Matters of Justice: Pueblos, the Judiciary, and Agrarian Reform in Revolutionary Mexico

Abstract

The ejido, as idea and reality, has been well covered textually. Essayists reporting on the Mexican Revolution, politicians taking up that revolution's mantle, and scholars examining its seeming neoliberal end have cemented the ejido as central to the history of Mexico's past century. Helga Baitenmann's painstaking new book makes clear that, despite this, we continue to misunderstand key aspects of the twentieth-century ejido's creation.Baitenmann returns to the originary land reform documents of the 1910s and their nineteenth-century precursors to illustrate the unintentional emergence of the communal, government-granted mode of land tenure and management that we understand as the modern ejido. In her introduction and throughout chapters that move from the nineteenth century through the 1920s, Baitenmann contextualizes past scholarly arguments about the ejido's origin and nature as products of accreted political mythmaking. She then uses the legal cases, petitions, and administrative paperwork that proliferated as villagers across Mexico took up each new land reform law to illuminate how the long-standing scholarly distinction between restitution and dotación had little salience for actors at the time. Expedience rather than creating patronage relationships or dependence on a still nascent revolutionary state motivated the turn to land grants and their management by administrative bodies separate from local constitutionally structured governments.Throughout the book, Baitenmann compares Zapatista and Constitutionalist proposals and laws to illuminate the commonalities and conflicts between them. While the Zapatistas aimed to remake social relations and the Constitutionalists remained far more specific in their goals, both pushed primarily for restitution of pueblo lands lost to haciendas. Yet, as Baitenmann makes clear, the burden of proof embedded in a judicial process that borrowed its norms from nineteenth-century law made restitution an often-untenable mechanism for villages to acquire or reacquire land. Even with the creation of a separate agrarian tribunal system under the president's oversight, a violation of the separation of powers that the postrevolutionary Supreme Court accepted for reasons of public benefit, restitution remained time-consuming and impossible for many. Instead, dotación became a temporary fix. The temporary nature of this solution was understood by all, with the eventual goal being privatized, unalienable smallholdings. Yet the legislation anticipated in the procedural documents and court cases examined by Baitenmann never emerged. Instead, the distribution and management mechanisms that villagers, agronomists, and politicians deployed in an ad hoc manner became the norms of twentieth-century Mexican land reform.Baitenmann in no way neglects how politics and corruption shaped this outcome. One of the many strengths of her book is its emphasis on how land policy was shaped as much by conflicts between and within villages as by land seizures by hacendados, the traditional focus of land reform scholarship. Because of their burden of proof requirements, both nineteenth-century and revolutionary restitution laws often revealed irreconcilable overlapping claims between villages, and villagers primarily interacted with the judiciary in attempting to resolve disputes with their neighbors. By focusing on legal matters, Baitenmann also addresses how, even if the Constitutionalist land reform law of January 1915 ultimately guided redistribution, Zapatista and other grassroots approaches shaped its implementation. By exerting pressure on political actors at all levels via all the administrative and judicial tools at their disposal, villagers made clear that their demands for land access could not be ignored. Presidents and the Supreme Court responded by redefining public utility, needed for government expropriation, to include social rights. This permitted the executive to overstep the constitution, deny hacendados access to the amparo rulings that had previously protected their property, and increasingly prioritize equity of access for all Mexicans.This book is tightly focused on the legal and procedural activities that created land reform during and immediately after the Mexican Revolution. Baitenmann makes clear the importance of this early period and the need to take seriously judicial processes that others have dismissed as corrupt, biased, or inaccessible to villagers. The book assumes the readers' considerable knowledge of and investment in debates over Mexican land reform, and its insights will likely take time to penetrate general historical narratives. To that end, Baitenmann could have more explicitly discussed how her findings about early land reform projects revise our understanding of their later application. That, though, is a small critique of a book that demonstrates the importance of rolling back political and historical mythmaking in order to recognize the agency, knowledge, and innovation of actors at all levels. While Matters of Justice challenges our understanding of essential elements of the Mexican Revolution's social project, it does so by emphasizing that all parties saw the need for some degree of real social revolution.