How it started

Nobody wrote down the day the first shovel went in. What the old people said, and what the papers say as far as they go, is that about 1790 a few families came up the river from the older villages below, on a land grant from the Spanish government, and the first thing they did, before the chapel and before most of the houses, was dig this ditch. They had wooden shovels and oxen and they followed the land with their eyes, keeping the ditch just a little downhill the whole way. It still runs where they put it. The engineers who came out in the 1970s with their instruments could not find much to improve.

The idea is much older than the village. The word acequia comes from Arabic. The Moors brought this kind of irrigation to Spain, the Spanish brought it to New Mexico when they came in 1598, and here it met the Pueblo people, who were already farming with water from the rivers long before any of that. So when we clean the ditch in March we are doing something people have done in dry country for a very long time.

The water rights

In New Mexico the rule for water is "first in time, first in right." The older your use of the water, the better your right when there is not enough to go around. Our right belongs to the land under the ditch, and it goes back to when the village started. When the State Engineer's people surveyed the fields for the court case that settled the rights on our river, the old parciantes swore to how long their families had watered, and the acequia's right came out among the oldest on the river. I went to some of those meetings with my father. He wore his good hat to every one.

But I want to say this too: on our river the acequias have always shared in a dry year by custom, ditch to ditch, and I hope we always will. A right on paper is one thing. Your neighbor's corn drying up is another.

What I remember

When I was a boy in the 1930s there were more than eighty peones at the limpia, and some families sent a team of horses with a fresno, a scraper, for the deep places. My first limpia I was twelve, sent in place of my uncle, and I was so proud I could not sleep the night before. The men gave me the easy stretch by the church and then teased me about it for years. In 1941 a summer flood took out the presa and every man and boy in the village was in the river for three days putting it back with rocks and cedar posts and brush. When I came home from the Navy in 1946 the first thing my father did was hand me a shovel. Two years later we built the wooden compuerta that we finally replaced this year.

There are fewer fields planted now than when I was young. Some of the children work in Santa Fe and Albuquerque and come home on weekends. Some land has been sold. But the ditch has run every summer for two hundred years, and it ran this summer, and the young ones still come to the limpia. That is what this page is for, really.

Palabras de la acequia: the words

We use these words on the ditch every day, in Spanish and in English both. Here is what they mean to us.