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Land and Politics in Mexico

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2009

Robert F. Adie
Robert F. Adie
Affiliation:
University of Winnipeg
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Abstract

In the many volumes written on the “agrarian question” in Mexico, probably no subject has received as much attention as the ejido, village communal land. Whether polemical or objective, most of these works have been concerned with the ejido primarily in economic terms. Questions have been raised about its importance as an economic unit, government action to improve its output, and its reform or even abolition for economic reasons. Related studies have been concerned with the ejido in terms of social justice, that is, the extent to which and the ways in which the ejidatarios, members of the ejido, have benefitted from the revolution. A few studies have been sociological or anthropological in nature, examining the ejido in terms of how it reinforces or breaks down traditional social and cultural patterns. While utilizing the data presented in these various studies, this note is concerned with the political aspect of the ejido or more specifically, how the ejido is a device which, both alone and in conjunction with a subculture of poverty, allows political control to be exercised over a vast peasant population engaged for the most part in primitive agriculture while urban Mexico proceeds with industrialization.

In the early 1920s George McCutcheon McBride insisted in his major study of Mexican land tenure patterns that the Indians had to be kept on the land.

Type
Notes
Information
Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique , Volume 8 , Issue 2 , June 1975 , pp. 299 - 305
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association (l'Association canadienne de science politique) and/et la Société québécoise de science politique 1975

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References

1 The Land Systems of Mexico (New York 1923), 171

2 A general discussion of industrialization in Mexico prior to 1910 can be found in Adie, Robert F., Agrarianism in the Mexican Political System, doctoral dissertation, University of Texas, 1970Google Scholar, “The Background of the Agrarian Myth.”

3 Wilkie, James W., The Mexican Revolution: Federal Expenditures and Social Change since 1910 (Berkeley 1967), 256.Google Scholar

This is a summary of “a manuscript in preparation for Yale University's Economic Growth Center” by Professor Clark W. Reynolds.

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5 Chevalier, François, “Ejido y estabilidad en México” in Ciencias politicas y sociales XI, número 42 (Octubre/Diciembre 1965), 444Google Scholar

6 For a statistical description of this poverty see Wilkie, Mexican Revolution, “An Index of Poverty.”

8 Agricultural data in Mexico is incomplete and, because of definitional problems, quite inexact. See Brandenburg, Frank, The Making of Modern Mexico (Englewood Cliffs, N.J. 1966), 253.Google Scholar

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12 There were only 900 collective type ejidos in 1960.

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