The Unseen River

The Santa Ana River is the largest river in Southern California. It traverses an area that is home to nearly 2/3rds the state population. However, for many Southern Californians, the river is surprisingly unseen and unknown. Winding its way down from Mount San Jacinto to the Pacific Coast, the river is constrained into a strait jacket made of concrete, part of flood control measures began in the late 1930s to protect property and development in Orange County.

Despite this, the Santa Ana River, and its related hydraulic systems, including the Orange County Aquifer, and the Prado-Chino Basin remain major influential forces in Southern Californian's daily lives. Many residents in the eponymous Santa Ana Canyon bike along bike trails that run the river's course. Fishing grounds near Lake Anaheim are fed by water from the river. And water for farmland and homes comes from the river and the aquifers it feeds. Politically, economically, entire government management agencies have been created with wide ranging powers to oversee and coordinate the ecological systems of the river and the interplay between the river and our urban landscape.

This balancing act now seems more crucial to understand than ever. California is a state constantly “on the edge” (Starr, 2003), precariously situated in its relation to water and in determining and provisioning water access. In Sacramento, the courts hear more than 6000 water rights cases every month. While numerous books have been written on the subject that detail and document the fraught nature of water, misuse, overexploitation, and unsustainability, (Hundley, 2001, Miller, 2001, Starr, 2005, Miller, 2010, Ingram and Roam, 2015, Miller, 2016, Arax, 2019,) the Santa Ana River, the largest watershed in Southern California still largely remains unexplored. As the river provides the drinking water for more than five million Californians, and passes through a region that is home to 15 million, it is critical to understand the river in a holistic manner. The development of infrastructure along the river historically, as part of a larger colonial project, to protecting land and capital provides insight into California's water politics and administrative regime, as well as how we as Californians think about and interact with water resources. It is this relationship between these management agencies and our use of the river that this interactive story map explores. This map shows how the Santa Ana River has been made unseen through a number of political and economic decisions that reflect our views on our relationship with our built environment and the 'natural,' and even how we imagine California's ecology. As this map will show, the lines between the natural world and the built one are blurry and are frequently more interdependent than we may we realize.

Through contextualizing the evolving contexts of the Santa Ana River and its infrastructure historically, we can study both as part of Californian culture today. Anthropologists studying infrastructure, and historians of Southern California can visualize the changing cultural and social values expressed through land and resource management, urban planning and material relationships with nature and natural environments. This story map argues the Santa Ana River is invisible because of a historic process that aimed to constrain, and even dominate the river in order to protect private land and property along the river, and to domesticate its waters for industrial and commercial use, beginning with the Spanish Empire, and continuing into the early modern era. More importantly, and more concisely, the invisibility of the river stems from the relationship between private development of land and property in California alongside the production of a historic myth that reimagined the Southern California landscape, and its ecology and hydrology. In essence, the river was made invisible because it was transformed to fit a myth that envisioned California as a place to extract and produce wealth.

This reconfiguration, as this story map argues, invariably expanded the relationship between man-made development and the river, causing the two to become inexorably intertwined. The visibility of the river and consequently its infrastructure is therefore seen primarily in the interaction between the river and these material developments. In the case of the Prado Dam, the most visible infrastructure built to control the river, this exists in the livelihoods and built environments that it has enabled, in the delicate political relationships between government agencies and bodies of experts who tend to our water resources, and often a fraught dynamic between the natural and constructed environments to preserve a predictable system necessary for capital.

In demonstrating that the relationship between material development and nature are so closely intertwined, this story map also demonstrates that as man-made-interventions can destroy ecological process, conversely, they can act to preserve natural processes. The preservation of capital, which was made possible through these interventions, like the Prado Dam, in fact has necessitated this because of the consequences of continual man-made alterations of the natural environment. This relationship between the project of making the river invisible and the effect it had on the environment has also contributed to the process of water management along the river largely invisible. This demonstrates that resistance to climate change intervention is itself part of discomfort and anxiety about human agency in reshaping the environment.

With the deepest gratitude, I thank my family: my grandmother Diane Reed, grandfather Bruce Reed, my mother and father Kim and Jeff, and my brother and sister Casey and Cody without whom this research and project would not have been possible. I thank them all for never ceasing to believe in the value of my pursuit and my love and passion for California and its history. I thank Etienne Hafner, for helping me through many sleepless nights and for his patience and time in explaining the science and processes of water treatment and purification. I thank Niera Webster for being a constant inspiration and guidance in my work, and for helping to steer me when I needed it, and for being a life-long friend. I thank Ari-Matti Prinkkilä for his constant friendship and the many calls I have shared with him while studying. I thank Thomas Løk for helping me feel safe and welcomed in some of the most difficult moments of my life and for not giving up on me, and I thank him for gifting me the physical means to publish this research, including the computer I use to type these very words. I thank the Orange County Water District of Orange County California for all the incredible work, research, and education that they contribute. Finally, I thank Professors Timothy Russell, Courtney Buchanan, Joanne Nucho, Gabriella Morales, Penny Sinanoglou, Cristina Bejarano, Omer Shah, Pey-Yi Chu, and Samuel Anderson for their wisdom, experience and utmost dedication and understanding in all the work they have done in helping to prepare me for this moment.

This story map is designed to highlight the river and illustrate land use along the river. It is divided into three components. For readers who are unfamiliar with the river, and California history, a timeline of California History pertinent to the Santa Ana is found below. To help spatially orient oneself, the story map below documents several sites along the river that each tell a story about the river and Californians. Use the navigation links above to jump between these sections. Clicking on the links in the story map will link you to several essays that are connected that tell the overarching theme of land use along the Santa Ana River.

This timeline shows the history of the Santa Ana River and its relationship with human co-habitation and human use. It details major events in California history, placing them in context but also illustrating how human relations with the river have changed over time.

How to use this map: Scroll the map by clicking with your mouse. Zoom in and out of the map by using the + and - keys in the bottom left. The button above these keys will let you track your location in relation to the map if you enable it. The button on the right will pull up a navigation legend that will bring you to points of interest along the map.

When Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, the first European to lead an expedition into Alta California passed by the mouth of the Santa Ana River, as he would have had to sailing north along the California cost during his 1542 expedition, he either did not see, or did not record it. It wasn’t until another two hundred years later when Gaspar de Portlá, the governor of Baja California, led his expedition, which founded the California Missions headed by Father Junipero Serra, was the first known recording of the river made in writing. The history of the river, however, did not begin with the Spanish. Nor does the long history of land use and land management along the river.

   Talking about the history of California means talking about the history of the intensification of water use, and water extraction. This process can be examined in the lens of incremental stages of technological reconfigurations, or it can be examined through political and cultural shifts about land use and ownership. Anthropologist Brian Larkin proposes that the defining feature of infrastructure is “when one technological system comes to dominate over others or when independent systems converge into a network,” (Larkin, 2016). The issue historically through this understanding then becomes a question of where this domination/convergence occurs.

Before Portlá and his expedition crossed the river near present-day Anaheim, California’s Native Americans had been living along and reshaping the river for over 9000 years. Along  Bolsa Chica  where the Santa Ana River exits into the Pacific, the Tongva, Acjachemen, and Chumash harvested Pickleweed (Salicornia) which was used as a food source, and a resource for making soaps and glass. Pickleweed when burned would act as an excellent source of soda ash, which could then be used in a variety of different ways, including glassblowing. In what is now present-day Riverside, members of the Tongva and Cahuilla communities practiced slash and burn agriculture along the Santa Ana to control weeds, open areas up to harvesting and to clear detritus and debris accumulated through periods of drought (Anderson, 2005). For as long as there have been human populations near the Santa Ana River, there have been different approaches to change and utilize the land around it, and to harness the river itself. To the Spanish, the Santa Ana River was anything but invisible: It was a tool in supporting their colonial ambitions.

          In order to maintain their settled lands and to legitimize the territorial claims made by the Spanish in California, Spain needed Spanish subjects living in California. California however was isolated, difficult to reach due to the unfavorable wind currents off the coast, and impassable mountain terrain overland through Mexico due to the Sierra Nevadas. Overland travel was also dangerous due to hostile relations between the Spanish and Native Americans living in the American Southwest (Miller, 2001. Hackel, 2005). All of these factors discouraged Spanish civilians from settling in what was viewed as a colonial backwater (Starr, 2005. Hackel, 2005). Because of this, California remained sparsely populated during the Spanish and later Mexican periods between the 1780s and late 1830s. Spain therefore was heavily dependent on the mission systems and their labor in order to sustain what little civilian presence did exist in California. Missions were uniquely situated in California at a period where the rest of the Spanish Empire began to pivot toward settled towns and military presidios. Governor Portlá largely selected missions as the means to settle Alta California because of the financial and political limitations preventing a larger colonial migration (Hackel, 2005).

The imperial project of the Spanish in California in the 18 ^th  century and the mission system established by the 1780s most major feature was the extent to which it restricted access to the river and to water. The Spanish missions near the Santa Ana River, including Mission San Luis Obispo and Mission San Luis Rey, depopulated Cahuilla and Tongva populations living along the Santa Ana River to supply the missions with both a work force for the growing labor demand needed to maintain the mission, and a population of neophytes to convert and “civilize” the indigenous inhabitants. The process of depopulation involved coercion, kidnappings, violent dispossession and required a network of encampments, facilities, and military posts to observe, patrol, and enforce Spanish claims and jurisdiction over areas that the Native population could escape to. (Starr, 2005. Hackel, 2005). The missions served to restrict indigenous movement and although Mission Indians were never legally considered slaves, in many cases they worked in slavery-like conditions. (Hackel, 2005. Starr, 2005.) The first infrastructure of the Santa Ana River included these settlements, all part of a larger project to claim ownership of the river and its lands.

The varieties of settlements in which the Spanish established were guided by principles established by the Spanish Laws of the Indies, a legal and textual framework that guided planning and settlement development within Spanish America. The Laws of the Indies covered everything a colonial governor would need to manage an efficient colony and considered the proximity of a settlement to native populations, distance to major sources of water and the coast, food, and even how best to layout the foundations for defense and for clear sightlines of the surrounding areas. In Los Angeles, for example, the Laws of the Indies also influenced the relationship between the missions and the military presidios of Spanish California. (Crouch and Mundigo, 1977). The missions therefore were the primary infrastructure through which Spanish colonialism was enabled and the Laws of Indies visualized their relationship to the river and to water as a strategic resource.

The majority of the land granted by Spain in California was granted to the Spanish Missions established by Portlá’s expedition and the Franciscan Missionaries. The land was not owned by the missions but instead granted in trusteeship in the name of the Spanish Crown. By the 1800s, Spain had also begun to award land locally to soldiers as compensation for their service. (Hackel, 2005). Spain was from the very beginning, acutely aware of the issue of water. Water was wealth, and water was power. Mission San Juan Capistrano and Mission San Gabriel were each given two halves of the watersheds of the Santa Ana River (Santa Ana Parks, Recreation, and Community Service Agency, retrieved 2011) to control for drinking and irrigation. When Mexico gained independence in 1821, the newly formed government took control of the missions in California and secularized their lands for state use. This process would also apportion water rights along the river. By 1833 Governor Jose Figueroa had begun to oversee the secularization of the missions altogether. Many of the missions' lands were converted into ranchos, massive ranches that encompassed upwards of tens of thousands of acres of land. One of the most significant examples of these grants was the creation of the Rancho de Santa Ana.

Like the Spanish, Mexico was concerned with legitimizing their claims over Alta California. Motivated by the continuing expansion of the United States West, and Russian trade posts expanding south to support the trade for Sea Otter pelts (Hackel, 2005. Starr, 2005.), Mexico needed to establish a continuous presence of Mexican citizens living in California. Rancho de Santa Ana was first awarded to Jose Antonio Yorba (1746-1825) in a land grand from the Spanish that included 48,000 acres centered along the Santa Ana River, encompassing the modern cities of Orange, Santa Ana, and Costa Mesa. After his death in 1825 the land was inherited by his sons, and the sons of his nephew, Juan Pablo Peralta, gradually expanding to include almost 200,000 acres (Bowers Museum, accessed 2024). Ranches like Rancho Santa Ana quickly subdivided the land into governable plots that through dispossession of California Natives, made California Mexican.

The large tracts of land between ranchos and the relative independence from both the Spanish and the Mexican government led many rancheros living in California to develop an independent identity as Californios. Californios were resistant to increased government presence and so the Mexican government largely allowed California to exist lassiez-faire (Starr, 2005). Those living in California saw themselves neither as Spanish nor Mexican. However, the vast majority of the land grants issued went to those of Spanish descent, relegating indigenous populations living in California to a caste of migrant laborers (Hackel, 2005).

Water in Spanish and Mexican California was delivered either by hand, or through the use of irrigation ditches dug in the earth called zanjas. Native American labor was used as the primary source of labor to dig zanjas and to transport water, and this was true during both the Mission period and the early ranching period, at ranches like Rancho de Santa Ana. (Hoffman and Stern, 2007.) Native American labor in the Mexican era sought to destroy indigenous relationships with the land, and to Hispanicize the native population through the creation of an increasingly dependent laborer-client relationship between indigenous laborers and Mexican land owners. However, there is a distinction between the two periods in that the creation of Zanjas was on the one hand, through a corvee labor system established by the state, and on the other, through private bidding for water rights for agricultural use. In most cases, zanjas could not be dug at will. Landowners would need to make special petitions for the right to dig water channels from a source and specify how much water they would draw and for what use to an official known as a zanjero. Zanjeros were prominent and powerful figures. In some cases, they had salaries that exceeded those of the mayor of a township, as was the case with colonial Los Angeles until the 1850s. (Hoffman and Stern, 2007). Water continued to be a symbol of wealth and prestige, but it had now become a commodity that rich elites could benefit, no longer exclusively the state.

Private water infrastructure and private water rights resulted in dispossession of indigenous ownership over land and water: only the wealthiest landowners of the largest ranches could afford to pay for the privilege of private zanjeros. But it also produced the claims of ownership which the Mexican government hoped to cultivate. It also brought about contestation and conflict in access to water, a theme that would become a common occurrence throughout not just Southern California and along the Santa Ana River, but across the entire region of California and the American Southwest as a whole. If the missions can be understood as infrastructure that rendered boundaries, and borders, then the private land grants offered by the Mexican government and the ensuing process of bidding for water rights can be understood as the legal and civic infrastructure where those borders were negotiated.

This contestation is most apparent during the arrival of Americans in the 1840s. While population booms in California initially began in the north, the result of the discovery of gold near Sutter’s Mill, American ranchers began to arrive in small numbers in Southern California around the same time. After the United States conquered California in the Mexican-American War, American ranchers came to Southern California to start ranches of their own. To acquire the land and water needed to own ranches, Americans would litigate the claims held by Spanish rancheros. Because Spanish and later Mexican land grants were frequently vague or ill defined, it became expensive, if not financially ruinous for rancheros to hire surveyors, and lawyers to defend their claims. Even if they had won their cases in court, they frequently needed to sell their land to American ranchers in order to pay their legal fees.

Litigation is to become a central tenet of the story of water in California. The scarcity of water makes litigation seem inevitable, especially in the context of an established legal doctrine and civic infrastructure that favored private development. This favoring of government disinvolvement in the developing frontier initially was the result of California’s isolated geography from Mexico. Later it was the result of the staunchly libertarian identity that developed in California’s resident population beginning with Californios. This rarified in the adoption of California’s unique doctrine of water rights, the so-called “California Doctrine” which was widely adapted in the American west. Emerging from the landmark California Supreme Court case, Lux v. Haggin (1886), the issue of water rights was rooted in the issue of accessibility and was buffeted by class dynamics that had been growing since the Spanish missions (Bremer, 1999).

Charles Lux and James Haggin, the plaintiff and defendant in the case respectively were not just arguing against conflicting water rights claims, but instead presented what they believed should be the future of California’s water policy. Lux and his business partner Henry Miller argued in favor of a riparian doctrine, which permitted equal access to water along a river’s flow. James Haggin, instead argued in favor of prior appropriation: first in line and first in right, a principle that went back to the early days of miners who struck their claims in the Gold Rush (Hundley, 2001). Haggin claimed to represent the poor and the common everyman in upholding the superiority of prior appropriation; to him and his supporters, prior appropriation offered fair and equal access to whoever had the initiative to stake a claim for themselves (Bremer, 1999). While the court found in favor of Lux and Miller, they also ultimately decided that both the doctrines of prior appropriation and riparian rights were valid and would both be respected within the state of California. The result was legal chaos in a landscape known for aridity and frequent drought.

What then, was the reason or the mechanisms by which this fundamentally libertarian water regime changed? When did water go from being a private commodity that accentuated territoriality and land ownership to a public good that the state had a vested interest in? More important, how did this understanding of private property rights influence the forms that infrastructure took along the Santa Ana River and elsewhere in California?

In the 1860s and 1870s, many new towns and settlements were founded in Southern California. With respect to water, many of these settlements were either founded with access to river water along the Santa Ana River in mind or were enabled through a combination of irrigation and drainage projects that aimed to transform the landscape. Two vignettes create a story about the kinds of people who came and what they were looking for.

  It is important to picture the motivations of the people who came to California from their own contexts. There is an adage that the people who came unwisely overexploited California’s resources. There is some truth to this, and there are examples from the Santa Ana River during this time that definitely support this. For example, the construction of Big Bear Dam by Frank Brown and its hasty construction is one such example (Williams, 2021.) However, there is also something lost in this adage, and there are also stories that reveal more complexity and nuance.

The seat of Riverside County, the city of Riverside, is a clear example. In 1870, two abolitionist Congregationalists by the name of John North and Dr. James Greves left their work in Tennessee with the Freedman’s Bureau and came to California. Disillusioned by the lack of progress in advancing African American rights and equality in the former Confederate States and maligned by reconstruction politics, they came to California to escape the horrors of the American Civil War. (Patterson, 1996.) North and Greves were looking to establish a Utopian community of like-minded individuals in what they believed was an Edenic paradise. Inspired by stories about the rich agricultural wealth and bounty of the landscape they had hoped to establish a colony of progressives far away from what they saw as America’s biggest failure.

Greves was especially nervous about the transaction. On route to Southern California, he travelled separately from the group of colonists who were his colleagues, afraid that the whole project would fall apart. His biggest fear? Water. Greves and North did not believe that the colony’s originally planned location was viable. They had previously settled on a location near what is present-day Pasadena but North had concerns that the proximity to Los Angeles would jeopardize their claims to water rights and potentially invite crime from the neighboring town. (Patterson, 1996.) Instead of this North had heard from individuals in Los Angeles that pointed to a potential location around fifty miles east near a silk colony that had been present since 1868. North and Greves determined that the location was satisfactory and that water rights could be purchased from a rancho that held the title to flow along the river. This was the Santa Ana River, and upon purchasing the land Greves and North had brought their colony to the plot that would eventually develop into downtown Riverside.

Greves and North’s story was not unique. Them and many others who had come to California came looking for a sense of peace that they could not find elsewhere. In California they believed that they had found it. The city of Anaheim is another example. Within the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area today, Anaheim is the second oldest city in the OC-LA area, second only to Los Angeles itself. Founded by George Hansen, a speculative businessman who believed that he could make money through founding a vineyard in Southern California, he purchased land from Rancho Santa Ana from the Yorba family that he used to divert water from the Santa Ana River near Santiago Creek. He diverted the water for several miles to a grape colony he had established with German immigrants who he had recruited in San Francsico. Many of these German migrants came to the United States and to California to escape the Prussian Austrian War, one of many conflicts of the wars of German unification that took place in the 1860s. These German settlers are responsible for Anaheim’s name, meaning “home on the Santa Ana River.”

Grapes and agriculture played significantly into the myth making of Southern California. The fertility of crops grown in the area and the ease with which agriculturalists were able to find in the loamy soils of the Santa Ana watershed inspired many to come westward. Grapes shown at the Philadelphian Centennial Exposition of 1876 showed the richness of California’s vineyards and were one of the most popular sites for exposition visitors. (Klein, 2018.) Other historians, such as Richard Street (1988) have urged for a greater depth of study into the effect that California’s agriculture had on contributing to imagined understandings of California’s landscape, beyond its material relationship. The point raised in these vignettes and by Street, is that many who came to California were promised safety and stability, the very landscape offering a sense of calm. The Santa Ana River continued to remain visible as a symbol of wealth, but it was rapidly becoming a symbol of paradise and fertility.

This third phase of development culminated in the California Citrus boom; within less than two decades many of the settlements and agrarian communities in Southern California had expanded to become massive citrus orchards that went on for seemingly forever. In order to support these orchards, large scale irrigation projects were built that were exponentially more complex than the small scale zanjas of the Spanish and Mexican periods. In Riverside and San Bernadino, the construction of the 11-mile-long Gage Canal, named for its builder, Canadian Mattew Gage which irrigated more than 600 acres stretched from San Bernadino down to the southern end of Riverside city. Meanwhile, in Orange County, water was readily available, even without the use of irrigation from the river. Individuals could easily draw from ground water sources, fed by the percolation of water from the river. In some places water would literally bubble up to the surface, lending the names of several cities in Southern California including Artesia, and Fountain Valley.

The boom had meant more and more people wanted to be part of the growth in Southern California, and this led to speculators like Frank Brown or the Chaffey brothers, George and William, who irrigated the northern sections of the Santa Ana Watershed to develop cities including Ontario, Rancho Cucamonga, and Upland. The action of speculators and land developers, including the Union Pacific and Santa Fe Railroads pushed water in Southern California to the limits of what it could provide, as the demand for more and more water continued to grow as more people came to Southern California in search of its promises. This demand and these irrigation projects had their consequences and the potential for disaster. Dam failures were a common occurrence and no failure in Southern California was perhaps as magnificent in scale or effect than the breech of the canal which created the Salton Sea, an environmental disaster of unparalleled nature in Southern California which continues to have significance to this day.

But the activity of speculators, transients, and the new residences building their lives also produced risk. Such is the nature of living along a river. The threat of floods was a very stark reality which many were consciously aware of. In 1861 and 1862, record floods in Northern California flooded Sacramento and San Francisco. Seasonal rains exceeded more than 50 inches of rain which turned the Sacramento Valley into a massive inland sea. “Relief boats on their errands of mercy, sailed over inundated ranches, past floating houses, and wrecks of barns, through vast flotsams… and the carcasses of horses, sheep and cattle, all drifting out to sea.” (Guinn, 1890.) The threat of flooding was enough that it resulted in public pressure on the California State government to intervene on behalf of farmers and communities in the San Juaquin Valley. Half-hearted reclamation projects in the 1860s and 70s saw a transition from private flood control to coordinated state flood control and water management agencies that devised levees and infrastructure designed to protect the property of those living in the valleys. (Hundley, 2001.) These same floods also affected Southern California in an uninterrupted torrent of rain that last for 40 days, and even completely destroyed at least one settlement at Agua Mansa. (Masters, 2012.)

In a speech given to the Irrigation Congress at Ogden, Governor George C Pardee made the issue of irrigation and flood control a matter of survival for California. Floods and control of water he argued was an existential crisis for the state. “With the factor of moisture under the control of man, his control over the creation of wealth is vastly enhanced. Civilization is based upon the existence of wealth since empires are based upon population.” (Pardee, 1903.) Pardee pointed to the success of the Riverside colony and the efforts of Greves and North and their successors in the use of water to transform the desert into a desirable space that California should become: “The Riverside colony of California has an irrigated area of 13,00 acres. These acres constitute the basis of community live to the extant of 10,000 inhabitants. At Riverside abundance is supplemented by the highest embellishments of civilized life.” (Pardee, 1903.)

Residents living in Orange County and in the floodplain of the OC were both aware of the benefits of controlling the Santa Ana River as the colony upstream of them had demonstrated. But they were also concerned with the potential for destruction. Engineer J.B. Lippincott, noting the rapid growth of the area seriously recommended the construction of reinforced concrete channels, levees, and dams along the river in 1917. (Masters, 2012.) Lippincott was motivated by fears of a flood that had occurred in 1916 occurring again. His warnings would in the coming years become seemingly prophetic.

In 1938, another flood swept across the Santa Ana River that caused widespread destruction throughout Orange County. The flood displaced more than 50,000 people and killed at least eight-seven. The destruction was vividly recalled by several individuals, interviewed as part of oral history research conducted by Cal State Fullerton. Lives were disrupted, and the entire community had to come together in order to deal with the crisis, “We had utilized a couple of the big flatbed trucks to go into some of these places and take people out. We took most of the people to the Elks Club which was on the high spot. We had men, women, and children at the Elks club till the water had receded and their homes were in shape.” (Martenet, 1968.) Schools were closed, and daily life was put on hold for weeks: “There was a pile of books nearly two weeks high sitting out on a table by itself, and the movement never moved one of those books. We didn’t have school for about two weeks as we tried to get those tents back where they belonged and to get the mod cleaned out.” (Bonney, 1974.)

The devastation of the flood was the impetus to finally follow through on Lippincott’s plan. Lippincott’s proposal was scaled up. His original proposal for a 70-foot dam instead became a hundred-twenty-foot dam, and wide concrete channels would stretch from Yorba Linda down to the Pacific Coast. Construction of the Santa Ana River dam began in Corona and finished in 1941. The Army Corps of Engineers had built a dam with a volume capacity of more than 2.5 million cubic meters of water. The Prado dam was born, rising from the Prado basin, and built on top of the ruins of the former township of Prado from where it takes its name. Prado had to those who experienced the floods of 1916, 1927 and 1938, offered a sense of solace. It was a promise that they would be shielded from such devastation again. The construction of the dam was a marked shift from the lassiez-faire attitude toward water management to the close involvement of overlapping government agencies in handling water resources. In short, the shift from water from a private commodity to a public good occurred because of the complexity in constraining water and domesticating it as a predictable resource, and because only government involvement could protect the totality of property that had existed along the river. As more and more individuals came to live near the river, the scale and enormity of risk to support continued development was only possible through the government. This shift encompassed all settlement, from speculation and businesses to those trying to start new lives.

The Prado Dam’s construction, and subsequent channelization of the river’s flow in Orange County ultimately worked to render the river invisible. The threat of floods and the destruction caused by the river threatened the dreams that people had come to California to search for, and often create. While the Santa Ana River had enabled settlement in Southern California, it had now become a danger to those who had built so much and dedicated so much time and effort to their settlements. This places the Prado Dam in an interesting place as a symbolic object. Despite being so large and so physically visible, it works in rendering the river invisible and today has rendered itself invisible in the social consciousness through its success. In his article, “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure,” Brian Larkin explores the concept of what he describes as the "ontology of infrastructure". (Larkin, 2013). An ontology loosely defined is the theory of being. What does this mean for infrastructure? Larkin’s article attempts to explain different conceptualizations of where infrastructure is situated in relation to other technologies, and how this affects the nature of what that infrastructure is materially, symbolically, and, physically. In essence, Larkin's article argues that infrastructure must be understood as a mechanical object and as a cultural one with symbolic meaning. An assertion made by Larkin in this article, is that “they [infrastructures] need to be analyzed as concrete semiotic and aesthetic vehicles oriented to addresses. They can take on fetish-like aspects that sometimes can be autonomous from their technical function.” (Larkin, 2013).

            In the case of the Santa Ana River, the aesthetics of its infrastructure are found both in the infrastructure of the river itself, and the effects the infrastructure produces. In this case, the symbolic form of the infrastructure is found in the transformation of the landscape around it, not just in the infrastructure on its own. Interpreting the Prado Dam for its aesthetic form, for example, it can be seen as an object of domination and of man's power over nature. This can be seen as a kind of fetish, but it is more useful to also consider the kind of changes it has created, in changing the ecology around the river for instance, also in the same manner. The historic myth making of the Californian landscape into an imagined Edenic paradise was enabled through infrastructural projects like the Prado Dam and flood control infrastructure that transformed the environment into the desired form. These projects brought about symbolic changes that articulated California and its environment as desirable, and as a source of material wealth.

            The Bicentennial mural on Prado’s face is useful for showing this in practice: the mural is of course a symbol of national and civic pride, but also more than this. Dams are extensively used as extremely visible examples by which the state renders itself legible, and by which they symbolically assert meaning. Globally, dams have also come to symbolize development and modernity. Philip Ball for example discusses in The Water Kingdom, how dam building in Maoist China drew on Chinese history, and mythology to reinforce the power and dynamism of the communist state. Ball recounts that when Mao Zedong swam across the Yellow River, he aimed to show the river as an object not to be feared, but something that could be conquered and tamed through the national spirt that he claimed to embody (Ball, 2017). Likewise, in the United States, historic dams such as the Hoover Dam or the Grand Coulee Dam, built during the Great Depression were not only projects that worked to bring jobs and economic relief, but they also demonstrated the power and legitimacy of the Federal Government, and rendered a promise of a national unity in a period of economic crisis (Hundley, 2001).

            The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power similarly constructed their facilities and infrastructure along the Los Angeles River to project their power, and of the advancing modernity in LA in the 1920s and 30s. In the 1960s when the LADWP constructed their new headquarters adjacent to city hall, architect Albert C. Martin designed the building with a massive pool that encircled the building as a moat, spraying columns of water several stories into the air to emphasize the importance of water and their role in delivering it to the city. The building’s glass windows, and bright exterior lighting accentuated this point and drew attention to the DWP’s role as the bringer of power throughout the county (Leslie, 2017).

            But both the LADWP headquarters and the dams built by Mao were made equally as visible in their failures and in their immediate hubris; not just a mechanical failure, but a negative reaction to their intended messaging. The grandiosity of the LADWP display was shut off in less than a decade when rising fuel costs caused by the OPEC crisis of 1973 and the increasing consciousness of the precious value of water became more apparent to Los Angeles residents. To many the fountains became gawdy and wasteful, as did its constant illumination. The building was resituated as the LADWP rebranded the structure as a green office. The building’s complicated HVAC system was shut down and a visitor center in the lobby was created which demonstrated the efficacy of the LADWP’s efforts in water treatment and hydraulic sanitation (Leslie, 2017). The collapse of the Banqiao dam in 1975 in China and sixty-one others revealed the flawed construction of many of the “Great-Leap Forward” dams but also the questionable logic in the reasoning for their creation. The question for many whose lives were disrupted by these dams asked what was their purpose? In the failure of the dams, they became opaque.

            It is in these moments when expectations about infrastructure and their promises are broken: sometimes infrastructure fails because people do not accept infrastructure for infrastructure's sake. Ultimately, the Santa Ana River’s infrastructure was working to protect livelihoods, private property, and a dream of an imagined landscape of permanence and serenity. They also continued to support a garden landscape in which immigrants coming to California had come to expect in the popular images and stories spread across the country. But the widespread interventions created by such infrastructure had unintended consequences that complicated much of the hydrology of the region.

Building the Prado Dam controlled the floods along the Santa Ana River but also marked the beginning of a much larger endeavor. A project of managing nature itself. Symbolically the dam represents a kind of human conquest and superiority over the natural world, one that has been muddied over time, but what does that actually look like in practice? What have the consequences of the Prado Dam been and what effect does the invisibility it renders have on how nature is either ignored or acknowledged?

The Orange County Water District’s Ground Water Replenishment system, located in Fountain Valley is a massive maze of pipes, pumps, and siphons that treats and injects over 130 million gallons of water per day into the Orange County aquifer. As of writing, the OCWD claims that since its opening in 2008, it has treated 400 billion gallons of water and provided for approximately 35% of the water needs of Orange County.  Visiting the OCWD website displays a prominent link  where they proudly discuss the facility and its role in maintaining the Orange County Aquifer, an aquifer which supplies 85% of the potable water needs of the OC. (OCWD, 2018). The GWRS when first opened received the Stockholm Industry Award, the highest award given in the industry for water management projects. There is a boggling array of statistics, every conceivable metric measured and tabulated from the capabilities of the GWRS to the demand expected for water in the OC, all used to keep a carefully balanced budget of water drawn from the aquifer.

 The documents  show how important maintaining the balance is; in 1965 studies into the Talbert gap, a barrier of sand and silt created by alluvial deposits revealed a vulnerability to the Orange Aquifer to saltwater intrusion (OCWD, 2018). Maintaining aquifer levels is achieved by the GWRS, an essential piece of infrastructure to prevent contamination. All the equipment and data the OCWD collect is part of a complex, two-step process of water treatment that begins with the Santa Ana River and the Prado Constructed Wetlands; biological filtration at these wetlands is the first step in an incredibly complex process of political and technological intervention.

The kind of intervention taking place in the GWRS and through their arbitrations by the special water master are not much different from the ones made by settlers in the 19 ^th , or the early 20 ^th  centuries . When the Prado Dam was constructed, it was built to serve a response to an identified need for flood control that led to consequences of its own, as is true of the river's channelization in the late 1940s. The dam itself was the result of several decades of irrigation and water harvesting practices in places like Anaheim and George Hansen or Santa Ana and Santiago Creek which were predecessors to its construction and enabled further development. Those consequences required additional interventions, and so and so forth, each new part of the infrastructure compounding in a larger system.

  In her book, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future, Elizabeth Kolbert argues that these interventions have become increasingly common in the 21 ^st  century, and that they may even now be necessary in combating climate change (Kolbert, 2021). Two chapters from Kolbert’s book stand out particularly in relation to water. The first discusses the consequences of the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, built to redirect the flow of the Chicago River in 1900 to prevent sewage from accumulating in Lake Michigan. Kolbert illustrates how while the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal diverted water and prevented epidemics of cholera, and typhoid, it linked the previously two unconnected water systems of the Mississippi River and the Great Lakes. When later, Asiatic Carp introduced to control invasive populations of reed, themselves introduced as an intervention to preclude the use of toxic pesticides like DDT (Rachel Carson herself suggested the use of the carp as a biological control in Silent Spring) they spread quickly and risked becoming invasive in the Great Lakes via this canal. Already viewed as a nuisance in the Mississippi River, the Army Corps of Engineers returned to their canal to build an  electric barrier  intended to keep the fish out.

  The second chapter by Kolbert is about the levees and dams built to regulate flooding along the Mississippi River itself. These levees, successful in stopping the flooding of the river have also had the unintended consequence of dooming the Louisiana Peninsula to sink into the Gulf of Mexico: without the deposition of new silt from flooding, the coast is slowly being eroded into the sea. Now, the Army Corps of Engineers is spending billions of dollars erecting a new set of barriers designed to entrench the coastline and prevent further erosion. The extremity of the situation is described quite plainly by Kolbert: “Every hour and a half, Louisiana sheds another football field’s worth of land. Every few minutes, it drops a tennis court’s worth. On maps, the state may still resemble a boot. Really though, the bottom of the boot is in tatters.” (Kolbert, 2021).

  In California, similar interventions are already taking place, or have already affected the state materially. The GWRS is one example. The redirection of the Santa Ana River away from its natural course, that it is into the former OC floodplain, and the encasement of the surface in the miles of asphalt, concrete, and suburban lawns has necessitated new means by which to ensure water finds its way underground. Saltwater intrusion is not just a matter of concern for the south, but for the north as well. In Northern California, the risk of over drafting the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers via the California Aqueduct is that it could potentially reverse their flows, leading to a massive intrusion of saltwater via their deltas. The problem has meant that the State has had to limit the amount of water that may be sent south, either for farming or for urban use.

  These interventions can be incredibly politically charged. Mark Arax’s The Dreamt Land, through a combination of journalistic reporting and ethnographic interviews shows how the contentious issue of water conservation in California’s Central valley has exacerbated politics to the fringe extremes. Politicians in Kern County rally slogans chanting “to hell with the Delta Smelt,” in reference to the endangered species of fish living in the Delta which have become a polarized mechanism by which the state is able to enforce the amount of water it distributes via the aqueduct (Arax, 2019). But limiting the amount of water via the aqueduct has created its own set of problems. Farmers living in the central valley have resorted to using ground water to offset shortfalls in the amount of water expected from the north. Derricks in Fresno or in Bakersfield aren’t drilling for oil, they’re drilling for subsurface water in aquifers. The use of water from these aquifers has been so extreme that has led to ground subsidence. This has been a historic problem, not just a recently developing one; the central valley is at a lower elevation today than it was fifty years ago, demonstrated dramatically in a picture of USGS surveyor and hydrologist Joseph Poland in the San Joaquin Valley.

The problem of groundwater is the reason why California has passed the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, sometimes colloquially referred to as “Sigma.” California’s hydraulic experts, including those at the California Department of Water Resources have recognized the danger in depleting California’s ground water resources. Once a groundwater aquifer is exhausted, it is impossible to restore. The GWRS works to prevent that, it is working to mitigate risk and therefore is continuing to keep the promise made in 1941 by the Prado Dam.

This is the final phase of development, which leads us to the understanding of the infrastructure of the river in the present. While the construction of the Prado dam did indeed work to prevent floods, it also inhibited the natural processes that enabled the transformation of the areas around Orange County. Built in a flood plain, the availability of water from ground water was because of the flooding action of the Santa Ana River. The Santa Ana River, constrained by the channelization completed in 1947, and the construction of the Prado Dam no longer flooded in this plain and prevented the natural recharge of the basin.

The GWRS is therefore itself a microcosm in the points raised by Kolbert. It was built to address technical challenges created by technical interventions. Even at the GWRS itself, the process of treating the water within the facility creates pure distilled water which cannot be returned to the aquifer. It requires yet another intervention in the form of mineralization, as the water treated is itself too pure. If injected into the aquifer before this process, it could cause damage to pipes, and drainage systems through mineral leaching.

  When saltwater intrusion was detected in 1956, the historic Orange County Water District, which had managed ground water in Orange County since 1933 began to file several lawsuits against upstream producers intended to regulate the problem. (Blomquist, 2021,) Salinity had been found as far as three miles inland, and a series of lawsuits to protect Orange County’s rights to the Santa Ana (i.e. its Riparian Rights, vs. the Appropriative Rights of those upstream) ensued. The most important was an arbitration ruled in the closing of a suit with the city of Chino in 1969. This lawsuit stipulated an allocation of water for recharge basins in Orange County and resulted in a standardized agreement between Riverside County, San Bernadino County, and Orange County that all water must pass through treatment facilities and meet regional standards set by the Santa Ana Regional Control Board. (Milkovich, 2023.)

The Santa Ana River, however, is a river heavily dependent on seasonal water availability. Fed by snowmelt, the flow of water along the river does not always remain consistent, and so preserving the Orange County Aquifer would require more than legal agreements between all parties. This was the motivation behind the construction of the predecessor of the GWRS, Water Factory 21, in 1975. Water Factory 21 took treated and purified recycled water, blending it with imported water from the Metropolitan Water District, who manage the Colorado River aqueduct and the California aqueduct to ensure that the water pulled from the Orange County aquifer was equal to the water put in the aquifer. (Milkovich, 2023.) Water Factory 21 was built at the same time as a shift in environmental priorities in California, as people became more aware of the issues of California’s water. Critical analysis had begun to be made about the California aqueduct and on California’s reliance on imported water to meet water deficits. In this way, Water Factory 21, and later the GWRS came to also contribute to the promise of stability and security made by the Prado Dam, even if the processes it invoked were largely unseen.

Today, many other cities in California are pursuing the act of managing nature that the OCWD has remained successful in. San Diego is constructing its own version of the GWRS dubbed “Pure Water San Diego” in the city of Mira Loma. Functionally the facility will do much of the same work as the GWRS. San Diego had earlier attempted to build such a plant in the vein of Water Factory 21, but the plan ultimately was shelved when public outcry over the facility derided it as a “toilet to tap” scheme. The OCWD, and ultimately Water Factory 21 and the GWRS were successful for the ways they drew upon the rhetoric of the environmental movement and the authority of public health officials and health politics. They were delivering a promise that the early San Diego facility did not. These facilities continue to grow more important as the issue of water in California becomes more and more politicized. A growing trend of apocalyptic climate predictions warns that California’s future is uncertain and that the state is powerless to do anything about it. Companies have begun trading water futures, buying and selling speculative water rights. But facilities like the GWRS and Pure Water demonstrate otherwise. But the success of these facilities is hidden in their very success itself. There is no crisis hidden in them. There is no failure to discuss. The invisibility matters because it has hidden successful water management techniques that could work to reverse the water crisis in California. As much as many would like, it is not possible to return to an original or earlier state of nature, especially with a system as complex as the Santa Ana River. We cannot for example, destroy the Prado Dam, as so many lives and dependent systems are connected to its continued functioning. But the dam itself has created a system in which unforeseen consequences have been produced which we cannot ignore. While technical interventions like the Ground Water Replenishment System offer solutions to the material problems, they do nothing to address the cultural meanings created by the drastic transformations discussed, or in addressing the ultimately colonial legacy of the changes to the Santa Ana River.

California’s relationship to water and land can often be aggressive, fraught with both interpersonal conflict and nature. Infrastructure so frequently is built with the intent of restricting nature or restricting its influence. California has some of the most visible examples of water infrastructure and some of the most egregious examples of when such infrastructure is allowed to go unchecked. But such infrastructure also comes as the result of desires and the dreams of the individuals who build it. These desires can sometimes go forgotten or become overlooked, either because they seem obvious or because they become lost in the technical function of infrastructure itself. The infrastructure, including its flood control channels and the Prado Dam have succeeded in making the river invisible. People no longer have to think about floods and the infrastructure of the river has thus lost its meaning through its own success. They no longer either want to because doing so reminds them of risk and the threat to the dream of California. Despite this, we still very much live within an ontology of floods. Arkstorms (also known as atmospheric rivers), like the kind that flooded California in 1861, or the one that poured down on Orange County in 1938 are likely to become more common with rising global temperatures. In 2023 and 2024, Arkstorms pushed the Prado Dam and its reservoir to the limits leading to another series of questions from the Army Corps of Engineers about its capabilities.

            This story map points to a larger issue about the nature of infrastructure and its ability to produce these silences. The politics of the California water crisis tend to ignore the facts of the Santa Ana River, or other successful examples in which water management agencies have come to correct historic mistakes in water management, like the OCWD. The invisibility produced through the historic development of the river and its infrastructure contribute to this problem. These examples should be understood, as well as the social implications that they create. With the rise of trading in so-called water futures, there is a potential relationship between these silences, and a neoliberal trend of privatization and commodification of water vis-à-vis the production of risk. Is this the next stage of California’s water infrastructure? Is this the sixth stage of the life of the Santa Ana River and its relationship to people? This map is limited in its abilities to answer those questions and in attempting to answer them, raises many more. How for example does the role of experts foster in shaping the imaginings of infrastructural development? And how for example does California’s legal system either stymie or contribute to solutions for sustainable water management? More study, particularly on how the culture of expertise in water management agencies has contributed to the success of the water management of the Santa Ana River is needed.

Appropriative Rights: The legal right to water according to seniority of claim. Water rights allocated through appropriative rights are usually recognized according to the continued use of those rights and the measured amount of water used. Under appropriative rights, the first person to find and use the water is guaranteed the amount of water that they can draw, but if they discontinue, or lower the amount of water they use then they subsequently lose those rights.

Aquifer: An underground source of water. An aquifer is not an underground pool of water, but instead a sediment layer of water retaining soil or sand. Removing water from an aquifer changes the physical structure of the sediment layer and can prevent its ability to retain water in the future. Alta California: Refers to the territory of the modern-day US State of California, as opposed to Baja California, the California peninsula that is the modern-day Mexican State of Baja California. California Doctrine: A hybrid of appropriative and riparian Rights in effect in California and 12 other US states. It is also sometimes called the "Reasonable Use Doctrine" that judges a claim to water rights according to the ultimate utilitarian use and need of the water. While this makes the allocation of water rights flexible to the evolving realities of water demand and technology, it also makes establishing water claims, seniority, remarkably difficult, and a often a process that requires court judgements. Californio: A self-described term used by late 18th and 19th century rancheros who lived in California. The term Californios was used by individuals who saw themselves as neither Spanish nor Mexican, but wealth rancheros would use the term and also refer to themselves as Spanish, even during Mexican rule. Corvee: A type of unpaid labor system in which the state forces a period of labor for the purpose of public works. It is essentially a form of conscripted labor that in some cases functioned as a tax; individuals could pay their way out of service if they could afford it. It is not legally slavery as individuals would be released upon their completion of their obligations, but often the conditions resembled slavery in the terrible working conditions and treatment from supervising officials. Intrusion: The occurrence of saltwater mixing with freshwater. Intrusion is considered a form of contamination in aquifers and can permanently contaminate an aquifer, rendering it unusable.

Percolation: The process whereby water is absorbed into a porous substance, like aquifer sediment layers. As long as a surface is permeable, or able to absorb water, the process will occur naturally through gravity. Presidio: A type of Spanish and later Mexican military garrison. Not a civilian settlement, were legally restricted to members of the military only. Typically neighbored by a King's Ranch or in the case of Mexican Presidios, Rancho Nationale which provided horses to the presidio. Presidios were used as frontier outposts which surveilled borders and established government order. Reservoir: Surface storage pool of water, for any number of purposes, from drinking water, to irrigation, to flood control. Distinct from the term "aquifer." Recharge Basin: An engineered structure that permits percolation into subsurface aquifers. Usually an artificial pit filled with gravel or silt that is placed on a permeable layer of soil. Recharge/Groundwater Recharge: The process of water percolation into an aquifer by absorption of the sediment material. This can occur naturally through rain or snowmelt, through floods, or gradual absorption by wetlands. Requires a material to be "permeable" or able to absorb water. Asphalt and Concrete for example are considered impermeable and do not allow for water to percolate. Mechanical recharge is also possible through the use of pumps which inject water underground directly or through recharge basins. Riparian Rights: The equal and uninhibited right to the water from the flow of a river or stream. Under riparian rights, no party can inhibit the water rights of another living along the flow through a channel or other diversion.

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