ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the history of the problematic relationship between state-centred governance of water in Colorado and New Mexico, US, and the historic Hispano irrigation institutions that have operated there since before the area became part of the US. This history has much to say about the complex relationship between local cultures of water and the imperatives of state-centred agendas for the use and allocation of water. It is a history that speaks to the challenges of achieving pluralism in water institutions, particularly to the challenge of carrying forward a collective community-based understanding of water when the prevailing legal and administrative order prioritizes water's commodity value. This narrative is presented in the hopes that it may be useful to the current struggles for collective water control in the Andean region, offering additional comparative evidence that water policy-makers ought not to be indifferent to the fate of well-adapted water institutions grounded in communities of use.
