Water Alternatives (Jun 2024)
How metrics shape water politics in New Mexico: From quantifying governance to active monitoring
Abstract
The politics of quantifying water are nothing new to the state of New Mexico. Indigenous views of water as integral, holistic, and bound to the land were shaken by Spanish Colonial norms of water infrastructure, metrics, and institutions. A second abrupt shift into Anglo-American water metrics tied to western homesteading emerged at the start of the 20th century. The Anglo-American system of assigning private use rights to water has resulted in more bureaucratic metrics far removed from either indigenous or ─ understandings of water. Interestingly, Spanish and Anglo-American forms of settler-colonial water metrics were not completely incommensurate in their intent despite their qualitative and quantitative differences. Surcos, a qualitative metric of water for the Spanish, and American acre feet both measure the amount of water needed to cover an area of land and were employed for active land settlement. It was not in the award phase of settler-colonial water rights that water metrics became most problematic. Based on over a decade of ethnographic work in the state, I argue here that the current politics and contestation of water quantification in the state of New Mexico are driven by changes to water governance when new technologies and policy measures are used to govern and monitor water users less transparently.
