast day, but now you can’t walk along the acequias any more, so the tradition has disappeared within my lifetime.

Drip irrigation, he claims, limits the range of crops that can be grown in a field because only the seeds planted in rows along the irrigation hoses get water. The traditional Spanish farmer’s field was more like a forest. A canopy of large trees protected smaller trees, which in turn protected grapevines, all sheltering lower crops from late and early frosts, down to the tiniest plants. One of his favorite things about traditional farming is the tiny, tasty volunteer plants like calite (lambs quarter) and verdulagas (purselane), which are used as herbs in traditional farm cooking. “We used to get huixtlacatle, a fungus that grows on blue corn, but hybrid corn doesn’t produce the fungus, so it has been lost. Other mushrooms also don’t grow because of the changes in the riparian environment as the acequias have gotten overgrown.”

acequia gate

Acequia Culture Today

The Acequia Activist

“Traditionally we measure water in time.”

—Miguel Santistevan

Miguel Santistevan, the Taos-area farmer and educator we met in the previous chapter, is among the leading figures in fighting to preserve New Mexico’s acequias through his activities with the New Mexico Acequia Association, founded in 1990 to provide a unified presence for the thousand or so individual acequias. Here he explains how acequia culture has shaped northern New Mexico and speaks of the challenges that confront acequias and the small farmers that depend on them today.

You hear complaints about people hoarding water or fighting over the water, but back in the day, water was the central thing that was shared. We had an age-old tradition, thousands of years of sharing water, all the way back to the Middle East. You always share what you have with others. I came across stories that during the Depression or during hard times, one family would make soup with a bone, and then they would take the bone to their neighbor so they could get a little bit of protein and get that flavor in their soup as well. Back in the day, when you were making chicos, it was a community event. Everybody would come and help out, and then the next weekend you would be at someone else’s house helping. You could always rely on your neighbors and your extended family to help.
Nowadays it’s everyone out for themselves. Even in agriculture, in the sustainability movement, sharing is the part that’s lacking. We’re not figuring out how to work with each other and how to rely on each other. To me, that’s a so-called luxury—it could also be called a sickness—of the modern economy. Everybody takes care of their own selves. How many people are living in two- to three-thousand-square-foot houses, and they’re just a couple without kids? And they’re not even living here year-round. They consider having an empty house a luxury. Then other people look at that and say, if I work hard I can have that.
But I say, if I work hard, I can be planting another half acre or another acre. To me, that’s wealth—having more seeds, more animals, more connection to my system, whether it be the water, the animals, the soil, the crop diversity, the insect life, the wildlife, the fruit trees. To me that’s the wealth of what I really have going on here, because as I see it, money comes and goes. I could buy some beer, I could go to the movies, and I’ll still have money to do that later, but if I don’t plant this corn, that can’t be replaced and there’s no money that can get that back.
If you look now, our acequias are irrigating a lot of hay and alfalfa. But the traditional Native American crops—the maíz, that’s definitely Native American, the calabaza (squash) is also Native American, the frijoles (beans) are also Native American. And other crops are also important—the frost-tolerant crops: the alverjon (peas), the lentejas (lentils), the garbanzos, the havas (fava beans)—so we get a jump on the season that the Native Americans didn’t necessarily have. We can be planting in February or March because those crops went through that breeding process in the Old World. So you put those together—the Native American depth of agriculture and land management with the Arabic, Middle Eastern, and Spaniard land management.
When the Spaniards came, they brought a whole crew of Claxcalteca Indians from what is Veracruz now. People envision the Spaniards coming over here and building the acequia system, but they didn’t do that. They hired the Mexicanos to put in the acequias. People like me, I would say that at least half of my blood is Mexican Indian, because that’s who came up here with the Spaniards. And then there’s also other native blood in my veins. I have a great-great-grandmother from Taos Pueblo, and there are stories of Apaches and Comanches stealing kids and all these things that happened. And the genízaro phenomenon—there was a time when renegade Comanches, Apaches, and Utes would come into a village and steal kids and sell them to Spanish landowners. Those people would be baptized and would lose their native identity and become hispanicized Indians or genízaros.
I have Vargas in my name; my grandmother’s maiden name is Vargas. So one of our cousins says, “Oh, we’re a direct descendant of Diego de Vargas [the Spanish governor who led the reconquest of New Mexico after the Pueblo Revolt of 1680].” And I say, “Well, that’s excellent, but it could be that we’re a direct descendant of Diego de Vargas’s house servant, for all we know.” A lot of people freak out when they hear that. They say, “Oh, my god, I’m from Spain, I’m a Spaniard, I’m pure Spaniard.” Then they get upset when I say there’s not even a pure Spaniard in Spain. I’m proud of being Mexicano, and I welcome all these immigrants, because they’re my cousins. We’re all—Somos gente de maíz [“We are people of the corn”]. The other day this Mexicano came out here, and I was honored to have him here, and he saw my cornfield and said, “Hey, this reminds me of home.” And I said, “You are home, man—Nuevo Mexico.”
Acequias are mostly a northern New Mexico thing, and southern Colorado. There are a whole bunch of them tucked away around here that the state engineer doesn’t know about, that nobody knows about except the people who are working them.
These water systems come from both the mountain and the river. A lot of people consider the acequia to be just the actual channel, but the way it was originally set up, the acequia is connected to the entire watershed, so any springs you have in the watershed, even on private property, belong to the acequia. Some people think that because a spring is on their property, it’s theirs, but it’s not. It’s communal property—all the water belongs to everybody. When people try to privatize a spring, it’s unacceptable. It’s a continuation of colonization, in my opinion.
Acequias are connected to the entire watershed, and the upper watershed is like a sponge. The snowmelt dissolves into the soil, into the aquifer. When you see the river, the river isn’t water flowing on top of the ground, it is water that is upwelling from the aquifer underneath the river. So we divert some of that water into the acequia, and most of that water returns to the aquifer, creating a hydrological cycle between the river and the acequia, extending the flood plain, extending the riparian area beyond what would otherwise exist.
Acequias are all about gravity flow. You don’t need any fossil fuels. Nowadays a lot of people are saying, well, I want to pipe my acequia. There’s no reason I should be cleaning out this ditch, because I can just put a pump in the river. But that’s dangerous, because the acequia . . . it’s not just the ditch and the water, it’s the whole system of water sharing.
For example, I have an acre of land, so I get the water for a certain amount of time. If everybody needs the water, then everybody gets that amount of time, typically four hours for an acre. If there’s a lot of water, I get a lot of water. If there’s a little bit of water, I get a little bit of water, and I’d better figure out a good way to use that water.
But now people say, “I could just put a pump in the river. The state engineer says I have 3.2 acre-feet of water, so I’m just going to pump that out.” That’s where the logic falls apart, because they’re measuring that water in volume, and traditionally we measure water in time. It’s a huge disconnect. That’s what’s creating this discrepancy between what is the reality of the water situation and what the engineers and lawyers think is going on in their air-conditioned offices in Santa Fe. Because it has to rely on water pressure. You know, there are some acequias that are level or even flow uphill, and they rely on the whole hydrological system to push that water along.
As we start running out of water, they might adjudicate these systems and say, “Okay, there are ten people on the acequia and five of you aren’t using it, so you lose that water right. You five that are using it, you can only divert this much water.”
They have all these equations, they call it the PDR—the Project Delivery Requirement—which equals the amount of water that each irrigated parcel requires according to their equation plus the amount of seepage that is lost to deliver it, and that’s the amount of water you’re allowed to divert. On paper that looks good, but if you cut down the amount of irrigation that can take place, you’re looking at a situation where there can be just a little bit of water in the acequia, like I saw in July—there was some water, but by the time I blocked it and diverted it, it only made it about a third of the way down the row because it all got consumed by the soil—so that’s not going to work for us. We need to divert the water so there’s enough pressure in the acequia so we can get the water on the land and do a good irrigation.
Some people say, “Well, you should go to drip irrigation,” but again that’s not respecting the original setup of the acequia. Drip irrigation is almost like putting your plants in a feed lot; you’re just irrigating this plant, it’s just getting little drops of water, but you stick a shovel in that soil and it’s just dry everywhere else. When you’re flooding an entire field, look at all these verdulagas, all these calites. I’m maintaining an agricultural ecosystem—there are things I didn’t plant that are coming up just because the water’s there, and I can use a lot of them for food, for medicine, for shampoo—I’ve got yerba de la negrita growing out there.
So there’s a more intense relationship I can have with this land by maintaining it as a flood ecology situation, plus recharging the aquifer so my neighbors down here who have wells are eventually going to get the benefits of me flooding my land here. It’s all part of that system. That’s not to say I’m against drip irrigation; I think in some cases it’s okay, but if it impacts the traditional functioning of the acequia, to where people say, “Well, I’m using less water than all you guys, so I should be able to pump out water whenever I want,” I say no, that’s not acceptable. You get water when it’s your turn, and you can put it in a tank and do drip irrigation later, but we cannot compromise the integrity of what it means for all of us to share this water and to have it equal within the acequia.
I don’t want us in a situation here where we’re hoarding the water. There’s plenty for everybody. I used to get all upset if people were stealing the water, because that’s such a shortsighted, limited viewpoint.
I’ve already gone through two hard years where there was just no water but at the precise moment it rains. You have to remember that another part of our culture here in northern New Mexico is our reverence toward God and our faith in God. We do not control the water. The water belongs to the earth, and the earth belongs to God.
In 2003 I had the most pathetic-looking cornfield you can imagine. More than half of it died. But the half that lived, I have that seed, and I planted some of that in this field when there was no irrigation. I planted twenty-four plants, and thirteen of them gave me corn, and I watered them once. So I never see it as a loss if I lose some of my crops; I can still go to the store, at this point, but I think those days are numbered to where the store is really going to serve our needs.
I have the luxury to adapt my crops. But in terms of the acequia systems here, most people agree that we need to share, that it belongs to everybody, and that’s traditionally how it was, and I’m hoping we go back to that. And we will. We’re going back to that because we’ll need to. If the water policy keeps going as it’s going, we’re going to run out of water. We’re only going to have water in the spring and whatever water we can get off the roof and whatever water we can recharge into the aquifer. It’s going to be a challenge—a crisis—but it’s also going to be an opportunity for us to work together.