Fluid Geographies

"Maria Lane's Fluid Geographies traces New Mexico's transition in the pre-statehood era from community-based water management to an expert-led structure controlled by engineers and bureaucrats. To understand this shift Lane carefully examines the chief conflict of the period, which pitted Indigenous and Nuevomexicano communities, with their long-established and locally organized systems of irrigation management, against Anglo-American settlers, with their Progressive-era preference for scientific expertise and centralized bureaucratic management of water. The newcomers succeeded in imposing their will, though disputes over water rights wended their way through the district courts of New Mexico's Rio Grande watershed for many years. Lane has gathered the records of more than 125 such cases, which she uses as the basis for a spatial analysis of evolving cultural patterns and attitudes toward water use and management in this time and place. Ultimately Lane shows that modernist water policy both reflected and helped construct a racialized understanding of scientific expertise, and in the process legitimized the dispossession of Indigenous and Nuevomexicano communities throughout the Rio Grande watershed"--