Acequias: How Water Creates Community

“Water is the lifeblood of the community.”

People intuitively know this. We prefer to live in places with nearby sources of flowing water (“flowing” being the key word, here; no one wants to live in a mosquito-ridden swamp). Streams, rivers, oceans, and canals are what draw people.

The most commonly-cited reasons for avoiding living in a desert or semi-desert, anecdotally, are “lack of water and vegetation.” Of course, the water isn’t actually lacking.¹ It’s just out of sight, sequestered in pipes underground. Modern construction in these arid zones hides the water, its only route of escape the drippers and sprinklers that dot the parks, medians, and backyards of suburbia. Ostensibly this helps control evaporation.

But people in these arid lands have for centuries lived in communities never further than a short walk from running water. They have raised generations of children under the shade of old-growth trees. Livestock never went hungry over the winter months for want of adequate stored forage. All of this without modern power tools, buried piping, or electric pumps. How?

An acequia skirts behind property lines. Multiple gates for flood irrigation visible.

Acequias (uh-SAY-key-uhs), as they are known in the American Southwest, are hand-dug, gravity-fed irrigation ditches and canals that carry water, usually snowmelt, from rivers for equitable distribution to farmers’ fields. They were long managed as a community resource, a commons that everyone had access to if their land intersected the acequia.

Moral Economy

Acequias today are managed through acequia associations, centered around a shared diversion canal from the river that leads to an acequia madre or “mother ditch” from which lateral canals carry water to individual properties. Association members pay dues, collectively handle maintenance on the ditch networks, and annually elect a mayordomo or “ditch boss” to oversee the acequia’s management and settle conflicts over water rights.²

Acequia associations have formed the basis for a mutualist moral economy centered around reciprocal trust (confianza) and respect (respeto) among friends and neighbors. It is through interaction with the acequia, the land irrigated by the acequia, the products of that land, and the human relations that govern the use and maintenance of the acequia that strong bonds are created in southwestern bosque (riparian woodland) communities.

An acequia flood-irrigating an adjacent field.

Social and Ecological Functions

Acequias are far from just ditches that make irrigation easier. Besides binding bosque communities together through shared commons, they are often paralleled by trails that serve as alternative physical connections to the impersonal, polluted, impermeable modern streets built for automobiles. They are byways for pedestrians, equestrians, bicyclists, and (on some of the larger canals) even kayakers.

The ditches themselves also grant numerous ecological services. Riparian biomes in arid and semi-arid climates are invariably the most biodiverse. In New Mexico, for example, 80% of all sensitive vertebrate species use riparian habitats at some point in their lives.³ Acequias not only irrigate fields, but also galleries of cottonwood trees that line them, providing much needed shade for inhabitants of the bosque, but also reducing evaporation from the acequia itself.⁴ Unlined acequias and flood-irrigated fields slowly seep water and aid percolation into the underlying aquifer or back into the river.⁵

Traditional agricultural technologies like acequias have been decried as “inefficient” in the past, but this mischaracterizes acequias as simply tools for irrigation, while they clearly also serve a multitude of other social and environmental functions. As a means of keeping surface and ground water in balance with each other, they are second to none.⁶ Keeping the water on the surface creates a thriving riparian ecosystem and the seepage waters trees while also recharging sources of well water.

Acequias are host to a wide variety of species that grow along their banks. An Oenothera elata “tall evening primrose” is pictured.

Water Commons as a Social Tool

Modern cities understand the need for access to clean, potable water for hygiene and sanitation. They spend billions of dollars building and maintaining underground infrastructure for this purpose. And yet, they neglect the social and ecological aspects of open water.

Modern technologies could be utilized to expand acequia/canal networks, increase their resiliency to droughts and floods, and bring surface water and its myriad ecological benefits to many communities - and not just those immediately adjacent to a river. Suburbs should be designed around shared watercourses, whether gravity-fed as in traditional acequias or pump-fed at higher elevations.

Expanding such acequia networks would transform suburbs away from being pockets of social and physical isolation from which automobiles are the only escape to destinations in their own right, with walking paths, gardens, orchards, parks, and the constant soothing sounds of fresh, flowing water for residents to enjoy. Access to such urban blue spaces has been shown to improve physical and mental health.⁷ Shared common access to the water and engagement with the local acequia association would serve to enhance the social connectivity of neighborhoods, increasing mutual solidarity and encouraging people to take pride in, help maintain, and beautify their localities.

Portrero ditch near El Santuario de Chimayo, a church in northern New Mexico. [Source]

Urban Waterworks

A great barrier to widespread adoption of neighborhood waterworks across the United States is certainly polluted runoff from roads. Expansion of acequia networks must come hand-in-hand with pedestrianization of city plazas, greater access to mass transit and protected bicycle routes, as well as roadside ditches with reedbeds and other flora for the bioremediation of any polluted runoff.

Privitization of water resources like bathrooms and drinking fountains across the planet has accelerated in recent years, even as people continue to move to cities and urban homelessness becomes more and more pronounced.⁸ Drinking fountains are on the decline while bottled water vendors expand. Cities are in desperate need of public water facilities, not just for sanitation and hygiene but for relaxation and stress reduction, too.

Fountains and other waterworks should be lived in, not just looked at. [Source]

Perhaps the most iconic and celebrated feature of the ancient Roman civilization (of which many Americans conceive their own nation to be a modern successor) are the many fountains, baths, cisterns, and aqueducts that brought water to the city, and still do. And yet today, an age in which we’ve been swimming in cheap hydrocarbon energy for over a century, we don’t bother putting that energy to work bringing open, running water to our cities, irrigating and greening them, and making them vastly more livable than the sterile, gum-stained concrete wastelands they are.

Why not? We have largely lost our imagination and downplay our agency to transform our places of being.

Water Types

There are in essence five types of water in urban landscapes (from my own observations), though most cities deal with only four of them and in strictly segregated circumstances:

• Black - raw sewage, requires treatment at water treatment facilities or otherwise extensive bioremediation systems.

• Grey - used water from drains, rainwater and road runoff. Can be polluted, though usually less so than black water. Usually is not treated before being dumped in water bodies, but is treated before use as irrigation.

• Green (irrigation) - water channeled directly from rivers or streams through irrigation ditches or canals. Not usually very polluted (though this varies), untreated and still unsuitable for drinking.

• Recreational - treated with chlorine. Sterile, but unsuitable for drinking. This is the water cities usually use in public pools.

• Drinking - the cleanest water fit for human consumption, “tap water” from fountains.

Green water is a water type hardly utilized by cities unless they are built on the banks of rivers and have historical canals or acequias. In the shift away from a transportation network reliant on canals and barges to one reliant on the steam locomotive in the 19th century and eventually the automobile in the 20th, we forgot the benefits of waterways, not just for transportation but also for physical, mental, and ecological well-being.

Larger waterways can certainly transform cities on a larger scale:

Hackney Cyclist @Hackneycyclist

A photo I took on my first visit to Utrecht in 2015 and the same view today

But we also need expanded access to drinking water in smaller-scale recreational settings: more fountains, more pools and streams. City bans on wading in fountains should be abolished. We need water for living in and not just to look at. We need more interconnectivity between water types, so that instead of flushing all “waste” water down the drain into the sewers to mix with black or grey water, it is channeled instead to open irrigation ditches with flowing water, recharging the aquifer and supporting verdant riparian habitats.

All of this can be done on an individual and neighborhood scale, as well:

James Dillon @NativeHavens

Before and after this small swale planting- seemed like a shame not to slow the runoff flowing through this site in order to water something other than turf.

Individuals can create watercourses and ephemeral, rain-fed streams on their properties and connect them with their neighbors’ to create larger networks. Instead of a small plastic pond and pump, extend the micro-watershed downhill before recycling the water back to the top, creating habitat as you go. The more flowing water on a site, the healthier and happier the residents.

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As a means by which regular people can transform their own neighborhoods with just a hand shovel, the acequia model is a great tool, its use honed by generations of cooperation, centering the needs of the community over the individual and promoting cooperation and mutualism among neighbors over shared access to a vital commons. ~

1. Agriculture accounted for 78% of total water allocation in New Mexico in 2005, much of it for thirsty crops like pecans and alfalfa. Agriculture contributed just 1.6% to the GDP of New Mexico in 2021.

The Business Water Task Force, (2010). “New Mexico Water Basics and An Introduction to Water Markets.”

Statista. (2022). Real GDP of New Mexico, by industry 2021.

2. Rodríguez, S. (2020). Key Concepts for a Multidisciplinary Approach to Acequias. Acequias of the Southwestern United States: Elements of Resilience in a Coupled Natural and Human System, 4-12. https://pubs.nmsu.edu/acequias/index.html

3. Boykin, K. G., Samson, E. A., & Alvarez, G. (2020). Acequia Ecosystems. Acequias of the Southwestern United States: Elements of Resilience in a Coupled Natural and Human System, 21-32. https://pubs.nmsu.edu/acequias/index.html

4. Fernald, A., Ochoa, C., Guldan, S. (2020). Coupled natural and human system clues to acequia resilience. Acequias of the Southwestern United States: Elements of Resilience in a Coupled Natural and Human System, 72-78. https://pubs.nmsu.edu/acequias/index.html

5. Ochoa, C., Guldan, S., Fernald, A. (2020). Surface water and groundwater interactions in acequia systems of northern New Mexico. Acequias of the Southwestern United States: Elements of Resilience in a Coupled Natural and Human System, 33-40. https://pubs.nmsu.edu/acequias/index.html

6. Medrano, L. (2021). Climate Change Puts New Mexico’s Ancient Acequias to the Test. Audubon. https://www.audubon.org/news/climate-change-puts-new-mexicos-ancient-acequias-test

7. Völker, S., Heiler, A., Pollmann, T., Claßen, T., Hornberg, C., Kistemann, T. (2018). Do perceived walking distance to and use of urban blue spaces affect self-reported physical and mental health?, Urban Forestry & Urban Greening, Volume 29, Pages 1-9. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ufug.2017.10.014

8. Hale, M.R. (2019). Fountains for Environmental Justice: Public Water, Homelessness, and Migration in the Face of Global Environmental Change., Environmental Justice, Volume 12, No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1089/env.2018.0031

Images:

Potrero Ditch at Santuario de Chimayo.jpg by Dicklyon is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

Léon Bonnat - Fille romaine à la fontaine.jpg “Roman Girl at a Fountain” painting by Léon Bonnat, 1875

all other images are my own or linked via Twitter