Key dates
- 28 November 1911The Plan of Ayala demands recovery of land, woodland and water.1
- 6 January 1915Carranza’s agrarian decree establishes restitution and grant procedures.2
- 5 February 1917The constitution is promulgated; Article 27 provides a foundation for reform.54
- October 1936Redistribution in La Laguna affects a major irrigated farming region.89
- 26 February 1992Publication of the new Agrarian Law following the Article 27 amendment.6
- 1993PROCEDE begins documenting and certifying agrarian rights.713
Land at the centre of revolution
During the nineteenth century, liberal property reforms and the expansion of large estates weakened numerous rural communities. Conflict concerned cultivated fields, but also access to woodland and water. Losing a common pasture could undermine a household’s livelihood even when the family retained a small plot. These changes differed across Mexico: estate workers, small private owners and communities claiming older titles did not necessarily seek the same remedies or share an identical agricultural past.
The Plan of Ayala, issued by the Zapatistas on 28 November 1911, offered a radical response. It demanded the recovery of appropriated land, woodland and water by entitled communities, while also proposing expropriation of part of large properties for people lacking land. Restoring earlier rights and creating new access to resources were therefore distinct demands. This was a programme of one revolutionary force, rather than a completed national land law. Its significance included the pressure it placed on competing visions of the post-revolutionary countryside.115
From the 1915 decree to Article 27
Venustiano Carranza’s decree of 6 January 1915 provided for invalidating specified unlawful transfers of community land and establishing procedures for restitution. Where restoration was insufficient, it allowed land grants, known as dotación. Commissions and executive bodies were intended to translate claims into administrative action. Officials still had to establish boundaries, evaluate titles, identify eligible beneficiaries and locate land for transfer.
The constitution was promulgated in Querétaro on 5 February 1917. Article 27 assigned original ownership of land and water to the nation and recognised its capacity to transfer property to individuals. It justified intervention in the public interest and supplied a foundation for agrarian reform while retaining private property. It did not turn every farm into a state enterprise. It allowed property rights and their distribution to be reshaped to meet social objectives.245
Ejido, comunidad and private farm
The ejido did not emerge fully formed as a uniform, permanent institution. Legislation in the 1920s and the Agrarian Code of 1934 progressively defined the organisation of reform. Social property included both ejidos and comunidades agrarias, but these were not interchangeable labels for any village. As a broad historical distinction, an ejido was associated chiefly with a grant to a group of beneficiaries, whereas a comunidad often rested on recognition or recovery of earlier communal rights. Legal routes to recognition were more varied than this contrast suggests.
The 1992 law explicitly distinguished settlement land, common-use land and parcels within an ejido. Community ownership of an area did not require every household to work its fields together. Individually operated plots could coexist with shared forests and pastures. The members’ assembly took decisions within the community’s jurisdiction, and the comisariado ejidal carried them out. A neighbouring private farm belonged to a different property regime: a similar field size did not imply identical rights concerning transfer, inheritance or participation in collective decisions.3761718
Cárdenas and the transformation of La Laguna
Under President Lázaro Cárdenas, who governed from 1934 to 1940, redistribution acquired particular momentum and political importance. It reached valuable regions of commercial farming. In La Laguna, across parts of Coahuila and Durango, the decision of October 1936 affected an agricultural economy closely connected to irrigation and cotton production. Drawing new boundaries around small parcels could not by itself keep shared infrastructure operating or finance the next agricultural season.
In his address from Torreón on 30 November 1936, Cárdenas presented the distribution of land as a first stage, to be followed by productive organisation, credit and improved public services. The speech records government intentions, rather than an independent assessment of outcomes. Collective arrangements for some aspects of farming were intended to preserve the region’s productive capacity. La Laguna nevertheless cannot stand for every ejido. Communities dominated by household cultivation on rainfed land faced different resources, constraints and routes to market.987
Credit, water and the working rural economy
In agrarian reform, a hectare was never a self-contained measure of economic success. Access to land gained its practical value through water, equipment, seed purchases and opportunities to sell a harvest. State credit could make cultivation possible while also connecting farmers to particular suppliers, crops or settlement arrangements. Research on the ejido sector at the end of the twentieth century highlighted differences between formal restrictions and the transactions people actually negotiated in everyday rural life.
Recognised rights did not remove the need to maintain infrastructure and agree on shared expenditure. A household might operate its own field while depending on collective decisions about resources outside the parcel boundary. That relationship generated benefits from cooperation as well as disputes over costs and representation. Comparisons of ejido and private-farm performance must therefore consider land quality, irrigation and services. Yield differences cannot automatically be attributed to tenure while disregarding farms’ operating conditions and resources.1081517
Membership, generations and women’s rights
Living within an ejido was not the same as possessing recognised agrarian membership. A person holding such rights could vote and share in benefits, while some other residents lacked that status. As generations passed, the position of children and grandchildren of the original beneficiaries became increasingly important: land and membership rights did not expand automatically with the number of households. Inheritance disputes could consequently determine not only access to a field but also a voice in local institutions.
Gender mattered as well. Carmen Diana Deere’s analysis shows how earlier legislation favoured male beneficiaries while making limited provision for certain women supporting families. The 1971 law widened formal equality, but changing the legal text did not eliminate practical barriers. Research published in 2021 on a women’s organisation in Hidalgo documents negotiation of access to communal land through collective action and social relationships. Holding a title, being permitted to use a resource and controlling the resulting income remained distinct achievements, shaped by relationships within households and the wider community.71112
The 1992 reform and its different pathways
The amendment of Article 27 and the Agrarian Law published on 26 February 1992 ended the existing policy of further land redistribution through agrarian reform and widened the ways in which land rights could be exercised. They did not privatise every ejido in a single nationwide operation. The historical legislation distinguished parcel use, transactions in specified rights and the adoption of full private ownership, or dominio pleno. This final step required separate procedures rather than following automatically from the announcement of reform.
PROCEDE, launched in 1993, surveyed land and documented rights concerning parcels, common land and residential plots. A certificate for an ejidal parcel was not automatically a private-property title. Documentation could reduce uncertainty, but could also reveal overlapping claims and disputed boundaries. Implementation therefore involved surveyors, officials and community assemblies, while its local course reflected pre-existing conflicts. Legal reform defined a range of possible actions; decisions and relationships of power helped determine which were pursued. Certification alone could not settle every disagreement over belonging or historical entitlement.6731618
Legacies in migration, forests and collective rights
The consequences extended beyond harvest size. Research on certification presented by Alain de Janvry and colleagues in 2012 linked greater tenure security with increased labour migration. The mechanism matters: a household member could leave with less fear that absence would undermine rights to land. In the study, migration did not mean an average disappearance of cultivated area. This finding neither implies that every village responded alike nor reduces migration to a single cause; it shows how changing property institutions could alter the allocation of household labour.
Shared forests formed another lasting legacy. Bray and Merino-Pérez describe community forest enterprises based on social property, investing in their businesses and local infrastructure. Their research also identifies management difficulties, unequal influence and conflicts over revenue. Ejidos therefore matter to institutional history as arrangements combining individual and collective rights, market production and community obligations. Their varied experiences resist a simple progression from communal land to entirely private farms. Studying how rights were exercised reveals more than classifying a village under a single ownership label.1314
Questions and answers
Did every ejido cultivate all its land collectively?
No. Many households operated separate parcels while pastures or forests remained shared. Collective production was one possible arrangement, particularly important in some regions affected by redistribution.611
Sources
- Emiliano Zapata i sygnatariusze / and signatories; INAH (1911). Plan de Ayala: transkrypcja dokumentu / document transcription
- Venustiano Carranza; Procuraduría Agraria (1915 / 2015). Ley Agraria del 6 de enero de 1915: reprodukcja dokumentu / document reproduction
- Jorge Alcázar Godoy (2015). Ley Agraria de 1915 y Ley Agraria vigente: modelos paralelos de tenencia de la tierra
- Francisco Javier Velázquez Fernández (2016). Herencia centenaria: Constitución y legislación federal agraria en México (1917–1950)
- Library of Congress (b.d. / n.d.). La Constitución de 1917: wystawa historyczna / historical exhibition
- Congreso de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos; FAOLEX (1992). Ley Agraria: tekst ustawy opublikowanej 26 lutego 1992 / text of the law published 26 February 1992
- Kirsten Appendini (2002). Land regularization and conflict resolution: the case of Mexico
- Lázaro Cárdenas; transkrypcja / transcription: Memoria Política de México (1936). Mensaje a la Nación. No se gobierna en México en bien de una sola clase, Torreón, 30 noviembre
- INEHRM (2020). El agrarismo cardenista
- World Bank (1999). Economic Adjustment and Institutional Reform: Mexico’s Ejido Sector Responds, Volume II: Background Papers, draft 1 July
- Carmen Diana Deere (1985). Rural Women and State Policy: The Latin American Agrarian Reform Experience, Working Paper 81
- Jozelin María Soto-Alarcón; Diana Xóchitl González-Gómez (2021). Collective Rural Women Access, Use, and Control Over Communal Land in Mexico: A Post-capitalist Feminist Political Ecology Approach
- Alain de Janvry; Kyle Emerick; Marco Gonzalez-Navarro; Elisabeth Sadoulet (2012). Certified to Migrate: Property Rights and Migration in Rural Mexico, working paper, 30 November
- David Barton Bray; Leticia Merino-Pérez (2002). The Rise of Community Forestry in Mexico: History, Concepts, and Lessons Learned from Twenty-Five Years of Community Timber Production, draft report
- Willem Assies (2008). Land Tenure and Tenure Regimes in Mexico: An Overview — abstrakt / abstract
- Ana de Ita (2022). PROCEDE: a failed programme to reduce poverty and inequalities in Mexico — abstrakt / abstract, UNU-WIDER Working Paper 2022/78
- John Richard Heath (1990). Enhancing the Contribution of Land Reform to Mexican Agricultural Development, Policy Research Working Paper 285
- World Bank (2001). Mexico: Land Policy — A Decade after the Ejido Reform, Report 22187-ME
Approximate dates (c.) describe the nature of the evidence: archaeology dates settlements, layers and remains, not single moments of invention.