Adjudicating hydrosocial territory in New Mexico

ABSTRACT

The US state of New Mexico shifted its management and legal treatment of water in the 20th century to a private property access right, weakening communal notions of water. This article explains how New Mexico has redefined and territorialized water rights as private property through the adjudication process and administrative governance rules. State adjudication of water rights disrupts horizontal social relations. The process also results in territorialization – not of fluid water per se – but of water users themselves. As water users have adjusted to this rescaling of governance, the state has found new ways to govern users vertically through water-crisis measures.

KEYWORDS:

• Acequias
• hydrosocial cycle
• territorialization
• water rights
• New Mexico

Acknowledgments

The author gratefully thanks all 243 New Mexicans who generously shared their time and insights. The author thanks the two anonymous reviewers for their comments that led to substantive and theoretical improvements in this paper, as well as the editors of this special issue for their guidance.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported between 2006 and 2015 by the Colorado College Hulbert Center for the Southwest Jackson Fellowship Fund, the Dean’s Office, Social Sciences Executive Committee and several Keller Venture Faculty–Student Collaborative Research Grants.