Water Justice across the Rural-Urban Interface: The Making of Hydrosocial Territories in New Mexico’s Rio Grande Valley

Abstract

Research on rural-urban water struggles establishes the importance of symbolic spatial categories for facilitating and justifying rural-to-urban water transfers. I build on this scholarship by asking how officials construct the rural-urban interface, or patterns of interaction across spatial boundaries, during water conflicts. This study takes a historical case study approach centered on the San Juan-Chama Project (SJCP) in New Mexico (USA), a transbasin diversion authorized in 1962 to bring water from the rural San Juan River Basin into the Rio Grande Basin for urban use. Analysis of archival material, government documents, and secondary accounts show that, although the SJCP would primarily benefit urban places, proponents relied heavily on the project’s rural benefits for justification. Through this process, official actors constructed and mobilized rural-urban boundaries in ways that supported greater urban control over regional water resources. These findings have important implications for understanding the formation of rural water injustices.

Keywords:

• Hydrosocial territories
• New Mexico
• rural environmental justice
• rural-urban interface
• water justice

Acknowledgments

Thank you to Tom Shriver, Kim Ebert, Stefano Longo, and Michael Schulman for helpful feedback and suggestions on earlier drafts. The manuscript also benefited greatly from the insightful comments of the editor and three anonymous reviewers.

Notes

1 Although the Rio Grande Compact makes no mention of groundwater, the New Mexico State Engineer began requiring that all new groundwater permits be accompanied by the equivalent surface water rights after Texas sued the state in 1951 for failing to meet its water delivery obligations (Daves 1995).

2 The 1939 Rio Grande Compact dictates that New Mexico deliver water to Texas above the Elephant Butte Reservoir in New Mexico, about 100 miles north of the border. As a result, water interests in southern New Mexico frequently align with Texas.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a dissertation grant from the Rural Sociological Society.