The Usefulness of Land: The Making of Central Mexican Ejidatarios through Legal Engagement, 1920–34

At the beginning of the 1920s, Mexico’s progressive agrarian reform policy signaled a great change for the nation’s landless poor. No other Latin American country had a revolution (1910-1917) and created a constitution (1917) dedicated to peasant land rights, control over foreign investment, and national ownership over natural resources. Under the protection of the Federal Constitution and the various state and federal mandates, Mexican farming communities held the legal right to petition for communal land grants (known as ejidos) for agricultural productivity. Although the law supported land distribution for agrarian change, in practice, the government approved only a small majority of ejido petitions from 1920-1934. During the mid-1920s, two Central Mexican rural villages, el Rancho de San Juan and Estación de Xico, joined the thousands of landless laborers vying for an ejido grant. Although these impoverished agriculturalists intended to use their ejidos for farming, the federal government granted el Rancho de San Juan and Estación de Xico with uncultivable communal lands. Based on ejido records, expert reports, and government sources, my paper analyzes how subsistence farmers and migrant day laborers in both cases engaged with local politics and legal institutions to secure their rights to land, labor, and citizenship. By challenging the usefulness of their communal farm grants, these petitioners utilized the law and their knowledge of the land to their advantage. Their actions demonstrate that the landless poor’s engagement with Mexican agrarian policies was part and parcel towards securing future improvements for their communal lands.