From Desamortization to Agrarian Reform in Mexico, 1856–1940

Abstract

The first phase of the development of land tenure in Mexico, from the desamortization laws in 1856 to agrarian reform, was completed in 1940 by the Lázaro Cárdenas administration. While between 1856 and 1910 property reforms served to concentrate land and stimulate latifundio, from the violent Mexican Revolution of 1910–1917 until 1992 a policy of social justice was implemented that sought to give land to peasant families, thereby generating a better distribution of land, though without improving its productivity. This signifies that if postrevolutionary modernity assumed, echoing neo-institutionalism or old trends such as positivism or regeneracionismo, that land redistribution was a necessary condition to generate economic growth, in reality it was the social dimension and not the economic that gave character to Mexican agrarian reform between 1920 and 1992. As a backdrop to this, the analysis of literature and history shows a truncated and limited agrarian reform in which traditional figures such as the cacique persisted. The traditional and official vision of the agrarian reform is misguided, in which it is understood as a product of restitutive justice, the result of peasants regaining the lands from which they had been evicted due to the desamortization laws and the greed of landowners hungry for land who had annexed the land of the pueblos. To the contrary, agrarian reform is distributive, allocating land to peasants who requested it, while the hacienda was not the source of all the evils that gave rise to the revolution. Nor can the situation of the Mexican countryside be portrayed as the fight of the peones against the hacendados or caciques hungry for land. This erroneous vision of the Mexican countryside should be demystified, because it does not take into account that agrarian reform became the touchstone to give an agrarian nature to a very diversified Mexican Revolution and convert it into an instrument for the postrevolutionary governments to champion the peasant struggle in 20th-century Mexico, becoming the key to economic growth and social justice in the rural Mexican world.