"Fluid Geographies tells the origin story of New Mexico’s modernist water-management policy, which today dictates how every state resident accesses water. Underlying this seemingly neutral policy based on expertise is a deep history rooted in Progressive, but racist, ideas about expertise. The arrival of American politicians and engineers in the nineteenth century replaced indigenous and community-based knowledge about how to manage water in a high desert environment, with their scientifically based knowledge. This transition was essential to the successful completion of the settler colonial’s project of controlling the state’s most precious resource: water. Anyone in the American Southwest and West who turns on their tap to get a glass of water or to nourish their garden must read this book. Only then can we understand the complex and tortured route of how water makes it from high up in the mountains and into our homes."

María E. Montoya, author of 'Translating Property: The Maxwell Land Grant and Problem of Land in the American West'

"Much of the commentary on rivers in the west speak to a future crisis as cities continue to expand and water sources become more and more scarce. In Fluid Geographies, Lane shows us how science made the Rio Grande into an object of colonial control. Using historical and legal analysis, Lane accounts for the logic of domination that settlers brought into New Mexico and how their myopic assumptions laid the foundations for water conflict and crisis today."

Andrew Curley, University of Arizona

"This beautifully written book shows us that municipal and agricultural water supplies are never only about water, but also about contested histories and structural inequality. Lane’s careful analysis of settler science, policy, and law reveals engineering infrastructure as a racialized legacy of colonialism: making, and remaking the hydroscape of the U.S. West via dispossession and ecological violence."

Rebecca Lave, Indiana University