This useful study treats the complicated evolution of agrarian policy in Mexico between 1810 and 1910. The author, an attorney who has served as the jefe del Departamento de Asesoría Jurídica y Agraria of the Instituto Nacional Indigenista, presents an ample résumé of agrarian-related laws and decrees, ranging from the promulgations of the Cortes of Cádiz and Hidalgo to the Ley del Pueblo of Alberto Santa Fe. His treatment, however, also touches upon a wider range of sociological and economic questions.
The nation’s agrarian problem is first set against the backdrop of the War for Independence, including a discussion of the economy in generalized terms and of the agrarian programs of Hidalgo and Morelos. The rest of the book follows this pattern, recording the locations and dates for some of the principal rebellions and treating the agrarian programs of Juan Alvarez, the agraristas of the Congreso Constituyente of 1857, the Church-state battle over ecclesiastical properties, and, finally, the colonization program and legislation of the Porfiriato.
The author has done well to criticize the self-interest in the Spanish decrees emanating from Cádiz, intended, in part, “para frenar” the insurrection in the colony. Mexican heroes, however, such as Morelos and the later Liberals, are not held as closely to the light. He correctly describes Morelos as the creator of a disciplined armed force composed of rancheros, the “clase media rural,” but perhaps it is wishful thinking when he argues that they constituted an army with an “ideology well identified with the interests of the indígena” (p. 56). No mention is made of Morelos’s suppression of the communalist movement near Acapulco or of his refusal to allow campesino land takeovers in those areas under his control.
The contradictions between Liberal land programs and those of the “precursors of socialism” are well presented. The desamortization laws are given a balanced presentation, although the author apparently feels that the Porfirian regime committed abuses of these laws against the villages far in excess of anything foreseen by the writers of the 1857 Constitution. It should be pointed out that legislation passed periodically between the 1820s and 1850s enabled large and violently opposed transfers of village lands to private holdings. By 1876, most village properties in central Mexico had already been alienated. By not perceiving the question of changing land tenure as an ongoing process associated with the rise of capitalism and later industrialism, the author joins many others in placing the onus of blame for a landless peasantry in the late nineteenth century on the Díaz administration.
The book concludes with a depiction of rural social stratification and 1910 land ownership data. The author has an impressive command of his subject and the result is well worth the reading for those interested in one of Mexico’s most basic questions.
