Rivers link multiple scales of time and space. They are at once landscapes of constant change and landscapes of deep memory, bearing witness as the world shifts around them. From the Mississippi to the Columbia, the Pecos to the Rio Grande, rivers intertwine the complex social and ecological histories of place; they bring up issues of rights and access, of broken treaties and stolen land, of environmental justice and exploitation, and of different worldviews that have shaped and reshaped human relationships with our shared resources.

Every spring, snowmelt from the Rocky Mountains flows through the steep terrain of southern Colorado and northern New Mexico. Small mountain streams merge into tributaries that join to form the Rio Grande. In the rift valley of what’s known as the Middle Rio Grande, the river widens and slows down as the water soaks into the alluvial sandy soil and meanders downstream to Juárez, where it becomes the contested international border line between the United States and Mexico. Passing through Big Bend, the river’s silty waters thread through the humid Rio Grande delta, eventually mixing with the salty water in the Gulf of Mexico. In total, the Rio Grande traverses 1,885 miles, flows (and sometimes doesn’t flow) through three states and more than twenty pueblos and tribal lands, and provides water to approximately six million people and to countless species that rely on the unique ecology that emerges when there is water present in an arid landscape.

The fourth-longest river in the United States, the Rio Grande has been the backbone of settlement in the arid West for hundreds of years. Beginning early in the twentieth century, the needs of farmers in the Middle Rio Grande Valley and the growing city of Albuquerque led to the creation of an extensive water infrastructure network engineered to contain the river, drain the land, and strategically deliver water to crops. Although agricultural production within the region has decreased significantly within the past century, hundreds of miles of irrigation ditches (known locally as acequias) remain in the valley, weaving through the residential neighborhoods of Albuquerque, skirting the industrial zone at the base of the escarpment, and flowing alongside heavily trafficked commercial streets to deliver water to the remaining agricultural fields.

As the landscape has shifted around them, acequias have become an integral part of the region’s hydrology, ecology, and culture. Yet droughts, development pressures, and the selling of water rights threaten their survival. In Santa Fe, there were once eighty acequias; now there are four. In Las Cruces, many of the acequias have likewise been abandoned. However, in Albuquerque there are still hundreds of miles of interconnected acequias that make the city a unique place to live and that, if protected and properly managed, have the potential to help shape the future of the city.

THE ACEQUIA COMMONS

The Tewa, Tiwa, and Keres peoples have long practiced a range of irrigation and flood control techniques along the Rio Grande. When the expedition of Juan de Oñate traveled through the valley in the summer of 1598, the Spaniards recognized elements of their own water culture, which had evolved during centuries of Moorish rule on the Iberian Peninsula. Despite the colonial legacy of violence, the water cultures of the pueblos and the Spanish were compatible in fundamental respects and blended to produce an entire culture surrounding the annual cycle of agriculture.

As Spaniards settled in the region, the Spanish Crown granted tracts of land, or land grants, to groups of settlers. The first task in the founding of a community was locating and digging the main irrigation ditch, or the acequia madre. All other development followed and responded to this preparatory investment in communal water infrastructure. The acequias were dug using hand tools and relied only on gravity to move the water, so they had to follow the existing contours of the land. The final path of the acequia was a negotiation between the laws of gravity, the topography of the landscape, and the needs of the people. From the hydrologic spine of the acequias, the bottomland was subdivided laterally to ensure that each individual parcel had access to the irrigation ditch. This created a settlement pattern of long, linear lots in the valley, oriented so the short edge of each lot would abut the acequia and the long edge would abut an adjacent property. Long lots were an adaptation to local topography and water resources, allowing simple and equitable access to land and water.

Building off the Indigenous and Spanish traditions of collective water management, the community managed the acequias as a commons. While the land that was historically held as a commons by Indigenous communities was expropriated and privatized through colonization, water was—and remains—one of few resources still held in common by the people.

The commons can be defined as something shared and protected by a community, to be kept open and protected for future generations. A commons is often described as being made up of three components: the physical landscape or resource; the community that collectively governs and shares the land or resource; and commoning, the practices and institutions that guide local stewardship of land and resources. The commons are both a physical space and a social practice. An example of these physical and social practices is the annual limpia that is still practiced in some acequia communities. The main ditch, or acequia madre, is shared physical infrastructure that the individual irrigators depend on. Every spring, all parciantes are expected to attend or to send someone to participate in the spring cleaning, or limpia, of the acequia madre. The mayordomo organizes the work crew to clean the silt, brush, and debris from the ditches. According to Sylvia Rodriguez, this act of stewardship “affirms and socializes members into a cooperative, subsistence institution.” In Mayordomo: Chronicle of an Acequia in Northern New Mexico, the late Stanley Crawford describes it as a form of ritual that helps maintain the complex social fabric and reinforces a sense of common purpose.

The subsistence lifestyle that revolved around the acequias of New Mexico continued until the start of the Mexican-American War in 1846. In the decades after the 1848 signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, court rulings regarding the legal title to the land grants resulted in 77 percent of the Hispanic and Indigenous land grant acreage in New Mexico being expropriated from the original owners by the United States government. When New Mexico became a state in 1912, the state constitution adopted the principles of public ownership of water and the doctrines of prior appropriation and beneficial use found in the 1907 Water Code. The doctrine of prior appropriation states that when shortages occur, the right to use water is determined by the chronological order in which the water was put to beneficial use; the older the claim, the more secure the right. Tribes and acequia associations across the state have pre-1907 water rights, otherwise known as “senior water rights,” meaning they are to be served first in a water-short year. Yet while a river’s use can be appropriated, water cannot be owned.

Men diverting water from the Rio Grande, circa 1920.

THE MIDDLE RIO GRANDE CONSERVANCY DISTRICT

When the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad built a depot three miles east of the Rio Grande in the 1880s, creating a new town center in Albuquerque, it both symbolically and physically shifted the town from an orientation to the river and agricultural lands to a railroad town oriented to national markets and commerce.

As Albuquerque grew, flooding and drainage problems were considered the most urgent challenges to economic growth in the region. In 1925, the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District (MRGCD) was formed as a regional water planning authority to take a comprehensive approach to flooding, groundwater levels, and irrigation in the valley. Seventy-nine independent acequia systems were incorporated into the MRGCD and were required to pay taxes rather than contribute labor hours. This was a significant institutional and social shift in the valley, a movement away from a self-governing system of participatory water management to one of central control and bureaucracy.

During the first decade of the MRGCD, most of the problems arose from too much water. The MRGCD built hundreds of miles of drainage ditches and two hundred miles of levees. Later, with the assistance of the Bureau of Reclamation, 127 miles of river were channelized, and dams were constructed upstream to hold back floodwaters. Once the land was drained and flooding was controlled, development in the valley could continue uninhibited. Between 1940 and 1960, the population of Albuquerque grew from thirty-five thousand to two hundred thousand. Typical of urban development trends in America during the mid-twentieth century, the combination of increased market values of land and decreasing returns on crops resulted in farmland being converted to residential, commercial, and manufacturing uses. Between 1935 and 1990, the amount of irrigated land in the Middle Rio Grande Valley dropped from sixteen thousand acres to six thousand acres. The historic long-lot properties of the valley were either consolidated and sold to developers or subdivided into parcels that no longer had access to irrigation water.

THE IRRIGATION NETWORK

Spring flow from the Rocky Mountains runs off the slopes into the Rio Grande and its primary northern tributary, the Rio Chama. From 1935 until 2022, water flowing in the Rio Chama was contained behind El Vado Dam, where up to 196,500 acre-feet of water could be stored in the cool northern mountains before being released down the river for irrigation. El Vado was taken out of service in 2022 for rehabilitation, and while the Bureau of Reclamation assesses alternate construction plans for the aging dam, a crucial component of the state’s irrigation network is in flux; for now, the Rio Grande’s summer flow is dependent on summer rains.

Fifty miles upstream of Albuquerque, the river is retained behind the Cochiti Dam, built on Cochiti Keres land in 1965 as a flood and sediment control structure. Once released from the Cochiti Dam, the Rio Grande flows through the lands of the Santo Domingo, San Felipe, and Santa Ana Pueblos before reaching the Angostura Diversion Dam. All the water for the irrigation network that extends from Sandia Pueblo to Isleta Pueblo is diverted at the Angostura dam.

Every spring the water level behind the Angostura dam is raised, the gates to the Albuquerque Main Canal are opened, and water begins to soak into the dry, sandy soil of the canal. Less than two thousand feet from the Angostura dam, two radial gates control the elevation of the water and fourteen slide gates split the irrigation water between the Albuquerque Main Canal and the Atrisco Feeder Canal. The Albuquerque Main Canal veers to the east and supplies water to Corrales and the entire North Valley. The Atrisco Feeder Canal (also known as the clear ditch) continues south, paralleling the river until it reaches the Atrisco Siphon, where it passes under the Rio Grande. Once across the river, the Atrisco Feeder becomes the Arenal Main Canal and supplies water to the city’s entire South Valley.

The Albuquerque Main Canal and the Arenal Main Canal are the main branches of the entire irrigation network. From these main canals, acequias divert water to supply irrigation water across the valley. Along the length of the acequias, headgates and side gates serve to direct water to the fields. The headgates are located inside the ditch channel and can be lowered to raise the upstream level of the water. Once the upstream water level has been raised, the side gates can be opened to allow water to flow into the lateral ditches or to farmers’ fields, where it is distributed either with flood irrigation or through a network of shallow channels.

Water that is not diverted to the fields continues in the ditches to feed lands farther downstream. Water that remains at the end of the ditch either feeds into other irrigation ditches or into drainage ditches that lead back into the river. One can tell the difference between irrigation ditches and drainage ditches because the irrigation ditches are above the elevation of the surrounding land so that water can be gravity fed to the fields, and the drainage ditches are below the elevation of the water table so that the water drains from the fields and eventually flows back to the river.

In October (or, due to drought, increasingly earlier), the gates at the Angostura dam are closed and water drains from the systems. The irrigation season comes to an end.

MULTIPLE FUNCTIONS

Although acequias were originally constructed for irrigation, they have become a functional part of the region’s ecological, hydrological, and recreational networks. Unlike most urban water infrastructure, which is buried underground or sealed in concrete, the acequias of the Middle Rio Grande Valley are earthen. This allows water to seep into the ground, creating a lush riparian habitat along the embankments. Cattails, rushes, and reeds grow along the ditches, providing habitat for crawdads, frogs, toads, and birds that otherwise would not be present in the harsh urban desert landscape. In addition, the “leaky” acequias help to recharge the aquifer and maintain the region’s riparian habitat by spreading the water and associated ecologies across the river valley, essentially mimicking the natural floodplain without flooding homes or damaging city infrastructure. This unique, constructed ecology integrates the human, natural, and built systems within the urban environment.

In addition to recharging the aquifer and creating habitat corridors through the city, the acequias serve as an unofficial trail network that weaves through the valley. In a city dominated by oversize roads and inhospitable sidewalks, the dirt utility roads adjacent to the acequias provide a level surface for walking, biking, and meeting neighbors. Trees on outer embankments provide shade and contrast to the asphalt, gravel, and sun-exposed dirt that dominate the city. Although there are No Trespassing signs at entrances to some acequias, many are open to the public.

The MRGCD, originally tasked with the management of irrigation, now has the opportunity to work with the city and residents to manage the region’s acequias to enhance and strengthen their multiple functions. With over-allocated water resources, a changing climate, and competing ownership claims on acequia easements, many farmers and community members have concerns that ditches throughout the region will be abandoned, filled in, and developed over. If this were to occur, the integrated system that today is a continuous, multifunctioning network would become fragmented and, gradually, erased. With this, the distinct acequia culture—which remains one of the few living models of a functioning, if imperfect, commons—would be lost. In addition, the distinct valley ecology that is supported by the leaky irrigation network would be at risk of drying up.

While the initial investment in the water infrastructure in the Middle Rio Grande Valley prepared the ground for the original settlement, the ditches can now play a critical role in shaping the future of the region. Despite the unknown future of water resources in the Middle Rio Grande Valley and the potential impact of droughts on current irrigation practices, the physical easements of the ditches exist as vital corridors in the city. Unlike cities that have to enter long and costly negotiations to purchase right-of-way corridors for open space, in Albuquerque the right-of-way easements already exist. If the ditches can be protected as legal entities within the city, then they can be reimagined as armatures upon which to build a public open space network in the valley that connects existing parks and helps guide future open space land acquisition and development. While originally an example of hydrologic commons, the open space network around the corridors can also become an expanded civic commons where people come together around the unique cultural, historical, urban, and ecological identity of the valley.

Right now, the city of Albuquerque has the potential to strengthen and celebrate what makes it a truly unique place to live. It can turn to its historic water infrastructure to help guide its development into the twenty-first century. It can reimagine itself as an Acequia City.

This article was adapted from text in Acequias of the Middle Rio Grande, a field guide created by Emily and Jesse Vogler.