From Surcos to Acre Feet, and the Changing Values of Water

• In Event: Agencies of Water: Quality, Quantity, and Health

Abstract

When the U.S. annexed what would become the Territory of New Mexico in the mid-19th century, residents were using a unit of measure for water called a surco. Surcos varied by ditch as an actual volume of flowing water, yet were a rational and practical way to account for shared water along communal ditches (acequias). During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, however, the introduction of a new metric for measuring water forced cultural and physical changes in New Mexico’s water channels and ditches The acre-foot measure of water derived from U.S. homesteading policies and desert reclamation projects. Culturally, it was alien to New Mexico. Dissemination of the new metrics required a new field, hydrology, and the development/rise/creation of new “water experts.” The new metrics were promulgated by new “water experts” across the western United States, but the birth of hydrography happened in a humble log cabin sitting alongside the Rio Grande.
The new metrics of water changed the cultural and the biophysical dimensions of water, both on the ground and more abstractly in the emerging sciences of hydrology and geomorphology. Tangibly, the new measures were geared towards larger storage and allocation schemes for scaling up economic development. This change in the scale of water affected how New Mexicans thought of and used water as an increasingly privatized good through use-rights. Water was no longer a shared necessity, but a new form of resource rent to be allocated by the state. These changed metrics reshaped rivers biophysically, as new dams, reservoirs, and irrigation schemes changed flow dynamics in major streams. Water’s agency goes beyond its simple presence or absence, yet the abstracted notions of “modern” water made water foreign to the very people who knew it best.

Author

• Eric P. Perramond, Colorado College