Abstract
AbstractChanges to Mexico's Constitution in the 1990s marked the end of agrarian reform and the Revolutionary land regime which had allowed beneficiaries to work but not to sell their land. New legislation allowed individual parcels of ejido land to be converted into private property. Many observers link this ‘privatization’ with a transformation of the periurban landscape resulting from private developers’ construction of mass ‘social housing’ developments: a classic example of neoliberal urbanism. We examine evidence for the Mexico City Metropolitan Area, finding that, although some developments do occupy former ejido land, developers mostly prefer private property, including former haciendas. Private sector interests are wary of the ejido for reasons that stem from its place in the corporatist political system that characterized twentieth‐century Mexico, and the patchwork of privatized individual parcels clashes with developers’ land acquisition strategies. Ejidatarios often prefer to retain control over their land, selling plots piecemeal. Our findings demonstrate the continuing significance of urban informality—on a scale that exceeds the development of ejido land for formal housing—and the intertwining of formal and informal. We interpret these interrelated processes of housing production as legacies of corporatism, underlining the significance of political influences on Latin American neoliberalism.
Highlights
In the early 1990s a major change to Mexico’s Revolutionary land regime was announced
We examine the evidence for the Mexico City Metropolitan Area
Ejido contributions to formal housing development we examine the location of the new housing developments in Mexico City’s periurban fringe and seek to explain our finding that they are more likely to be found on private than on ejido land
Summary
In the early 1990s a major change to Mexico’s Revolutionary land regime was announced. A new Agrarian Law (1992) enabled ejido communities (those receiving inalienable land grants in the country’s agrarian reform) to remove land from the tenure regime which had allowed them to inherit and work but not to sell, mortgage or let it. As Mexico’s agrarian communities––some 29,700 ejidos and 2,300 comunidades, many of them indigenous––owned over half the national territory, these changes had the potential to produce dramatic changes in the country’s urban development (Jones and Ward, 1998; RAN, 2019).. They connect the reform of Article 27––the ‘privatization’ of the ejido2––with a remarkable transformation of. We are grateful for the IJURR reviewers’ astute and helpful comments
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