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Andrew Needham, The Water Knife, The American Historical Review, Volume 129, Issue 3, September 2024, Pages 979–981, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae308
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Paulo Bacigalupe. The Water Knife. New York: Albert A. Knopf, 2015.
In the opening scene of Paulo Bacigalupe’s The Water Knife, a phalanx of Apache helicopters flown by the so-called Camel Corps—the paramilitary arm of the Southern Nevada Water Authority—swoops down on an Arizona city of one hundred thousand people. Angel Velazquez, the titular “water knife” (a commando who attacks city water facilities), directs the attack. Troops zip-tie the city’s water manager, who objects that the “ruling is a farce.” “Law of the River says senior rights gets it all,” the water knife responds, telling the manager that “you’re pumping some crappy junior water rights that you bought secondhand off a farmer in western Colorado.” The helicopters take off, destroy the city’s water infrastructure with Hellfire and Hades missiles, and beat their way back to Las Vegas.
I’ve now read Bacigalupe’s novel three times. Each time, I’ve been unable to put it down. Half action-movie, half neo-noir, it builds a world of dystopian plausibility, a world different from our own but deeply informed by the recent history of the Southwest. The Water Knife’s narrative intercuts between three figures. Velazquez, the water knife, enforces the SNWA’s water rights through military and covert means as the states and cities of the Southwest go to battle over water, often literally. Lucy Monroe, a journalist blogging under the hashtag “PhoenixDowntheTubes,” reports on suburban collapse, on people trying to survive within “square mile after square mile of buildings that weren’t good for anything except firewood and copper wiring” after their water rights were terminated (10). And Maria Villarosa, a Texas refugee trapped in Arizona after the borders with California and Nevada were sealed, survives by selling water outside a Chinese-owned development that combines water-recycling and luxury housing. Their stories intersect as they search for an archival document—evidence of water rights “senior to God”—with the potential to forestall Phoenix’s demise.
