Zanja

Okay kiddo, you might have seen ditches or trenches on the side of the road or in fields. Zanja is a similar ditch, but it’s a special type of ditch that was used long ago in places like Mexico or the Southwest U.S. by Native Americans and Spanish colonizers to carry water to crops, homes, and animals.

Imagine you have a garden, but you don’t have water to water the plants. You might carry buckets of water from the hose to your plants, but that’s a lot of work! Instead, you can dig a long, shallow ditch from a nearby river or stream to your garden. If the ditch is made sloped, it will create a sort of “water slide” so water can flow to your plants more easily. That’s what a zanja is- a long, shallow ditch that carries water from a source to where it’s needed.

People made zanjas by hand using hoes, shovels, and picks. They dug long, winding paths in the dirt and lined them with rocks or bricks. The zanja carried water often for miles across the land to other areas. It was really important to keep the zanja clean so that the water flowed smoothly and didn’t get clogged up with dirt, plants or debris.

Today, we have more modern ways of getting water to where it's needed, but zanja were an important invention that helped people grow crops and live in new places. Some zanja still exist today and even serve as reminders of the old techniques our ancestors used to move water around.