Before the 1910 Mexican Revolution, most land in post-independence Mexico was owned by wealthy Mexicans and foreigners, with small holders and Indigenous communities possessing little productive land. During the colonial era, the Spanish crown protected holdings of Indigenous communities that were mostly engaged in subsistence agriculture to countervail the encomienda and repartimiento systems. In the 19th century, Mexican elites consolidated large landed estates (haciendas) in many parts of the country while small holders, many of whom were mixed-race mestizos, engaged with the commercial economy.
After the War of Independence, Mexican liberals sought to modernize the economy, promoting commercial agriculture through the dissolution of common lands, most of which were then property of the Catholic Church, and Indigenous communities. When liberals came to power in the mid nineteenth century, they implemented laws that mandated the breakup and sale of these corporate lands. When liberal general Porfirio Díaz took office in 1877, he embarked on a more sweeping program of modernization and economic development. His land policies sought to attract foreign investment to Mexican mining, agriculture, and ranching, resulting in Mexican and foreign investors controlling the majority of Mexican territory by the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution in 1910. Peasant mobilization against landed elites during the revolution prompted land reform in the post-revolutionary period and led to the creation of the ejido system, enshrined in the Mexican Constitution of 1917.Markiewicz, Dana, The Mexican Revolution and the Limits of Agrarian Reform, 1915-1946. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers 1993.Hart, John Mason, Empire and Revolution: The Americans in Mexico since the Civil War. Berkeley: University of California Press 2002Dwyer, Johnre J. The Agrarian Dispute: The Expropriation of American-Owned Rural Land in Postrevolutionary Mexico. Durham: Duke University Press 2008.
During the first five years of agrarian reform, very few hectares were distributed.Cumberland, Charles. The Meaning of the Mexican Revolution(US: D. C. Health and Company, 1967), 41 Land reform attempts by past leaders and governments proved futile, as the revolution from 1910 to 1920 had been a battle of dependent labor, capitalism, and industrial ownership.Carleton Beals, Mexico an Interpretation(New York: B.W.Huebsch Inc., 1923), 89 Fixing the agrarian problem was a question of education, methods, and creating new social relationships through co-operative effort and government assistance.Carleton Beals, Mexico an Interpretation(New York: B.W.Huebsch Inc., 1923), 92 Initially the agrarian reform led to the development of many ejidos for communal land use, while parceled ejidos emerged in the later years.Malcolm Dunn, "Privatization, Land Reform, and Property Rights: The Mexican Experience," Constitutional Political Economy, 11(2000):217 Land reform in Mexico ended in 1991 after the Chamber of Deputies amended Article 27 of the Constitution.
History of land tenure in Central Mexico
Prehispanic era
The rich lands of central and southern Mexico were the home to dense, hierarchically organized, settled populations that produced agricultural surpluses, allowing the development of sectors that did not directly cultivate the soil. These populations lived in settlements and held land in common, although generally they worked individual plots. During the Aztec period, roughly 1450 to 1521, the Nahuas of central Mexico had names for civil categories of land, many of which persisted into the colonial era.Charles Gibson, The Aztecs Under Spanish Rule. Stanford: Stanford University Press 1964, pp. 257ff. There were special lands attached to the office of ruler (tlatoani) called tlatocatlalli; land devoted to the support of temples, tecpantlalli, but also private lands of the nobility, pillalli. Lands owned by the calpulli, the local kin-based social organization, were calpullalli.Gibson, The Aztecs Under Spanish Rule, p.257S.L. Cline, ‘’Colonial Culhuacan, 1580-1600: A Social History of an Aztec Town’’. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press 1986, pp. 140-141. Most commoners held individual plots of land, often in scattered locations, which were worked by a family and rights passed to subsequent generations. A community member could lose those usufruct rights if they did not cultivate the land. A person could lose land as a result of gambling debts,Bernardino de Sahagún, Florentine Codex: The General History of the Things of New Spain, volume 8, p. 88. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. a type of alienation from which the inference can be drawn that land was private property.
There were lands classified as "purchased land" (in Nahuatl, tlalcohualli).Bernardino de Sahagún, Florentine Codex The General History of the Things of New Spain, edited and translated by Arthur J.O. Anderson and Charles Dibble. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, volume 11, p.251. This civil category of land is part of the compilation on soil types. In the Texcoco area, there were prehispanic legal rules for land sales, indicating that transfers by sale were not a post-conquest innovation.Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl, Obras Históricas, Mexico: Universidad Autónoma de México, 1977, vol. 2, p. 385. Local-level records in Nahuatl from the 16th century show that individuals and community members kept track of these categories, including purchased land, and often the previous owners of particular plots.S.L. Cline, Colonial Culhuacan, 1580 – 1600: A Social History of an Aztec Town. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press 1986, pp. 125-159., S.L. Cline and Miguel León-Portilla, The Testaments of Culhuacan. Los Angeles: UCLA Latin American Center, Nahuatl Studies Series No. 1, 1984.
Colonial era
After the Spanish conquest of central Mexico in the early 16th century, Indigenous land tenure was initially left intact, with the exception of the disappearance of lands devoted to the gods.Charles Gibson, The Aztecs Under Spanish Rule. Stanford: Stanford University Press 1964. A 16th-century Spanish judge in New Spain, Alonso de Zorita, collected extensive information about the Nahuas in the Cuauhtinchan region, including land tenure.Alonso de Zorita, Life and Labor in Ancient Mexico, translated by Benjamin Keen. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press 1963.Georges Baudot, Utopie et histoire au Mexique. Paris: Privat 1976:45ff. Zorita notes there was a diversity of land tenure in central Mexico, so that if the information he gives for one place contradicts information in another it is due to that very diversity.Zorita, Life and Labor, p. 86. Zorita, along with Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl, a member of the noble family that ruled Texcoco, and Franciscan Fray Juan de Torquemada are the most important sources for prehispanic and early colonial Indigenous land tenure in central Mexico.Cline, Colonial Culhuacan p. 141.
There is considerable documentation on Indigenous land holding, including estates held by Indigenous lords (caciques), known as cacicazgos. Litigation over title to property date from the very early colonial era. Most notable is the dispute over lands held by don Carlos Ometochtzin of Texcoco, who was executed by the inquisition in 1539. The Oztoticpac Lands Map of Texcoco is documentation for the dispute following his death.
In early colonial Mexico, many Spanish conquerors (and a few Indigenous allies) received grants of labor and tribute from particular Indigenous communities as rewards for services via an institution called encomienda. These grants did not include land, which in the immediate post-conquest era was not as important as the tribute and labor service that Indians could provide as a continuation from the prehispanic period. Spaniards were interested in appropriating products and labor from their grants, but they saw no need to acquire the land itself. The crown began to phase out the encomienda in the mid-16th century, limiting the number of times the grant could be inherited. At the same time, decreases in Indigenous populations and Spanish migration to Mexico created a demand for foodstuffs familiar to them, such as wheat rather than maize, European fruits, and animals such as cattle, sheep, and goats for meat and hides or wool. Spaniards began acquiring land and securing labor separate from the encomienda grants. This was the initial stage of the formation of Spanish landed estates.James Lockhart, "Encomienda and Hacienda: The Evolution of the Great Estate in the Spanish Indies," Hispanic American Historical Review 59 (August 1969).Ida Altman, Sarah Cline, and Javier Pescador, The Early History of Greater Mexico. Pearson 2003.
Spaniards bought land from individual Indians and from Indian communities; they also usurped Indians’ land; and they occupied land that was deemed "empty" (terrenos baldíos) and requested grants (mercedes) to acquire title to it. There is evidence that nobles sold common land to Spaniards, treating that land as private property.Cline, Colonial Culhuacan, pp. 155-57, based on land sales records for late 16th-century Culhuacan. Some Indians were alarmed at this transfer of land, and explicitly forbade sale of land to Spaniards.Cline, Colonial Culhuacan, p. 155.
The Spanish crown was concerned about the material welfare of its Indigenous vassals and in 1567 set aside an endowment of land adjacent to Indian towns that were legally held by the community, the , initially 500 varas.A vara = 0.84 meters. Cline, Colonial Culhuacan, p. 129Woodrow W. Borah, Justice By Insurance: The General Indian Court of Colonial Mexico and the Legal Aides of the Half-Real. University of California Press 1983, p. 136. The legal framework for these entailed Indigenous community lands was the establishment of settlements (designated pueblos de indios or merely pueblos) as legal entities in Spanish colonial law, with a framework for rule established with via the town council (cabildo).Wood, Stephanie, "The Fundo Legal or lands Por Razón de Pueblo: New Evidence from Central New Spain." In The Indian Community of Colonial Mexico: Fifteen Essays on Land Tenure, Corporate Organization, Ideology and Village Politics. Arij Ouweneel and Simon Miller, eds. pp. 117-29. Amsterdam: CEDLA 1990. Land traditionally held by pueblos was now transformed to entailed community lands.Gibson, The Aztecs Under Spanish RuleEmilio H. Kourí, "Interpreting the Expropriation of Indian Pueblo Lands in Porfirian Mexico," Hispanic American Historical Review 82:1, 2002, pp. 79-80 There was not a unitary process of the creation of these lands, but a combination of claims based on occupation and use since time immemorial, grants, purchase, and a process of regularization of land titles via a process known as composición.Kouri, "Interpreting", pp. 79-80.
To protect Indians' legal rights, the Spanish crown also set up the General Indian Court in 1590, where Indians and Indigenous communities could litigate over property. Although the Juzgado de Naturales supposedly did not have jurisdiction in cases where Indians sought redress against Spaniards, an analysis of the actual cases shows that a high percentage of the court's casework included such complaints.Borah, Justice by Insurance, p. 122. For the Spanish crown, the court not only protected the interests of its Indian vassals, but it was also a way to rein in Spaniards who might seek greater autonomy from the crown.Borah, Justice by Insurance, p. 123