Fluid Geographies - by K Maria D Lane (Hardcover)

About the Book

"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"--

Book Synopsis

An unprecedented analysis of the origin story of New Mexico's modern water management system.

Maria Lane's Fluid Geographies traces New Mexico's transition from a community-based to an expert-led system of water management during the pre-statehood era. To understand this major shift, Lane carefully examines the primary conflict of the time, which pitted Indigenous and Nuevomexicano communities, with their long-established systems of irrigation management, against Anglo-American settlers, who benefitted from centralized bureaucratic management of water. The newcomers' system eventually became settled law, but water disputes have continued throughout the district courts of New Mexico's Rio Grande watershed ever since.

Using a fine-grained analysis of legislative texts and nearly two hundred district court cases, Lane analyzes evolving cultural patterns and attitudes toward water use and management in a pivotal time in New Mexico's history. Illuminating complex themes for a general audience, Fluid Geographies helps readers understand how settler colonialism constructed a racialized understanding of scientific expertise and legitimized the dispossession of nonwhite communities in New Mexico.

Review Quotes

"Lane's remarkable deep reading of nearly two hundred district court cases will undoubtedly be a foundational resource to generations of future researchers. The author's warning, that 'expert-led laws, agencies, and administrative procedures thus accomplished the dirty work of settler colonialism more effectively and less noticeably than violent military action, ' is a timely reminder that the violence of colonizing institutions is as real and lasting as that of their armies."-- "Places"

"Fluid Geographies tells the origin story of New Mexico's modernist water-management policy, which today dictates how every state resident accesses water. Underlying this seemingly neutral policy based on expertise is a deep history rooted in Progressive, but racist, ideas about expertise. The arrival of American politicians and engineers in the nineteenth century replaced indigenous and community-based knowledge about how to manage water in a high desert environment, with their scientifically based knowledge. This transition was essential to the successful completion of the settler colonial's project of controlling the state's most precious resource: water. Anyone in the American Southwest and West who turns on their tap to get a glass of water or to nourish their garden must read this book. Only then can we understand the complex and tortured route of how water makes it from high up in the mountains and into our homes."

--María E. Montoya, author of 'Translating Property: The Maxwell Land Grant and Problem of Land in the American West'

"This beautifully written book shows us that municipal and agricultural water supplies are never only about water, but also about contested histories and structural inequality. Lane's careful analysis of settler science, policy, and law reveals engineering infrastructure as a racialized legacy of colonialism: making, and remaking the hydroscape of the U.S. West via dispossession and ecological violence."

--Rebecca Lave, Indiana University

"Much of the commentary on rivers in the west speak to a future crisis as cities continue to expand and water sources become more and more scarce. In Fluid Geographies, Lane shows us how science made the Rio Grande into an object of colonial control. Using historical and legal analysis, Lane accounts for the logic of domination that settlers brought into New Mexico and how their myopic assumptions laid the foundations for water conflict and crisis today."--Andrew Curley, University of Arizona

About the Author

K. Maria D. Lane is professor of geography and presidential teaching fellow at the University of New Mexico, where she also serves as interim dean of graduate studies. She is the author of Geographies of Mars, also published by the University of Chicago Press.