Land reform in Mexico

Before the 1910 Mexican Revolution that overthrew Porfirio Díaz, most of the land was owned by a single elite ruling class. Legally there was no slavery or serfdom; however, those with heavy debts, native wage workers, or peasants, were essentially debt-slaves to the landowners. A small percentage of rich landowners owned most of the country's farm land. With so many people brutally suppressed, revolts and revolution were common in Mexico. To relieve the Mexican peasant's plight and stabilize the country, various leaders tried different types of agrarian land reform.

During the first five years of agrarian reform, very few hectares were evenly distributed.Land reform attempts by past leaders and governments proved futile, as the revolution from 1910-1920 had been a battle of dependent labor, capitalism, and industrial ownership. Fixing the Agrarian problem was a question of education, methods, and creating new social relationships through co-operative effort and government assistance. Initially the agrarian reform led to the development of many Ejidos for communal land use, while parceled ejidos emerged in the later years.

Land tenure in Mexico has over the long term seen the transfer of lands into the hands of private proprietors engaged in agricultural production for profit. But the social and economic problems that resulted from this concentration of ownership brought reformist solutions that attempted to reverse this trend. In the current era, there is a retreat from agrarian land reform and a return to consolidation of land holding of large enterprises.

The rich lands of central and southern Mexico were the home to dense, hierarchically organized, settled populations that produced agricultural surpluses, allowing the development of sectors that did not directly cultivate the soil. These populations lived in settlements and held land in common, although generally they worked individual plots. During the Aztec period, roughly 1450 to 1521, the Nahuas of central Mexico had names for civil categories of land, many of which persisted into the colonial era. There were special lands attached to the office of ruler (tlatoani) called tlatocatlalli; land devoted to the support of temples, tecpantlalli, but also private lands of the nobility, pillalli. Lands owned by the calpulli, the local kin-based social organization, were calpullalli. Most commoners held individual plots of land, often in scattered locations, which were worked by a family and rights passed to subsequent generations. A community member could lose those usufruct rights if they did not cultivate the land. A person could lose land as a result of gambling debts, a type of alienation from which the inference can be drawn that land was private property.

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