Mayordomo

Chronicle of an Acequia in Northern New Mexico

Stanley Crawford

• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Year: 1988
• ISBN:
  9780826325914
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Irrigation ditches are the lifelines of agriculture and daily life in rural New Mexico. This award-winning account of the author's experience as a mayordomo, or ditch boss, is the first record of the life of an acequia by a community participant.

One

We have been at work nearly an hour this windless spring morning, an aura of haze at the horizons promising no more than brief gusts later in the day, in the afternoon, when it will be hot. I am standing on a bank overseeing a row of men bent double as they dig. Mutterings and grunts pass up and down the line, the clang of shovel blades, the clack of handles, the hiss of dry brush being pushed or kicked away. I lean on a six-foot length of a slightly curved cottonwood branch that tapers from two inches in diameter where I hold it between my hands to less than an inch thick at the lower end with which I scratch a series of lines across the irrigation ditch every fifteen minutes or so to mark the divisions between tareas. Long, deep cracks run the length of the weathered staff, yet it is strong, having already served the year before for this same purpose. I note that the older men below me, and the oldest would be over seventy, know how to keep their shirts tucked in while the youngest, the fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds in outgrown clothes, expose strips of backside in varying shades of whiteness and brownness, smoothness, hairiness. I will know that they are all finished with their sections, their tareas, even the men beyond the bend and hidden by the willows, when I hear the clamor ceasing of shovels splashing into gravel. There will be silence, a few laughs, and then I will hear putty knives scraping mud from the blades, and the sound of files singing against metal.

Fewer workers have shown up than I expected this Saturday morning, only seventeen. We had thirty yesterday. We still have the most difficult part of the ditch to dig, a half-mile from here to the lower desagüe. The seventeen-year-olds flash their mirrored sunglasses at me, wondering if I will be hard on them and make them dig una pal’ abajo deep like the woman mayordoma Juliana Espinosa does on the other side of the river, or whether I will be satisfied with a cursory scraping of dry grass off the lower edges of the banks. Her son, a blustery insecure kid of sixteen or so, is back working again today despite some words between us yesterday. I hear someone say: “They all went out and got drunk.” “Who?” I call down from the bank. “The ones who got paid yesterday?” “Yeah,” someone else calls out. Laughter. The pay is low, $2.50 an hour, a dollar below the minimum wage, $20.00 a day, but enough to buy some gas for the car and an evening of beer drinking. Last night was a fullmoon Friday. Our missing thirteen piones are sleeping it off. Fewer piones means more hours of work but also harder digging for everyone. When your crew is over thirty in number, then you seem to spend more time walking and taking breaks than shoveling. But I am not one of those who will work our small crew half to death to prove something—that we are men or that this is work or that I am in charge. The ditch itself will pace our labors. As it winds its way, the Acequia de la Jara, through thickets of willow and plum along this stretch of particularly luxuriant growth above Gregory Serna’s overgrown apple orchard, I know where most of the weak spots are in the bank and where they will have to be built up and where the grass has grown constrictingly thick and where the channel must be widened a little, and there will be enough sandbars to shovel out on the inside of bends along the serpentine course: this will be the work that proves enough to tire my workers by the end of the day. And almost anything we do will serve to keep the ditch wide and deep enough to accept the rolling tongue of water, clogged with leaves and twigs, muddy and white foamed, that will race down the three-foot-wide channel two days from now, Monday, the twenty-fifth of March, 1985, from one end to the other of the twisting watercourse, through a culvert under a highway, down through a siphon under an arroyo, along the backyards of some twenty houses and across the high ground back of empty fields and neglected orchards, until the water finally fans out over a pasture and spreads out through a grove of cottonwoods and willows to trickle back into the Rio de la Junta, rejoining the waters it was separated from by a small diversion dam two miles upstream.

I move on down the line. The bank stands a good three feet above the ditch channel along here before dropping off precipitously into Gregory’s orchard ten feet or so below, and is overgrown with willows and wild rose canes. As I make my way along the crown of the bank inspecting my workers’ tareas I must watch my footing. It will not do to slip off and disappear down into the brush below. Lose footing and lose face. I pause above Juliana’s son, Frankie, whom I regard with suspicion—he keeps his eyes on me too insistently—and reach down and draw a line with my staff along a ridge of grass-sprinkled silt he well knows he should have dug out. “Square it up along there.” His neighbors to either side look down at their own tareas and poke at clumps of mud with the tips of their shovels. I move on down the line. The bank lowers and becomes less treacherous. This is the most difficult section of the irrigation ditch. Along here it runs ten to twelve feet above three little-used bottomland fields, hugging a south-facing hillside which is the source of a fertile clay soil that supports an abundant growth of willow, wild rose, New Mexico olive, squawberry bush, native plum, hemlock, oshá, clovers and alfalfa, and innumerable types of grass. The day before yesterday, Thursday, ten of us with long-handled pruning shears took two passes through here at cutting back last season’s growth in order to clear standing room for us to dig today. The clay soil is also the favored habitat of burrowing creatures, both muskrats and crayfish, which excavate systems of tunnels underneath the channel and carve small drains here and there in the south bank. What starts out as a trickling leak in the side of the ditch can end up in a major collapse in which ten to twenty feet of bank slides away into the orchard below. This has happened once or twice a year now for the past five years. Each time the mayordomo must summon a crew of ten men or so to dig out a new channel further back into the hillside. We repaired one such collapse yesterday at the end of the day, a gaping cave-in that had stood there all winter since last October. Two feet down in the red clay of the new channel we had sliced into the hillside were the thin strata of carbon perhaps from some ancient brush fire. Perhaps this stretch of the acequia has always been difficult: perhaps a hundred years ago they cleared the brush away with fire, as we did the year before last. Or two hundred years ago. Nobody knows how old the Acequia de la Jara is. Reynaldo Vasques, a former mayordomo now in his sixties, says it was here in the time of his grandfathers. Now and then it seems strange to me that such things—community irrigation ditches, acequias—survive these days, despite what I sense as a decline in the subsistence agriculture that first brought them into existence. I cannot imagine, knowing what I now know, the immense labor that would have brought even this one into existence, small as it is, a channel that varies from four feet to a foot and a half in width in its two miles of wanderings through the back yards along the side of the hills. The first Spanish settlers could have dug the Acequia de la Jara as early as 1750, perhaps using forced labor from a nearby Indian pueblo. By comparison this present time must be a pleasant, comfortable dream. With one or two exceptions, the men and boys are working today for a little extra money, not out of necessity.

They stand below me now pausing for breath, glancing up at me for some signal. They begin to turn, shuffle along the channel, kick at the fine sand.

“¡Vuelta!” I call out. “Vamos.”

They file past me, sound of shovel blades dinging as the metal brushes against twigs. A canopy of dry brown willow branches, old growth standing dead in place, arches over the ditch. This first day of spring sees nothing in green beyond the occasional trefoil leaf of clover or alfalfa peeping out from beneath dry leaves. At the edges of fields and along fencelines the new-growth willow twigs have deepened in orange, and on cottonwood and native plum, buds are beginning to swell. The landscape ripens, glowing, toward spring; following the next storm, whose currents will assist the vultures on the last leg of their soarings up from Mexico where they winter, the wind, that great seed-dispersing machine, will blow for days on end from midmorning until dusk. The winds have been so far subdued this year. We have often had to dig out the ditch in gale winds, through brush and trees alive with creaking movement. The sand and silt blows into your eyes and ears and mouth, lodges in your hair, under your collar. But today the light of the morning remains soft and mellow, and I think the day will remain mercifully calm. Two of the older men, the cousins Orlando and Ewaldo Serrano, have rolled cigarettes. The scent of tobacco hovers over the line as it moves, shuffling, toward the next section, bent backs to me as I fall in behind them, with their old denim jackets, faded flannel shirts, white T-shirts on the kids used to the cold from waiting for the morning school bus, and then they pause to turn their faces back toward where I stand, the heavy-lidded and broad faces of the older Serrano men, Indianlike with their high cheekbones and full lips, the grey eyes of Reynaldo Vasques always ready to smile or show irritation or anger, a small-boned man with finely cut features and who seems to have scarcely aged in the nearly fifteen years I have known him.

The tareas I normally measure out are perhaps two paces long, five or six feet, making a section, a vuelta, between eighty and a hundred feet long with a crew this size. This is only my second season as mayordomo, but I have walked the ditch as a parciante and as a member of the comisión for fifteen years, enough times that the annual cleaning, la limpia or la saca, has come to mark the line between winter and spring perhaps as surely to me as those who have grown up with the custom. I was thirty-two when I moved here. My first year as a parciante, owner of an empty field of willow-covered bottomland my wife and I had bought the previous autumn, I stumbled out of bed like a nervous teenager the morning of my first ditch cleaning and wondered where I had left the shovel and whether I should file it sharp, worried over what clothes to wear, wondered if the weather was going to be warm or cold that day, whether the wind would come up and spoil the slowly accumulating heat of the first days of spring—and feared that I would be unable to keep up with the others in my digging or that I would be confused by the counting in Spanish. That first year in the early 1970s I worked under the stern eye of Reynaldo Vasques, then mayordomo, my number catorce today, who would often jump down from the bank and grab my shovel and hack into the side of the ditch with it to show where he wanted the channel más ancho, wider, wider. . . . That was the only year I worked as a parciante, digging awkwardly, spasmodically, wearing myself out by digging too deeply alongside those who had done such work every spring since they were fourteen or fifteen or were tall and strong enough to handle a shovel and had early mastered the art of digging out just enough, not a shovelful more, to convince the inspecting eye of the mayordomo that they have done the necessary work—the mayordomo being more likely to pass a tarea that looks clean and is neatly scraped of dead leaves and dry grass and rocks than one that has been actually dug out but remains messy-looking. The following year I was elected to the comisión of three at the annual meeting in the dusty village schoolyard where those of us who became the comisión nearly outnumbered the voting parciantes present. Commissioner, comisionado, is an imposing title bestowing only the privilege of exemption from the physical labor of digging out the ditch during the March cleaning. I was elected, if that is the word, to become a petty bureaucrat who would drive around collecting money from some twenty-some suspicious neighbors. “You should make those people pay, the delincuentes,” I was told again and again.

And there were other reasons. I soon discovered that the parciantes of the Acequia de la Jara had managed to divide themselves into two feuding factions, the two Vasques families who lived at the bottom end of the ditch, and everybody else. Jerry Munster, another newcomer gringo elected to the comisión that year, was at first as flattered as I was at the honor bestowed on us by the Serranos, who outnumbered the Vasqueses at the meeting. Reynaldo, however, remained as mayordomo and persisted through that year in sending his second youngest son, Randy, around to collect money—the joke circulating at the time held that whenever Randy needed to work on his Chevy he would make the rounds shaking down parciantes. Such practices had perhaps earned the family the ill will of their neighbors, who responded by letting as little water as possible pass down to the end of the ditch. Reynaldo and his wife Teresa were very secretive with the ditch books; whenever you went to their place to find out how much you owed in delincuencias or mayordomia, they disappeared into a back room. Fifteen minutes later they would emerge with a scrap of torn-out notebook paper with a figure scrawled on it. The new commission never obtained the ditch books but within a year or so, after consulting with officials of other ditches, we awoke to the obvious impropriety of a mayordomo collecting money to pay his own salary. We set up a new bookkeeping system, began collecting the money ourselves and paying the mayordomo a monthly salary for the six-month season, an arrangement Reynaldo accepted after an initial period of distrust and as soon as he realized that it was easier to come to the treasurer for a monthly check than drive around to argue with his neighbors. He was a good mayordomo for spring cleanings, though during the irrigation season he tended to neglect the ditch unless he actually needed water down at his place; much of the time the ditch ran lower than it might have.

I shuffle along behind the crew and note a stretch of bank that has barely been scraped of weeds and not dug at all, a roll of silt and mud that should have been dug out. I will have to inspect the next section more thoroughly. They grumble if you work them too hard. But they’ll grumble if you don’t work them hard enough, don’t do a good job: they grumble for the ditch. You have to show them that you can be forceful when it is necessary for the ditch to be so. I reach the end of the dug-out section. Ahead lies a sandy white stretch of meandering ditch littered with leafless orange willow clippings and straw-colored stalks of dry clover. As I place my right foot on the border that marks the dug from the undug, the crew stops and turns to watch me pace out their tareas, wondering whether their numbers will fall where they are now standing. I place the tip of my staff in the sand about two paces ahead of my right foot and draw it across the width of the channel and call out: “¡Uno!” The pión, who has slipped in behind me, moves into my place as I step forward and immediately begins hacking at the growth of grass and clover along the sides of the channel. “¡ Dos!” If I have marked well, my right foot comes down on the line. Two paces. A tarea, a job or chore, long enough to work well without banging elbows with your neighbors. “¡ Tres!” And the same length, if possible, as the ones next to it on either side, longer or shorter exceptions to be made at fencelines, culverts, or other irregularities.

As a commissioner I used to arrive the morning of cleanings to help the mayordomo check in the parciantes or piones working for them, a complex task when thirty people show up to work for themselves or for a neighbor, plus another ten or fifteen men from the village who have come looking for work, plus a carload who have driven down from the nearest mountain village, some of whom can be assigned to a parciante who has neither shown up nor sent a pión—plus the usual latecomers, parciantes or piones, who had heard that the digging was going to start at the bottom of the ditch, not at the top, or at the top end, not at the bottom, or who arrive with pruning shears when they should be bringing shovels or shovels when they should have brought pruning shears. Men must be reassigned or sent away for the proper tools or sent away without work or to find a parciante who will pay them to work for him at the end of the day. In the old days, if there were old days, the parciante himself showed up, or a son or cousin, everyone knew who was working for whom, and the record keeping would have been no more complex than determining who among invited guests had or had not arrived for a party. The absentees, the delincuentes, were then assessed for the time of their absence at an hourly rate determined by the commission at the annual meeting, then as today. These sums, plus the monthly mayordomia collected to pay the mayordomo’s salary for the irrigation season, constituted the acequia’s modest treasury.

For ten years as a commissioner I helped the three preceding mayordomos check in crews each morning during the spring cleaning which could last from two to four days. But I brought along a shovel, too, and afterward tagged along to clean up sections of the ditch which in my estimation had not been well enough dug out. What, they may have wondered, is this innovation? A comisionado who digs, who comes along behind us and tells us with this digging that we do not know how to do our job? And worse, a gabacho. . . . (This bewildering epithet was once applied to French refugees in seventeenth-century Spain and is thus historically appropriate to the Anglos who sought refuge in the Hispanic villages of northern New Mexico from the turbulence of urban America in the late 1960s and early 1970s.) The first year of my tagging along, the last day of the cleaning, a cold and windy afternoon in March, the then mayordomo Reynaldo Vasques, pión number fourteen today, looked at his watch and handed me the willow pole of his office, la vara, said, “I have to take my wife to the doctor,” and left me in charge of a crew of twenty old men and boys and fellows in their late twenties whom I regarded as hoodlums and near criminals. Some of them had been drinking. Sand blew into the air every time someone lifted a shovel. For all I kn...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface: Words and Names
• Chapter One
• Chapter Two
• Chapter Three
• Chapter Four
• Chapter Five
• Chapter Six
• Chapter Seven
• Chapter Eight
• Chapter Nine
• Chapter Ten
• Chapter Eleven
• For Further Reading