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...
