Acequia Madre del Bosquecito
El Bosquecito, New Mexico · taking water from the river since about 1790

Buenos días. My name is Henry Maestas and I have been secretary-treasurer of the Acequia Madre del Bosquecito since 1981. Before that my father was mayordomo of this ditch for sixteen years, and his father before him cleaned it every spring with a shovel he made himself. I am 73 years old. I was in the Navy in the Pacific, and after that I fixed trucks and road graders for the state highway department for thirty-one years, so I know about machines, but this computer is my granddaughter Melissa's idea. She teaches fourth grade in Albuquerque and she says people everywhere can read this. All right.

This page is for two kinds of people. If you are one of our parciantes, it is so you know what the commission decided without driving out to my house to ask. (You can still come to the house. Bring your receipt book.) If you are not from here, it is so you know what an acequia is, because most people in this country turn on a faucet and never think where the water comes from. We think about it every day from April to October.

What is an acequia?

An acequia is a ditch that takes water out of the river and carries it to the fields by gravity. No pumps. Up the valley, where the river is higher than our fields, there is a presa, a diversion dam of rock and logs and brush, that turns part of the river into the ditch. From there our acequia madre, the mother ditch, runs about three and a half miles along the edge of the valley, a little higher than the fields, and every family below it can open a gate and let the water down into their land. What we do not use goes back to the river at the bottom end.

But an acequia is not only the ditch. It is the people who share it. The people who own the water rights are called parciantes. We have 41 parciantes on this ditch with about 163 acres among them, most of it in small pieces: alfalfa, chile, corn, a few orchards of apples and apricots, some pasture for horses, and a lot of gardens. Every spring the parciantes clean the ditch together. At the meeting in December they elect three commissioners, the comisionados, who make the rules and look after the money, and a mayordomo, the ditch boss, who runs the water day to day and settles who gets it when.

Under New Mexico law an acequia is a political subdivision of the state. That means it is a little government of its own, older than the state, with the right to make its rules and collect its dues. People laugh when I tell them that I am the treasurer of a government. It has $3,212.40 in the bank this morning, so it is a small government.

Officers for 1999

Albert has been a commissioner longer than I have been secretary, and he still walks the whole ditch at 75. Dennis is our first mayordomo under fifty in a long time. He works for the county and does the ditch mornings and evenings, and the acequia pays him $650 for the season, which is not enough, and he knows it, and he does it anyway.

The 1999 season

The new compuerta. The big headgate at the presa, the one my father and the other men built out of planks in 1948, finally rotted through last fall. The commission had been saving for three years. In February we bought a steel gate with a screw wheel for $1,850, and on two Saturdays a crew of nine poured new concrete walls for it. Jerome Hernandez ran the mixer. The old planks are stacked behind Albert's barn because nobody can stand to burn them yet.

La limpia. We cleaned the ditch on Saturday, March 27. Every parciante owes one peón, one worker, for every acre or part of an acre, or pays $20 for each peón he does not send. We started at the presa at seven with 49 people and shovels, and we were at the bottom end by four. The mayordomo walks ahead and gives each peón his piece of ditch, and you clean your piece and move down the line. This year we took out a lot of silt below the church, two cottonwood roots as big as my leg, one shopping cart (I do not know either), and the usual tumbleweeds. The families brought posole and red chile and tortillas to the bridge at noon. Twelve peones were paid for instead of sent, and that money goes to the new gate. My grandson Eric went for me for the first time. He is sixteen and he complained the whole morning and then he did not want to leave.

The water comes in. Dennis opened the new compuerta on Thursday, April 1, and it worked. Through April and May the river was good and everybody watered when they needed it.

San Isidro. On Saturday, May 15, after Mass, we carried San Isidro out of the chapel and along the ditch to the fields, the way it has always been done, and Father Patti blessed the water and the land. The children carried flowers. More people walked this year than I can remember, maybe sixty. I am not saying it was because of the new gate. I am saying there was food after.

On the schedule. By the middle of June the river was dropping, like most years, and on Monday, June 21, the mayordomo put us on the days. That means each part of the ditch gets the water two days a week and everybody waits his turn. The days are on the rules page. The summer rains came in July and helped us through.

A disagreement. In July two parciantes on the lower end had words about a turn. One said the other kept his gate open past his hours. The other said his hours were cut short to begin with. A shovel was left where it should not have been, and things were said at the post office. I will not write the names, because they are both good men and everybody here knows anyway. Dennis and the three commissioners met them both at the ditch on a Sunday evening and walked it together. For the rest of July Dennis opened and closed every gate on that stretch himself, with his watch, and that was the end of it. Last week I saw the two of them talking at the feed store, so I think we are all right.

Dues and dates to remember

If you bought land on the ditch this year, welcome. Come and see me or Dennis before next spring so we can put you on the list for the limpia and show you where your gate is. The water right goes with the land, and so does the shovel.

The 1999 Rules and Water Schedule
Our History and the Old Words

Write to the acequia at [email protected].
Melissa reads me the mail over the telephone on Sundays. I answer everything, but not fast.


visitors since March 1999

Last updated September 19, 1999