On a hot summer evening, as the Sangre de Cristo Mountains were living up to their name, reddening in the portal of dusk, I was driving back from a hike near Taos, New Mexico, where I had recently moved. I slowed the car, noticing a group of people on the side of the road. I had no context for what I saw: eight people or so—mostly men—some bearded and muddy, wearing cowboy hats or ball caps, some in high rubber boots. Cars were parked on the road’s dirt edge, with doors left casually open as though the meeting would not last long.
What was this? A neighborhood emergency? A memorial? Prayer circle? From my driver’s seat, I caught the slightest bit of conversation—a mix of Spanish and English—flowing fast and incomprehensible to me.
It was about a year later that a neighbor asked me if I used my acequia rights to irrigate my two acres. He explained that to have access to acequia water, I had to attend meetings throughout the spring and summer and ask for the water. These meetings were called the reparto, the meeting I had witnessed on the side of the road.
The acequia system in New Mexico is a wonder. A winding series of gravity-fed ditches, acequias guide mountain snowmelt across the land like a bloodstream. It has been like this for centuries—the Indigenous people of the area used irrigating ditches long before the Spanish arrived with the word acequia in the late 1500s.
The extensive irrigation system created by the Spanish that still covers much of New Mexico has its origins in the Middle East, Syria, and North Africa, from where Spanish Mexican (today, Hispanos or Chicanos) colonizers and settlers brought it. These days, according to the New Mexico Acequia Association, a group established to protect water resources and acequia culture, approximately one thousand acequia systems are functioning in the state. The acequia I belong to is called the “upper portion of the acequia Madre de Rio Lucero”—the upper portion of the mother ditch of the Lucero River.
The person overseeing the water for each acequia community is the mayordomo (mayordoma, if a woman—fewer!); he parses out the flow to the parciantes—landholders with surface water rights. To bring the water to land, one works with dams to stop the water from its natural path downhill and guide it to the area in question. Small dams—usually made of tarps or metal—create flooding, also known as sheet irrigating, across fields of alfalfa or pasture. Parciantes receive a slot sandwiched in between neighbors, who must do their part to ensure the water is available at the allotted time, and vice versa. If someone fails to change up the dams to release water to the next person, he or she can be fined.
When I moved to my house in northern New Mexico, I didn’t feel that irrigating was for me. My focus was on my job and on doing things that new homeowners do—gardening, fixing leaks, settling in, and the like. I didn’t really have time to get involved in acequia business. I had a well, and I could use the well to water my garden and my trees. I hadn’t yet understood the many ways that irrigation supports life on the land, how irrigating replenishes the aquifer that my well was drawing from, for example. Or how, even though neighbors are somewhat in competition to access the water, the whole ecosystem benefits from the most people using it.
Also, irrigating is hard work—digging, dragging sandbags, hauling river rocks to fill in eroding holes, setting up dams and tearing them down. And not just physically—it’s work that requires a lot of patience and watchfulness. It just seemed to me that working with the acequias was for other people—farmers and ranchers, people who have known one another, helped one another, married each other, farmed with one another, feuded one another—for a very long time here.
In the early spring three or four years after moving to New Mexico, I noticed an announcement about the limpieza in the post office. This is the annual ditch cleaning that all parciantes are invited to, a community effort to clear away tree roots, rocks, garbage, and anything else that blocks the snowmelt’s flow from on high. It had been such a beautiful, warm spring, and I felt bold; I wanted to explore the area and learn about the ditches. So I met at the dilapidated community center with a shovel and boots at eight in the morning on an April Saturday and offered my services. The mayordomo split up the twenty or so neighbors into groups, and I was put with about five men into the back of a truck. We headed to Taos Pueblo land, toward the first headgate. We would start our work where the water comes down from the mountains and is first portioned off between Pueblo and non-Pueblo land.
We drove higher and higher on a rough dirt road, bouncing around in the truck bed. I struggled to avoid sharp loppers, picks, and shovels. I was the only woman with a group of mostly local farmers who seemed to know one another well; I felt out of place and shy. We passed through fields and homesteads, past sleeping horses and a few buffalo. The juniper became larger and larger and the piñon, too. Ponderosa pine spotted the landscape; sage and grasses filled in beneath. Silence settled and rose around us.
At the end of the road, we left the truck. The river was loud—full of winter’s offerings—pouring into a concrete structure with iron gates and then three ditches spread out like fingers, pointing the way home. This was the place, I thought, way up here, where the early people put their organizing stamp on life in the high desert. A seminal act of management, sharing, nourishment, hope for the future, and probably prayer. And in more recent years—careful measurement.
This measurement has been a long time coming. For centuries, discord, resentment, and various forms of deep engagement haunted the water here that nourishes Pueblo and non-Pueblo users both. But in the early 2000s, perhaps knowing that things would not get easier as populations grew, a group of Spanish Mexican descendants and acequia members proposed negotiations with the Pueblo to settle—once and for all—just how much water could be directed from land downstream through the non-Pueblo ditches. The negotiations were a necessity. Development, resource encroachment, fear of litigation costs, and ongoing conflicts combined with a recognition of the negative impacts of wells on sacred Pueblo pasture had brought the Taos Valley communities together to find a permanent solution.
In the final agreements of what is known as the Abeyta Settlement, the Pueblo relinquished their “aboriginal” usage (the amount of water they had used since time immemorial) but still retained access to most of the water coming off the mountains. Many people from the communities involved are happy with the agreement, and many are not. “For the settlement to work”—said Nelson Cordova, director of the Taos Pueblo Water Administration department in 2019—“we had to compromise. We had to compromise, and we had to deal with our non-Indian neighbors.”[1] Many in my own acequia community are protesting the agreement for a variety of reasons, including questions about the cost of some of the agreement’s projects and unknown impacts on both wildlife and people. Some along my ditch have said, “In the old days, we just talked with the Pueblo; we can still work together as neighbors.”
Way up on the Pueblo land that April, I could see the gauge set up by the state engineer to determine just the amount of water that was allowed to pass through the ditches. Listing to the side, likely knocked out of alignment by the water itself, it seemed to convey its own sense of protest. So this was it, I thought, the symbol of confusion and conflict, compromise and settlement. A white gauge with a single red line.
But how do you measure a blessing?
Acequias have guided the blessings of life for over ten thousand years, with their origins in the deserts of the Middle East. They were brought to Spain by the Moors, who occupied the region from about 711 until 1492. The word acequia comes from the Arabic, al-sāquia, and its meaning is multilayered. On the one hand, it is a canal. But its origins are in ancient Yemeni, where it meant “bearer of wine” or “bearer of water.”[2] An acequia is both a what and a who—it is an irrigation ditch bringing water to farmland, and it is a barmaid serving wine to those in need. And in the ancient mysticism of the Middle East, water is not just water, wine not just wine, and a bar and barmaid much more. The bar—a “tavern of ruin,” as Rumi described it, is where the divine wine intoxicates the seeker. Water is a divine gift, no different from the secret substance of spiritual ecstasy.
The conflation of water with divinity isn’t limited to early Islam but is ubiquitous in mystical traditions. In Jewish law, a sacred agreement pertains to the responsibility to give water to those in need. In Isaiah, it is said, “Let all you who thirst, come to the water!” In Psalms, “As a deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God!” And as the Pueblo people indigenous to the Taos Valley describe it, “Water is a blessing that is part of creation and perpetuation of life itself.”[3]
When the Spanish arrived in New Mexico in the sixteenth century, they found Indigenous people using intricate irrigation systems, from water catchment to gravity-fed canals. Although they were not as extensive as what the Spanish intended to create, they were not dissimilar. A terrible drought at the end of the sixteenth century emphasized the value of irrigating with ditches to harness river water as well as mountain runoff. The Spanish anticipated a massive colonization effort and knew they needed all the water they could access, including snowmelt and water from what today we call the Rio Grande and from the Rio Chama, Rio Pecos, and their tributaries.[4] Settlers were allotted land only where water could bring life through the acequias. Intricate laws governed these early allocations and the use of available water.
The acequia system in my area of northern New Mexico reflects this deeply integrative experience of water, life, community, and sacred responsibility. The communities are cooperative democratic institutions with their own governance structures, some of which even exist outside of general US laws.
Bearers of life, the acequias have also been the focal point of deep tensions. The Spanish wrested water for their own use, often at the expense of the Pueblos. At the same time, acequias require cooperation and compel community—among different ditch members and among the settlers and the Pueblo people. The acequia system is referred to as “an enduring divinity” by the New Mexico Acequia Association, and whether through stealing, hoarding, sharing, or compromise, water has tied together the peoples of this semiarid landscape for a very long time and has tied those peoples to the divinity that sustains life itself.
As enduring as they have been, the acequias are threatened. Development is a serious threat and includes people building houses across ditches, cutting off water to others. Mineral extraction, marijuana cultivation (using tremendous amounts of water), separation of water rights from property rights (so they can be sold off and commodified), and of course, climate change (and resulting drought)—all threaten the presence of water and the sacred ditches that hold it. These days, a deep thirst has spread across the land as water has become more and more compromised.
• • •
The summer following my first ditch cleaning, I mustered the courage to ask for water. I trudged up to the road pullout at the time indicated on the reparto announcement. When I arrived, the parcientes were getting back in their cars and driving off. I learned a lot that first year, including that the meeting decisions were often made fifteen minutes before the start time. I felt utterly foolish standing there, too late. But the next night, I arrived on time, early, and asked for water.
The mayordomo asked if anyone could take the slot from seven in the evening to seven in the morning, and I raised my hand. I was given water early in the season when the runoff was high. The first few hours were wonderful and encouraging. The sun threw its soft darkness gently across the land. Evening birds came to eat the rodents escaping from the flood. The moon rose, and the glow of the sky reflected off a layer of translucent fluid shimmering like reptile skin throughout the grasses. But as the night fell, the mountain air cooled, and water seeped into my rubber boot through a crack in the heel. There was so much water, and in time, the earth refused to absorb it. It pooled first at the willows on the low-sloping southwestern corner, then at the road’s edge, slowly eating it. It was beautiful and monstrous. It was beyond me. I ended up jogging back to the main dam around midnight, first lifting up the tarp where I had stopped the flow to the fields below, then damming the water where I had released it to my land.
I could not sleep for hours. I was disappointed for getting in over my head but excited by the memory of the moonlight spreading through the trembling grass.
My engagement with the acequia coincided with intensifying drought, drawing closer every year, like a hungry giant. That early tumult of runoff was followed by weeks and weeks of dearth. Local fires, dire heat, and minimal rain became more the norm. Combined with my new commitment to irrigating, I felt a strange combination of hope and despair, new life and inevitable destruction, a yin and yang of excess and loss.
At the end of that summer, masses of birds fell from the New Mexico sky—warblers mostly. The scientists declared they had died of starvation midflight. The terrible fires along their migratory route, the high winds, the lack of bugs to eat, all these contributed to the die-off. I couldn’t drive to the grocery store without birds pelting the windshield, and sometimes ten or twenty in just fifteen minutes, as though God was an angry two-year-old flinging his precious toys in every direction.
• • •
Winter is a time of dreams, but that year, my nights were empty. In the high desert, winter goes on and on. The vast sky of blue suddenly shoved aside by big snows and suffocating clouds. The water that flowed down the stream along the road, now shallow and frozen, caked with patches of snow, mostly empty culverts home to hibernating skunks and rabbits.
Where does winter’s silence hide summer’s hymn? I longed for the aliveness of spring and wished I could call it forth, wished I could feel the stirring of bluebird wings, see that banner of a neon meadowlark chest glowing amid the still unresurrected alfalfa. Instead of the melodic welcome, winter whispered to me from far away, “Not yet, not yet, not yet.”
One early morning, lighting the woodstove against the still-clinging darkness, I noticed a book of poetry I had stored on my shelf years earlier. It was Hafiz and the Book of the Winebringer. After the word winebringer was the word Saqi-Nama, like al-sāquia, acequia. The conduit of water, of wine. I opened the book and flipped through the pages, lit by the fire:
Bring, Winebringer, that liquid, fiery and bright,
Taking tiredness from heart, from soul the night:
Come, Minstrel . . . quickly, that song be playing,
So that these eyes a hundred rivers are weeping. (Gurgani, died 1058)[5]
My heart hid and emerged throughout the winter like a gravestone beneath a stormy moon. In the cold and snow, I felt a deep longing partnered with memories of acequia waters. I had grown attached, ignited to, the water, to the earth, to Her nourishment and Her sorrows. And I missed Her those winter days; I missed lying in the sun, the sweetness of the clover, and the way the newly planted apple trees grew higher and higher. In the darkness of winter, I missed the gifts of the wine bringer:
Winebringer, bring wine you
Call a cup of melted ruby,
Or like a sword in light of sun
At noon, flashing brightly.
You could say that it is rosewater, distilled until pure . . .
Its sweetness is like the balm of sleep on eyes so sleepy.
You could call the cup a cloud
And wine . . . drops of rain:
Or joy filling heart after a prayer
Is answered eventually.
If wine did not exist all hearts
Would be bleak deserts. (Rudake, 858–941)[6]
• • •
My seventh summer in the area, the drought had released its grip for one in-breath in the cycle of its onslaught and the mountain runoff was immense. I irrigated four times. The land sang. My newly planted apple trees looked better than ever. My orchard grass was tall and beautiful. The aspen seemed healthy despite the fungus that was ravaging them, slowly. Water, like an empty, shimmering snakeskin, undulated through the grasses. As evening fell, the moon rose, spreading itself everywhere, a veil of light wafting over the earth. I was getting the hang of working with the water. I felt more confident asking for it at reparto. I still could not understand much of what took place at the meetings, but Joe, a farmer whose family had been in the area for over a hundred years, graciously translated for me.
“You get the water at seven. But the flow will be heavy, so make sure some of it goes downstream unless you are ready to use it all.”
“Now?” I asked, panicky. People laughed.
“No,” Joe said. “Seven in the morning!”
“Who does it go to after me?”
“Send it to Ernie.”
“So, I just let my dam up and take out the dam below?”
“Yes, yes. But don’t take it all at once, or it will be too much!”
These days, I am often still confused, but I am no longer embarrassed. My neighbors are patient and kind. I am part of a community with a shared love for land, water, and traditions. As reparto ends, I linger to argue about water stealing, or to talk about the bear that is killing sheep, or to complain about how the state engineer didn’t measure our share carefully enough from the headgate. I stick around, and I drink it in:
We drank wine from the Cupbearer
At an inn higher than the sky.[7]
Notes:
[1] “Taos ‘water protector’ protests highlight complexities of water rights settlements,” New Mexico Political Report, November 22, 2019. https://nmpoliticalreport.com/2019/11/22/taos-water-protector-protests-highlight-complexities-of-water-rights-settlements/.
[2] Roberto Lovato, “Acequias and the Hydraulic Genius of Shari’ah Law,” Craftsmanship, Winter 2017, https://craftsmanship.net/the-hydraulic-genius-of-shariah-law/.
[3] Gilbert Suazo, “A Tribal Perspective About the Taos Pueblo Water Settlement,” Native American Rights Fund, https://www.narf.org/nill/documents/water/2013/materials/suazo.pdf.
[4] José A. Rivera, Acequia Culture: Water, Land, and Community in the Southwest (University of New Mexico Press, 1998), 2.
[5] Hafiz and the Book of the Winebringer (Saqi-Nama): Anthology of This Genre in Sufi Poetry, trans. Paul Smith (New Humanity Books, 2015), 8.
[6] Hafiz and the Book of the Winebringer, 62.
[7] “We drank wine from the Cupbearer,” Rifai.org, https://www.rifai.org/sufism/english/hazrats/hazrat-yunus-emre/we-drank-wine-from-the-cupbearer/.
Image Credits: Photos courtesy of Hilary Hart.
