Mayordomo

The visual imagery of the West strikes me as the most powerful details within the novel. The landscape is described authentically and derives beauty from that aspect of itself, which draws images in my mind toward the opening scenery of the Milagro Beanfield War movie. It’s clear that the people in the story live more intimately toward the land than your average person despite providing the reader a simplistic vibe of their personalities – which implies that this connection is normal and widespread among the culture. The narrator’s connection to the people is that he is the Mayordomo, or the ditch master, and is telling the story with knowledge about the acequia and the people in it. However, he remarks himself as an outsider and this is shown by his more objective stance he has toward his job and toward the New Mexico community. However, this doesn’t stop his job as the Mayordomo from being more important than it is initially let on to be. His job relates to water control, which is necessary for not only the lives of crops in the ecosystem but also the residents consuming the crops. Thus, it can be seen that the Mayordomo is necessary for life within this culture as they require the environment to be healthy so that they, themselves, can also be heathy and alive.

This has clear connections to the Milagro Beanfield War movie as life there was upset by capitalization trying to remove their water systems for chances at profit. While the plot in Mayordomo seems simpler with respect to conflict, the overall theme is the same with regards to water. It is literally the lifeblood of the culture because it feeds the crops they’re trying to harvest as well as being a generally versatile resource. This is a stark contrast to the modern interpretation of water, which is heavily commercialized and underrated within our current culture. Biologically, we know it makes up most of our bodies and even with that knowledge we still don’t appreciate it as much as the cultures in both the movie and the book above. The tone of the water from both of them is almost spiritual as it is the saving grace of a dry landscape that is always flowing down an irrigation canal and being spread along a thin line surrounded by earth. In these communities, water is shared and naturally distributed through this river – the same river that animals and fish sometimes reside inside – while modernism has instead objectified water within a bottle meant to be purchased rather than cultivated by one’s own need for survival. The characteristic of managing one’s water supply is more genuine in both Mayordomo and Milagro Beanfield War as it comes from their tradition and is shown to be important for their innate survival when they struggle with it being threatened. This shows it’s more than just biological desire – it’s spiritual, psychological, and even communal with respect to their goals of maintaining the tradition that has kept them alive for generations.