Abstract

GINZBERG, Eitan. Renouncing a Revolutionary Ideal: The Debate over the Private and the Communal Nature of the Mexican Agrarian Reform. Hist. mex. [online]. 2019, vol.69, n.2, pp.551-611.  Epub Nov 20, 2019. ISSN 2448-6531.  https://doi.org/10.24201/hm.v69i2.3974.

This paper focuses on the 1921 parliamentary debate regarding a federal law supporting the expropriation of landed estates throughout the country by local governments, splitting them into family-size farms and selling them to needy peasant families as freeholdings (homesteads). This paper explains what brought about the quashing of the ideal of small freehold estates, embedded in Article 27 of the Mexican constitution, replacing it essentially with the communal or shared model (ejido). The major argument is that what led to the abandonment of the freehold agrarian option was the agro-statutory division of power anchored in Article 27, which entrusted the responsibility for the communal ejido reform to the central government, and the responsibility for the homestead reform to the federated states. The political center did not accept this arrangement, fearing the loss of its leadership in the management of Mexican agrarianism. This led to the rescinding of what most thinkers of the revolution defined as the right way of rehabilitating the Mexican pueblo, turning it into the spearhead of Mexican economic prosperity and modernization.

Keywords : Mexican Agrarian Reform; Small Private Landholding; Mexican Homestead; Ley de Fraccionamiento de Latifundios; Ejido; Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution.