Gendering the Ejido: Rural Women and Agrarian Politics in Postrevolutionary Veracruz

This paper examines the ejido, or collectively controlled land parcels administered by the Mexican state after the 1910 Revolution and local ejido governance in the Veracruzan Huasteca through the framework of gendered space to understand how women laid claims to land and other rights through their participation in agrarian politics. Since the beginning of agrarian reform during the Mexican Revolution, Mexican governing officials saw the implementation of collectively-controlled land parcels as a mechanism for transitioning Indigenous communities away from subsistence farming and towards small-scale agrarian markets through their ability to sell excess crop production. The ejido’s laws of primogeniture before 1971 also favored men in the ownership of property and incentivized women to wed in order to secure their future alongside propertied men. Drawing on the racial and gendered history of agrarian reform and the changes to the agrarian code in 1971, this paper interrogates how prospective and titled Nahuatl-speaking ejidatarias and rural women in popular peasant organizations in the Huasteca Veracruzana laid claims to the ejido between 1955 until the culmination of Mexico’s agrarian reform in 1991 which coincided with a period of increased possibility for women and a dramatic increase in state violence against peasant organizers.