Abstract

VENTURA-PATINO, María del Carmen. Communal Lands, Agrarian Regulation and el Costumbre in La Cañada de los Once Pueblos, Michoacán, at the beginning of the 21st Century. LiminaR [online]. 2019, vol.17, n.2, pp.67-84. ISSN 2007-8900.  https://doi.org/10.29043/liminar.v17i2.681.

Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, this article seeks to explain how P’urhépecha communities in the region called the Cañada de los Once Pueblos in Michoacán regulate their lands in accordance with what they call el costumbre (customs), as well as the tensions and imbrications that arise in relation to the terms established in agrarian law. To do so, we contrast the juridical natures of legal and de facto agrarian communities, where the former reflect what we call “negotiated normativity”, while in the latter we observed greater communal autonomy and less influence by the state in regulating people’s lands. Through their communal practices, local indigenous people challenge the monist idea of the state while striving to defend their inclusion in it as collective subjects, simultaneously demanding recognition of their communal property system and their own means of settling boundary conflicts. Certification programs and agreements to lease lands to agribusinesses are two of the challenges that today are testing local practices of communal autonomy and the communities’ permanence as collectivities.

Keywords : agrarian communities; communal citizenship; lands; el costumbre.