The research objective of "Intersections of Authority" is to identify and interpret the ways that federal natural resource management philosophy was co-opted and modified during its enactment in specific legal and political contexts in the American West. Through archival and documentary investigation of New Mexico's Office of the Territorial/State Engineer in the early twentieth century, the project will examine the intersection and co-existence of various authority structures at work in the practical determination of water rights for the Rio Grande Valley. Specifically, the project seeks to answer the following research questions:
1. How was the scientific authority invoked in federal resource management policy for the American West negotiated and altered through its legislative incorporation into existing legal and political systems for water rights determination in New Mexico in 1905 and 1907?
2. In what ways and to what extent did the Office of the Territorial/State Engineer participate in a negotiation of multiple authorities or integration of various forms of expertise to legitimize its water management activities between 1905 and 1917?
3. To what extent did the State Engineer's production of legitimate environmental knowledge for the Rio Grande Valley in 1917 and 1918, through scientific survey and definitive cartography, reflect its successful negotiation of multiple authority sources?
To answer these three questions, the project will contextualize legislation, legal cases, policy documents, and topographical maps related to the administration of water rights for New Mexico's Rio Grande Valley. Dr. Lane's methodological expertise in using archival materials to critically interpret geographical knowledge production will be supplemented by the expertise of Dr. Matthews in legal issues related to the geography of natural resources and public lands.
Drawing theoretically from recent work in the geography of science and the nature of expertise, the project will fundamentally question the rational basis of early water reclamation policy in the American West by illuminating the extent to which early water management expertise and authority were rooted in local knowledge and local politics. This creative re-investigation of well-studied resource disputes in New Mexico will foreground the intersections and interactions of competing authority systems over the Western waters.
As many of the laws passed in the early twentieth century still govern resource use today, a fuller understanding of the root legislation's practical instabilities and applications will shed new light on contemporary water disputes. The State Engineer's maps of the Rio Grande Valley produced in 1917 and 1918 are today considered some of the earliest sources of reliable evidence regarding the seniority of modern claims to water rights. As time erases some of the contingent and incomplete nature of its scientific authority, we must look anew at the structures of expertise and authority that supported the map series and its makers. This project will thus helpfully complicate our understanding of historical evidence as the Rio Grande Valley continues its rapid urbanization, and as the value of water continues to rise.
RESEARCH ACTIVITIES The "Intersections of Authority" project has resulted in the creation of several datasets and publications dealing with the New Mexico’s early-20th-centry water management transitions. This project was designed to investigate the ways in which new U.S. federal natural resource management policy (and philosophy) intersected with existing norms for water management in the late territorial period in New Mexico. Research activities have focused on: (1) identification of early efforts to introduce scientific hydrology to New Mexico through the USGS Hydrologic Field School, (2) creation and analysis of a database listing all major legal cases related to water in the Rio Grande valley between 1900 and 1912, (3) creation and analysis of a historical GIS that includes the specific geographical locations of disputed water bodies identified in the legal records, (4) creation and analysis of an archive including all publications concerning water management or irrigation practice in the Santa Fe New Mexican between 1900 and 1912, and (5) analysis of the first two decades of agency reports published by the Office of the State Engineer (originally called the Office of the Territorial Irrigation Engineer, then Office of the Territorial Engineer). INTELLECTUAL MERIT OF THE RESEARCH Analysis of these extensive databases continues, but current findings include: (1) Attendees of the Embudo Field School had a very limited exposure to the cultural geography of New Mexico. They entered via rail from Denver and did not learn anything about local irrigation customs before deployment across the West as influential hydrologic engineers. (2) The development of water laws in late Territorial-era New Mexico relied discursively on a rational-scientific model of hydrologic quantification that was not technically feasible in New Mexico at the time the laws were enacted. (3) Water-related disputes that went to district court in New Mexico’s Rio Grande Valley in 1900-1912 were spatially segregated by type. Cases in the "upper counties" (Rio Arriba, Santa Fe) dealt mainly with intra-ethnic conflicts such as acequia governance and local diversion disruptions. Cases in the "lower counties" (Sandoval, Bernalillo) dealt mainly with inter-ethnic conflicts such as the digging of well for Anglo-dominated irrigation and railroad companies on the lands of Hispano land grants or pueblo territories. (4) Legal judgments on local-level water disputes in Rio Arriba County between 1900-1912 sometimes explicitly mandated technological solution (in accordance with federal Reclamation policy) that failed to resolve on-the-ground disputes between Hispano and pueblo acequia communities. The fundamental mismatch between traditional dispute resolution techniques and the science-based Reclamation policy is thus visible in the district court record. (5) The Office of the State Engineer was highly focused on four primary areas of technical "expertise" in its reported water management activities: (a) the expert creation of a hydrologic survey that would quantify flow in all of the major waterways of New Mexico; (b) the rational maximization of the ‘duty’ of water, or the number of acres that could be productively irrigated per unit of water, via permitting decisions; (c) the cultivation of improved agronomic-hydrologic expertise among farmers that had been resettled from the humid eastern United States to the semi-arid Southwest; and (d) the market efficiency of irrigation schemes worthy of investment and promotion. BROADER IMPACTS OF THE RESEARCH By studying the legal and scientific approaches to water management that were first introduced to New Mexico in the early 20th century, this project provides a fuller historical understanding of a topic that continues to dominate in New Mexico and the Southwest.
