Overview

Custom and tradition within the acequia (irrigation ditches) agricultural communities of New Mexico, despite the law that assigns a priority date and implies ownership of water, still govern the use of the water by mayordomos and commissions, and repartimiento, or water distribution and sharing, is worked out among communities without state oversight. New Mexico communities have maintained--not preserved--their commons in ways that remain part of our everyday lives: parciantes irrigating crops and fields with acequias; extant land grants managing their forest resources communally; grazing associations forming to collectively raise cattle on private and public lands; and pueblo farmers saving seed to reproduce crops regionally grown for hundreds of years. As an editor and writer I have often referenced the work of economist Elinor Ostrom, a proponent of the philosophy that people can create rules to manage shared resources, without the interference of the state or marketplace. As an editor and writer I have covered all the water stories that both challenge and complicate the idea of the commons: priority administration; state and federal adjudications; pre-existing rights on federal lands; regional water planning; ski area development; changing demographics; drought and climate change; and much, much more. This book will guide the reader through that history with stops along the way to tell the stories of those trying to ""keep their eye on the prize,"" i.e., water as a right of the commons.

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9780940875111

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!No Se Vende! Water as a Right of the Commons is an up-close and personal investigative research document of Kay Matthews' life as an acequia parciante and commissioner, small farmer, and statewide activist in the heated, and very complex, struggle to protect water as the major component of public welfare for people and the environment in New Mexico. The other side of that struggle is an all-out attempt, by proponents of economic development, to commodify water into a market-driven product destined to promote the resource depletion and human expansion that obviously threatens not only New Mexico, but also our planet. Matthews provides an overview of many battles to abet or defeat water transfers from one acequia, or watershed, to another; conflicts between the State Engineer and regional water plans; also the huge Abeyta and Aamodt adjudication settlements north of Santa Fe and the Lower Rio Grande in the south. With remarkable patience, Matthews follows the intricacies of the political maneuvering pitting Indian water rights against the centuries-long water customs of outside irrigators. She explains how developers attempt to divide and conquer indigenous water users so as to destroy what's left of their mutually beneficial usage. It is said that all wars of the Twenty-First Century will be fought over water. Matthews gives us a brilliant overview of a complicated microcosm--in New Mexico--that stands for how those wars are developing worldwide. It's a crie de coeur that we must listen to and emulate. --John Nichols, author of The Milagro Beanfield War, American Blood, The Last Beautiful Days of Autumn

Author Information

Kay Matthews is the editor of La Jicarita, an online journal of environmental politics based in the Hispano and Native American communities of northern New Mexico. Kay grew up in Colorado, attended Antioch College, the University of New Mexico, and has lived in New Mexico for 40 years. She lives on a 10 acre farm where she grows fruit, vegetables, and pasture hay.

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