Testimony on Acequias Before Colorado State Legislature

Acequias: Water Democracy and Ecological Resilience

Moderator's Note: We are posting the testimony (February 18) of Devon G. Peña before the Colorado General Assembly, House Committee on Agriculture, Natural Resources, and Livestock. The Governor signed an amended version of HB 09-1233 in April. See blog entries for April 7 and April 1o.

Acequia de sangria (bleeding ditch) delivers water to a two-acre field of
heirloom maiz de concho at Rancho Dos Acequias, San Acacio, Colorado.

COMMENTS PREPARED FOR THE AGRICULTURE, LIVESTOCK, & NATURAL RESOURCES COMMITTEE, 67TH GENERAL ASSEMBLY, STATE OF COLORADO REGARDING THE PROPOSED BILL ON “RECOGNITION OF ACEQUIAS” (HB 1233)

Prepared by Dr. Devon G. Peña
Denver, Colorado. February 18, 2009

I. Introduction

Madam Chair, thank you for allowing me to testify; it is a real privilege. My name is Dr. Devon G. Peña and I am a Professor of Anthropology, American Ethnic Studies, and Environmental Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle. I am also a landowner, farmer, and irrigator in the San Luis Valley. Indeed, I am one of the fortunate souls to have land with water rights on Colorado’s oldest irrigation ditch, La Acequia de la Gente de San Luis, a.k.a., the San Luis Peoples’ Ditch, established in 1852. I am here to testify in support of the passage of the legislation that is before you on the “Recognition of Acequias.” My testimony will draw from my qualifications as an expert research scholar and as an acequia farmer. Over the past 27 years, I have organized and directed interdisciplinary research teams of natural and social scientists to carry out comprehensive studies of the history, culture, economy, and ecology of the acequia farming system.

II. Cultural and Historical Significance of Acequias

Research scholars have long recognized the acequia as a significant part of the cultural heritage of humanity. Indeed, the acequia, because of its thousand-year history as a cultural and civic institution, is being considered for designation as a world heritage resource by the United Nations at the request of the government of Spain and the famous water commissions of Andalucía.

Aquino Gallegos irrigates family' garden plot at Colorado's oldest
Centennial Farm, the Corpus A. Gallegos Ranches (est. 1852).

Congress long ago granted this sort of recognition under the terms of the 1986 Water Resources Development Act that declared acequias to be valuable cultural, historical, and engineering resources important to the development of agriculture in the American Southwest. The State of New Mexico, of course, has long recognized the legal status of acequias as bonafide sub-county institutions of local government with wide-ranging authority relevant to the protection and conservation of water resources for agricultural uses.

III. Acequias Renowned as “Water Democracies”

The acequia is more than just an irrigation ditch. Indeed, the term refers as much to the form of local democratic self-governance based on the association of acequia parciantes (landowners with irrigation use rights on a community ditch). Acequias have been celebrated by natural and social scientists as “water democracies” (see Rivera 1999, Peña 1998, 2003, 2005) in recognition of their traditional “one farmer-one vote” form of decision-making within the community ditch. Indeed, John Wesley Powell, in an 1897 Survey article, celebrated the acequia systems by characterizing the association of irrigators as a “watershed commonwealth.”

This legislation will recognize and value the fact that acequias, and their unique system of customary democratic law, is as true to place as any other legal principles governing water use and conservation in Colorado’s Upper Rio Grande bioregion. This legislation will allow acequias to revitalize the traditions of local self-government and thus preserve the acequia “way of life.”

Indeed, as my colleague Dr. Jose Rivera of the University of New Mexico has observed, the acequia is not just an irrigation ditch nor is it just a form of agrarian democracy, it is a “culture” in the sense of a whole way of life. This cultural diversity is an important source of the resilience that makes this one of our most important cultural and historic resources in the State of Colorado.

IV. Ecosystem Services of the Acequia System

One of the areas of research that recently has occupied the attention of scientific scholars is the study of the ecosystem services provided by the acequia irrigation system and its tradition of gravity-driven flood irrigation. Indeed, in looking toward the conditions of a Post-Peak Oil world, the gravity-driven traction of the acequia system is being reevaluated as an important contribution to agriculture based on sustainable and renewable use of energy.

More recent studies by hydrologists, ecologists, conservation and wildlife biologists, edaphologists (soil scientists), and environmental economists are verifying research I directed in the 1990s under grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ford Foundation on acequia farming families in Northern New Mexico and Colorado’s San Luis Valley. Our study found that acequias provide a wide range of ecosystem services including the conservation of agrobiodiversity, provision of wildlife habitat and movement corridors, soil conservation, and the preservation of water quality.

Fernald et al. (2007) report that acequias are important in providing water quality services that maintain native vegetation associations. Shallow groundwater flows caused by ditch seepage and flood‐irrigation methods dilute contaminants present in pre‐existing shallow groundwater and protect the deeper groundwater by transporting contaminants away from the deeper aquifer (Fernald, Baker, and Guldan 2007). In this manner, acequia systems provide vital hydrological, agroecosystem, and riparian functions and thus support biodiversity at the species, population, and landscape ecology levels. Few modern-day agroecosystems in the United States follow this habitat-friendly pattern at the landscape ecology level. Fernald et al (2008) further report that recharging of in-stream flows by means of sub-irrigated flows means that acequias do not necessarily damage riparian lifezone conditions downstream of ditch diversions.

V. Economic Base Services of the Acequia System

In addition to these ecosystem services, the acequias also provide a vital set of economic base services that are crucial not just for the agricultural sector but for the regional tourism economy that is associated with the beautiful cultural landscapes created over generations by the acequias.

Rivera (1999) and other researchers have demonstrated that much of the tourism industry in New Mexico owes its existence to the verdant cultural landscapes created by acequia farming practices. Indeed, with the growth of New Mexico’s wine industry, most observers note that this too would not be possible without the existence of acequias and their rich, deep soil-horizons on properly irrigated bottomlands. This is also the case in our own San Luis Valley where tourists are attracted to our area largely because of the presence of the historical and cultural landscapes that were created by acequias.

One recent study (Peña 2003) estimates, conservatively, that a seven-county area in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado with large numbers of acequia farms receives a net economic benefit of between $280-300 million a year in economic base services from the acequias. The estimates, as I said, are conservative and do not include the direct sales of heirloom organically-certified crops like the famous roasted white corn known as chicos del horno, prepared in our iconic adobe ovens.

The San Luis area is known for its religious tourism sites like the fabled Stations of the Cross Shrine and the Capilla de Todos Los Santos. Increasingly, we are attracting another brand of cultural tourist, the agri-tourist. Indeed, San Luis is home to various 501(c)(3) non-profit organizations that are promoting agri-tourism through the preservation and prosperity of our historic acequia farms. Since at least the early 1980s, the San Luis area has hosted students from high schools, community colleges, and universities from all over Colorado and New Mexico who come to study, work, and live among our acequia farming families. This law will greatly strengthen the ability for acequia associations to organize initiatives that protect and maintain an attractive environment that draws these growing numbers of cultural and educational tourists.

VI. Concluding Remarks

For too many decades, the farming and ranching and the environmentalist communities were at loggerheads. The world is changing and environmentalists are learning to recognize and value the vital role played by farmers in Colorado in preserving open space, wildlife habitat, and thus biodiversity. I am proud to have been one of the first social scientists to make the argument that farming in nature’s image produces vital ecological and economic services to our cherished bioregion. I am blessed to be an acequia farmer entrusted along with my neighbors with the preservation of the land, water, and local place-based culture.

References Cited

Fernald, A. T. T. Baker, and S. J. Gulden 2007. Hydrologic, Riparian, and Agroecosystem Functions of Traditional Acequia Irrigation Systems. Journal of Sustainable Agriculture, 30:2:147-71.

Hicks, G. A. and D. G. Peña 2003. Community Acequias in Colorado’s San Luis Valley: A Customary Commons in the Domain of Prior Appropriation. University of Colorado Law Review 74: 387-486.

Peña, D. G. 1998. Chicano Culture, Ecology, Politics. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Peña, D. G. 2003. The Watershed Commonwealth of the Upper Rio Grande. In James K. Boyce and Barry Shelly, eds., Natural Assets: Democratizing Environmental Ownership. Washington, D.C.: Island Press.

Peña, D. G. 2005. Mexican Americans and the Environment: Tierra y Vida. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Rivera, J. 1999. Acequia Culture. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

The Bolita Bean Wars

Homespun heirloom varieties are endangered

EL RITO, CO. More than two decades ago in 1987, I made my first visit to the Corpus A. Gallegos Ranches at the principal headquarters a mile west of San Luis, Colorado. This is one of Colorado's famed and distinguished Centennial Farms, a designation given only to those farms that have been in continuous operation under the same family for at least 100 years. I was privileged to meet Corpus and his wife Yvette as well as three of their children - Joe, Rafaelita, and Jerry. This is the oldest, continuously operated (non-Native American) family farm in Colorado (established in 1851).

What I remember most vividly about that visit was the meal: The centerpiece was chicos del horno and bolitas. Both of these dishes were new to me. I'll never forget the bursting flavors that issued from each roasted corn kernel imbued as it was with the burnt earth terroir of the adobe horno. At the time, the Gallegos family was without their own horno (earthen-work oven), but that is another story best left for later.

The bolita beans were also spectacular. I was raised on a diet that included a lot of pinto beans. The main difference I tasted was that the bolitas produced a rich creamy tan-hued broth that seems as if some sort of sweet cream was added. I asked Corpus and Yvette to explain the preparation: How did you all get this creamy broth? Water, salt, and pepper and an overnight simmer was their response.

I was stunned. So much flavor and rich, creamy good eats; and all of it coming from the bean itself and not some secret spice or additive.

The following morning Corpus pulled out a large Mason jar filled with bolita beans. He had come to show me the secret of the bolitas. The bolitas, Corpus explained, get their name from the fact that they are shaped like tiny little round balls. (See photo below).

The beans on the left side are heirloom bolita beans from
the Corpus A. Gallegos Ranch in San Luis, CO while the
beans on the right side are a commercial hybrid variety
from Dove Creek, Inc. in western Colorado.

The shape, size, and color of the bolitas was distinct: Round or really oblong and ball-like, beige-tinted, and quite petite. These beans were about half the size of the typical pinto bean which has squared edges instead of soft rounded curves to its morphology [a branch of biology that deals with the form and structure of animals and plants; or, the form and structure of an organism or any of its parts.]

Bioinvasions alter the bolita

Flash forward 22 years and I find myself irrigating the hay and heirloom crops fields on the ranch my sister, Tania, and I recently acquired as a home for our non-profit organization, The Acequia Institute. I am a third-year parciante of the acequiahood. As Joe Gallegos tells me: "You are one of us now. No more 'You all' and that kinda talk..."

Yet, not all is well in our Culebra acequiahood.

This year, as is usual every April and May, I went about town collecting seeds from local acequia farmers for the Institute's ongoing work on in-situ agro-biodiversity conservation. The Institute is home to a "Memory Seed Bank" that is part of my personal 25-year effort to protect the unique variety of native heirloom crops of the Rio Arriba bioregion.

Our focus at the Institute is on the "three sisters" endemic to native South and North American agroecology and ethnobotany - corn, bean, and squash - and their wild relatives. The preservation of the genetic distinctiveness of bolitas is a primary concern of ours since this bean variety has outstanding culinary qualities and has been adapted by local farmers to a 90-day growing season at an average elevation of 8,000 feet above sea level.

What I found this year was deeply disturbing. The bolitas of the acequia farms of the Rio Culebra watershed are "genetically contaminated," a condition most likely resulting from open cross-pollination with other hybrid and land race varieties of Phaseolus vulgaris (the common bean) that farmers here may have inadvertently introduced.

We have been silently invaded by cheater bolitas.

Food sovereignty is built on a foundation of locally-adapted seed stocks

The common bean is an herbaceous annual plant. The dozens of native land race varieties of the common bean were domesticated in Mesoamerica and the Andes at least 5,000 years ago. The ancestor of the domesticated varieties is the Frijol de Rata and this "wild relative" is still found throughout Mexico, the Andes, and the American Southwest. Beans, squash, and corn are the "Three Sisters" that provided the foundation of Native American agriculture. Beans are a legume and are thus appreciated by Native farmers for their nitrogen-fixing qualities that naturally enrich the soil medium.

The bolitas I collected this year (nine samples from different families and corresponding to most of the distinct riparian zones associated with the original long-lots or vara strips) show signs of contamination from the introgression of genetic traits associated with non-Native, non-heirloom varieties including the commercial hybrid or "cheater" bolitas marketed by Dove Creek, Inc.

This biological contamination is caused by "foreign" sources of bolita-like beans that have cross-pollinated with the local heirloom varieties. I discussed this problem with Linda Prim, formerly of the Ghost Ranch in Abiqui and now a consultant with our local acequia farmers' coop, the Culebra Coperative Growers. Linda is a leading expert on seed saving and land race biodiversity conservation.

Linda verified my worst fears: "The bolita is in danger of extinction," she explained. It has been widely contaminated by cross-pollination with other beans and the introduction of commercial hybrid versions of our beloved creamy bolitas.

This constitutes not just a threat to the genetic integrity of our local heirloom beans, it is an assault on our food sovereignty. If we cannot protect and nurture the preservation and exchange of our native land races, we may very well lose the capacity to remain self-sufficient in the sustenance of our local food system. If we cannot protect our bolitas, this will be a first step toward granting corporations control of our seed stocks.

As a result, the Acequia Institute has been working on a seed saving and exchange "Memory Bank" that focuses on re-establishing the integrity of our local heirloom varieties. This summer, the Institute is planting five experimental plots, in isolated locales, to begin the process of restoring the integrity of our local beans through careful "natural selection" of those beans that exhibit the morphological and culinary qualities we have grown to appreciate over the generations of place-based farming practices. This will be followed by genetic testing to set the benchmarks for our Culebra bolitas.

We will report back on the results after our Fall harvest in early October.

Limpiza y saca de acequia - 2009

Parciantes, familia, y amigos on the San Luis Peoples Ditch (April 23, 2009)

The San Luis Peoples Ditch Annual Clean-Up

EL RITO, CO. Every spring, the parciantes of the acequias of New Mexico and Colorado gather to engage in the collective labor of cleaning up the acequias to get ready for the irrigation season which around here starts around May 15 (The Feast Day of San Isidro Labrador).

Tania P. Hernandez on the acequia clean-up crew.

This year, on the San Luis Peoples' Ditch, we had more than sixty people turn out for this communal endeavor. We had a dozen students and three faculty from Western State College join us this year. There was even a self-identified tourist by the name of Mark who toiled alongside the rest of us.

Elaine H. Peña cuts weeds from the bank.

The limpieza y saca de acequia is an ancient custom that has been followed throughout the history of Chicana/o acequia farming in the Rio Arriba. This is a very important part of our local food system as it prepares our irrigation system and nurtures the bonds of mutual obligation and cooperative labor among the parciantes of the acequiahood.

Tania P. Hernandez and Praxedis Ortega, Jr. pause for a photo op.

The parciantes of the San Luis Peoples Ditch, now renamed as La Acequia de la Gente de San Luis, include some of the first farming families in Colorado like Praxedis Ortega, Jr., the owner of a Colorado Centennial Farm. "Prax" is the fifth generation in his family to farm off La Acequia de la Gente de San Luis.

The mid-day comida.

The day's proceedings always revolve around a collective luncheon of local foods prepared with ingredients from the previous year's harvest. This year we were treated to chicos del horno, chile verde and chile colorado, habas, bolita beans, corn bread, corn tortillas, and even hot dogs and burgers (prepared with locally butchered ground beef).

Sisnaajini (Mount Blanca) and the Gallegos-Peña haystacks.

This year was an especially memorable one because we engaged in our collective labors fully aware of and in the mood to celebrate the passage of Colorado's new "Acequia Recognition" law that formalizes the customary law of the acequia as an alternative to the Doctrine of Prior Appropriation. The new law also states that the collective work of limpieza y saca is legally required for all the farmers on the ditch.

The annual limpieza y saca de acequia is above all an important social event. It is the "cultural glue" that binds neighbor to neighbor in a spirit of conviviality.

This year's snowpack is about 110% of the annual average so we will have plenty of water for all 74 acequias in our local watershed. Even the "water hogs" might have an easier time than usual if they take water out of turn or take too long to irrigate their fields.

Yet, despite the spirit of community, a deep rooted sense of place, and the new Acequia Law, we face some serious challenges in our little bioregion. I am just now waiting for Joe Gallegos to drive to the Torcido Creek Gate of La Sierra Commons (formerly known as the Taylor Ranch) for the first of what I am certain will be a long series of protest events by local people against subdivision developers.

A new subdivision is being developed on the Torcido Creek Road that provides entry to our common lands. The subdivision developer claims that this is a private road and we can no longer use it for access to the commons. The local people and the County Commissioners disagree and rightly assert that this is a county road and must therefore remain open for local people to gain access to the mountains.

A critical issue of concern to us is that this development represents yet another act of environmental racism that will affect the quality and quantity of water moving from the mountains and into our streams and acequias. The 35-acre lots need roads and the developer constructed what must be close to a hundred miles of new erosive surfaces.

It seems our struggles for environmental and social justice never end, they simply enter into new chapters of resistance to those who treat water and land as mere commodities instead of the ecological basis of life to be cared for under Original Instructions. Another summer of civil disobedience is in order. We will prevail; we always have.

El amanecer, Taos. El espiritu de
nuestra comadre seguira con nosotros.

Sodbusters and the 'native gaze' - Part VII

Diversity: The key to resilience

I conclude with a photograph and accompanying epigraph: “Diversity is the key to resilience.” This photo shows some of the heirloom land race maize harvested from our Culebra bottoms in September 2007. The rainbow bundle of maize includes many “chimeras” and represents 25 years of collecting and seed saving of Zea mays.



I should clarify the first statement and note that my acequia-hood vecinos harvested the seed corn. That single act of tequio demonstrates the importance of collective community work in sustaining a local food system.

All my neighbors wanted to see my corn harvested. They appreciated the fact that one of the heirloom lines I have collected is a drought-resistant white flint from the Seri people in Baja California. This white corn is a lot like our heirloom concho varieties, a local white flour corn that also comes in dent and flint iterations and is the basis of our annual oven-roasted chicos production. Both the Seri white flint and the concho are short-season varietals and do not require a lot of irrigation.

This motivated everyone and so Joe Gallegos organized much of the harvest work. Indeed, I was at the time preoccupied with arranging for my Father’s funeral and also engaged in a wearisome, stressful battle to redefine my future not only as a member of an embattled Department but indeed as an activist-academic.

I will always connect the three events: Death; Rebirth; Survival.

I am bound to reflect not just on the diversity of our corn, but on the diversity of other plants including the many beneficial weeds that co-inhabit our field crop, orchard, and meadow landscapes. These “beneficial weeds” include the edible and medicinal wild relatives of cultivars that prefer to grow alongside the corn, bean, and squash trinity.

Certain “weeds” are essential to our local heritage cuisine. One should not have a Lenten meal in La Plaza de San Luis de la Culebra without freshly sautéed quelites (Lambs Quarters) to give you one interesting example.

I sort of feel that way sometimes: Like a weed, not yet proven beneficial, that has to survive by negotiating some level of acceptance and co-existence within the given association of “Native” plants to find solace in the soil medium of the modern western university.

I know I am often seen, or even see myself, as an exotic weed that refuses to be naturalized to these soil conditions. I am immutable in resisting academic monocultures of the mind. I imagine that perhaps I might sometimes even be misconstrued as a noxious weed according to someone else’s framing of my intellectual being and my presumed “faculty politics.”

Such feelings born of misrecognition or narrow, even fear-based, ideological proclivities are really not my concern. I am concerned with what I perceive as the structures of knowledge production that academic communities are sometimes prone to engage and reproduce, and which can indeed constitute acts of epistemological violence since they force the Other into the kind of troubling genuflection we have had to endure over the past hour or so.

I can’t say I always relish the challenge of presenting a parallax-shifting vantage point epistemology. My family’s acequia farm in Colorado constantly tugs at me, filling my mind with the presence of a place that zigzags me between Seattle and San Acacio. These thoughts are the liminal result.

Closing now with a brief lesson from linguistics or if you prefer semiotics: The word “weed” is variously defined in Spanish as 1. mala hierba (bad herb or plant); or 2. debilucho,-a (bad person). It can also be used in a transitive verbal and figurative sense as escardar (to weed out). I have learned through my own experiences that academics are prone to engage in the weeding out of the soil of knowledge production. That itself is the most demanding epistemological contradiction of our time and place. Perhaps to rebuke all that and signal some semblance of audacious hopefulness, I want to close with a poem I improvised to end this paper:

I am a weed

Soy hierba;
I am a weed
Unwelcomed; exotic;
soiling the ground
Bringing unwelcome thoughts…
Soy debilucho,
soy una amenaza
I am a threatening Other:
Porque creo en las instrucciones originales
I believe this place teaches me
Sacred ground of all my being
Epistemology does not beget ontology
Being here in place
Blesses me with the knowledge
Of inhabiting not conquering
Of coevalness not greedy usurpation

Translation plantation
Homogenization
Fast food for all
GMOs will be your fall!
The hunger is not
In the eyes of the child
It is in vacant hearts
Yearning to find freedom
From deconstructed
Onco-burgers
And napalmed Freedom fries
The thirst is not in our bellies
It is gnawing away inside our souls
Exhilio, memorias de pérdida
Los buitres sobre vida muerta

The thirst for justice
Against the aridity
Of capitalist desire
Is a burning that leaves
Not even figurines etched
Under the heat of nuclear-blasted
Walls in Nagasaki
It is, I am a weed:…A hunger that thirsts for justice.

This is Part 7 of 8 of an original as yet unpubished essay prepared by invitation for the Department of Anthropology, Spring 2008 Colloquium, “Epistemologies of Anthropological Research,” University of Washington, May 23, 2008. It is presented here free of the footnotes in the original. Sources cited in the text will be posted at the end of the series of 8.

This is a work in progress; please do not quote, cite, or circulate without the author’s permission. Send inquiries to: dpena@u.washington.edu. The author thanks Elaine H. Peña and Mario Montaño for comments on earlier drafts.

"Recognition of Acequias" - Colorado State Law Forwarded to Governor Ritter

Moderator's Note: We are providing without comment the text of HB 09-1233 as amended and passed on third reading by the Colorado General Assembly House Committee on Agriculture, Livestock, and Natural Resources. The bill has also received the approval of the State Senate and awaits the signature of Governor Bill Ritter.

The "Recognition of Acequias" Law re-establishes the norms and practices of acequia customary law in certain southcentral Colorado watersheds. This includes important principles that define water as a communal asset-in-place and bases allocation of water rights on equity and not just priority; the one farmer equals one vote rule; the sharing of scarcity; the expectation of communal labor and mutual aid in the maintenance and cleanup of acequias; and the possibility of a ban on the sale of water away from acequias.



NOTE: This bill has been prepared for the signature of the appropriate legislative officers and the Governor. To determine whether the Governor has signed the bill or taken other action on it, please consult the legislative status sheet, the legislative history, or the Session Laws.

UNEDITED TEXT OF COLORADO LEGISLATION (HB 09-1233):

AN ACT
________

HOUSE BILL 09-1233

BY REPRESENTATIVE(S) Vigil, Court, Curry, Fischer, Frangas, Hullinghorst, Labuda, Looper, McNulty, Merrifield, Pace, Tipton;also SENATOR(S) Schwartz, Bacon, Foster, Gibbs, Groff, Heath, Hodge, Newell, Romer, Sandoval, Tapia.

CONCERNING THE RECOGNITION OF ACEQUIAS, AND, IN CONNECTION THEREWITH, AUTHORIZING ACEQUIA DITCH CORPORATIONS.

Be it enacted by the General Assembly of the State of Colorado:

SECTION 1. Legislative declaration.

(1) The general assembly hereby finds that:

(a) The first nonnative Americans to settle in Colorado were Hispanics from colonial Mexico, who brought with them their ancient irrigation practices based on a community ditch called an "acequia", pursuant to which water was treated as a community resource and allocated based upon equity and need rather than priority of appropriation;

(b) Colorado's territorial session laws from 1868, 1872, and 1874 recognized the validity of acequias within the counties of Costilla, Conejos, Huerfano, and Las Animas, including the requirement for irrigators to contribute labor to the upkeep of the acequia and a preference over other diversions for acequias' diversions regardless of priority;

(c) As the general assembly recognized in the following excerpt from Senate Joint Resolution 02-028, the continued operation of these historic acequias is an "essential foundation for the sustenance of the local economy":

"WHEREAS, Spanish American settlers founded the Town of San Luis in the Culebra Valley in 1852, thus making it the oldest town in Colorado; and

"WHEREAS, In keeping with their ancestors' acequias tradition, these settlers quickly initiated an irrigation system; and

"WHEREAS, The oldest water right in Colorado is attributed to the San Luis People's Ditch, with a priority date of April 10, 1852, in the amount of 21 cubic feet per second from Culebra Creek in Costilla County; and

"WHEREAS, Originally, the land adjacent to the Ditch was divided into strips approximately 100 yards wide and 16 to 20 miles long, allowing settlers to have irrigated farmland near the Ditch and also to have access to range and timber land, and today, the Ditch is 4 miles long and irrigates 1,600 acres of farmland; and

"WHEREAS, The San Luis People's Ditch has been continuously operated for irrigation purposes for 150 years, thus making it an essential foundation for the sustenance of the local economy; . . ."

(d) Upon adoption of Colorado's constitution, the prior appropriation system became the law governing water allocation; and

(e) The prior appropriation system is, in fundamental ways, inconsistent with the community-based principles upon which acequias were founded.

(2) The general assembly hereby determines that:

(a) Notwithstanding the constitutional establishment of the prior appropriation system, communities that were historically served by an acequia have used informal methods to continue to allocate water based upon equity in addition to priority and to treat water as a community resource; and

(b) Recognition by the general assembly of the continuing existence and use of acequias, while continuing to comply with the constitutional requirements of priority administration of tributary water, is critical to preserving the historic value that acequias provide to the communities in which they are located.

(3) The general assembly hereby declares that the purpose of this act is to promote and encourage the continued operation of acequias and the viability of the historic communities that depend on those acequias.

SECTION 2. Article 42 of title 7, Colorado Revised Statutes, is amended BY THE ADDITION OF A NEW SECTION to read: 7-42-101.5. Acequia mutual ditch - definition - powers.

(1) FOR PURPOSES OF THIS SECTION, "ACEQUIA" MEANS A DITCH THAT:

(a) ORIGINATED PRIOR TO COLORADO'S STATEHOOD;

(b) HAS HISTORICALLY TREATED WATER DIVERTED BY THE ACEQUIA AS A COMMUNITY RESOURCE AND HAS THEREFORE ATTEMPTED TO ALLOCATE WATER IN THE ACEQUIA BASED UPON EQUITY IN ADDITION TO PRIORITY;

(c) RELIES ESSENTIALLY ON GRAVITY-FED SURFACE WATER DIVERSIONS;

(d) SUPPLIES IRRIGATION WATER TO LONG LOTS THAT ARE PERPENDICULAR TO THE STREAM OR DITCH TO MAXIMIZE THE NUMBER OF LANDOWNERS WHO HAVE ACCESS TO WATER;

(e) HAS HISTORICALLY BEEN OPERATED PURSUANT TO A ONE LANDOWNER-ONE VOTE SYSTEM; AND

(f) HAS HISTORICALLY RELIED ON LABOR SUPPLIED BY THE OWNERS OF IRRIGATED LAND SERVED BY THE ACEQUIA.

(2) SUBJECT TO ANY CONTRARY PROVISION OF SUBSECTION (3) OF THIS SECTION, THE PROCEDURAL AND SUBSTANTIVE REQUIREMENTS OF THIS ARTICLE OTHER THAN THIS SECTION THAT APPLY TO THE CREATION, POWERS, DUTIES, AND GOVERNANCE OF A DITCH CORPORATION SUBJECT TO THIS ARTICLE SHALL BE DEEMED TO APPLY TO THE CREATION, POWERS, DUTIES, AND GOVERNANCE OF AN ACEQUIA DITCH CORPORATION.

(3) AN ACEQUIA DITCH CORPORATION MAY BE ORGANIZED PURSUANT TO THIS ARTICLE, AND A DITCH CORPORATION ORGANIZED PURSUANT TO THIS ARTICLE MAY CONVERT TO AN ACEQUIA DITCH CORPORATION, IF:

(a) AT LEAST TWO-THIRDS OF THE IRRIGATED LAND SERVED BY THE DITCH IS PLATTED OR ORGANIZED INTO LONG LOTS, THE LONGEST AXES OF WHICH ARE PERPENDICULAR TO THE STREAM OR DITCH;

(b) SURFACE WATER RIGHTS PROVIDE ALL OF THE WATER RIGHTS USED FOR IRRIGATION IN THE DITCH, AND SUCH WATER RIGHTS HAVE HAD SUBSTANTIALLY UNINTERRUPTED USE SINCE BEFORE COLORADO'S STATEHOOD;

(c) THE IRRIGATED LAND SERVED BY THE DITCH IS LOCATED WHOLLY IN ONE OR MORE OF THE COUNTIES OF COSTILLA, CONEJOS, HUERFANO, AND LAS ANIMAS; AND

(d) AS REQUIRED PURSUANT TO SECTION 7-42-101, THE STOCKHOLDERS OF THE DITCH FILE ARTICLES OF INCORPORATION, OR AN AMENDMENT TO THE ARTICLES OF INCORPORATION, THAT STATE THE STOCKHOLDERS' INTENTION TO CREATE OR CONVERT TO AN ACEQUIA DITCH CORPORATION.

(4) AN ACEQUIA DITCH CORPORATION, IF ITS ARTICLES OF INCORPORATION SO STATE, MAY SPECIFY IN ITS BYLAWS THAT:

(a) ITS ELECTIONS MAY BE HELD PURSUANT TO A ONE LANDOWNER-ONE VOTE SYSTEM;

(b) OWNERS OF LAND IRRIGATED BY THE DITCH CAN BE REQUIRED TO CONTRIBUTE LABOR TO THE MAINTENANCE AND REPAIR OF THE ACEQUIA OR, IN THE ALTERNATIVE, TO PAY AN ASSESSMENT IN LIEU OF SUCH LABOR;

(c) WATER IN THE DITCH MAY BE ALLOCATED ON A BASIS OTHER THAN PRO RATA OWNERSHIP OF THE CORPORATION; AND

(d) THE CORPORATION HAS A RIGHT OF FIRST REFUSAL REGARDING THE SALE, LEASE, OR EXCHANGE OF ANY SURFACE WATER RIGHT THAT HAS HISTORICALLY BEEN USED TO IRRIGATE LONG-LOT LAND BY THE ACEQUIA.

SECTION 3. Safety clause. The general assembly hereby finds, determines, and declares that this act is necessary for the immediate preservation of the public peace, health, and safety.

____________________________ ____________________________
Terrance D. Carroll Peter C. Groff
SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE PRESIDENT OF
OF REPRESENTATIVES THE SENATE
____________________________ ____________________________
Marilyn Eddins Karen Goldman
CHIEF CLERK OF THE HOUSE SECRETARY OF
OF REPRESENTATIVES THE SENATE

APPROVED________________________________________
_________________________________________
Bill Ritter, Jr.
GOVERNOR OF THE STATE OF COLORADO

A culinary journey through Ecuador

Andean Foodways: Del maiz a las abas, papas, y verdes

Seattle, WA. Most of us rightly think of Mexico as the cradle for the origin and domestication of Zea mays (maize, corn). That may be, but on a recent trip to La Mitad del Mundo, I learned that Ecuadorians are probably much more focused on the diversity of corn as a matter of vernacular (everyday popular) cuisine.

Ubiquitous maize

Corn is ubiquitous in both places and is of course Mexico's great gift to the world. But the Ecuadorians approach corn with a great deal more fanfare and nuance in their everyday cuisine. Mexicans might eat tortillas everyday, and munch an occasional corn-on-the-cob, but Ecuadorians prepare myriad everyday foods based on distinct land race varieties of corn in ways that range from simple toasted flint kernels to nuanced corn-based batters for empanadas or corn cakes with cheese.

Let's start with some basics: Tostados are the original "Corn Nuts." These fried kernels of Andean white or yellow flint corn can be prepared with a variety of ingredients but my favorite version involved a street vendor's use of clarified butter mixed with home-made pig fat (lard) with a dash of sea salt, cinnamon, and clove.

Yet another variant of maize cuisine involves the preparation of mote, which is the Ecuadorian version of Hominy. This white, cal-soaked, white corn is used as a condiment side or ingredient for soups including consomes of pork or fish, amid variations that reflect the coastal or mountain contexts.


Choclos are the Ecuadorian version of corn-on-the-cob. These are a truly ubiquitous food staple and can be found on close to every restaurant menu, in every street-vendor's warm bucket, and in every household's kitchen table. Choclos, steamed sweet yellow corn, are the preferred daily snack and are often paired with fresh cream for slathering or slices of quesos frescos during the merienda.

Of course, choclos are also a basic accompaniment to ceviche, and Ecuador counts with numerous regional variations of the lime-soaked mariscos and pescados dish. Choclos also show up at the dinner table besides a bowl of fanesca, the Lenten stew prepared exclusively during Holy Week. A good bowl of locro, potato-cheese soup, is also usually accompanied by a side of choclos.

Corn meal is used to make a wide variety of savory and sweet empanaditas. In one favored savory version, the corn meal is the envelop for a filling of local Mozarella cheese and sweet choclo kernels. Another version has the corn enveloping verde, the fried sweet green plaintain, often paired again with the cheese. Another sweeter version is the humita, or the Ecuadorian tamal.

Quimbolitos are "corn dumplings" made from corn meal infused with lard, raisins, choclos, and vanilla extract. We enjoyed these dumplings during our first almuerzo presented in a clear chicken broth that served as the opening course by our host family.

Beyond maize: yuca, plantains, and potatoes

Muchines de yuca are tasty cassava balls with a crunchy outside protecting a soft, savory filling. Favored in the coastal towns, the muchines are mostly served as an appetizer or side dish topped with salsa de ají, Ecuador's contribution to hot pepper sauce.

The nearly bewildering array of cuisine dedicated to the plantain in Ecuador is a delight to explore. As far as I could tell, there are three principal types of plantain used in everyday cooking: Large Yellow, Medium Green, and Small Yellow plantains.

The patacones are the fried medium-sized green plantains and are also known as verdes; these unripened plantains also play a big role as filling for empanaditas. The small yellow plantains are preferred for use in the puree for potato cakes, or llapingachos.

Yuca (cassava) is as ubuquitous as maize and plantain and is utilized across a wide variety of preparations. The one that most intrigued me was how it is used in its pureed form to prepare llapingachos (potato cakes). Yuca is also used in the preparation of a wide range of soups and stews and certain land race varieties are imbued with medicinal properties including the treatment of enlarged prostate.

Yet another snack we tried are the chifles, or fried yellow plantain chips. For a sweet and piquant effect, chifles (and dried yuca slivers) can be used to dip into salsa de ají.

A word about papas (potatoes). Ecuador is not Peru, or even Bolivia, in its diversity of perennial land races in the tribe of Solanum tuberosum in the Solanaceae or deadly nightshade family. But it does have some hardy native high altitude potatoes. There are some small yellow potatoes that seem to be the preference in the preparation of llapingachos (fried potato puree cakes).

Globally, there are about five thousand potato varieties and three thousand of these are found in the Andes across high altitude Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Chile and Colombia. There are also about 200 wild species and subspecies, many of which can be cross-bred with cultivated varieties, and are protected by indigenous inhabitants.

In urban Quito and Manta, the chain grocery stores offered a reduced range of only 3 or 4 different varieties of Ecuadorian potatoes: a medium white; a large red; and a small yellow variety.

However, rural roadside stands presented a much wider variety of potatoes from one place to the next. It seems potatoes are a serious place-based matter in Ecuador and the mass marketing of this diversity has not yet co-opted this traditional practice of heirloom preservation. Each place seems dedicated to the cultivation of 4 to 6 varieties that are consumed or sold locally.

A range of slow-cooked pleasures for the omnivore

Speaking of meats, Ecuador's regional cuisines vibe with creative dishes involving beef, chicken, pork, sea and freshwater fish, shellfish, and lamb or goat. We sampled various parrilladas, grilled meat and sausage assortments.

In Manta's Martinique Restaurant we had an amazing serving of appetizer mollejas (beef sweetbreads) stewed in a simple but eloquent neo-French dressing of whole cream, white wine, peppers, and garlic. The same restaurant served outstanding plates of corvina (Sea Bass) in various guises including our favored version, a la plancha (open-grilled).

Even the local cold cuts from the deli at the Supermaxi in Manta made for excellent sandwich fill when paired with freshly baked bolillos (round buns).

Pig's heads are commonly used by street vendors and puestositos as the source of delicious fritadas. The shredded pork is combined with fried sweet yellow plantains and boiled skinless potatoes. We ate our sampling of fritada at a puestosito on the Panecillo (Bread Loaf Hill) underneath the towering figure of La Virgen de Quito, a monument featuring the only winged-Virgin in the world.





Truchas at Two Mile High

Some of the best food we sampled in Ecuador involved both simple and complex fish recipes. This was especially the case in the upland area of Papallacta (House of the Potato), an eco-tourist volcanic hotsprings resort and sustainable community in the mountains lying one hour east of Quito at an altitude of 10,086 feet.

The thermal springs here are at the entrance to one of Ecuador's most cherished cloud forests and páramo (high altitude grasslands). Yet, the restaurant at Papallacta derives all of its vegetable, tuber, grain, and herb supply from the organic 3 hectare polyculture huerto familiar. The home kitchen garden, despite the high altitude, produces food year-round.

The Ecuadorian government, working with local indigenous communities and Japanese scientists, developed a fish hatchery that serves to restock streams in the Cayembe-Coca Ecological Reserve while providing fresh brook trout (trucha) directly to local restaurant tables.

At Papallacta we sampled truchas in two different presentations: a la plancha with a white wine sauce and a breaded and baked cordon bleu trout stuffed with local melting cheese and ham. We also sampled a fish and prawn soup prepared in a base infused with cream, coconut, yuca, and mote.

Ceviche was everywhere but we followed local advice and waited till we got to the central coast at Manta before sampling this classic seafood dish. Some 20 kilometers east of Manta is the inland village of Montecristi, best known for its misnamed "Panama"-styled hats. We sampled three versions of ceviche in Montecristi and all of them involved fresh ingredients (fish and shellfish) and careful skilled preparation. The local honey bees agreed and they danced and flitted about our table.

The ceviche in Montecristi included corvina, or what is sometimes called "Gulf" or "Chilean Sea Bass." This delightful, flaky white fish meat melts in your mouth like butter. The Monterey Bay Aquarium lists this species as endangered but many different white finfish are also presented with the name, corvina, and I suspect that was the case in Montecristi.

Some missing elements

Through the course of our "local, slow, and deep food" tour of Ecuador, I am sorry to report that we did not try encocado, a concoction of shrimp (or sometimes fish) smothered in a rich, spiced coconut sauce. We cook a Thai version of "coconut fish stoup" in Seattle, so we truly regret missing this version.

We also did not sample the presumed "National Dish" of Ecuador consisting of roasted guinea pig or cuy. This was not due to any food prejudice on our part perhaps stemming from reservations many Americans have over eating something we consider household pets.

We never returned to the old barrio in Quito that was reputed to have the best version around. I did not get the sense, in the long days spent in the northern lake district uplands or the central coastal area (Manta), that cuy was as big a part of the regional cuisine in those areas as it seems to be in the more urbanized places like Quito or rural mountain locales.

We also did not sample the range of cuisine from the "Oriente," the vast Amazon jungle that lies east of the Andes and is the third major geographic subdivision of Ecuador in addition to Mountains and Coast. Of course, we heard not just about lemon-flavored ants but about the many selva creatures, usually egg-laying flies, that slowly eat you. How is that for an inversion of the slow food chain?

Is it sustainable, resilient and just food?

Ecuadorians are into their food as much as any other comparable Latin American culture. The question that comes up of course: Is the Ecuadorian food system sustainable, resilient, and just?

Ecuador has hunger, but in relative terms the number of hungry and malnourished persons is relatively low. Indigenous areas that have experienced an economic and cultural resurgence show little signs of widespread hunger. Our visits to Cayembi indigenous strongholds of Cotacachi and Otavalo in the Northern Lake Districts of Imbabura Province revealed a well-fed and well-nourished population.

Some environmentalists express concern that maize terraces have spread across the entire foothills biome of Imbabura and pretty much all of the montane ecosystems of the Andean Cordillera.

It is true that maize sembrados are an ubiquitous feature of the foothills landscape; indeed every urban household lot seems to have a bit of corn and other grains planted. However, it is not clear that this represents a recent encroachment and intensive cultivation of the Imbabura Province predates the repelled Inca incursions of the late 15th century.

The Ecuadorian hill terrace agroecosystem seems well-suited to extant local conditions and is by and large well-maintained. I did not notice extensive evidence of erosion or landslides (there are always localized exceptions). The intensive labor necessary to maintain these soil conservation structures and landscape features is present and this is likely a result of the fact that 30 percent of Ecuador's population is indigenous. The terracing system adds depth and stability to the rich volcanic soils that underlie most of the arable uplands.

These traditional agroecosystems have been displaced in some areas of the Andean corridor but the most severe transformation involves the establishment of large tropical fruit plantations in the coastal litorals.

In the mountain valley surrounding Otavalo, thousands of invernaderos (greenhouses) have been built on former farm land for the production of flowers for national and export markets. The tales of poisoned workers and degraded environmental qualities associated with the cut-flower industry are well known. This case involves foreign investors including interests that were first rooted in the Colombian cut-flower industry, Israeli capital and technology, and Dutch investors.

The big agro-industrial export crops remain bananas, coffee, and cocoa. The 1998 El Nino event destroyed the coastal banana plantations and that sector is only now undergoing a recovery of sorts but exports have already reestablished Ecuador as the world's leading banana exporter. Banana plantation workers, many of them Afro-Ecuatorianos and itinerant indigena migrants are ununionized and earn an average of $2 a day.

Despite problems in the "Banana Republic" sector, it seems the independent small and medium sized producers of plantains are doing well. This sector was not as severely affected by the 1998 drought in part because many of these smaller producers can still flood irrigate with acequias, are located in more rainy montane valleys, or remained small and diverse enough to survive disturbances affecting banana production.

Coffee is a growth industry both domestically and in the export-oriented sector. While cocoa is still principally produced for domestic consumption, more than anything else, it is witnessing rapid increases in exports spurred by the search for organic and socially responsible (Fair Trade) sources by high-end specialty chocolate manufacturers in Europe, Asia, and North America.

The most important lessons I learned during this food tour occurred while visiting the village of Cotacachi in the Northern Lake District outside of Otavalo. I learned that the native Cayembi people of this bioregion managed to repel Inca intruders who arrived in the 15th century. They were also never fully subordinated by the Spaniards in the 16th century due to the remote and mountainous nature of the area.

The native peoples of the Imbabura bioregion remain well positioned to maintain some semblance of local governmental autonomy. Indeed, Cotacachi has received recognition from the United Nations (UNESCO) for its progressive work on participatory democracy and transparent municipal government.

This political and cultural climate contributes in no small measure to the sustenance and success of an organic, resilient, culturally-appropriate, and socially well-embedded local food system. People in Cotacachi are eating well; they are eating local; and they are eating heritage cuisines instead of westernized fast foods. Obesity is rare and malnutrition has been greatly reduced among Cayembi youth, elderly, and underemployed workers.

The lessons of Cotacachi present hope for an alterNative place-based approach to indigenous inhabitation of homelands linked to resilient local food systems. This Cayembi automous village illustrates the possibility that local food self-sufficiency is an inextricable quality of food justice. Most of the rest of Ecuador is still struggling to understand that lesson.

Fanesca, or food as syncretic conviviality?

There is one more thing to say about regional cuisines and local food systems in the areas of Ecuador that we visited. Coastal plains and mountains; rural and urban locales; all these places shared the common occurrence of acts of food-sharing in public or in the household. The act of sharing food is an important social event in and of itself. It is a dedicated form of conviviality.

I witnessed and participated in this everyday lived practice of la comida. Every day we spent in Quito with our gracious host family, we were summoned to the familial daily rounds of almuerzos and cenas. As Gustavo Esteva has observed, the consumption of food is not just for purposes of bodily nutrition, it is also a powerful cohesive symbolic practice imbued with interpersonal and collective meaning. Food in this way nurtures souls and promotes social bonding and reciprocity in small groups and large.

An example of a food that captures this symbolic gesturing is fanesca, the Lenten chowder that is served exclusively during Holy Week before Easter. The recipe for fanesca reads like a fascinating "who's who" of ecuatoriano ethnobotanical diversity. The grains and legumes used are all local land race varieties.

There are actually twelve grains used in the traditional quiteno recipe for fanesca. These are said to represent the "Twelve Disciples" of Jesus Christ. Most recipes include chochos, abas, lentils, peas, and two or three varieties of corn.

The inclusion of chochos (tarwi) is interesting because chocho (Andean Lupine flower seeds) is said to represent a "wild indigenous" grain that has been collected by Cayembi and other native peoples for millennia. Fanesca in this manner is rooted both in the Western Christian worldview and in the indigenous ethnobiology of place.

We can call this food "syncretism" but the deeper history of these indigenous grains and legumes, including abas which are a "naturalized exotic," signals something a bit more profound.

Fanesca is fastidiously tied to a Christian religious calendar cycle so that the temporal frame freezes or subordinates the indigenous agricultural cycle and the cosmovision that underlies it. The aboriginal cycles are partly defined by the autopoetic condition of alternating seasonal patterns involving both the collection of wild "pulses" and the cultivation of domesticated crops in an extended agroecological mosaic that includes wild relatives and not just the cultivars.

In other words, there is no "wild" and "domesticated" space in the indigenous food system or its cuisine. The presence of Lupinus mutabilis (Andean Lupine or chocho) in fanesca recipes is thus for me an intriguing indicator of a dialectical tension between a multicultural and largely land race-based recipe and the presentation of the chowder as a featured Holy Week entree that has been reinvented as an icon of food conviviality in Ecuador.

Acequia Recognition Law is Passed by Colorado General Assembly

Acequia recognition law

Moderator's Note: We are posting a journal kept over the past five weeks since I testified with Joe Gallegos and others on February 18 in Denver to support passage of Colorado General Assembly House Bill (HB) 09-1233. The proposed law recognizes acequia systems and re-establishes traditional norms of self-governance for our historic community ditches. HB 09-1233 was passed by the House on February 25, 2009. On March 23, 2009, the Colorado State Senate passed their version of the House Bill. As of April 7, the legislation awaits the signature of Governor Bill Ritter.

February 18 (Denver)

By the time this news report and commentary is posted, we are certain to have been waiting for several weeks to learn of the destiny of the "Acequia Recognition" law introduced two weeks ago by our incomparable salt-of-the-Earth Colorado State Representative, Edward Vigil (D) of Ft. Garland.

Mr. Vigil is a first-year, freshly-minted, State Representative from our district in south central Colorado which includes the Chicana/o strongholds of the San Luis Valley and Pueblo. He is the first acequia farmer from the San Luis-Ft. Garland area to serve in the state legislature in close to a hundred years.

I admire Rep. Vigil for having the courage and vision to be so bold as to introduce a law, in his frosh year at that, presenting a challenge to the dominance of a singularly Anglo-American legal regime for water allocation and governance in Colorado.

At the invitation of Joe Gallegos, I came to testify before the Colorado House Committee on Agriculture, Livestock, and Natural Resources. The testimony was to support legislation entitled HB 09-1233 "Recognition of Acequias." The bill was developed by Rep. Vigil and Thomas Morris, legal counsel to the House Committee. Joe Gallegos and I provided some input on the first draft over the past few weeks. Mr. Morris drew ideas and concepts from an article published in the Colorado Law Review (see Hicks and Peña 2003).

We have remained quiet and reserved, but the breaking news will soon require us to offer commentary and perhaps a note of celebration.

The hearing before the committee went well and four people testified in support of the proposed statute. Rep.Vigil led off by presenting the amended bill and discussing its merits. Rep. Vigil was followed by three other voices. These included Mr. David Robbins of the Colorado Water Congress (CWC). Not much in matters pertaining to water law in Colorado goes through without first being vetted and approved by the CWC. Mr. Robbins was knowledgeable and gracious, demonstrating a sense of appreciation and respect for the historical, cultural, and ecological significance of acequia systems.

Next was Joe Gallegos, the lifelong advocate of acequia farmers and hailing from one of the oldest farming families in the State of Colorado. Joe's great-great-grandfather, Dario Gallegos, established Colorado's "Oldest Town" (La Plaza de San Luis de la Culebra) in 1851.

The first thing Dario and his compatriots did, way back in April of 1852, was to dig by hand the town's first acequia madre or "Mother Ditch," La Acequia de la Gente de San Luis (a.k.a. San Luis Peoples Ditch). This was more than ten years before Colorado became a Territory and a quarter century before the creation of the Centennial State (1876).

Testifying last before the House Committee, I briefly described the legal history and the principles of acequia self-governance. I outlined the ethnoecology and agroecology of the acequia-riparian long-lot. The acequias provide vital ecosystem and economic base services that have been valued in excess of $300 million a year in benefits accruing to the seven-county area known as the Rio Arriba (Upper Rio Grande) in New Mexico and Colorado. I will post my testimony on the blog at a later date.

Our expectations remain so high that the disappointment of a loss is imponderable. We are all jitterbugging through time and space.

February 19 (Denver International Airport)

Acequias and the 'Lords of Yesterday'

As I sit here waiting for my flight back to Seattle, I am reflecting on the day's proceedings. I can't help but recall the excellent book by Professor Charles F. Wilkinson, Crossing the Next Meridian: Land, Water, and the Future of the West (1992). The opening chapter, as I recall, is entitled "The Lords of Yesterday" and it outlines and then criticizes three laws that have come to shape pretty much close to everything about the "settling" of the lands West of the 100th Meridian, an area Wilkinson calls the "Intermountain West."

The three "Lords of Yesterday," Wilkinson explains, were the EuroAmerican settler miners, ranchers/farmers, and loggers that relied on the federal government and three laws to settle, exploit, and transform "the West" into an extractive resource colony that displaced native cultures, laws, and ways of life.

The General Mining Act of 1872, the Homestead Act of 1862 , and the Doctrine of Prior Appropriation with roots in the California (1849) and later Colorado (1959) "Gold Rushes" were the three most significant legal frameworks imposed on native peoples in the "conquest" and enclosure of the "West."

Punching a Hole in the Doctrine of Prior Appropriation?

The water law of the Intermountain West has been defined by the prior appropriation doctrine ever since hardrock miners in California and Colorado declared themselves to be the "first in use" and thus "first in right." Never mind that Native Americans and Chicana/o communities had their own laws for the allocation and use of land, water, and other resources. In recent decades, researchers have deemed these alterNative systems to be more democratic, resilient, and ecologically-sustainable compared to the modern regime of land and water law.

The acequia legal code, rooted in deep antiquity, clearly predates the advent of the prior appropriation regime. Yet, in 1882 the Colorado Supreme Court affirmed in Coffin v. Left Hand Ditch that the only true water law of Colorado was the principle of first in use/first in right. This tragically mistaken and ethnocentric decision erased hundreds of years of legal evolution in the water allocation and use practices in upland headwaters territories that had been sovereign parts of local place-based water institutions under Native, Spanish, and subsequent Mexican rule.

The Colorado Supremes enshrined "Prior" in Left Hand Ditch despite the fact that the Colorado Territorial Legislature had just enacted three laws recognizing acequia governance norms during the 1870s, a few years before statehood.

While acequia principles are as true to place (if not more so than Prior), Left Hand Ditch nonetheless imposed Prior as the only water law held to be "true to place" in the State of Colorado. This has had the effect of erasing the institutional memory and codification of the earliest forms of watershed governance and local democracy in the region.

Despite this legal erasure, the acequia water democracy and its forms of local self-governance persisted over time through informal arrangements deriving ultimately from the strength of mutual reliance interests that are the heart and soul of acequia place-based cultures.

The proposed new law will restore some crucial aspects of the legal paradigm of acequia customary law and practice and make Colorado a more progressive and "legally plural" state in the area of water law. Will the General Assembly see fit to allow us to punch albeit a small hole in the edifice of one of the three principal laws of the Lords of Yesterday?

February 25 (Shoreline, WA)

This morning I finally received a call from Joe Gallegos informing me that the House of Representatives of the Colorado General Assembly had just voted unanimously on third reading to pass HB 09-1233 on the "Recognition of Acequias." Full passage of the bill is expected once the Colorado State Senate votes sometime during the first half of March. Senator Gail Schwarz is the principal sponsor carrying the bill in the State Senate.

Restoring the Resilient Water Democracy of the Acequias?

This bill is significant because it recognizes that acequias have "...historically treated water as a community resource and...allocated water...based on equity in addition to priority." Moreover, the law states that the acequia "has historically been operated pursuant to a one landowner-one vote system."

In one short but pithy paragraph, the law legitimizes five central norms of acequia water law that are distinct from the principles enshrined in the Doctrine of Prior Appropriation:

(1) Water is a communal resource and not a commodity.

(2) The principle of the one farmer-one vote rule. This restores our long cherished democratic practice that was lost with Prior's shift to a share-based system in which larger landowners had more votes.

(3) The law also specifies that acequias may rely on "labor supplied by the landowners of irrigated land served by the acequia," a phrase that restores our customary practice of cooperative labor and mutual aid.

(4) Since the law establishes that water is a community resource for purposes of acequia governance, incorporated ditches will be able to adopt by-laws or modify existing by-laws to exercise a "right of first refusal" on the sale or transfer of water to non-acequia uses. Incorporated ditches may also use conservation easements to restrict water transfers or sales.

(5) Finally, the law allows acequias to allocate water on the basis of principles of equity and fairness and not just priority. This is an especially important principle since it allows irrigators to share scarcity in times of drought instead of following the "priority call" system imposed by Prior Appropriation that provides water only to the most senior water rights at the expense of more junior rights. We have restored the principle of shared scarcity.

I will have another report on the new Acequia Law as soon as the Colorado State Senate vote is in. Some questions are emerging: Are we are on the cusp of a "minor" revolution in the evolution of water law in the Intermountain West? Are Prior's days as a singular normative regime for water governance and allocation numbered? Will a plural regime emerge in the Colorado watersheds with historic uninterrupted acequia water use and customary allocation practices embraced by these resurgent place-based principles?

Colorado acequia communities will seeks answers to these questions soon. At the behest of fellow parciantes, I will on occasion report to this blog on emerging local plans and discussions for the convening of the Congreso de Acequias (Acequia Congress) for Colorado. Our efforts likely will be modeled to some extent on New Mexico's Congreso de Acequias.

We will need our colegas in the New Mexico Acequia Association to help our communities find a process to discuss and define the values, norms, and rules that acequias in the four counties of Colorado included in the bill (Costilla, Conejos, Las Animas, and Huerfano) might use to implement the new law.

This must derive from a process of collective action drawn from the fullest participation of acequia parciantes across the bioregion. El Congreso de Acequias de Colorado promises to initiate the resurgence of acequia water democracy as an institution of place-based cultures in the headwaters of the Upper Rio Grande bioregion.

March 28, 2009 (Cotacachi, Ecuador)

I have not yet heard from Joe or Ed about the status of the Acequia Recognition bill. It went to the Senate two weeks ago and received a generally positive first reading. I have been anxious throughout this trip without news. My access to the Internet has been spotty....so my mind drifts into place....and I find connections.

There are acequias in Ecuador. Maize and acequias.

There are indigenous communities, resurgent participatory democracies, and their place-based communally-oriented agriculture, artisan production, and the albeit conflicted local management of the protected areas and ecological reserves.

Ibambura is the principal maize growing area in the Andean corridor of Ecuador. Located in the northern highlands close to the border with Colombia, this area includes several blue volcanic-origin lakes and is thus known as the Imbabura or Blue Lakes District.

One of the Cayembi villages, Cotacachi, is known for its leather-making and wool-weaving artisan traditions. Less recognized is that the bioregion is also vested with profound agroecological richness: Both rain-fed and acequia flood-irrigated polycultures are evident here.

This involves close to continuous year-round production of annual grains centered on the diverse land races of maize, various tubers including potatoes and yucca, and perennial and annual grains like quinoa.

There are numerous other perennial heirloom fruit vines, bushes, and trees and wild relatives of cultivars like the Andean Lupine and its ubiquitous chochos, the flower seeds so big they are presented, after careful steeping and rinsing to remove water-soluable toxic alkaloids and a soft boil, as beige-hued medium-sized habas next to a bowl of salsa de aji. The chochos are like our own quelites or verdolagas, the edible wild relatives of plants that are present with domesticated crop mosaics in polyculture huertos familiares.

Indeed, the word in rural areas like Cotacachi is that President Correa is making indigenous autonomy a vital part of the agenda of post-neoliberal state making policies. This process is riddled with contradictions and the constant threat of illegal loggers, drug traffickers, and military operations related to the intrusion of the FARC from Colombia into northern Ecuador's Imbabura bioregion.

I think back to our little valley in south central Colorado and our efforts to succeed in much the same manner as the indigenous people of Cotacachi, who are working to restore the Acequia de la Victoria as part of their place-based governance in and of place.

These are the ties of people and their memories intertwined with the land and water, clouds and skies, plants and animals, and living processes of change, disturbance, and resurgence. These are the presence of life as a process of change bound to place, a process of regeneration (autopoesis).

April 5 (Quito, Ecuador)

I arrived in Quito today after ten days in the Northern Lake District and Manta on the central coast. Finally received word from Ed Vigil that the Senate approved the Acequia Recognition Law on March 23, the day I left for Ecuador.

It seems almost anti-climatic now. We are waiting for Governor Ritter to sign the legislation.

Perhaps it may seem a bit trivializing, or a slip beyond the obvious, to state that the Acequia Recognition Law can be read as a central "watershed" event in the history of water law in the Intermountain West? Environmental justice ethics have prevailed in challenging yet another form of disparate impact resulting in this case from the subjection of place-based law by "positive" law.

For the first time in the history of Western water law, water has been declared a communal and place-based resource rather than a commodity. The value of water as an asset-in-place is thus re-affirmed. This opens the door to the acequia watershed democracy, which can now unfold in its own "natural" habitat as a mutual-aid commons freed from the tethers of individualistic and commodity forms of value.

Local, slow, and deep

Theorizing Food Justice: A Brief Conceptual Note

SHORELINE, WA. Yesterday, I had a brief but fascinating conversation with an acquaintance who identifies as a vegan activist. She is highly committed to the "slow" food movement. She explained her "slow" and "local" food philosophy:

If you "go slow," that means you also "go local." Slow leads to local. I only eat local grains, veggies, fruits, and nuts. Every meal is slow-cooked from organic ingredients grown slowly by farmers that I know personally. Many are close friends and I often work on their farms for the food I need. I have become self-reliant and I have helped the local farmers become self-reliant. This unites slow and local food ethics. Together with my vegan diet, I am reducing my own carbon footprint...The vegan philosophy means I am not guilty of inflicting pain on others including animals or the people who go hungry because so many of us still eat dead animal protein.

As a consumer of "dead animal protein," I am of course guilty of perhaps leveraging a larger impact on the planet's environmental space compared to my vegan colleague.

I asked my friend to tell me more about the communities where her farmer friends live and work. It turns out that most of them are white farmers who live in the Skagit watershed north of Seattle or the Chehalis watershed south.

I asked if she knew which Native American "first nations" inhabited those watersheds. Her response was a disappointing surprise:

Well, in the Skagit, you know, there are a lot of multi-generational farmers who are not Native American. They have been here a long time and have as much stake in this watershed as any one else. But I don't remember the names of, you know, any tribes. I haven't met any Indians myself, so I really can't tell you much about the cultural history of the area...It is also a problem with, or because of the conflicts over salmon recovery. The Indians and the farmers are fighting it out but I am not that well-read on the matter.

I was surprised because I sort of naively expected that anyone with the intelligence and ethics to become a local/slow foodie, would also be "well-read on the matter" of Native communities in a given watershed. It is not like we just disappeared. Surely one must also become knowledgeable of the "deep" history of places in practicing a slow/local food politics?

How can one go local and not know the "deep histories" and continuing Native struggles in and of place? How can one not know about the crippled state of local Native food systems and the impact that even the most organic, vegan-friendly settler-farmers might be exerting on the survival of salmon and on the prospects of the Native struggles to restore salmon runs and indigenous resource rights?

My vegan friend was oddly also lacking knowledge of Native ethnobotany, the rich traditions of the collection and use of wild plants for their recognized and valued nutritional, medicinal, and spiritual properties. She did not know any of the wild mushrooms in the Skagit or Chehalis that are still harvested by Native people. Camus bulbs? Not aware.

She did not seem to fully realize the impact that modern "forestry," agribusiness (including organics), and urban sprawl have had on fish and shellfish habitat in the Skagit.

In other words, my vegan acquaintance overestimated the degree of the reduction of her personal ecological footprint. Lacking depth about the environmental history of the lands of the Skagit, she assumed that organic farmers were indeed sustainable and equitable.

But compared to what? Should not the Native local food system be the standard rather than just the settler's organic alternatives to corporate monoculture factories in the fields? Lacking deep local knowledge she could not estimate a more accurate rendition of the "ecological footprint" she partakes in by being a beneficiary of generations of structural violence and historical trauma experienced by Native peoples and their animal and plant co-residents in the Skagit or Chehalis.

This means that when we start to build a "theory" of food justice, it is simply not enough to examine the ethics of "going slow to go local." One has to "go deep," first and foremost, and this means respecting "local knowledge" including especially the multi-generational place-based agroecological, ethnobotanical, and gastronomical knowledge of Native cultures.

Sodbusters and the 'native' gaze - Part VI

Other’s foods: limpiezas y la comida

I leave the lands of our acequia farm to engage in a promised critical appraisal of recent work in the anthropology of food. One especially good recent collection of essays on anthropological and cultural studies of food (Counihan 2002) presents an intriguing range of contributions on “just what food means to Americans.”

Here we go again, I thought, when I first started reading the book: Another set of deconstructed Happy Meals.

The contributors actually cover much wider ground and this includes an excellent essay on the political economy of global food production (Friedmann) and a decent critical treatment of the environmental, political, and economic problems posed by agricultural biotechnologies (Middendorf et al).

However, the editor (Counihan) and her husband ethnographer (Taggert) contribute two separately-authored chapters on food in the San Luis Valley in Colorado that I find incredibly problematic and indicative once again of a type of anthropology badly in need of getting grounded in the two meanings of the term I have adopted for this paper.

Counihan starts well enough intent on revealing how Hispana women’s food-centered stories break through the silences in the discourse on food and culture. She asserts, “…food can be a channel of oppression.” Yet: “Because food is so often the work and language of women, food stories emphasize the importance of women and challenges [sic] the centrality of men.” (2002:295) In the end, the author presents a fairly bleak picture of a patriarchal culture that forces women, really one woman, Counihan’s source, to “cook for others” and yet insists that women, or at least this particular woman, must remain invisible in the kitchen.

This essay over-generalizes from one interview to an entire culture and its history of food practices. It simply overlooks the rich nuances in Chicana/o gendered divisions of labor surrounding food production, processing, preparation, and sharing.

There is a lot of differentiation in who grows, cultivates, harvests, processes, prepares, serves and shares food in Chicana/o communities but, like many other groups, this follows more complex age, class, national origin, as well as gendered locations that are actually quite fluid and intersecting from one family to the next and within the same family over time. Chicana/os are not fixated on one immutable gendered division of labor when it comes to food production and consumption as Counihan misleadingly suggests.

The men of the San Luis Valley are no more central to food production than women are presumably to food preparation. Chicanas, as Sarah Deutsch (1989) demonstrated two decades ago have had to take command of farming operations in the Rio Arriba acequia communities since at least the 1880s when men often left for work in mining camps, sugar beet plantations, or sheep camps as far north as Wyoming and Montana.

Men have always played a significant role in food preparation. During my first sabbatical at Colorado College (1990-91), I lived and worked at the Gallegos Ranches in San Luis. Yvette Gallegos was retired from a successful career as a schoolteacher while Corpus A. Gallegos had returned from an equally distinguished career as a teacher and principal. They were hosting me at their ranch. Corpus did most of the cooking including a wonderful breakfast served at 5 a.m. before we set out on daily farm chores. Corpus always prepared this multi-course breakfast since Yvette insisted we needed energy to carry us through the morning tasks. This typically consisted of grilled vegetables from the kitchen garden, home-cut bacon, huevos con papas fritas, chicos-bolitas stew, and tortillas with roasted green chiles.

Yvette still fancied canning and she continued to process, with all the men helping, the farm’s produce. The Gallegos’ cupboards were filled with chokecherry jam, elderberry jelly, and other home kitchen-processed foods.

There was a spirit of collaboration across age, gender, and city/village resident status. This issued from the kitchen, which was the business nerve center of the household, to the fields, acequias, orchards, and beyond into la Sierra. I should note that in my family, my Father-in-Law is the cook; always has been. When I visit, he serves me a Laredo version of the breakfast Corpus prepared for me in San Luis. In my own household, my wife and I usually share cooking duties everyday and are most delighted when we can share a gastronomic innovation with our friends and neighbors down in San Luis.

Regardless of the cook’s gender, there is one thing I am absolutely certain about: The families, at least those I have dined with over the decades that I have spent researching acequia farms while sharing heritage foods and bioregional cuisines in the Rio Arriba, all want to eat together.

As Esteva and Prakash (1999:55, 65-7) have noted, la comida (the shared meal) is at the heart of the food culture of Mexican-origin peoples everywhere. That is not a stereotype but a serious observable pattern of preferred cultural organization and behavior. Sharing a meal is a signifying event of utmost importance because it conveys a commitment to conviviality – the act of sharing is what the meal is about and not just nutrition.

While Counihan acknowledges “Hispanics expressed sociability and social equality by sharing food,” she also notes that they “marked class differences and borders by not eating together.” (2002: 299) She goes on to describe how “People in Antonito defined class according to wealth and education” and how “Hispanics from the laboring classes rarely ate in the homes of the wealthy Hispanic landowners and professionals.” Class breaks down the conviviality of food in Counihan’s take on the gendered food practices of Colorado Hispanics [sic].

In Counihan’s version, the father of her primary informant refused to share food, least of all with Anglos, because this refusal meant he “refuted the class subordination expressed through making food for others.” (2002:300)

James M. Taggert echoes this theme of class division in an equally misguided take on masculinity and food among the Hispano men of Antonito. Taggert mismanages the information provided by his singular ethnographic source. In this version of Hispanic food ways, food becomes a hidden code for class stratification and resistance.

According to Taggert (2002) people in the San Luis Valley do not cross class divisions to eat together. The working class eats in its space separate from los ricos (the rich) who have their own differentiated space.

However, this too is something I do not recognize at all in San Luis, Antonito, or any other acequia community I have had the privilege of visiting in response to invitations for la comida. It seems intriguing that Anglo anthropologists appear overly preoccupied with demonstrating that, gosh darn it, Mexicans are just as riddled by patriarchy and class hierarchy as any other ethnic group and we therefore need to stop romanticizing these folk as paragons of some equitable and sustainable future. That is the subtext I disentangle from these two essays.

The sharing of food, la comida, at least in San Luis, Antonito, and other acequia farming villages in the Rio Arriba that I know first hand as a resident farmer and fellow gastronome, is precisely one of the most significant “sociable” events that is used to cut across class, gender, and racial divisions.

It must be understood as well that the imaginary world of ricos y pobres (rich and poor) in the Counihan-Taggert narrative is a bit of a stretch since the acres separating “wealthy” and “poor” landowners is negligible at best (although there are growing numbers of landless Chicana/os in our bioregion).

Also, every person, at least within the context of acequia culture, labors long and hard hours at farm and ranch work; no one is above getting their hands dirty since all of these are small family farms. Everyone in the acequia community is in other words part of “the laboring class.” For example, no one escapes la limpieza (0r saca), the annual ritual of the communal work of springtime irrigation ditch clean-up.

The annual Saca deo La Acequia de la Gente de San Luis de la Culebra, which I participated in this April 19, involves a multi-generational, mixed gender and mixed class contingent of helpers. This year, about eight of the forty-two crewmembers were women. The largest landowner has about 160 acres of irrigated land; the smallest has about ten acres. Both shared equally in the work of ditch maintenance.

In the middle of our cleanup day, there was a two-hour break for la comida, a communal meal prepared by two men and three women who used local organic ingredients and recipes handed down over the generations. The multi-course meal became the endless subject of our “idle chit-chat” as we traded glowing reports about how that corn in the chicos stew came from Sally Chavez’s garden or how those outstanding creamy bolita beans came from the Gallegos boys and so on.

Everyone present – male and female, young and old, and large or small landholder – understood that the Acequia Madre cleanup in April is a necessary precondition for the production and preparation of the meal we shared that day. These interconnections are silenced when anthropologists, however progressive and supportive they might be, quickly rush to pen the next best critique of patriarchy and masculinity in Mexican communities, obscuring the changing practices of our dynamic and ever-expanding networks of local ‘foodies.’

I just don’t believe that, epistemologically, it is a very good idea to engage in remotely directed research even over a period of long visits and many years. Grounding any given anthropology of food requires sustained participation in the entire local food system. It is this system that seems absent in these accounts by Counihan and Taggert.

There are some significant differences between San Luis and Antonito in matters of food, class, race, and gender. I believe these are rooted in the organization of the food systems in each community. Both communities include original Chicana/o settlements that date back to claims based on Mexican-period mercedes (the Conejos grant in Antonito and the Sangre de Cristo grant in San Luis). Both have long-established acequia systems but the level of organization regionally has the San Luis-area acequia associations well ahead of Antonito. Many of the acequias in Conejos County have taken hard hits and have even lost significant portions of quite senior water rights.

Agriculture remains a vital force in both areas and there are many remaining multigenerational farming families, both Chicana/o and white. Antonito is located in Conejos County, an area that was demographically and religiously transformed beginning in the late 1870s with the establishment of Mormon communities and later railroad grid towns settled through in-migration of white Americans including many Midwesterners. San Luis never experienced such a demographic and cultural transformation and remains a predominantly Mexican-origin and Catholic community.

To some extent, this was a consequence of geography: The establishment of railroad grid-towns in our own Costilla County was limited to the higher plateau desert scrub country around present-day town sites like Fort Garland and Blanca to the north and Mesita and Jaroso to the South-Southwest, some 10 to 30 miles from the Culebra bottomlands.

This is where the industrial monocultures, with their center-pivot irrigation circles, were established, far away enough from the acequia-hood that their disruptive influence was limited to the usurpation of more than half of the original water rights decreed to acequias in a legal battle stretching from the 1880s to the early 1900s. (Hicks and Peña 2003)

Antonito has grocery chain stores, convenience marts, and fast food outlets. San Luis has none of these. Much of the agriculture in the Antonito area does involve larger homesteaded acreage irrigated by mechanical sprinklers in alfalfa-hay monoculture production. Some corporate seed potato and potato growers are also evident. Grain producers and other fairly large thousand-acre operators are producing biodiesel and ethanol fuel sources (canola, sunflower, and corn) and becoming a bigger part of the reshaping of the environs of Antonito and its neighboring towns. Cattle ranches west of the Rio Bravo are much larger than those east of the river.

However, the practice of maintaining home kitchen gardens, orchards, and polyculture milpas appears to have fallen by the wayside across much of the Antonito area although some acequia farm families in Ortiz, Mogote, Conejos, and other largely Hispana/o rural hamlets still raise home kitchen gardens or maintain family orchards.

Another difference is that the acequia ranchers in Antonito have access to grazing permits on public lands while Chicana/os in the San Luis area do not have immediate access since all the local headwater forests are privately owned. Many Antonito-area acequia ranchers run cattle in federal public domain areas located within the Conejos watershed in the Rio Grande National Forest and BLM-administered holdings.

Costilla County has no such public lands and it was only in 2002 that the courts restored grazing rights to the enclosed land grant commons, another important story that lies beyond my scope today. The dependence of the acequia ranchers on grazing permits in the high country likely changes local food practices as well since it marks a shift away from a focus on polyculture milpa agroecosystems. Ranching on public lands carries a different set of strong relationships but it lacks the dense network of social interactions focused around food production and consumption that farming creates.

I think that together these conditions – the availability of grocery stores, convenience marts, and fast food outlets; the decline of home kitchen gardens and orchards and therefore the loss of heritage cuisines, canning, and food preservation practices; the demographic shifts that produced greater class stratification and altered the quality of agriculture into a form dominated by larger corporate-styled operators; the corresponding decline of acequia governance; and the displacement of Hispano males from traditional skilled artisan craftwork and hence a retreat into the home as a patriarchal refuge – contribute to a sharpening and heightening of racial, class, and gender divisions in Antonito that perhaps do get played out in some of the ways described by Counihan and Taggert.

In contrast to this, however, the smaller family farms of San Luis-area acequia farmers continue to produce many of their own local crops that are destined for home consumption, local barter, and sales. These include chicos, bolitas, calabacitas, alberjones, habas, and many other staple vegetables and orchard crops. This does not mean we are fixated on static traditions or are failing to adapt and change.

Culebra acequia farmers are engaged in wholesale and retail marketing of organic heirloom chicos and bolitas. These crops fetch premium prices in Taos, Santa Fe, Albuquerque, Denver, Pueblo, and Colorado Springs. The most successful marketing of organic heirloom “value-added” products in San Luis involves “Pepitas,” a heritage cuisine company started by three local Chicanas with deep roots in the acequia tradition. Surely, Counihan would not object to women in acequia farm communities organizing themselves to make a good living by retailing traditional recipes and mixes, in effect creating livelihoods by “cooking for others.”

This is Part 6 of 8 of an original as yet unpubished essay prepared by invitation for the Department of Anthropology, Spring 2008 Colloquium, “Epistemologies of Anthropological Research,” University of Washington, May 23, 2008. It is presented here free of the footnotes in the original. Sources cited in the text will be posted at the end of the series of 8.

This is a work in progress; please do not quote, cite, or circulate without the author’s permission. Send inquiries to: dpena@u.washington.edu. The author thanks Elaine H. Peña and Mario Montaño for comments on earlier drafts.

Obama's Department of Agriculture Budget

Excerpts from White House Home Page Agriculture Funding Highlights

Moderators Note: As a public information service and without comment, we are re-posting excerpts on the USDA budget as highlighted by the White House Home Page on the Web:

The budget proposal for the USDA:

• Provides over $20 billion in loans and grants to support and expand rural development activities, including small businesses, renewable energy, and telecommunications.

• Includes a $50 million increase to address deferred maintenance on the most critical health and safety infrastructure within our national forests.

• Supports the implementation of a $250,000 commodity program payment limit. The payment limit will help ensure that payments are made to those who most need them.

• Reflects the President’s commitment to wildfire management and community protection by fully funding suppression costs at the 10-year average, establishing a discretionary contingent reserve for wildfires, and including program reforms to ensure fire management resources are focused where they will do the most good.

• Fully funds the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) to serve all eligible individuals.

• Includes $1 billion per year for the Child Nutrition reauthorization.

• Supports a pilot program to help increase senior participation in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

• Reflects the President’s commitment to supporting independent producers through improved enforcement of the Packers and Stockyards Act and investing in the full diversity of agricultural production, including organic farming and local food systems.

• Reflects the President’s commitment to fiscal responsibility by reducing direct payments to the largest farmers, reducing crop insurance subsidies, eliminating cotton storage credits, eliminating funding for the Resource Conservation and Development program, and reducing program funding for overseas brand promotion.

The White House homepage explains that the budget:

Supports rural revitalization, education, and land grant programs…[and] includes an additional $70 million for rural areas, for competitive research grants that provide incentives for teachers working in rural areas…

This page corrects an amount erroneously included in the printed version of A New Era of Responsibility.

Sodbusters and the 'native' gaze - Part V

Invaders, exotics, and ecological restoration, or: resisting soil governmentality

We expect that much of this land will be restored to Native perennial polyculture meadows. There are numerous “invasive” species in Colorado and our watershed is no exception, but we are lucky to be located so far down the Acequia Madre that we are not yet overwhelmed by noxious plants from the Asian steppes and other places that are becoming the “scourge” of farmers and ranchers in the state of Colorado.

Don’t get me wrong; I am not about to launch into an all-out diatribe against so-called exotic or invasive species. That would constitute an epistemological contradiction for someone who considers himself to be “eco-centric.”

I pretty much reject the concept of “weed” but share the concern of some restoration ecologists for keeping the balance in favor of native and “naturalized exotic” plant associations. I am a proponent of many “naturalized exotics” like the potato or Fava beans (habas) for example.

However, Leafy Spurge, Canada Thistle, and Russian Knapweed are examples of noxious plants spreading in the San Luis Valley agricultural districts. These troublesome species are unwanted because cattle and other livestock can eat them, get sick, and die. My concern is that these species displace native plants and thus affect habitat for many living organisms.

The trouble with these noxious invaders is that they are “invaders” prone to dominating the landscape, a sort of exotic weed monoculture. I understand this happens more readily in, or is in any case associated with, soils that have suffered considerable disturbance from human activities.

These noxious plants are the biological baggage and ecological legacy of European empires (see Crosby 1988). Restoration of Native sovereignty may require ecological restoration to exorcize these biological analogs of conquest, colonialism, and the degradation of land and body alike.

An additional trouble is that these noxious invaders are usually treated under the framework of a military-styled “warfare against weeds” paradigm. Last year, the USDA, through the local office of the NRCS (the Soil Conservation Service now the Natural Resources Conservation Service), announced that it was “launching an all out war against these noxious invasive weeds” (Anonymous weed technician from NRCS in a conversation with the author, March 2007).

The “war” involves rapid deployment of herbicide treatments, of course. The USDA teams sprayed herbicide on a test plot of Leafy Spurge growing along the edge and a few other isolated patches in the local high school athletic fields.

We, as local acequia farmers, objected and instead opted to use goats and sheep on the patches of Leafy Spurge laying within the polygon perimeters of our long-lot farms. The Leafy Spurge in the USDA test plot is coming back, like a fiercely defiant fairy-circle gathering around the sprayed patches that are dead but obviously not gone.

The goat and sheep treatments had their desired effect and the Leafy Spurge is in retreat on the acequia farms’ test plots. Some of the technicians are finally starting to come around but a few of them remain committed to the modern chemical treatment protocol.

This story about weeds is partly interesting because it is suggestive of changes occurring in the relationship between the state (in the form of the NRCS) and the local Chicana/o farmers. There is clearly a process of ‘devolution’ of planning authority to the local soil conservation board; this was barely imaginable two decades ago when local board members, scientists, and technicians were mostly white men from outside our community.

Today, the local NRCS office includes one local Chicano and a progressive white woman. The office seems much more open to the local farmers who are now experiencing a level of attention they have long yearned for.

Underlying these interactions between acequia farmers and NRCS staff is a contested process of ‘governmental devolution’ on soil matters in the southern half of the Costilla County Soil Conservation District. One vision, the top-down one, allows the local NRCS office a bit more autonomy, within strict budgetary limits and subject to individualized contracts, to reach out to ‘under-served’ and ‘under-represented’ farmers like the acequia farmers of the Culebra watershed.

Many of the local acequia farmers are approached to enter into agreements with NRCS or the FSA (Farm Security Administration). You can do this for example by applying for an EQIP (Environmental Quality Incentives Program) grant. This grant has been used to improve acequia components like compuertas and other water diversion, soil erosion, and sediment control structures.

It took several federal lawsuits (including Garcia v. Venneman, 224 F.R.D. 8 (D.D.C. 2004) to get the USDA to begin addressing decades of discrimination against Latina/o farmers. The EQIP outreach is an example of new programs designed to address these patterns of racism and neglect and are led by progressive Chicana/os and white men and women in our local NRCS offices.

However, the restoration ecology work before us cannot be entirely supported by programs like EQIP. We face the challenge of converting that meadow from sprinkler to flood irrigation. The repair work to restore compacted soil under the concentric grooves of the old sprinkler system and to realign the network of lindero and sangría acequias likely can be addressed with the technical and financial assistance of the NRCS and FSA.

There is, however, another set of problems beyond the apparent current scope of these programs. We need to rely on permaculture features to slow down the movement of water through this badly damaged meadow. We need to anchor and buffer the more erosive slopes with a system of ancones (terraces), alamosas (Cottonwood tree lines), and bordos (raised berms) of Native vegetation like sand cherry, chokecherry, gooseberry, and osha to protect the patches of ancestral riverbed gravels that were exposed by decades of excessive plowing, inappropriate and poor irrigation practices, and overgrazing (Mike McGowan in personal note to the author; June 2006).

There are always dangerous ambiguities presented by how the USDA, locally, works to implement programs from the top-down not the least of which is the tendency to impose technical design criteria that may not be entirely appropriate to acequia methods and that may even undermine or weaken our commitment to collective community-based approaches to problem-solving.

These are efforts to inculcate a new individualist and “modernist subjectivity” on the parciantes by inducing us to accept individualized contracts and the possibility of shifting to drip irrigation or other techniques at variance with acequia flood irrigated practices. These seemingly neutral designs can reduce our ability to act on the basis of shared norms of mutual reliance.

It is hardly recognized that mutual reliance interests constitute an alternative to the dominant “individual rational actor model” of economic behavior that undergirds the various programs administered by the NRCS under the last, current, and presumably future Farm Bills.

As acequia farmers we continuously negotiate our way in a manner by which we tend to juxtapose ourselves against the imposed process of neoliberal governmentality of soil. Against this “conduct of conduct,” the community seeks collective, informal, and self-provisioning responses to soil conservation needs.

In 1995-97, Robert Curry and I managed to log a small set of “soil augur” surveys in which we found evidence at the Corpus A. Gallegos Ranches and a few other sites to corroborate the local claim that acequia farms are “soil banks.” Not all acequia farmers are that successful but the technology of gravity-driven flood irrigation, when combined with intensive permaculture practices, carries with it the possibility of regenerative effects from a peculiar anthropogenic disturbance regime.

I am using the language of conservation biology to convey the idea, familiar now to most of you, that at our best farmers can act like beavers and contribute to biodiversity when they follow original instructions as inhabitants of a place.

This is Part 5 of 8 of an original as yet unpubished essay prepared by invitation for the Department of Anthropology, Spring 2008 Colloquium, “Epistemologies of Anthropological Research,” University of Washington, May 23, 2008. It is presented here free of the footnotes in the original. Sources cited in the text will be posted at the end of the series of 8.

This is a work in progress; please do not quote, cite, or circulate without the author’s permission. Send inquiries to: dpena@u.washington.edu. The author thanks Elaine H. Peña and Mario Montaño for comments on earlier drafts.

Food justice and the Obama Administration

DEFINING FOOD JUSTICE PRINCIPLES FOR A POST-NEOLIBERAL WORLD

Shoreline, WA. On October 15, 2008 (World Food Day), the U.S. Working Group on the Food Crisis sent then candidate Barack Obama an Open Letter. Candidate Obama had just declared that as President he would seek to end childhood hunger by 2015.

The Working Group is a coalition of progressive food, farm, labor, and justice organizations from across the United States. The coalition offered its advice in the form of five principles the new Administration should follow in pursuit of sustainable food justice policies:

• Stabilize and guarantee fair prices for farmers and consumers globally;
  
• Rebalance power in the food system;
  
• Make agriculture environmentally sustainable;
  
• Respect, protect and fulfill human rights of farmworkers and other food system workers; and
• Guarantee the right to food.

We do not yet have a complete picture of the direction the Obama Administration will adopt with respect to food, nutrition, and agriculture policy. The appointment of former Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack as Secretary was not an encouraging sign to be sure. On issues related to biosafety, to cite but one key example, the former governor, seems too mainstream and unreflexive in his support of the biotechnology sector.

Will Obama abide by the food justice principles of fair trade, local empowerment, ecological soundness, attainment of labor and social justice, and guarantees for the right to be free of hunger through access to wholesome, healthy, and culturally-appropriate foods?

These principles are a tall order. How exactly does one go about the process of re-balancing power in a corporate-dominated global food system? How does one define "fair" trade in a world still dominated by market fundamentalists? How does ecological agriculture become the "norm" in the face of the agri-genomics revolution? What are the rights to be granted to farmworkers and other food system workers who are, from their own vantage point, more than just "cheap" seasonal or casual labor? Who grants such rights and will these include the right to organize a union regardless of one's immigration status?

Is this progressive agenda still bound to a type of top-down "decentralization" logic at a time when what we need and indeed are starting to create through social movements is bottom-up self-mobilizing or "decentralism"?

In the end, one could argue that even these progressive principles reflect a top-down logic especially on issues of "workers' rights." The progressive agenda invests too much trust in what might turn out to be a neo-Keynesian state strategy to "save capitalism from the capitalists" and that basically invites the state to grant extension of civil and equal treatment to various categories of peoples that have been kept down and out; locked-up in detention; exposed to death and violence not just in pesticide-ridden fields but on treacherous hot desert sojourns; or recycled through the revolving doors of diaspora "cheap" labor. This granting of "rights" to our brothers and sisters who have been subject to marginality for so long they are sure this is what it actually means to become "Americanized."

Our proposals for environmental and food justice require a more radical set of practices that lead not so much to a re-structuring as a sublation of the dominant global food system. To end hunger and malnutrition we need to simultaneously challenge the avarice-driven hunger for profit of transnational agribusiness corporations while consciously rebuilding our place-based local food systems.

De-commodify food to challenge globalization?

The spaces of autonomy dedicated to local food sovereignty are opening in thousands of localities across the world. We only need recognize and nurture these impulses. The alterNative institutions for local food sovereignty that grassroots social movements are creating can bridge the divide separating producer from consumer while relying on the collective intellectual, material, and cultural assets of the community in order to de-commodify food.

This might be the first demand of the food justice movement: Make food a right not a commodity. Even better if this "right" can be thought of us something not so much pertaining to the "individual." Instead, the alterNative vantage might embrace a right to self-provisioning of food through locally-grounded cooperative union and mutual aid.

Moreover, we are asserting these types of freedoms now and are not waiting for the state to deliver justice. Don't wait; act now. This is the path of movements like Via Campesina, the South Central Farmers, and the acequia farmers of the Rio Arriba bioregion. We don't ask permission from the state to be "free" and instead create our own freedoms through direct organizing and community-based action. If the state, on notice, decides to support these struggles I am certain most of us would not reject assistance if it did not tie us down to "reformist reforms."

The demands of the food justice movement incorporate principles of the anti-globalization movement since the emphasis remains on place-based self-provisioning and demands to restore more "autarkic" forms of food sovereignty. Also, the role of fair trade demands becomes less important since a return to heritage agroecosystems implies a reduction in the production of exotic crops for cash-export markets and a focus first on local food self-sufficiency.

The de-commodification and re-localization of food systems are two critical elements of any truly just and sustainable agriculture and food policy. Of course, this will require that we punch deep holes in the arguments of the naysayers who claim we cannot feed the world without a reliance on industrial mass production of food. Local food systems are attacked for being incompatible with the economies of scale [sic] it presumably takes to feed an ever-growing human population.

But these are indeed unproven assumptions and the corporate take-over of "organics" serves to clearly illustrate that we can actually produce mass quantities of food without pesticides or herbicides. Unfortunately, this also means that the social justice issues of workers' control and right livelihood are brushed aside as the "backward" annoyances of an earlier era superseded by corporate organic producers that feign themselves lords of a New Age of non-adversarial capitalism. But this is a subject best left to a future blog.

Food sovereignty and the return of the social wage

We need to recall that the Keynesian programs of the 1940s, 50s, and 60s were the albeit co-opted results of hard fought for victories through decades of struggle since well before the 1929 Crash. Over time, working-class struggles sought to create a "social wage" in the form of food stamps, unemployment checks, school lunch programs, student grants and subsidized loans, and pension and retirement funds.

We should be proud of any accomplishment that moves a people closer to a world where we "work to live" and do not "live to work." Where the hell did this notion of the "welfare" state as some "liberal" anomaly or evil vampire-sucking creation come from? That is a rhetorical question. It is capital that sucks the blood out of listless proletarian bodies.

The food stamp and school lunch programs are the only true remnants of the massive programs conceded to the power of 20th century working-class struggle and organization during those heady pre-Reagan days when the "welfare" state, despite is contradictions and limitations, was able to define and provide for a real social wage or "floor" under which no one was to fall. We had in effect succeeded in de-commodifying our own relationship to waged-labor or income. It was a brilliant victory if we want to work to live and not live to work. Stop apologizing for the social wage and demand that a bigger cut of the "stimulus" go toward a refurbishing of the so-called "social safety net." In other words, divorce work from the reproduction of your body's species-life, or "working-class self-valorization," to borrow an old, out of fashion phrase by Toni Negri.

This concept of the social wage basically involves the idea that the common wealth produced by generalized labor power means no one goes homeless, hungry, or lacking for health and educational resources or environmental amenities like clean air and water. If biopolitics means anything worthwhile or interesting it is this idea of how we have come to resist capital's efforts not just to exploit our bodies but to regulate the contingencies that affect, limit, or even diminish the life-giving capacities of our bodies. As Sylvia Federici says, "The body had to die so that labor power could live" in service to capital.

The social wage becomes a way of re-appropriating some of our common wealth and food is part of this social wage.

Re-balancing power in the global food system?

It may be that the only enduring way to re-balance power in the global food system is by introducing the concept of the social wage into the discourse on food sovereignty. This allows us to de-link demands for food sovereignty from demands for "fair" trade with its continued faith in the "market."

However, this also requires shift toward the "local" - in the sense of a spatial re-orientation of the food system from global commodity chains toward local, more autarkic, bioregional food systems. Think globally, eat locally.

Directing major investments into the ecological and cultural restoration of local food systems could be the best practice frontier of any truly just and sustainable Obama Administration "Green Jobs" strategy for the 21st century.

I invite my readers and followers to think about how we can go about making resistance against global food systems a principal investment of US efforts to re-balance power and combining this with the proactive forces that are already rebuilding local food systems. Local food needs to become one of three keystones of any "progressive" food and agriculture policy for the United States. Support for a transition to local food systems, along with renewable energy and sensible climate change policies, could become the defining hallmarks of progressive policy in the Obama Administration.

We will be watching and reporting on developments as they occur in the critical months that lay ahead as we witness the start of the unfolding of this Administration's food and agriculture policies.

Sodbusters and the 'native' gaze - Part IV

Devolution or revolution of the soiled?

The headquarters of our family’s "Rancho Dos Acequias" is housed in an adobe-brick, territorial-style home rebuilt over the burned-out ruins of the first homestead in the 1920s. The home was expanded in the 1940s and again in the 1960s. We are currently renovating the infrastructure and converting to a hybrid solar-wind-hydronic energy and water heating system that will take us off the grid. The Institute oversees the agricultural and restoration ecology programs on a historic acequia farm in San Acacio, Colorado. The 200-acre parcel is a classic riparian long-lot traversing the Rio Culebra bottomlands within the 1844 Sangre de Cristo Land Grant. Our irrigation water comes from La Acequia de la Gente de San Luis de la Culebra (a.k.a. San Luis Peoples’ Ditch), the oldest adjudicated water right in the state (1852 decree). A smaller portion issues from La Acequia de Roberto Allen, pronounced, Ah-YEN, a junior 1957 decree under Colorado’s prior appropriation law.

The Sangre de Cristo Land Grant includes uplands that were springtime hunting grounds for the Tabehuache and Weminuche clans of the Mountain Ute first nation well into the mid-1800s. When Chicano land grant activists filed a lawsuit in 1979 to reverse Taylor’s 1960 private enclosure of the commons of the land grant, the Ute people, now living west of Durango, gave this struggle their blessing as a form of resistance by indigenous peoples. (Frank White, Ute-xicano elder, personal communication, June 1988)

The farm came with an unexpected gift, the kind I am sure archivists dream about: A primary original document in the form of a 300+ page deed that presents a detailed history of the Sangre de Cristo Land Grant, legal descriptions for various vara strips or long-lots apportioned, and the water rights pertaining to these lands. The deed traces the changing ownership of the land between 1851 and 2006. Some of the documents pertain to the original decrees and the adjudication and re-adjudication of the water rights vested in both of the acequias.

I have learned from reading this document that “our” land was originally deeded by Carlos Beaubien to Diego Gallegos, the younger and more obscure brother of Dario, who is recognized as the founder of La Plaza de San Luis de la Culebra, established in 1851. This happened a bit before the time when Kit Carson was assigned to retire from a notorious “Indian-fighting” career at Fort Massachusetts, located near today’s town of Fort Garland about 20 miles north of our farm. He died not too close to destitute in the shadow of Changing Woman, Sisnaajini, Mother Mountain of the Dine Twins, Monster Slayer and Water Giver.

The deed shows that the farm came into new ownership several times before my sister and I purchased it in February 2006. Two of the previous owners were Anglo American families. One involved two generations of a family that established a successful wool and mutton operation and sustained a commercial cauliflower and later beer hops operation over a period of about four decades (1946-82). The other involved a retired Air Force colonel who was seen locally as a curmudgeon. He was a widely disliked sheep and alfalfa-hay producer with a reputation for stubbornly challenging acequia customary practices in the allocation of irrigation water within the community ditch (1982-1998).

I knew this retired colonel rather well and interacted with him almost on a daily basis for more than five years when we both lived in the area. He once told me during an informal chat something that just now reminds me of the sodbuster’s attitude: “These damn farmers. They have got to modernize. They are pretty backward or maybe just plain lazy...These ditches? Hell, they date back to medieval times!” [How little he knew to appreciate the deep history of acequias as rooted in antiquity when al Andalus was the heart of a multicultural Islamic Spain, 711-1492.] He went on: “They should convert to sprinklers. Get more efficient. Save water by, you know, paving the canals. It’s all about becoming more modern… It’s not about race like you were asking earlier” [I had used the term, culture not race.]

I won’t dwell on the retired colonel’s obvious racial prejudices toward lazy Hispanic [sic] farmers. I have an even more practical and pressing problem now that he is gone but left a heavy imprint on the land. My sister asnd I inherited this curmudgeon’s 1970s-styled 75 yard-long center-pivot mechanical irrigation sprinkler. We acquired the land from a multigenerational Hispano farmer from down in the Española Valley who had bought it in 1999. We irrigated with the center-pivot that first season (2006) and had significant diesel fuel, labor, and maintenance costs. We stopped using the sprinkler last year (2007) during our annual May to October irrigation cycle. Instead, we did the best we could with the damaged acequia network. I spent a lot of time ‘changing water’ on those large meadows and this has become an activity I cherish.

We plan on dismantling the three-ton mechanical centipede-on-wheels this summer. Then, in 2009, we plan to restore the use of acequia gravity-driven flood irrigation to this middle vega after we re-seed with native grasses and sedges and add some permaculture features to slow the movement of water over the land and reduce the effects of wind erosion.

This acequia farmland is very resilient. It still has fairly deep soil horizons, and soil formation is evident since the bottomlands receive regenerative dustings from the mesa tops and from the fine sediment transported by the acequias through flood irrigated practice. There is little evidence of compacted clay lens, tepetate. I don’t have any gullies. The main problems on this northern and upper elevation half of the farm are the concentric grooves produced by the wheels of the center-pivot sprinkler and the state of the acequia network for that vega with potential for arroyo-cutting given the decades of inattentiveness and disrepair. This was definitely the wrong site for a mechanical irrigation sprinkler (although I don’t believe there is a “good” site anywhere on earth).

The myriad problems with center-pivot agricultural sprinklers are legendary but the one that reminds me the most about the foolish arrogance of the farmer in the sodbuster joke is the fact that the sprinkler encourages prairie dogs to burrow more profusely in the sprinkler irrigated fields. Flood irrigation by acequia techniques keeps the burrows to a minimum. The critters tend not to locate in flood-irrigated fields because the flooding of the burrows makes them uninhabitable. The sprinkler irrigation is more like a long and steady rain. I can just see the prairie dogs showering under the evaporating mists; studies show that mechanical sprinklers are less efficient than acequias at delivering water to the crops because of aerial evaporation. The difference for soil erosion control and the effectiveness of getting water to the crop is rather striking.

Yet, the retired colonel kept insisting that sprinklers were superior to acequias. Maybe he was just too old and worn out and could not invest the long and hard labor it takes to master the art of flood irrigating. In any event, he was quick to belittle the acequia parciantes. Yet, as soon as he lauded the superiority of the center-pivot he was complaining about the rising fossil fuel costs to operate the sprinkler machine. He lamented the fact that he had to run the sprinkler a lot longer than it takes for an acequia to irrigate a comparable field and how this created scheduling conflicts with other irrigators. He complained mightily about the high cost of maintenance and the many hours spent driving long distances to acquire expensive parts for repair jobs. Sometimes he couldn’t do the job himself and then had trouble getting the right mechanic to do the job for him.

The sprinkler became his personal maintenance nightmare and this caused all kinds of misery on the community ditch since these breakdowns upset the timing of allocations to different irrigators. One time he claimed that the sprinklers were better because they reduced soil erosion and compaction. However, in the next breath he complained that the sprinkler, circling the field on large tractor-like wheels was producing a series of concentric grooves of furrowed and compacted soil where the wheels met the ground. Repairing this damage is a major task before me as I work to restore more healthy soil conditions before reintroducing acequia flood irrigation to this meadow.

These men were classic sod busting monoculture farmers and both abused the land. The results are apparent everywhere. One can see this in the barrancos along the Culebra River where the sheep and cattle over the decades cleared the banks of native vegetation and then trampled the edges, collapsing the banks in chunks of lost topsoil and rootstocks from willows and alders long ago washed out toward the Rio Bravo del Norte (aka Rio Grande). Or one can see the effects in the hummocks (cespedes or mogotes) that mark the transition from the riparian zone to las vegas de en medio, the once deeply flowered wet meadows that result from the sub-irrigation flow of the upstream acequias. I am newly engaged in a practical battle with the ghosts of these sodbusters in my efforts to repair the damaged riverbanks and to restore the native plant associations in the hummocky meadows for now still deprived of their perennial Native polyculture.

This is Part 4 of 8 of an original as yet unpubished essay prepared by invitation for the Department of Anthropology, Spring 2008 Colloquium, “Epistemologies