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Abstract
The ejido is the most important form of collectively owned property in Mexico; approximately half of the country's territory belongs to ejidatarios of whom women make up roughly 20%. Recent legal reforms aimed at privatizing the ejido are forcing ejidatarios/as to sell or rent their lands to corporations seeking to invest in oil, mining, and energy production. This paper examines the gender impacts of land privatization for renewable energy generation in two ejidos of Zacatecas, Mexico: El Orito and Benito Juárez. The first agreed to rent their lands to a private company while the other did not. Results show that land rentals benefitted a handful of ejidatarios, while the people affected the most include male stone miners, ejidatarias who were excluded from decision-making, and women who obtain food and fuel from ejido common lands. Benito Juárez served as a good point of comparison because its common lands were not privatized, and people continue to use them in traditional ways. However, people in Benito Juárez also hold different bundles of rights to common lands based on gender, economic status and age. The paper calls for a gender and intersectional approach to continue examining the differentiated impacts of ejido privatization in Mexico.
Highlights
The ejido is the most important form of collective land ownership in Mexico
According to the Agrarian Law contained in the Constitution of 1917, each household should receive a plot for cultivation and have access to common lands not suitable for agriculture or human settlement that are part of an ejido (Procuraduría Agraria, 2009)
The paper adopts a gender and intersectional approach to land grabbing in order to explore how common lands privatization affects women and men
Summary
The ejido is the most important form of collective land ownership in Mexico. It is a product of the revolution of 1910 which led to the expropriation of rich landowners in order to distribute land among landless peasants. According to the Agrarian Law (Procuraduría Agraria, 2009), only the ejidatarios/as who have a full bundle of rights can decide how to use common lands, who enters the area and what to do with them Their families and other people living in the ejido can collect resources for daily subsistence, but they cannot participate in decision-making regarding management, exclusion, and alienation. Some men of El Orito, those living in the rural area of the ejido (Boquillas) were active in stone mining when MPG arrived These men did not want to rent their lands because they have “stone banks” and “they were exploiting them” other ejidatarios “managed to convince them” (Fabiola Sepúlveda, Visiting Judge, Agrarian Attorney’s Office, Zacatecas). Security guards are not too kind to them, nor to other people passing through these recently privatized common lands, as stated by a female cyclist who declared in one of the workshops that “security guards treat us like criminals.”
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