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Current scholarship on poverty in the U.S. borderlands argues that limited low-income housing and unenforced land development regulations cause poor domestic water access in south Texas's predominantly Mexican-American rural and periurban low-income communities (colonias). In this article, I argue that water politics, not only poverty or failed public policy, determined the trajectory of inadequate water access. Drawing from legislative archives, legal documents, and court records, I examine two companion legal cases (Jimenez v. Hidalgo WCID 2 et al. [1971] and Fonseca v. Hidalgo WCID 2 et al. [1971]) that challenged the ability of farmer-controlled water control and improvement districts (WCIDs) to dominate regional water governance by excluding colonias from district territory. This territorial exclusion denied colonias residents the right to vote for WCID board candidates and, thus, denied residents the political standing to change the district's operation from irrigation to domestic water supply. Drawing on current scholarship in critical legal geography, the article details how emerging legal discourses rescripted narratives about colonias residents’ access to water through debates over the political territoriality of the WCIDs. Moreover, the legal process shifted the terms of debate from voting rights to historical precedent, the market, policy failure, and prospective water rights. The final legal ruling against colonias residents foreclosed any standing they had in regional water governance and shunted them into their current position of passive consumers of dysfunctional public services with limited ability to change their relationship to regional water management institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Groundwater law in the United States is ill suited to deal with the issue of groundwater marketing. As freshwater shortages become more common with increasing population and a warming climate, scholars and business people are touting water markets as the solution to conservation and distribution, as well as a source of hefty profits. T. Boone Pickens--the famous oil tycoon of Texas--has turned this concept into reality with his attempt to exploit the groundwater of the Ogallala Aquifer in the Texas Panhandle for thirsty Texas cities. Despite the looming water shortages, however, states have not adapted their laws to deal with the marketing issue. As a result, the legality of groundwater marketing like the Pickens Plan is currently decided by outdated laws that were never meant to deal with groundwater marketing. In general, groundwater marketing is only legal where the law permits off-tract use--an old distinction that bears no relationship to the policy issues that must be raised by state legislatures to seriously address upcoming severe water shortages. This Note examines the various legal doctrines in the United States governing groundwater and determines that, whether for or against water marketing, states should affirmatively address the policy issues presented by the potential of marketing by updating their laws so that they can deal with the new paradigm of high-value groundwater in a thirsty age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]