Thicker than water

SAN LUIS - A junkyard at dawn may not be the most likely place to find the oldest tradition in Colorado, but that’s where the mayordomo told everybody to meet.

It was a good midway point on San Luis’ town irrigation ditch.

As a meadowlark puffed its yellow breast and sang from the top of a burned-out school bus, and a dusty calico cat slinked from beneath a heap of ’57 Chevy skeletons to stretch in the sun, a line of cars bumped down the dirt road leading into the dump.

Men got out of the cars holding shovels. They thrust their fists into pockets against the cold spring air and waited for orders from the mayordomo, just as their fathers had. And their fathers’ fathers, and their fathers, too.

It was time to clean the San Luis People’s Ditch, a simple spring ritual that has been going on in a corner of the San Luis Valley for 155 years — longer than any other event in Colorado.

And it runs deeper than the ditch. Without this communal work day, many say, the town as it is would cease to exist.

“Who’s here for Trujillo?” the mayordomo, or ditch boss, said. He was a sturdy, stern-looking man with a mustache, worn jeans, and a list in his hand.

A young man with a baseball cap pulled over his eyes stepped forward and the mayordomo put a check by his name. “Who is here for Romero? Who is here for Montoya? Who is here for Molindo? Who is here for Gallegos?”

Many of the old Spanish names on the list are the same family names of the farmers who came here from Taos in 1849. They were chased out by Utes and came back again in 1851 to start the first town in Colorado.

The next spring, six years before Denver was founded, when Colorado Springs was just a Ute campground, they dug a traditional Spanish irrigation ditch, called an acequia. Ever since, each farmer along the acequia has been required to help with spring cleaning or send someone who can.

It’s a sweaty, unglamorous tradition, full of shoveling muck and chopping weeds.

“I don’t even know if I’d call it a tradition,” one of the farmers said before the work day started. “It’s more of a necessity.”

COMMUNAL LIFELINE

This day of menial labor runs through the heart of the community, just as the narrow, windy acequia runs through the heart of the town.

Without spring cleaning, the acequia would clog and burst. Without an acequia, the lush pastures would quickly cede to sagebrush.

Without the pastures, this ancestral oasis would offer current generations few reasons to stay. Family bonds would wither like squash blossoms in the August sun. The community, with its seven generations of folk traditions and close blood ties, would scatter like dust.

“This ditch is their life blood. It defines them,” said Colorado College anthropologist Mario Montaño, who specializes in traditional cultures of the Rio Grande. “To let anything happen to it would almost be a sin to them.”

In the junkyard, the mayordomo checked off names one by one. Eleven here. Four absent.

The mayordomo is the man elected by the farmers to referee the ditch. When irrigating starts, he makes sure everyone’s fields get enough water and no one’s gets too much. If a farmer sneaks out to illegally let water into his garden by moonlight, it’s the mayordomo who knocks at his door. If a farmer doesn’t show up or send a proxy to the spring cleaning, it’s the mayordomo who levels a $100 fine. For this duty, he is paid $2,200 a year.

The job is ancient — created by the Moors, who passed it to the Spanish, who brought it to the New World, where it has stayed almost unchanged for centuries.

“Basically I make a bunch of grown men play fair,” the current mayordomo, Tom Garcia, said. “And by the end of the season, everybody is mad at me.”

He looked at the dozen workers gathered by the heaps of dead cars beside the acequia. It was a ragtag crew — men a little too old or a little too young for ditch work, a woman who works at a computer and has the smooth hands to prove it.

“What happened to all the young guys?” a middle-aged farmer with a potbelly hidden under a baggy Broncos sweat shirt said, half-joking.

“They all grew up and moved away,” another said.

DWINDLING RESERVES

San Luis is a small town getting smaller. Like many rural places, it has few jobs to keep 20-somethings from leaving for the city. About 50 people have gone since 2000. The population is now 697.

Maybe eventually, the mayordomo said, San Luis will be overrun by the yuppies like Taos. It already has a new espresso bar. Or maybe it will fade from existence.

Considering the future isn’t as important as cleaning the acequia. At the top of the fivemile ditch, the roiling Rio Culebra had pushed a thick layer of silt into the canal. At the bot- tom, a forest of chamiso bushes was threatening to swallow the ditch.

“We’ll start at the top,” the mayordomo said to his predecessor, Joe Gallegos, who was mayordomo for 13 years. “You get after that chamiso, and we’ll work down to you.”

The group split up and worked all morning in lines like chain gangs, shoveling muck onto the bank, whacking back wild roses and torching dry chamiso brush.

There were a few years in the 1990s when the farmers stopped cleaning the ditch themselves and paid a crew to do it. Then, to save money, they went back to the old way.

“I enjoy doing it the old way. It brings the community together,” said Charlie Chavez as he dug. He has come to the spring cleaning since he was a kid and his father grew cauliflower and sweet peas. This year, his teenage son came out to shovel along with the neighbors.

“You get the kids involved and hopefully they stick with it and it becomes a tradition,” Chavez said.

Just down the ditch, Dolly Costillo, the lone female worker, said the annual workday is a social glue for San Luis. “It’s a small town, we all know everybody, but we don’t hardly see each other. This is a way to reconnect.”

Aric Egaña, 20, was less romantic. He’s shown up every year since he was 14. “It’s not that I want to do it, it’s that I have to do it for my family,” he said.

That’s how it’s always been with the ditch — not a want but a need.

LIVING OFF THE LAND

“We were founded on water. It is everything,” said Joe Gallegos, who still grows corn and hay on the land his great-greatgrandfather Dario Gallegos settled.

He was chopping chamiso just down from an old orchard on his family land.

“This community doesn’t have a lot of money. These farms are hard to make a living off. Everyone has to have another job. But look what else it gives us,” he said.

He stopped chopping and gazed out at the green pastures where horses grazed under willows bright with new leaves.

“We have trees,” he said. “We have wildlife, deer, coyotes. We have this view. The cattle, the horses. We are close to our neighbors. We know them. We help them. It’s natural assets man, not money. How do you put a value on that?”

At noon, the crew gathered in one of the farmer’s barns, where a few of their wives had laid out a spread of red chili, enchiladas and hamburgers. The crowd sat on benches and old pieces of machinery, chewing and chatting in a mix of English and Spanish garnished with laughter.

Too soon after lunch, it was back to the acequia — scrape with the shovel, chop with the axe. It is tedious work but leaves ample time to mull over the pressing and not-so-pressing issues of the community:

Who would be a good water lawyer to represent the ditch against a gold mine upstream that threatens to pollute the acequia?

Is Pabst really a good-forcheap beer?

When would snow on nearby Culebra Peak melt enough for an eagle-shaped snowfield, known as La Agila, to appear? The timing would tell the farmers a great deal about the irrigating season ahead.

How was one of the ditch diggers, 17-year-old Antonio Ozuna, going to handle the fact that his date to the senior prom that night was the principal’s little sister?

“You better be good, man, or you’re in trouble,” one of the diggers said, and they all laughed.

Then they spotted the mayordomo’s pickup going by on the road.

“Uh-oh,” Gallegos said. “Everybody look busy.”

No one mentioned the acequia’s future.

Can a 155-year-old ditch survive much longer with cities tempting water rights and young people away with the promise of money no one in the valley can match? Will the young men of this spring still be cleaning their acequia when they are old?

“Of course they will,” said Praxedes Ortega, who inherited his farm from his father, who inherited it from his father.

“Without the water, there is nothing.”

There has always been something trying to destroy the acequia. Speculators have been trying to take the land and water from these humble, Hispanic families for more than 100 years. Droughts took away the rain. Wars took the young men. Before all that it was the Utes.

“But look, 150 years later, we’re still here,” Ortega said.

“Every one of us, our dads passed on the land, and we’ll pass it on. That’s how it is. We have had lucrative offers, but we don’t want to sell.”

IRRIGATION TERMS

Acequia: A small, community-run irrigation ditch, usually dug by Hispanic farmers along the Rio Grande in New Mexico and the San Luis Valley in Colorado. The word acequia comes from the Arabic al saqiya, which means “water conduit.” Arabs introduced the ditches to Spain in the eighth century, and the Spanish introduced them to the New World, where hundreds of acequias are still in use. Colorado has 69 active acequias. Mayordomo: Also called “the ditch rider”; an irrigator on the acequia elected and paid to oversee the irrigation ditch. The mayordomo sets watering schedules, maintains the ditch, and makes sure users don’t take more than their share of water.

The No. 1 Water Right: Under the Colorado water law of prior appropriation, people who first put water to a beneficial use, such as irrigating, have the right to keep using the water when others start taking water from a stream. The water right for the San Luis People’s Ditch dates back to 1852, making it the oldest right in the state.