As we run north out of Taos, look at the small green fields either side of the road, and the ditches feeding them. Those ditches are acequias, and they are one of the oldest continuously operating institutions in the United States.
An acequia is a gravity-fed irrigation ditch, but calling it a ditch undersells it badly. The Spanish brought the system here in the sixteen hundreds — and they had it from the Moors, who had it from the Romans and from the Middle East, so the technology running through that channel is genuinely ancient. Pueblo communities here had their own irrigation long before that.
What makes acequias remarkable is that they are not just plumbing; they are LAW. Each acequia is a legal entity in New Mexico, older than the state itself, with elected officers — a mayordomo who manages the water and commissioners who govern the association. The water is shared by rules worked out over centuries, and in a dry year everyone takes a cut together rather than the senior right taking everything.
Every spring, the members turn out to clean the ditch by hand. It is called la limpia, and it is part civic obligation, part community event, and it is still happening in these valleys right now.
In a region where water law elsewhere is a knife fight, that is worth noticing.
Those green strips are the result. Where the acequia goes, things grow. Ten feet beyond it, sagebrush.
Photo: Netherzone · CC BY-SA 4.0