Читать книгу Unsettled Waters - Eric P. Perramond - Страница 14

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Abeyta

Taos Struggles, Then Negotiates

Then these guys showed up with survey stuff, walked on the edges of all our fields, and kept talking about a state survey to figure out water use. They had a state vehicle, from the state engineer you know, so a lot of us just decided it was time to meet and start talking. We were doing business with a handshake; [it] was a neighborly way of doing business. But it was clear that had to change if they were going to start watching us carefully.

—ENRIQUE MONDRAGÓN¹

The Taos Valley had its own long-standing adjudication lawsuit stuck in legal mire for decades. The Abeyta suit, filed in 1969, simmered in quiet but adversarial litigation mode as the parties “spent the next 20 years trying to gather and build evidence and find data, maps, and historical documents so that we could annihilate each other in court.”² In the end, however, the parties did not annihilate each other. Abeyta is notable as the first lawsuit to avoid a “normal” full state adjudication and settle out of court. In its settlement process and terms, Abeyta later influenced the Aamodt suit negotiations to its south, providing a form of interbasin social peer pressure to move to settlement. The lessons of Abeyta have far-reaching implications for basins undergoing and awaiting adjudication.

The major streams in the Taos Valley have their headwaters on Taos Pueblo lands. The Pueblo, then, were in a good position to negotiate their ancestral claims with other parties: the nearby acequias, the town of Taos, and mutual domestic water associations. For the small town of Taos, nestled at seven thousand feet in elevation on the eastern plateau of the Rio Grande Gorge, the strong but unquantified claims to water by the Pueblo were terrifying. The Abeyta adjudication began just as the economy and landscape of Taos were shifting away from agriculture. Like the larger city of Santa Fe to its south, Taos was becoming an art-market mecca, and its economy was increasingly relying on water-thirsty tourism. New residential developments, including suburbs, exurbs, and second homes, also demanded more water. With its main water sources—surface stream waters and wells—on the legal table, Taos had a lot to lose in adjudication.

Compared to the Pojoaque Valley to the south, Taos had decent water supplies. Surface water represented nearly 80 percent of water used in the valley, according to a recent water-planning study.³ Irrigators and landowners relied on a large number of domestic wells, which became a key sticking point in the later adjudication. Water conflict, accommodation, and cooperation were nothing new in the Taos Valley. Long-standing disputes between towns such as Taos, Arroyo Hondo, and Arroyo Seco were par for the course from the eighteenth century onward.

Water sharing between the Taos Pueblo and the adjoining acequias was also tested intermittently yet endured into the late twentieth century. Irrigation in the Taos Valley depends on a set of mountain streams, along with other minor streams to the south (see map 6). These streams feed to one of the densest networks of acequia ditches in New Mexico, some seventy-one individual ditch associations. Approximately two thousand parciantes still depend on these acequias today.⁴

MAP 6. Map of the Taos Valley and its major streams and acequias. Adapted from Rodriguez (2006, plate 1).

Prior to filing the adjudication suit in the late 1960s, Office of the State Engineer (OSE) technicians had already been at work in the Taos Valley, preparing for water infrastructure. State and federal actions on the long-anticipated San Juan-Chama Project to bring Colorado River water into the Rio Grande Basin spurred the need for state water accounting. Tied to these larger plans was a small dam proposed by the state and the Bureau of Reclamation in the Taos Valley, to be called the Indian Camp Dam. The dam would have been close to where the current and smaller Talpa Reservoir is located (see map 6). While originally popular in Taos in the 1950s, plans for the Indian Camp Dam met with real resistance once federal and state project officials proposed a conservancy district to reorganize water governance. Taoseños worried that the project would raise taxes on already poor farmers. Locals also feared a loss of water governance for the area’s acequias and domestic mutual water associations that provide drinking water from wells. The formation of the conservancy district near Albuquerque, decades before, fed these concerns in Taos.

AFTER INDIAN CAMP DAM, THE INEVITABLE

The Indian Camp Dam died because of local opposition to taxation and loss of governance.⁵ However, adjudication continued as the process had already been triggered by the OSE and the state’s attorney general. After all, a full water accounting was needed for the San Juan-Chama Project and its effects on water rights. The OSE was charged with mapping these lands, waters, and preexisting cultures of waters. It was hard work to envision, much less complete. What is remarkable was the amount of time, precision, and annotation for crops inserted into each map. Each map was made with care yet errors abounded, and the later files are replete with correction maps for boundary sliver issues, ownership changes, and crop annotations that changed over time. Water and water use never stay still, and the maps would have to be constantly updated to be correct.

Mapping, field checking, and aerial photography of all water users and their fields in the valley ensued. OSE field staff came to depend on local irrigator knowledge in Taos. One day in 2011, I spoke with Bob, a retired OSE field technician then in his early seventies. As he recounted his experience in the Taos Valley, what seemed like an expert’s account quickly morphed into a humble narrative of long days, confusion, mistakes, and later corrections at the office in Santa Fe. The work was difficult, and Bob’s realm of expertise depended on local knowledge to execute it in any satisfactory way, as he related.

We needed their help to make this happen. I mean, there was a lot of discussion … I sometimes felt like they were negotiating with us … or that they were trying to maneuver us into decisions that would make it on the map, talking about water duties, or what crops were planted when, bickering about crop rotation and that a fixed amount of water for any field was never set, right? People had a lot to say, and some of these old-timers questioned how or why we were doing all this in the beginning. That field checking must have been … in the spring of 1968 or thereabouts. We tried to pay attention to the important stuff on water, but sometimes, well, people just go off, and they got on these tangents how they were special, they ignored the state engineer or the thinking that this wasn’t state water, that kind of thing … We got it right, mostly, in the end, but a lot of the time we [OSE] were pretty generous about the water duties we assigned or dimensions of fields and how much water people actually needed. I think people were irrigating like crazy with us present [chuckles] … I mean they weren’t growing rice in places like Taos or Talpa, so that … [laughs] was pretty entertaining.⁶

Locals were not always fully trusting of the process. Bob’s recounting also makes it clear that Taoseños were intent on being visible to OSE staff in their irrigation practices. They wanted to be seen making full use of their water at the time of mapping, often to the point of overwatering. The hydrographic surveys were the starting point for enjoining the various kinds of expertise necessary to make the 1907 water code work in New Mexico.⁷ However, mapping property lines in the valleys was complicated.

Miguel A., a leather shop owner now in his sixties who used to run some cattle in El Prado, recalled local reactions to the new presence: