Mexican Liberal Agrarian Policies, Nineteenth Century

Nineteenth-century liberal agrarian policy focused on the abolition of corporate landholding. The disentailment of church lands and the division of indigenous communal lands were both seen as essential to the formation of an independent state, the basis of which would be the individual property-owning citizen. Liberals touted the end of corporate landholding as a necessary requirement for the country's economic, political, and financial progress: It would put more land into market circulation; theoretically ensure equality through the elimination of corporate privileges; generate new national allegiances by breaking the material basis for communal loyalties; and create a larger rural property tax base (communal lands were not subject to direct property taxes) and a source of credit for the fledgling state.

After Mexico gained independence, the Catholic Church and indigenous communities held extensive amounts of arable land in the central and southern parts of the country as corporate or entailed properties. Although the Cortes of Cádiz in 1813 had called for an end to corporate land-holding, the Mexican constitution of 1824 had no such provisions. Individual states passed their own decrees, but these had limited, if any, success in the decades immediately following independence. At the national level the advent of liberal agrarian policy can be dated from the June 1856 implementation of the Lerdo Law (named after treasury minister Miguel Lerdo de Tejada, 1812–1861), which explicitly called for the sale of church lands not used for religious purposes and the division of indigenous communal lands into individual, private plots.

Part of a broader assault on the church at mid-century, the law decreed that the church's urban and rural real estate be sold and the church prohibited from acquiring land again in the future. Church lands would be offered first to existing tenants at a reduced rate to encourage their purchase, but, many tenants, out of loyalty to the church, refused to buy. In such instances, the land was sold at public auction, often ending up in the hands of hacendados and speculators. Similarly, the law took aim at lands held in usufruct by largely indigenous communities based upon colonial land grants. Systems of tenure within communities were quite diverse, with forms of private ownership mixing with forms of communal tenure. As well as lands under cultivation by villagers, there were lands rented to bring in cash, and ejidos, which were pasture and woodland areas initially not subject to the Lerdo Law. Liberal policies sought to divide such lands into individual, private plots in order to turn communal landworkers into small landholders, and stipulations were put in place that, in theory, would permit Indian villagers to purchase the land they worked at a nominal fee.

Although expropriations of the church lands began immediately upon the passage of the Lerdo Law, the surveying and division of indigenous lands proceeded haphazardly. In many parts of the country lands continued to be held communally until well in to the Porfiriato (1876–1910). When land divisions did proceed apace, at times they were promoted as much by sectors within villages that were eager to capitalize on changing markets and policies as by federal officials or large landowners.

These liberal land policies were complemented by the surveying and sale of so-called terrenos baldíos, or vacant lands, particular in the far north of the country during the Porfiriato. Such lands theoretically belonged to the federal government but were often used by villagers for grazing and hunting. These activities were increasingly curtailed as survey companies delineated the bounds of the baldíos, receiving a third of the land in payment with the remaining two-thirds offered up for sale. As was the case with communal land divisions, the newly surveyed lands often ended up in the hands of hacendandos, speculators, and foreign investors. By the end of Porfirio Díaz's reign in 1911 it is estimated that much of the land in Mexico had been divided, surveyed, and put into circulation. Though the ideal may have been to create a large class of small-landowners, in reality land became increasingly concentrated in fewer hands in much of the country. To this the liberals had little response, given their primary allegiance to private property, although critics such as Wistano Luis Orozco and Andrés Molina Enríquez soon arose. Their voices proved prophetic: Nineteenth-century liberal agrarian policy is often directly linked to the coming of the Mexican Revolution in 1910.

See alsoAgrarian Reform; Lerdo de Tejada, Miguel; Religion in Mexico, Catholic Church and Beyond.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bazant, Jan. Los bienes de la Iglesia en Mexico, 1856–1875. Aspectos economicos y sociales de la Revolucion liberal. Mexico, D.F.: El Colegio de México, 1971.

Hale, Charles. Liberalism in the Age of Mora. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968.

Hernández Chávez, Alicia. Anenecuilco: Memoria y vida de un pueblo. Mexico City: El Colegio de Mexico, 1991.

Holden, Robert. Mexico and the Survey of Public Lands: The Management of Modernization, 1876–1911. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1994.

Kourí, Emilio. A Pueblo Divided: Business, Property, and Community in Papantla, Mexico. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004.

Molina Enríquez, Andrés. Los grandes problemas nacionales. [1909]. Mexico City: Ediciones Era, 1978.

Nugent, Daniel. Spent Cartridges of Revolution: An Anthropological History of Namiquipa, Chihuahua. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.

                                  Raymond B. Craib