Michael Meyer has given us [an] eloquent, well-researched book. Water in the Hispanic Southwest deals for the first time with the single natural resource of paramount importance in this region. The book does so based on far-ranging, extensive research into primary and secondary documents. It does so clearly and eloquently. It is mercifully brief and fundamentally important.


This down-to-earth history is marked by excellent background information, pertinent theory, and analytical skills and rests on hundreds of manuscripts from a dozen archives in Spain, Mexico, and the Southwest, with thorough use of the best literature. . . . indispensable for the study of regions where the water supply does not meet human needs.


This book should find favor not only with historians, lawyers, and hydrologists, but also with sociologists and political scientists. . . . The relevance of these Spanish and Mexican legal precedents to current water rights issues is self-evident.