Deregulating the social life of property: neoliberalism and the proliferation of normative dissonances in Mexico

Abstract

In 1992, a neoliberal land reform was carried out in Mexico. One of its objectives was to open the ejido institution, created in 1915, to the market. Until then, ejido land was forbidden to be sold, rented or leased. Based on ethnographic research in an indigenous region of southern Mexico, the aim of this study is to clarify the normative divergences caused by neoliberal land reforms and to explore the meanings that privatization and commodification of communal ejido lands hold for indigenous peasants alive today. The main argument is that ejido residents have responded to the new Agrarian Law in diverse ways within the same ejido region. Some ejidatarios have conserved the principles of social justice and the moral peasant economy implicit in the abrogated agrarian legislation, and established de facto rights and obligations to govern access to ejidal plots, while other ejidatarios conceive land as an object of economic exchange. Hence, while the goal of Mexico's neoliberal reform was to eliminate divergences between the stipulations of Agrarian Law and people's acts with regard to the land, on the ground, its effects have been to widen conflicts and generate new ones between local customs and social practices.