ABSTRACT
Since the end of the Mexican-American War and the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, the State of New Mexico has progressively shifted its approach to water, water rights and water users in this arid southwestern US state. This chapter reviews the ongoing transitions in New Mexicos water management as part of the larger geopolitical, demographic and environmental processes by which Mexican Cession lands have been remade as the American Southwest, an Anglo-settled territory. It discusses the historical process of state territorialization of water in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The concept is also vital to political geography and has a long history of use as a way to understand and explain changing notions of sovereignty and nationalism. Although both Spanish imperial law and Mexican state law had allowed for communal ownership of various natural resources, American law did not provide for joint ownership of land or water at the community level.
