Early the morning of March 21, a line of 34 parciantes of the Acequia de la Cañada Ancha made their way down a path, shovels in hand, snaking along a steep scarp to one of New Mexico’s oldest surviving irrigation ditches.
Many of their grandfathers, and grandfathers’ grandfathers, had followed the same path.
“Our priority is 1690,” mayordomo Carlos Vigil said, smiling slightly. “My ancestors came here in the early 1600s. When they first dug it, they used plows and then horse-drawn escrapes.”
As Vigil handed out team assignments to the gathered men and boys and noted what families were represented, he had two seemingly paradoxical concerns: too little water in the ditch and too few people using it.
An early warm spell this winter melted much of the snow in the mountains near Truchas, Vigil said. The ditch is filled by the snow melt that flows from the Sangre de Cristo Mountains to the Rio Chiquito. The ditch then carries that water to parciantes in Rio Chiquito to Chimayó.
Without a strong snowmelt, less water will be available to plant crops.
“It got warm for a while and melted the snow,” Vigil said. “I read about snow pack. What snow?”
The acequia is working with the State Engineer to implement a pilot water banking program so that parciantes who don’t plan to irrigate can redistribute their water to others on the ditch while retaining their water — and the ditch’s — rights.
“I’m a little concerned about people not using their water,” Vigil added after a while. “If you don’t use your water for four years, you lose it. The ditch loses it.”
Many of the boys and young men present were filling in for grandmothers, aunts and uncles.
“It’s my second year cleaning the ditch,” Daniel Vigil, 10, said.
He and his brother Gabriel, 17, were there for their father Philly.
As they shoveled cobbles and sand from the ditch, the boys talked of tradition.
“This benefits our communities and our families,” Gabriel Vigil said.
But others readily confessed another motive for their labor. The going rate for freelance ditch cleaning is $40 a section — about five feet, or a shovel length.
“In the 1970s, when we were kids, you got $12 a section,” Pete Vigil, Carlos’s son, said. “Now if you don’t pay $40 or $50, nobody wants to come.”