Ejido Land Research Articles

‘Until the land title is in my hands, the land is not sold!’: land, violence, and Indigenous survivance in Michoacán, Mexico

ABSTRACT In this article, we use a settler capitalism framework that centers racialized gender violence in the pueblo of San Miguel Nocutzepo. We tell a story about how neoliberal policy in Mexico permitted the privatization of formerly collectively held Indigenous ejido land, which resulted in selloffs to outsiders who invested in avocado production and ended up being controlled by organized crime. Specifically, we point to the intersections between the regional agricultural recomposition and the social fabric of life in Nocutzepo as we attribute the land repurposing that the avocado-producing region of Michoacán has undergone with the encroachment of settler capitalism and organized crime. We also, however, highlight narratives of survivance in Nocutzepo that shed light on the various ways people faced violence to protect their family, pueblo, and land. Finally, we focus on a mothers-led struggle for youth and community empowerment and well-being or buen vivir that lobbied for a new Indigenous bilingual intercultural school in Nocutzepo to respond to the decline of subsistence agriculture. Our findings caution that while not all Indigenous struggles result in collective victories, everyday practices of resistance form an essential basis of survival.

An index of environmental and cultural suitability for the cultivation of climate-resilient castor bean in rainfed low-productivity common lands in Mexico

Castor bean plants yield commercially important oilseeds with multiple uses; they are characterised by tolerance to drought and adaptation to marginal soils in arid and semi-arid regions. In northern Mexico, a large amount of arid land is categorised as “ejidos”: a system of mixed land ownership managed under a specific legal system, where land users have access to common or individual (parcelled) land. This work aimed to examine the suitability of castor bean cultivation on unused marginal land in ejido land. To determine the environmental suitability of the ejido lands of Coahuila, Mexico, we adapted a land Productivity Index (PI) from an existing method; it consisted of a set of biophysical indicators (edaphic factors, climate, and topography) adapted to castor bean cultivation. We then complemented this index with a “cultural component”, assessing the ethnobotanical knowledge of the people, their willingness to implement a new crop type, and the type and current use of the land. As a result, we found that 114,300 ha of ejido land (1.76% of the total) were very suitable for castor bean cultivation according to the Environmental-PI and that 808,524 ha of ejido land (12.4% of the total) was very suitable according to the Cultural-PI. We also hypothesised that the willingness of “ejidatarios” to cultivate castor beans was related to their degree of knowledge about the plant and the land available for its cultivation; however, their willingness was mostly related to differences in land tenure: “ejidatarios” who own parcelled land were more interested in obtaining benefits from the land through the implementation of novel crops, compared to those who only have access to common land. Highlights • In Mexico, the “ejido” is a unique land ownership and management system where users have access to common or individual (parcelled) land. • According to our Environmental Productivity Index, 114,300 ha of ejido land in Coahuila, México, were very suitable for castor bean cultivation. • This index was complemented with a “cultural component” gauging the people’s perception and willingness to introduce castor bean as a new crop. • 808,524 ha (12.4%) of ejido land were very suitable for castor bean cultivation according to the cultural component of our index. • Differences in land tenure most strongly influence the willingness of the ejido people to cultivate castor beans.

An index of environmental and cultural suitability for the cultivation of climate-resilient castor bean in rainfed low-productivity common lands in Mexico

Castor bean plants yield commercially important oilseeds with multiple uses; they are characterised by tolerance to drought and adaptation to marginal soils in arid and semi-arid regions. In northern Mexico, a large amount of arid land is categorised as “ejidos”: a system of mixed land ownership managed under a specific legal system, where land users have access to common or individual (parcelled) land. This work aimed to examine the suitability of castor bean cultivation on unused marginal land in ejido land. To determine the environmental suitability of the ejido lands of Coahuila, Mexico, we adapted a land Productivity Index (PI) from an existing method; it consisted of a set of biophysical indicators (edaphic factors, climate, and topography) adapted to castor bean cultivation. We then complemented this index with a “cultural component”, assessing the ethnobotanical knowledge of the people, their willingness to implement a new crop type, and the type and current use of the land. As a result, we found that 114,300 ha of ejido land (1.76% of the total) were very suitable for castor bean cultivation according to the Environmental-PI and that 808,524 ha of ejido land (12.4% of the total) was very suitable according to the Cultural-PI. We also hypothesised that the willingness of “ejidatarios” to cultivate castor beans was related to their degree of knowledge about the plant and the land available for its cultivation; however, their willingness was mostly related to differences in land tenure: “ejidatarios” who own parcelled land were more interested in obtaining benefits from the land through the implementation of novel crops, compared to those who only have access to common land. Highlights • In Mexico, the “ejido” is a unique land ownership and management system where users have access to common or individual (parcelled) land. • According to our Environmental Productivity Index, 114,300 ha of ejido land in Coahuila, México, were very suitable for castor bean cultivation. • This index was complemented with a “cultural component” gauging the people’s perception and willingness to introduce castor bean as a new crop. • 808,524 ha (12.4%) of ejido land were very suitable for castor bean cultivation according to the cultural component of our index. • Differences in land tenure most strongly influence the willingness of the ejido people to cultivate castor beans.

Dispossession through land titling: Legal loopholes and shadow procedures to urbanized forestlands in the Yucatán Peninsula

AbstractUnder certain circumstances, land titling, property regime changes, and land‐use conversions yield substantial profits. Yet few people possess the wealth, knowledge, and networks to benefit from these procedures. In the Yucatán Peninsula, a region recently targeted as a prominent investment location by the Mexican national government (mainly with the “Tren Maya” megaproject) and the private capital, forestlands collectively owned as ejidos by Mayan peasants are on the trend to complete privatization. Against the arguments of neo‐institutional economists that in the 1990s promoted legal reforms and justified land‐titling programmes worldwide to make available credit for uncapitalized peasants, individual land titling of commonly held lands in Mexico increased the overall economic value of the land, but not the investment in economic activities related to farmland and indigenous communities. Instead, those policies enabled land grabbing, dispossession, and urbanization. In this article, I describe recent private‐led initiatives of ejido land titling that have redefined agricultural land's uses, meanings, and values for capitalist accumulation. In doing so, I explain how and why Mayan ejidatarios have been excluded from the monetary benefits of land titling, a top‐bottom dispossession process only accomplished through shadow procedures and former privatization of ejidos' common lands.

Peripheralization, Ejidos and Agricultural Livelihoods in Intermediate Mexican Cities: The Importance of Collective Agency to Reduce Vulnerabilities

This paper focuses on the interactions between peripheralization, vulnerabilities of agricultural livelihoods, and local collective agency in the creation of new capabilities in intermediate cities. It discusses the theoretical implications of a study conducted in the municipality of Tarímbaro, part of the intermediate city of Morelia, Mexico; it expands on results already published in preliminary form. The unit of analysis was the ejido, since this type of social land tenure, granted to landless peasants in 1917 after the Mexican Revolution, is one of the most important forms of social organization in rural Mexico. About one-half of the Mexican territory comprises >30,000 community-based land tenures (mainly ejidos), and a high proportion of the land now occupied by urban centers was ejido land. This paper uses the example of 15 ejidos, notably affected by the expansion of Morelia city, to illustrate how local (rural) organizations can foster collective agency to reduce differential vulnerabilities in peri-urban agricultural livelihoods in intermediate cities. In 2015, a semi-structured interview was undertaken with the president of each ejido, followed by a survey of 61 individuals from 11 of the 15 ejidos. The peripheralization of Morelia has produced inequalities in the adjacent municipality of Tarímbaro. Differential vulnerabilities in peri-urban agricultural livelihoods were found in the participant ejidos. Not all the ejidos have been successful in addressing vulnerabilities associated with urbanization of agricultural land, but those who have achieved some success have certain characteristics that reinforce common values and motivations to establish common goals to sustain local livelihoods. This paper highlights the importance of functional (rural) organizations in regulating access to, and distribution of, resources in the peripheries of intermediate cities.

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

• 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.

THE IMPACT OF MEXICO’S LAND REFORM ON PERIURBAN HOUSING PRODUCTION: Neoliberal or Neocorporatist?

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.

POLÍTICAS NEOLIBERALES Y MERCADO DE TIERRAS AGRÍCOLAS: EJIDO CUBILETE, SINALOA, 1993-2019

Este trabajo analiza efectos de las políticas neoliberales en el mercado de tierras ejidales. Se estudió el caso del Ejido Cubilete, Sinaloa de 1993 a 2019, centrándose en: 1) motivos de venta, 2) irregularidades durante la compraventa, y 3) condiciones de los ejidatarios después de la enajenación. Se utilizaron como técnicas de investigación: 1) revisión documental, 2) grupo focal, 3) encuesta a ejidatarios enajenantes y 4) entrevista a informantes clave. En Cubilete se encontró que en 26 años el 43 % de los ejidatarios vendió todo o una parte de su tierra, lo que en superficie representó el 23 % (744 ha). No ha habido venta masiva de parcelas, pero tampoco hay seguridad jurídica en la tenencia de la tierra, permitiendo ventas abusivas, ilegales y fraudulentas que afectan a enajenantes y compradores. La legalización de la venta de tierras de 1992 ha traído diversos efectos en los ejidos, como el fomento de la privatización de la propiedad social y la formación de neolatifundios.

Linking changes in ejido land tenure to changes in landscape patterns over 30 years across Yucatán, México

Mexico’s ejidos are shifting away from community-managed, and toward individually managed lands. Shifting land tenure is a mechanism for modern agricultural development that drives changes to landscape patterns, and loss of mature forestland. Such forest conversion is conspicuous across Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula. Thus, Mexico’s federal government recently identified the peninsula as a high priority region for landscape conservation. However, few studies have examined the link between changes in ejido land tenure and changes in landscape patterns. We examined spatial-temporal relationships between shifting ejido land tenure and subsequent changes to landscape patterns among 710 ejidos (2.5 million ha) across the State of Yucatan. Our analysis focused on a series of years preceding and a series of years following the changes to Mexico’s constitution that legalized parcelization of ejido lands. Our research questions were (1) how have land cover patterns changed over time and (2) after two decades of legal parcelization, did land cover patterns differ between individually managed and community-managed ejido lands? To investigate these questions, we used recent and historic remotely sensed satellite images to map and analyze changes to land cover patterns over 30 years, and related them to changes in land tenure arrangement, particularly among ejidos pre- and post-parcelization. We show that changes in ejido land tenure contributed to changes in land cover patterns, and that individually managed areas and highly parcelized ejidos exhibited a much greater increase in crop and grassland cover, and therefore a much greater increase in deforested lands, than common areas and community-managed ejidos. Moreover, we show that individually managed areas and highly parcelized ejidos exhibited higher annual deforestation rates than common areas and community-managed ejidos. Therefore, our research demonstrates that even in dry tropical forested regions, common property protects forests. We conclude that individually managed and privatized lands, especially for agricultural development, can threaten the conservation potential of community-managed landscapes in Yucatan and beyond.

Evolution and Collapse of Ejidos in Mexico—To What Extent Is Communal Land Used for Urban Development?

The ejido system, based on communal land in Mexico, was transformed to private ownership due to neoliberal trends in the 1990s. Based on the theory of stakeholders being agents of change, this study aimed to describe the land policies that changed the ejido system into private development to show how land tenure change is shaping urban growth. To demonstrate this, municipalities of San Andrés Cholula and Santa Clara Ocoyucan were selected as case studies. Within this context, we evaluated how much ejido land is being urbanized due to real estate market forces and what type of urbanization model has been created. These two areas represent different development scales with different stakeholders—San Andrés Cholula, where ejidos were expropriated as part of a regional urban development plan and Santa Clara Ocoyucan, where ejidos and rural land were reached by private developers without local planning. To analyze both municipalities, historical satellite images from Google Earth were used with GRASS GIS 7.4 (Bonn, Germany) and corrected with QGIS 2.18 (Boston, MA, US). We found that privatization of ejidos fragmented and segregated the rural world for the construction of massive gated communities as an effect of a disturbing land tenure change that has occurred over the last 30 years. Hence, this research questions the roles of local authorities in permitting land use changes with no regulations or local planning. The resulting urbanization model is a private sector development that isolates rural communities in their own territories, for which we provide recommendations.

Rethinking Landscape Conservation: Linking Globalized Agriculture to Changes to Indigenous Community-Managed Landscapes

Community-managed landscapes have valuable conservation potential. In particular, indigenous community management has slowed deforestation. However, globalized agriculture is an underlying driver of changes to indigenous community-managed landscapes. Our objective is to explain a hypothesized global-to-local causal pathway that stems from processes of globalized agriculture and changes to indigenous community-managed landscapes. The global-to-local pathway involves a nested hierarchy of political–economic processes, specifically land and natural resource privatization, commodification, and acquisition. At the local landscape level, we focus on changes to land tenure, livelihoods, land use, and land cover. Changes to land tenure involve a shift away from community and toward individual ownership and management. Concurrently, livelihoods shift away from subsistence and toward market-oriented activities. Subsequently, land use shifts away from small-scale extensive and toward large-scale intensive crop cultivation, away from diverse crop cultivation and toward monocropping, and away from crop toward livestock farming. Ultimately, land cover shifts away from diverse agro-forested and toward homogeneous deforested lands. We illustrate our approach using ejidos, a type of community-managed lands, in Yucatán, México as an exploratory example. We use descriptive statistics to initially assess the shift in ejido land tenure, from community to individually parcelized systems, and the shift in a principal subsistence livelihood and land use activity, from maize cultivation to cattle rearing. We highlight that individually parceled areas within ejidos are more deforested than community-managed areas. In all, we urge landscape conservation scientists to more fully consider not just local actions but also impacts stemming from globalized agriculture and to advance the breadth and depth of more extensive studies and analyses.

Deregulating the social life of property: neoliberalism and the proliferation of normative dissonances in Mexico

In 1992, a neoliberal land reform was carried out in Mexico. One of its objectives was to open the ejido institution, created in 1915, to the market. Until then, ejido land was forbidden to be sold, rented or leased. Based on ethnographic research in an indigenous region of southern Mexico, the aim of this study is to clarify the normative divergences caused by neoliberal land reforms and to explore the meanings that privatization and commodification of communal ejido lands hold for indigenous peasants alive today. The main argument is that ejido residents have responded to the new Agrarian Law in diverse ways within the same ejido region. Some ejidatarios have conserved the principles of social justice and the moral peasant economy implicit in the abrogated agrarian legislation, and established de facto rights and obligations to govern access to ejidal plots, while other ejidatarios conceive land as an object of economic exchange. Hence, while the goal of Mexico's neoliberal reform was to eliminate divergences between the stipulations of Agrarian Law and people's acts with regard to the land, on the ground, its effects have been to widen conflicts and generate new ones between local customs and social practices.

Mantener la ambigüedad de lo común: los nuevos y disputados sentidos del ejido mexicano en la era neoliberal

This paper is about the meanings of the postrevolutionary ejido in contemporary Mexico and the processes of privatization and commodification that have transformed this form of land-tenure over the past four decades. The ejido was designed to fulfill a social function being the main asset to which any ejidatariowas entitled. A legal neoliberal reform in 1992 overthrew many of the ideological principles of the postrevolutionary regime and allowed the opening of the ejido sector to the market economy. Despite ejido land circulation in a legal real estate market, ejidatarios have established a set of vernacular regulations thatemphasize the collective interest over the individual interest and that also limit real estate speculation. This response has widened, within the Mexican ejidos, the gap between the Law, local rules and social practices.      https://doi.org/10.22380/2539472X26

Migrant by josé Manuel Mateo (review)

Reviewed by: Migrant by josé Manuel Mateo Thaddeus Andracki Mateo, José Manuel. Migrant; illus. by Javier Martínez Pedro; tr. from the Spanish by Emmy Smith Ready. Abrams, 2014. 22p ISBN 978-1-4197-0957-9 $17.95 R Gr. 5-8. Recently arrived in Los Angeles, a nameless young narrator recounts the journey of his or her family from their life working on privately owned ejido land in Mexico to hopping a freight train bound for the U.S. and hiding from the “men who looked like the police.” The story of undocumented migration is told in an easygoing but insistent voice, reflecting a child’s-eye view of leaving home for a bewildering new one. The draw here will be the book’s format: a single, black and white, Aztec-inspired ink illustration on amate paper, in an accordion-folded codex. The intricate image unfolds slowly, pulling the reader along from rural fields to the streets of L.A., and makes a breathtaking feast for eyes to carefully examine in full when opened completely. The smallness of the hundreds of individuals in the whole spread effectively conveys the helplessness of children caught in transnational flows, even as the narrator’s strong voice conveys migrant children’s agency, ordinariness, and love of play. Curricular uses here abound: beyond a brief examination of the causes and effects of North American migration (facilitated by a factual authors’ note and perhaps a pairing with Tonatiuh’s Pancho Rabbit and the Coyote, BCCB 7/8/13), this would also be an interesting component to add to an examination of the book as a physical object. [End Page 584] Copyright © 2014 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Changes in land use, land tenure, and landscape fragmentation in the Tijuana River Watershed following reform of the ejido sector

Changes in land use and land tenure can influence both physical fragmentation and ownership fragmentation of landscapes, with implications for biodiversity. In this study, we evaluated changes in land use and land tenure in the Tijuana River Watershed, a region of high biodiversity and endemism, following the implementation of a new Agrarian Law which allowed for privatization and sales of communal land (ejidos) beginning in 1992. In order to understand changes in land use and cover, we constructed maps from aerial photographs and Aster images and measured changes between 1994 and 2005. In order to understand changes in land tenure, we collected data from Mexican government sources on ejido land size, ownership, and sales, and we conducted 55 structured interviews with ejidatarios in the watershed. Our results demonstrate that land-use/cover change between 1994 and 2005 was dominated by an increase in urban area and grasslands, and a decrease in coastal sage scrub, chaparral, and, to a lesser degree, agriculture. In particular, the conversion of coastal sage scrub has left a far more fragmented landscape than existed in 1994. In addition, most of the ejidos in the watershed, as well as individuals interviewed, had participated in some stage of the land certification and titling process allowed by the new Agrarian Law, resulting in substantial changes in land tenure. However, land tenure security appeared to play a larger role than a desire to sell land and, contrary to studies from other regions, full title to the land was obtained in a range of urban and rural settings, rather than primarily on land closest to urban zones. Our results suggest that past predictions regarding future urban growth and fragmentation of native vegetation in the region have proven accurate and highlights regions of change that merit further study.

From Sugar to Blackberries

In recent years, economic crisis in the sugar industry and the closure of an important sugar mill in Michoacán, Mexico, have fostered the entry of transnational agribusinesses that contract with local growers for blackberry production. Land concentration is under way as wealthy growers rent ejido (agrarian-reform) land to grow berries and small-scale growers shift to less capitalized berry production or migrate out of the region. An analysis of the impact of this transition, part of the globalization of the agro-food system, on campesinos, workers, and their communities reveals that a general improvement in the economy has been accompanied by increased inequality, concentration of land ownership, and out-migration, a division of labor by gender that is detrimental to women, and damage to human health and the environment due to increased use of pesticides.

The evolution and resilience of community-based land tenure in rural Mexico

This paper examines the evolution of ejido tenure in Mexico since the 1992 constitutional and legal reforms in that country. Prior to the Mexican Revolution, communal tenure had all but disappeared, but since 1920 community-based tenure re-emerged to become the dominant tenure form in Mexico. The paper investigates ejido land tenure through an examination of ejido governance structures and the tenure rules relating to the acquisition, transfer and extinction of land and resource rights. It draws on community-level research and numerous published case studies, relevant laws, and on data describing the status of ejidos countrywide. This reveals a diverse set of practices, which in many instances depart from the rules as defined in the Agrarian Law and even in internal community regulations. Land tenure plays a critical mediating role in the inter-relationship between humans and the environment. Using the framework of resilience I examine the persistence of ejido tenure and its dynamics in the aftermath of major land policy and legal reforms. Three major ‘shocks’ are identified which are seriously challenging the resilience of ejidos. These are the 1992 legal reforms, NAFTA and the resulting out-migration from rural Mexico, and urbanization. I conclude that ejidos have generally been resilient enough to accommodate the 1992 reforms, but problems with cross-generational transfers that stem in part from labor migration, and urbanization have set ejidos on a course that could ultimately overcome all but the most resilient communities.

Deprived land‐use intensification in shifting cultivation: the population pressure hypothesis revisited

AbstractThis article provides a theoretical framework, based on optimal control theory, to analyze farm households' land‐use intensification decisions in forest‐based shifting cultivation (slash‐and‐burn) agroecosystems. The main results from the analysis generally coincide with the “Population Pressure Hypothesis” (PPH) as an important driver of soil degradation due to the so‐called “fallow crisis” or “deprived land‐use intensification” in shifting cultivation. However, the model also shows, from a supply perspective, that such a vicious circle of lower yields and greater forest land clearing may be avoided when the production elasticity of on‐farm labor outweighs the elasticity of substitution between farm labor and soil fertility. Furthermore, using data from shifting cultivating households from Yucatán, Mexico, we calibrate the effect of changes in population density. The numerical analysis suggests that by contrast to better‐off households, when population density increases, poorer shifting cultivating households' optimal labor allocation strategy is to further extensify land use by clearing more forest in the village common property land, or ejido land.

Family Property and the Limits of Intervention: The Article 27 Reforms and the PROCEDE Programme in Mexico

AbstractIn the 1990s the Mexican peasants witnessed the introduction of a new Agrarian Law and the implementation of the land regularization programme, PROCEDE. In this article it is demonstrated that the privatization of previously communally held ejido land did not lead to the promised dynamic land market, nor to an increase in agricultural productivity. On the basis of an in–depth study of land tenure practices in the ejido La Canoa in Western Mexico, it is shown that the changes of 1992 did not address the main problems of peasant agriculture. The new Agrarian Law legalized practices which, although illegal, had already become quite common in ejidos throughout Mexico. In addition, it is argued that legal security does not necessarily reside in official registration by the state, but can also be based on local recognition of land rights. The main argument of the article is that property consists of complex sets of claims, rights and obligations that cannot be manipulated by forms of state intervention that reduce land tenure predicaments to technical problems.

Illegal Practices and the Re-Enchantment of Governmental Techniques

After the Mexican Revolution (1920–1920) large landholdings were expropriated and handed over to the rural population formally organized in communities known as ejidos. The Agrarian Law stipulated that ejidatarios (members of ejidos) acquired only usufructuary rights to the individual plots allocated to them, and were not empowered to sell or rent them, nor to retain land which they ceased to work. Transactions concerning plots of ejido land, illegal until 1992, were studied in the ejido of La Canoa, a small hamlet in Jalisco.It was found that many ejidatarios migrated, usually to the USA , for periods of years, and rented out their land while they were away. They ran the risk of having their land taken away on the occasion of the periodic Investigation of Use of Plots (IUP) by the Ministry of Agrarian Reform (SRA). However, by putting a relative in charge of the land, and by paying the small annual tax in person, the ejidatario could often avoid this. Other ejidatarios would normally follow the strategy of not raising objections. Sales of land to other ejidatarios also occurred. Although they often disapproved for social reasons, others again found it preferable not to interfere. The ejido assembly would approve such transfers under the pretence that they were ‘voluntary transfers of use rights’, that the land had been abandoned and allocated to the purchaser, or that the purchaser was the vendor’s heir. Officials of the SRA were paid not to make problems, and no sale was ever cancelled. When in 1992 a new Agrarian Law was enacted allowing sales, ejidatarios began to engage in sales in the ‘new way’, through the use of documents drawn by lawyers. Although the measuring and registration of plots, required by the Law as a condition for sales, had not yet occurred, they were confident that the sales would not be cancelled.It is seen that the negotiation, bargaining and execution of illegal transactions were carried out in a discursive context formed by the formal agrarian legislation. The SRA lacked the capacity or information to exercise detailed control over land, and so long as the ejidatarios were not divided among themselves, they could ‘keep the law at a distance’. Governmental techniques were re-enchanted: thus the IUP turned into a procedure for the legalisation of illegal or formally defective transactions; documents such as tax receipts became ‘proof’ of continued residence in the ejido. ‘Shadow procedures’ were created to conceal illegal transactions. It is argued that these illegal land transactions became established in a patterning of processes which may be best understood not as based on a normative order but as a force field in which the patterns emanated from conflict and competition.