BOOKSHELF

Mayordomo: Chronicle of an Acequia in Northern New Mexico, by Stanley Crawford. University of New Mexico Press, 1988. 229 pages. $16.95, hardcover.

For hundreds of years, inhabitants of the Southwest have farmed the arid desert. They do so by capturing scarce water or by building canals to irrigate their fields. Irrigation is still a critical element for modern agriculture throughout America's desert regions.

In New Mexico, small organized groups of water users have existed for 300 years. These intimate associations are called acequias, a term that also refers to irrigation canals themselves.

In its broader sense, the acequia is a political, social, and cultural entity comprising members whose shares of water rights are based on the size of their plots of land. The members elect their own governing boards, pay dues, and maintain their own ditches. Each year, on a date designated by state law, the acequia meets and elects its officers. The mayordomo, or chief officer, manages the business of the unit. He frequently inspects the acequia madre ("mother ditch") to assure that water flows to the group's headgate. Although he receives a salary only during irrigation season, he oversees this ancient artery even when the fields it serves are frozen and bare. New Mexico has about a thousand acequias, ranging in size from a few parciantes, or members, to more than a hundred. The author tells the story of his term as mayordomo Travels in Mexico and California, by A. B. Clarke. Edited by Anne M. Perry. Texas A & M University Press, 1988. 143 pages. $17.50, hardcover.

Today you can board a transcontinental jet airplane in New York and a few hours later, after a cocktail and a light lunch, arrive in San Francisco relatively fresh. One hundred forty years ago, it took the "forty-niner Argonaut" Asa B. Clarke six months to travel from the East Coast to the Golden Gate. This is his vivid and detailed journal of that 1849 trip to the California goldfields by way of the southern route through Mexico. Clarke, a relatively well-educated farmer and teacher and an of the Acequia de la Jara from March, 1985, to March, 1986. His account of a ditch and the people who depend on it is so insightful and so beautifully written that it won the 1988 Western States Book Award.

Crawford, who was educated at the University of Chicago, the Sorbonne, and the University of California at Berkeley, has lived in northern New Mexico for nearly 20 years. He has written four novels, but Mayordomo is his first venture into nonfiction.

The author supervised a water channel three miles long and narrow enough to jump over. From this intermittent stream, 21 parciantes draw their quota of water to nourish the cornfields that furnish each family's food. Obviously the member at the end of the ditch is at the mercy of the neighbors upstream. Over the years, many at the end of the canal have sued or threatened to sue, convinced they have been cheated out of their fair share. Today, as in frontier times, guns are much in evidence when old friends clash.

When Crawford came to this centuries-old Hispanic community, he had no local roots. He was a well-educated, well-traveled Anglo with only marginal skills in Spanish. The fact that he gained the trust of his neighbors in less than 20 years speaks well of him indeed.

An enchanting record of four seasons devoted to a basic element of subsistence agriculture-an irrigation ditchMayordomo is certain to become a treasure of Southwestern literature.

adventurous soul, was 32 years old when he began his journey. He and his companions sailed from New York and landed near Brownsville, Texas, where a cholera epidemic was raging. From there, on foot and by mule, he labored across northern Mexico. Despite illness, Indian attacks, hunger, and thirst, Clarke wrote daily journal entries graphically describing impoverished Mexican towns and dangerous countryside.

Entering what is now Arizona south of the "Presidio of Teuson," he endured continuing adversity as he crossed the desert to the Gila River and then traversed a hundred miles of sand west of Yuma.

In the goldfields northeast of San In Francisco, he established a store at Marysville. But within two years he returned to the East Coast, and he never went west again.

Clarke's memorable description of the journey makes for exciting reading and reminds today's crosscountry traveler, who is prone to complain about brief airport delays, of times when travel was difficult.

(BACK COVER) Saguaros on the slopes of the Santa Catalina Mountains form a dramatic backdrop for the third bole of the Ventana Canyon mountain golf course near Tucson. A report on contemporary desert landscaping techniques begins on page 10. CHRISTINE KEITH