Gender and land rights in Mexico: A case study from Southern Veracruz

Abstract

Women's rights to land and participation in land distribution processes in rural Mexico have not been seriously documented. Most studies focusing on forms of land ownership and peasant organisation in the country see the peasantry as a homogeneous category or emphasize class divisions only.1 This is also true for Latin America as a whole. Except for the series of papers contained in the book edited by Carmen Deere and Magdalena Léon de Leal2 and a handful of independent articles published mostly by women scholars, most research on agrarian reform in Latin American neglects gender issues. This is particularly striking if we consider the enormous impact of land reform on the social, economic and political life of virtually every country in the region.3