A few weeks ago I took a class on the Mexican Revolution, and the idea of ejido captured my attention. I just wrote the longest paper I’ve even done in Spanish on this subject (1000 words is so little in English!), and here’s a very brief rundown.Please excuse my English, I am losing my ability to write properly. In Spanish you can write 50 word sentences, and it’s ok!
The Mexican Revolution was, to simplify a lot, a struggle over land rights. Indigenous Mexicans were working their traditional lands in pretty much the same way as our Indigenous peoples (ie in terrible conditions, for nothing more than food and accommodation) and racking up huge debts to the owners of the big haciendas (farms). The revolutionaries won the war and in the 1920s Zapata turned down the presidency and started to redistribute land to indigenous peasants (campesinos). His motto was ‘the land belongs to he who works it with his own hands’ (or some such, that’s my translation!). About half of all arable land was redistributed to around 3 million people.
Large areas were given to cooperatives, who then divided it up into ejidos — plots of land that are tended by one family. You couldn’t sell your ejido, but you could pass it on to your children, and it could be taken away from you if you weren’t using it — basically, instead of owning it outright, you have stewardship of it as long as it’s productive. Ejidos were set up more to make people self sufficient, and they are still a feature of Mexico’s land tenure system. They are different to the communal lands here, which are worked in cooperatives administered by indigenous elders and generally produce together (ie ten plots will all grow the same type of lentils, and they’ll all pool their resources to sell it together).
So here’s the problem: ejidos are really, really unproductive. I’m sure they worked well enough in the years when no-one had farm machinery and everyone had 15 kids to cultivate their plots, but nowadays it’s just not happening. Also, when the idea of ejidos was thought up, moving up in the class system, getting an education or a job outside of manual farm labour, was unthinkable for the proletariat. Now, although this place is, really, screwed up in terms of education and opportunity, you don’t HAVE to be a campesino if your dad was, but because of how Mexican people generally handle their money (all of it goes into houses and *things*, as there’s not a strong culture of investment and after multiple crises they are rightly distrustful of banks and cash money) all of an ejidatario family’s resources are tied up in their ejido. They can’t sell up and leave for better work or educational possibilities, so they’re stuck in rural areas, tending unproductive plots and eking out a very difficult existence. So they’re selling. ‘Under the water’ (not table… an interesting mental picture, I think).
In 1992 the law was apparently changed to allow ejidatarios to privatise and sell, but no-one (not even lawyers) knows exactly what the situation is. I’ve found this to be the case with respect to a lot of legal stuff here. Because people are scared to buy it without the usual legal protections and proper land titles, they only get very low prices, and guess who’s buying? Big rich landowners, who are consolidating multiple ejidos into big farms. I have no idea how this situation could be improved, but I think it’s an interesting example of how changes within a society and in the local and international economic situation complicate policies that were, at the beginning, very well thought out and fair. If world economies had not become so intertwined and Mexico had remained undeveloped, with little opportunidad for movement between social classes, I can see how the ejidal system would have greatly improved the lot of campesinos. But that’s not the case, and the challenge now is to find a balance between instability and rigid systems that don’t permit changes with the passage of time.
