Customer Reviews

Mayordomo: Chronicle of an Acequia in Northern New Mexico

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In "Mayodomo" Stanley Crawford describes his experience as manager of an "acequia" or irrigation ditch system in arid northern New Mexico. The use of acequia-irrigation originated in Spain and was introduced to the desert Southwest by Franciscan monks over 300 years ago. Acequias feed from rivers or larger acequias, and from these larger tributaries water is run through farm land and orchards then back to the main source. Each year a manager (mayordomo) and three commissioners (comisiados) are democratically elected to oversee water rates and insure fair distribution of water to each "parciante" or landowner who farms along the ditch. Acequia association members are historically of Hispanic or Latino descent, so Crawford's anglo heritage creates an interesting viewpoint of an age old tradition.
As mayordomo Crawford supervises the annual spring clearing of his association's acequia, determines the amount of water that each parciante will receive, and is partially responcible for record keeping and payrolls. A parciante's share of water is determined by the nature of his plantings and for a larger part, the weather. As manager of his ditch Crawford must also contend with family feuding, annual dues or "delincuencias" and parciantes who "cheat" by diverting water to their lands.
Crawford's observations take more into account than the physical labor and political hierarchy associated with the maintenance of an acequia. His words create a meaningful perspective of life among the residents of an old northern New Mexican farming community and his story reveals a group of people that have been chronicled by few writers and generally ignored or forgotten by everyone else. It is a book with literary, anthropological, political, and historical significance. Spanish water laws, established long before state government regulations, support solidarity and insure the parciante's place in the community. Recent land and water legal disputes threaten to undermine an important aspect of life in northern New Mexico, one that keeps these communities together and has done so for hundreds of years.

Far too many accounts of life in New Mexico are written by people with an agenda, often Anglos who came here to "find themselves" or "get back to the land" and were outraged when they discovered that reality wouldn't cooperate with their fantasies. By contrast, Stanley Crawford arrived with an open mind and integrated his family so successfully into a small, predominantly Hispanic village that he became the "mayordomo" in charge of administering the community's irrigation system. This book recounts his experiences and describes the workings of the community, in which the water system performs an important symbolic function as well as a practical one. It's well written, sometimes almost poetic, and often very funny. I think this and Crawford's "A Garlic Testament" are far and away the best books on life in rural New Mexico, and I recommend both of them unreservedly.

In New Mexico today there are about 1000 acequias, or ditches, used for irrigation. Many date back well over one hundred years, most were originally dug by hand, and most are still maintained primarily by shovel and human muscle and sweat. Over the years, a communitarian and utilitarian system developed for the adminstration of acequias. One feature of that system was the election annually of a "mayordomo" or master of the ditch, who is responsible for making decisions affecting the allocation of water among the various properties along the course of the acequia; recruiting, supervising, and paying laborers to maintain the ditch; and, along with "commissioners", negotiating water allocation issues with neighboring acequias.

MAYORDOMO is a fascinating story of this system, as told by Stanley Crawford, an Anglo outsider who moved to Northern New Mexico around 1970 and began farming in the foothills of the Sangre de Christo Mountains of Northern New Mexico, something which he has continued to do up to now, selling his produce at, among other outlets, the Santa Fe Farmers Market. Crawford's property lay along one of nine acequias in a high mountain valley, and compelled by his dependence on the acequia for his fields and crops, he became involved in the traditional, largely Hispanic, system of water allocation. He eventually was elected mayordomo of his acequia (nearly by default, the job often entailing more headaches than it is worth in either pay or prestige). MAYORDOMO is the story of one year of his service in that role, from March 1985 to March 1986.

There are two principal aspects to the book. One concerns low-tech and small-scale farming, close to the soil, in an area of this country that remains rural even today but was more so in 1985, marked by challenging but not impossible conditions snug up against the southernmost extension of the Rocky Mountains. The second concerns the unusual "patchwork of state, federal, and traditional Spanish water laws under which we operate the ditches." In that regard, Crawford provides a fascinating picture of a vestige of traditional, non-Anglo, communitarian property law that still tenuously, and anomalously, survives in this country -- although almost surely it is doomed to extinction over the next quarter century or so.

Stanley Crawford is an accomplished writer, such that for the most part the book is an easy and relaxing read. There are a few occasions when he gives vent to irrelevant personal bugaboos and several of his accounts of negotiations or discussions regarding contested water use issues become a little too detailed, and thus mildly tedious, but those missteps are not frequent or protracted.

This is the second time I have read MAYORDOMO. The first was in 1989. Had I reviewed the book then for Amazon (had it existed then), I would have given it five stars. It did not make as big an impression on me this time around. For those who live in Northern New Mexico, however, I still think it a five-star book, as it provides valuable background and context for the rural, traditional life of many Nortenos. (Two other books about Northern New Mexico that I also believe almost essential for an immigrant Anglo like me are "Enchantment and Exploitation" by William deBuys and "River of Traps" by William deBuys and Alex Harris.)

This is an outstanding, thoughtful, and thoroughly delightful memoir. I assign it to university students in a class on the history of water.

I was so taken with A Garlic Testament that I drove my family to New Mexico to see what Crawford was talking about - I didn't discover Mayordomo until I returned to Kansas City - drove back! Two great books! Two great trips!

Stanley Crawford is not a bad writer. He's not.

But "Mayordomo" is not a good book.

It is EXCRUCIATINGLY boring, and that's coming from someone who is obsessed with New Mexico culture and history, who thoroughly enjoyed Annie Dillard's equally plotless (but much better written) "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek," and who lives right next to a small town known for its acequia--the Spanish name for the ditches that regulate so much of New Mexico's irrigation water and that form this book's subject.

During the time I read this book, it was all I could do to force myself to pick this book up and continue, but because it was related to some research I was doing, I did. I think during the time I read this, I read literally fourteen other books, all books picked up in a desperate effort to read anything but this. It is PAINFUL.

A more high-falutin' type might tell you that this is a book about laboring to maintain the aquatic, agricultural lifeline of a traditional Hispanic town. And it is.

But what that also translates to is that this is a book about cleaning out a ditch: ...removing leaves from the ditch, removing fallen limbs from the ditch, evening off the ditch's sides with a workcrew, arguing with people about cleaning out the ditch, and so on and so forth.

Here, I'll open the book at random to a few spots, and see what comes up.

Page 61: "We pull and pry the branches out with the pitchfork and rake."

Page 185: "The obstacle, a massive tangle of muddy branches and twigs at the fence dividing Jose's and Rupert's fields, proves to be unyielding to my half-hearted efforts."

Page 47: "The ditch banks are high along here and in good condition; there is no need for more than a superficial cleaning."

Page 82: "The channel must be moved back into the hillside a foot or two along seven or eight feet of the bank or whatever will give us enough dirt to fill up the hole and move the channel into firmer ground."

Page 213: "The engineer picks up a sharpened two-by-four stake and writes 'Start Here' in black marker on it, and then he and Hollander place it at the southeast corner of the future structure, next to the trunk of the beaver-felled cottonwood that straddles the ditch, and drive it into the soft sand."

I swear those are all from me just opening the book at random. The ENTIRE book is like that. The whole book is about cleaning and raking and shoveling out ditches!

The prose is dry and unexciting, the plot nonexistent, the characters too numerous and nondescript to keep track of, and to make it all even more pointless, all the names--even the name of the community it's set in--have been changed, so the book doesn't even teach you anything you can apply to a real place.

On the plus side, I did learn some acequia terminology that has come in handy to me here in small town New Mexico--"tareas" and "parciantes" and all that--and it did make me want to volunteer on a ditch cleaning myself just to see what it's really like. And it is one of the only books on its topic.

But overall, it's not worth it. Unless you are the type who just loves really quiet foreign films in which people do nothing but talk, this is not the book for you. There are better books about New Mexico, better books about nature, better books about Hispanic culture, and even better writings by this same author. (I recommend his article on San Antonio, New Mexico. Now THERE's a town with an interesting acequia, complete with armed standoffs between locals and developers.)

Maybe I just have the attention span of a kid raised on MTV, and the (lack of ) sensitivity of a guy who laughs at Quentin Tarantino films, but I still don't think it would have been asking too much of this book to please just not be so incredibly dull, bland, and eventless.

Read this only at your own risk, or to help with your insomnia.