In between rights and power: Women’s land rights and the gendered politics of land ownership, use, and management in Mexican ejidos

Abstract

• Analysis of the assertion of previously secured women’s land rights and the effects on empowerment. • Study in two Mexican ejidos reveals that women struggle to translate legal land rights into practical land ownership, use, and control. • Local social norms and everyday gendered politics marginalize women from ejido community land governance and household level resource management. • Cases of women’s leadership indicate potential to build critical mass for collective women’s political participation and land control. • Case study from Mexico addresses an over-representation of studies on women’s land rights based on cases from Africa. We explore how gender relations structure the assertion of formal women’s land rights (WLRs), highlighting community-level land governance dynamics under individual and collective tenure arrangements. Contrary to a predominant focus on legal reforms, we document the everyday gendered politics in two Mexican ejidos – a globally renowned land tenure regime, which unifies customary and statutory systems and legally affords women and men equal rights as landowners, land users, and decision-makers. Findings explain when, how, and why female landowners practice their rights and exercise their political powers over their land. Women struggle to translate legal land rights into practical land use and control due to masculinized ejido land management; women continue to be marginalized from masculinist spaces of ejido governance and collective decision-making scenarios. Yet increasing cases of women’s leadership in local land management institutions indicates the potential to build critical mass for collective participation in land politics. We encourage further attention to these issues so that the legal attainment of WLRs might be reinforced by more equitable distributions of decision-making, power, and land control. Our contribution addresses a lack of attention to the gendered politics of land control after WLRs have been legally formalized.