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Social change and land tenure regimes in Mexico

A critical review

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Abstract

This paper argues that the changing land tenure legislation in Mexico is a concrete reflection of generalized societal attitudes towards indigenous and traditional peasants. It contends that the 1992 neoliberal land-reform mimics the progress-oriented liberal project of the ninettenth century and continues a market-centered modernization process underway since the 1940s, which has been legitimized by an overt institutional disdain and discrimination against indigenous people, peasants and their ways of life. It concludes that this process of assimilation or eradication of traditional agro-ecosystems, cultural diversity and social organization will further increase the vulnerability of Mexican peasants to economic and cultural change. As peasants engage in market-controlled business ventures in the rural areas, migrate to cities, rent or sell their lands, they simultaneously adapt to new values and envision new strategies for subsistence that are increasingly mediated by political-economic forces largely beyond their sphere of influence.

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Notes

  1. Ejidos are territories granted to groups of landless peasants upon demand; while comunidades agrarias are lands given back to indigenous peoples based on demonstrated historic ownership. These lands were not allowed to enter the real-estate market, therefore ejidatarios and comuneros could not legally use them as guarantees for loans, nor were they able to rent, lease, sell or use their rights on the land they worked, possessed or inhabited.

  2. The overturn of the PRIista regime in 2000 should not be seen as a consequence of generalized disapproval of these policies, since neither the succeeding party in power (PAN), nor the PRD have ever proposed to reverse the 1992 reforms to Article 27.

  3. These policies were essential in accommodating the pressing urban expansion and major tourist developments like Cancún and Acapulco (Vázquez Castillo 2004).

  4. However, as explained by Fernández and Urquijo (2006) the relationship between altépetl and calpulli was not strictly hierarchical. These authors provide a thorough discussion on the spatial organization of indigenous settlements in the Mesoamerican high plateau before the Spanish Conquista and how it was transformed and misunderstood in the process of creation of the pueblos de indios.

  5. According to Varo Berra (2002, p. 83), the word ejido refers to the collective-use lands that existed in peasant communities of the Iberian Peninsula, and were traditionally situated at town’s exits. In these lands community members could bring their cattle for pasture, cut wood, collect plants, hunt, fish, etc. Therefore its name in old Spanish “exido” from its Latin roots “exitus”, or exit.

  6. As described by Fernández and Urquijo (2006), this process drastically changed indigenous territorial organization as well as the relationship between indigenous people and their environment.

  7. Melville’s (1990) concludes that the pastoral sector of the early seventeenth century Mexican economy was indeed monopolized by large Spanish landholders after a destructive process that included the out-rooting of native indigenous villages, the disruption of their agricultural systems, wide-spread soil erosion by overgrazing, demographic decay of indigenous populations, reduced agricultural production and the subsequent increase of prices of those products. In spite of widespread domination of such practices, recent research highlights the existence of an “agrarian mosaic” of landholdings where indigenous groups retain control of marginal lands (Assies 2008).

  8. Foley (1995, p. 66) describes it as an effort to support and create “an alternative social sector of peasant production”.

  9. This trend increased the demand for basic services, which was obviously not always met. As a consequence slums and urbanization became synonyms, while this urban expansion in turn further increased pressures on periurban ejidos and comunidades agrarias, which witnessed in situ urbanization and slumization—between 20 and 66% of the country’s urban population, depending on the source. This process in-turn was facilitated by government-led expropriations, and paralegal sales and rentals of communal lands (Davis 2006; Vázquez Castillo 2004).

  10. As a matter of fact, the Mexican government reformed Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution as part of an agenda of reforms required to put in place the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Most protests started in the early 1990’s when peasant organizations (unsuccessfully) demanded that NAFTA include effective trade-protections for corn, beans and dairy products. As the trade agreement became effective, peasant protests escalated first in the form of El Barzón movement; the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas; or under the flag “El campo no aguanta más”; and most tragically in San Salvador Atenco where the government violently repressed protests (killing, torturing, jailing and raping peasants) organized by the Frente de Pueblos en Defensa de la Tierra, which opposed the expropriation of 5,000 hectares of agricultural land for the construction of an airport (López y Rivas 2010). Nevertheless, these movements have not been successful in forcing a shift in national agrarian policy away from neoliberalism and free-trade (Assies 2008).

  11. Altogether participating communities comprise about “85.7% of Mexico’s social property and 46.2% of the entire land surface of the country” (Smith et al. 2009, p. 181).

  12. This process reproduces the dynamic described by Stavenhagen (1978), where agrarian policies further integrate the peasant economy to the market, opening up some opportunities, yet continuing to withhold the mechanisms that would render it completely obsolete, thus guaranteeing the existence of a peasant economy to keep wages low, while also retaining enough people in the rural areas to control social unrest and demands on public services in cities.

  13. Given a chronic lack of gender-sensitive data it is hard to estimate and classify misogynous violence in Mexico. However, most sources report a steadily increasing rate since the 1990s. The International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH 2006) cites more than 3.3 million reported cases of physical or sexual violence against women in 2003. Olivera (2006) reports 5,000 cases of femicide nationwide in 2002 and 8,000 by the end of 2005. Meanwhile Patricia Castañeda (2007) identified 1,205 cases in 2004, while the FIDH (2006) estimated 800 cases in that same year for the State of Mexico alone, about 7.47 femicides for every 100,000 women.

  14. PROCAMPO was phased out in 2008 after seeing its initial budget decline about 5% every year (Assies 2008). See Varo Berra (2002) and Vázquez Castillo (2004) for a complete description and analysis of this program.

  15. This sudden jump in prices has been associated with NAFTA, as it largely increased dependence on US corn and forced out of business thousands of farmers (Malkin 2001; Oxfam 2008).

  16. This is true; even though abandonment of agricultural lands has also left room for the expansion of scrub land in some areas (López et al. 2006). As documented by García-Barrios et al. (2009), the negative consequences associated with generalized expansion of agricultural activities into secondary and primary forest lands exceed any positive effects associated with abandonment of rain-fed agricultural plots.

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  1. University of Costa Rica, San Pedro, Costa Rica

    Mauricio Herrera Rodriguez

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Herrera Rodriguez, M. Social change and land tenure regimes in Mexico. GeoJournal 77, 633–649 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-011-9409-7

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