Negotiating Land Tenure and Indigenous Communal Property in the Chiapas–Guatemala Borderlands

Recent scholarship on Guatemala's nineteenth century has shown that Liberals and Conservatives—despite their constant battles over political control—shared much in the substance of their policies. These shared politics were most evident in land policy. Both Liberals and Conservatives worked to standardize land tenure along the liberal model to establish state authority in the countryside, curb the autonomy of Indigenous communities, and promote agricultural investment. The Guatemalan state pursued these ends through haphazard land legislation. Extant scholarship on nineteenth-century Guatemala has challenged the narrative of progressive liberalization of land policy and dispossession of Indigenous Guatemalans from their communal landholdings, but little has been done to recast Indigenous communities as more than reactive recipients of state policy. This paper analyzes the contentious enforcement of a growing corpus of land law in nineteenth-century Guatemala. Drawing on court records of land disputes, I approach this question from the perspective of several Indigenous communities (primarily Chuj, Jakaltek, and Mam Maya) whose lands spanned the disputed borderlands between Guatemala and Chiapas, Mexico. This paper argues that these communities actively engaged with the state, challenging the liberal model of private property ownership and export-oriented agriculture in Guatemalan courts. They leveraged customary land rights and deployed flexible notions of state justice to negotiate the implementation of changing land laws in defense of their communal landholdings. However, the letter of the law was not the only consideration of state officials adjudicating land conflicts in this borderland space. The threat of territorial loss to Chiapas often pushed Guatemalan officials to prioritize the expedient occupation of the land by Guatemalans over the legal merit of their land claims. Indeed, Indigenous communities and ambitious landowners alike vied for advantage in this unpredictable legal environment, contributing to the interpretive legal culture that shaped the enforcement of Guatemalan land law.