Acequias, GMOs and bioregional autonomy | Report on the condition of agriculture in Costilla County, Colorado

With special reference to center of
origin land race cultivars and GMO crops

PART 1 |
ECOLOGICAL, CULTURAL & HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

Devon G.
Peña | Viejo San Acacio, CO | November 15, 2015

Moderator’s Note: This is the first in a three part series plus a source bibliography. The
author is Co-Founder and President of The Acequia Institute and prepared this report
during August-September 2015. The report is intended as a contribution to local
agricultural, scientific, and environmental education for Costilla County
residents, farmers, and public officials. The information or views presented in
this report do not reflect the official views or policies of The Acequia
Institute or its Board of Directors and Officers or the University of
Washington.

Geographical, Ecological, and
Historical Context

Costilla County is in south
central Colorado in an alpine desert steppe region known as the San Luis Valley
(SLV); Figure 1 below. The county
seat of San Luis is 60 miles north of Taos, New Mexico. Average annual rainfall
is the same as California’s Death Valley (about 6 to 7 inches). The SLV steppe
is ringed by the Sangre de Cristo Mountains (east) and the San Juan Mountains (west).
The high country sustains deep snow pack used by farmers during the spring and
summer snowmelt runoff season.

Emerging abruptly from the
Valley floor, the frontal edge of the mountains presents dozens of peaks
exceeding 3962 meters (13,000 ft) and 10 exceeding 4267 meters (14,000 ft)
above sea level.  The SLV intermountain
‘park’ itself has an average elevation of 2,407 meters (7,900 ft).

Fig. 1. San Luis Valley. In this perspective, S is on top. Costilla County is along the edge of the southeastern side of the Valley between the Sangre de Cristo sub-range known as the Culebra Mountains (on the E) and the Rio Grande (on the W); upper left quadrant within SLV on this map. Source: geogdata.scsun.edu. 

The rapid elevation gain
means that nearly every major life zone in North America is represented within
an average ten-mile walk from Upper Sonoran (or cold) Desert to alpine tundra
above timberline. These environmental conditions result in an average growing
season of 100 to 120 days but the region is home to a robust agricultural
sector and also hosts a significant source of indigenous agrobiodiversity in
the form of local land race cultivars including maize, bean, and pumpkin/squash
varieties.

The SLV is within ancestral
Ute first nation territory and members of the Capote bands hunted bison, mule
deer, antelope, and elk across the high steppe well into the 1850s. Armed entry
by white settler cavalry began during the same period with the establishment of
Ft. Massachusetts (1852-58) near present day Ft. Garland and resulted in the
permanent expulsion of the Ute people from the Valley.

Today, the Southern Ute
tribal reservation is limited to 1059 square miles in an area centered around the
vicinity of Ignacio, and due southeast of Durango, Colorado.  This is about 181 miles due west from San
Luis, Costilla County across the San Juan Mountains. Some descendants of
Ute-Mexican marriages still reside in the Valley’s diverse Indo-Hispano,
Chicana/o and Mexicana/o rural villages and communities.

La merced

The Mexican government
issued the Sangre de Cristo Land Grant in 1844 as part of a decades-long,
liberal inspired process to confirm and secure Native Pueblo and community land
grant rights involving common lands and private vara strips. The Colorado section of the grant is just north of the
New Mexico border at Amalia-Costilla but strong cross-border family, social,
and cultural ties prevail. The 1 million-acre land grant includes what today
constitutes the entirety of the Culebra Mountain Range and associated
acequia-irrigated agricultural bottomlands within Costilla County; see Figure 2 below.

Fig. 2. Mexican Land Grants in Colorado and New Mexico. The Baumann map depicted here mislabels
these Mexican land grants as “Spanish”. Source:
Paul R. Baumann 2001. SUNY-Oneonta.

The land grant (merced) led to the establishment of a
diverse community of people whose ancestry can be traced to a bewildering
amalgamation comprised of a minority of Spanish (mostly Mexican- or New
Mexican-born Spaniards, or criollos)
and a majority comprised of P'urhépecha, Tlaxcalteca, and Mestiza/o (Native
Mexicans); Pueblo, Diné, and Jicarilla Apache (Native Americans); and Sephardic
and other Mediterranean peoples; all of whom moved up from Mexico and New
Mexico to permanently settle in the area comprising today’s Costilla and
Conjeos County in Colorado as part of a combined native settler and indigenous
diaspora.

These are deeply rooted
place-based communities and many acequia farm families hail from mixed
mestizo/o and genizaro (qua Christianized Indian) communities like Abiquiú
which were established as ‘frontier border’ outposts when the area was still
part of hotly contested New Mexico Territory prior to the U.S. invasion and
usurpation of 1848.  Pueblo
intermarriages also run deep across the history of these families.

The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe
Hidalgo essentially defined Mexicans that chose to remain north of the new
border as part of a pre-existing
indigenous population with distinct rights. This included rights to common and
private property in land and water, preservation of native language(s) and
dialects, and full U.S. citizenship status.

The customary laws
associated with the exercise of these rights, many of which were actually
rooted in Pueblo Indian and other indigenous cultural traditions, were
abrogated and systematically violated during one of the most scandalous
episodes in the history of colonial dispossession and enclosure of Native
Pueblo and Chicana/o land grants (Ebright 1994).  Northern New Mexicans faced the notorious
Santa Fe Ring and San Luis Valley acequieros
had the U.S. Freehold Land and Immigration Co. as principal interloping
usurper.

This was all part of a
violent process of illegal expropriation and appropriation of Mexican land
grants, in violation of Treaty rights, and reshaped the political geography of
land tenure in what are now the U.S. Southwestern states of Colorado, New
Mexico, and Arizona in addition to parts of the adjacent states of California,
Texas, and Utah.

Despite cycles of enclosure
and dispossession, the mostly mestiza/o and indigenous Culebra acequia villages
established the first community irrigation ditch systems — or acequias — in the
what is now the State of Colorado and did so well before the establishment of
Colorado Territory (1861). The acequias are sustained to this day in part
because of the power vested in militant attachment to the first 23 adjudicated
water rights in the State, beginning with the San Luis Peoples Ditch which was
dug by hand and draught animals in 1852.

Most of the upland common
areas of the Sangre de Cristo Land Grant have been privatized. The one
exception involves 80,000 acres in northeastern Taos County that are managed by
land grant heirs as a common property in the New Mexico stretch of the merced.
These heirs established the Rio Costilla Cooperative Livestock Association
(RCCLA) and eventually purchased the acres in 1942. Livestock grazing (mostly
cattle) was the primary focus at the start of this community-based cooperative
endeavor but in the 1950’s the land began to be seen for its unique
recreational values.  In 1983, visitors
were given the opportunity to hunt, fish and camp in designated portions of the
ranch.

‘La Sierra’ portion of the
land grant comprising originally all of what is now Costilla County, Colorado is
the watershed that pertains to our struggles, and it also comprises
approximately 80,000 acres (as seen in Appendix 1). This section has been the
subject of a protracted land rights case that dates back to 1981 and is a
response to violation of due process rights provoked during the violent 1960
enclosure by a North Carolina timber man and land speculator by the name of
Jack T. Taylor.

Today, the heirs and
successors of the Culebra acequia farm villages have access to La Sierra for
the exercise of some of the original historic use rights (no subsistence
hunting or fishing are allowed). But this instance of usufruct occurs within
the enclosed boundaries of a ranch property that is still privately owned, now
by wealthy billionaire investors from Texas.

In a historic 2002 ruling
addressing the famous Lobato v. Taylor
land rights case, the Colorado Supreme Court restored historic use rights to
the heirs and successors to the 80,000-acre Colorado common lands of the Sangre
de Cristo Land Grant (i.e., La Sierra).  
The veritable common lands of this merced, perhaps the largest to be
restored in this manner anywhere in the world, are vital to the survival of the
watershed-dependent acequia farmers and to the protection of the area
residents’ strong sense of place and bioregional values. Some 500 families
comprised of heirs and successors have access to the mountain range to gather
fuel wood and construction materials and to use as pasture for livestock
grazing.

Fig. 3.  Sangre de Cristo Land Grant, La Sierra Common, and Subdivisions. La Sierra is the 80,000-acre common land or ejido. Map courtesy of High Country News at URL: https://www.hcn.org/issues/104/3250. 

Finally, absentee real
estate speculators have ruthlessly subdivided the dry land llanos (prairies) of
central and far western Costilla County and while most of these lots remain
vacant, in 2015 conflicts arose over land use regulations governing permits for
septic tanks and home construction, camping rights and other issues; see Figure 3 above. These conflicts are the
long shadow cast by the legacy of the enclosure of the common lands of the
Sangre de Cristo land grant; under local customary law these lands were never
intended or considered appropriate to permanent settlement by humans. Many of
the inhabited lots are close to industrial monocultures in center-pivot
sprinkler circles, some sown with GMO crops that present a landscape of
polka-dot uniformity (Peña 2005).

Acequia Systems

The acequias are gravity
driven snowmelt dependent community irrigation ditches. They are also among the
oldest collective action institutions as constituted by the practices of  local self-governance by tribal and
non-tribal indigenous peoples in the U.S. Southwest.  This is especially evident in the Rio Arriba
or Upper Rio Grande watershed where Pueblo Indian and Chicana/o communities of
northern New Mexico and south central Colorado sustain the acequia institution
across a nine county area.

Acequia flood irrigated
technology and the civic association of farmers for self government tied to
water allocation practices both are rooted in antiquity with parallel and
interlaced origins in the kuhls of
Kangra (India), as-Saquiyas of the
Middle East (Yemen) and North Africa, acequias
of Andalusia, Spain, zanjas of Mexico
(and the Philippines), and KwVo of
Native American ancestral civilizations including nearby historic Pueblo
communities at Taos, Okay Owingeh (San Juan), and other northern Pueblos.
Research scholars have long celebrated the acequia as a sustainable, equitable,
and resilient irrigation technology and an effective institution of collective
action for farmer-directed management of local water resources.

Fig. 4. San Pedro Acequia.  The headgate of the
second 

oldest acequia in Colorado. Photo by Devon G. Peña

The acequia association is a
self-organized instance of political and legal autonomy; Rivera (1998) has
noted how in some cases the acequia is the only daily form of local government
present in more remote and isolated mountain villages of New Mexico and
Colorado. Acequias are widely celebrated as deeply rooted, time-tested “water
democracies” and are considered a significant national and world heritage
resource (Rivera 1998; Peña 1999, 2003, 2005; Hicks and Peña 2003, 2010;
Rodriguez 2007).

In Colorado context, the
customary common law of the acequia is “prior” to the dominant settler doctrine
of prior appropriation, which arrived with Anglo settlers and specifically the
hard rock miners of the ‘59er ‘Pikes Peak or Bust’ gold and silver rush.
Acequia customary law and the post-territorial settler legal regime of prior
appropriation are distinct and in many ways incompatible. For example, under
acequia law voting rights on a given community irrigation ditch are based on
the principle of “one irrigator, one vote”, which is indicative of an
indigenous preoccupation with governance through consensus and equity.

In contrast, under prior
appropriation, voting rights are allocated on the basis of proportional shares
in the ditch (company) and this means that larger landowners tend to dominate
governance and decision-making processes. Another key difference is that
acequia customary practices for water allocation respect the ancient principle
of “shared scarcity” while the prior doctrine imposes a newer inequitable
system of priority calls in which only senior water rights receive water in
times of drought.

Given this cultural,
ecological, historical, and legal context, the Costilla County Land Use Code
and the Costilla County Comprehensive Plan prioritized the adoption of rules
and regulations to protect acequia farms and associated watershed values which
are therein broadly construed as matters of legitimate state interest in order
to promote the preservation of acequias as significant state and national
cultural heritage resources; see Costilla County Land Use Code at §1.20.A.2 and
Costilla County Comprehensive Plan at Policy ENR-14 (p. 24), Policy ENR-16 and Policy
ENR-17 (p. 25).

These differences, and
especially the historical status of acequia law as older than prior
appropriation, were to some extent recognized and codified in 2009 when the
Colorado legislature approved and the governor signed HB 09-1233, the Colorado
Acequia Recognition Law. One local consequence of this new law is that the
acequias are now able to act as bona fide sub-county consulting authorities
involved in the review of county land use planning and zoning actions and
regulations, especially those that impact watershed functioning in
acequia-dependent agricultural communities like the Culebra watershed in
Costilla County.

Testimony in support of the
2009 law recognized the value of the “ecosystem services” provided by acequias
including the production of wetlands, creation of wildlife habitat and
migration corridors, regeneration of soil horizons, and preservation of native
agricultural biodiversity through the seed saving and plant breeding practices
of acequia farmers (Peña 1999, 2003, 2005:81-85, 2009; 2015; Hicks and Peña
2003; Fernald, et al 2014).

Today, there are an
estimated 200 acequias irrigating approximately 5000 farms distributed across
the four counties of southern Colorado designated as eligible for inclusion
under the 2009 law (Costilla, Conejos, Huerfano, and Las Animas). These farmers
collectively irrigate some 70,000 acres of prime farmlands with significant
additional acreage in wetlands created by the subsurface flows associated with
acequia flood irrigation methods. Costilla County, the heart of acequia farming
in Colorado, hosts 73 acequias managed by more than 350 family farmers who
sustain 23,000 acres of field and row crops and more than 10,000 acres of
sub-irrigated wetlands (Peña 2003; acreage estimates are based on official
Costilla County Clerk data).

PART 2, to be posted on Monday, introduces the scientific evidence establishing the Culebra watershed of Costilla County as a bona fide center of origin and agricultural diversity.