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Peasants and the Law: a History of Land Tenure and Conflict in the Huasteca

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2009

Frans J. Schryer
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The Huasteca, a region with a semi-tropical climate and abundant vegetation, has become one of the most violent and conflict-ridden parts of rural Mexico. Starting in the mid-1970s, a series of land invasions involving mainly Nahuatl-speaking Indian peasants broke out in the district of Huejutla in the northeastern portion of the state of Hidalgo (also known as the Huasteca Hidalguense). Militant agrarian peasants, who cut fences, confiscated coffee orchards and ripped out cultivated grasses, justified their use of direct action both in terms of Mexico's agrarian code and Nahuatl notions of village boundaries; similarly, local landowners appealed to their rights as property owners and the legal system in general in order to persuade law enforcement agents to evict peasant intruders and have them arrested. Many poor peasants, who live in usually cohesive communities, also became bitterly divided over whether or not they should join in land invasions, and some people on both sides took the law into their own hands and meted out their own version of justice through abductions, corporal punishment and even executions. The resulting violence and political turmoil culminated in the expropriation, by the Mexican government, of 18,000 hectares of privately owned land and the implementation of a programme of social reform.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Latin American Studies , Volume 18 , Issue 2 , November 1986 , pp. 283 - 311
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1986

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References

1 The author of this article conducted fieldwork in this region between 1981 and 1985. Approximately two years of participant observation and interviewing (spread out over various trips) were complemented with research in various archives. This research was made possible by funds awarded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

2 Pequeña propiedad (‘small property’) is privately owned, commoditized land. Ejido land, modelled after a type of communal landholding dating back to the colonial era, was established by the Mexican government after the Revolution. Ejido land is officially owned by the state which confers usufruct rights to land reform recipients (ejidatarios) who must govern themselves according to a national agrarian code. Legally recognized communal land belongs to communities which are allowed to determine the distribution and use of such lands according to local tradition. While groups of peasants may have to wait many years before their ejidos are officially granted or their communities legally recognized (or turned into ejidos), and while there are often conflicts over boundaries due to poor technical studies, it is theoretically impossible in law for any piece of land to belong simultaneously to more than one form of tenure.

3 These nine municipios had a total population of 68,967 inhabitants in 1978 and 191,345 in 1980. Secretaría de Agricultura y Recursos Hidraúlicos (SARH), Comisión de Estudios del Río Panuco, Huasteca Hidalguense. Estadísticos generates (June 1982). Each municipio (roughly the equivalent of counties in the English-speaking world) is headed by a presidente municipal (roughly the equivalent of a mayor) who is theoretically elected by the population at large. Apart from an advisory council, and a tax collector (who usually acts as representative of the police department as well), the presidente municipal administers the area under his jurisdiction with the help of one or two representatives called jueces in each of the villages or hamlets that belong to the cabecera.

4 It has the only daily market place and gasoline station and the only banks, hotels and movie theatre in the northern part of the state of Hidalgo.

5 For example, the municipio of Atlapexco had no privately owned rural properties according to the official agricultural census of 1970; information concerning different types of crops grown and number of head of cattle are listed only for 8 ejidos. Estadística, Directión General de (1975), V Censo agrícola-ganaderoy ejidal (Hidalgo, Mexico, 1970).Google Scholar

6 Unlike the official agricultural census, a map of the municipio of Atlapexco in the state branch of the Land Reform Secretariat (Comisión Agraria Mixta, whose archives will be referred to hereafter as ACAM) in the city of Pachuca did indicate some areas of privately owned farms outside of ejido boundaries.

7 According to the registration list (padrón general) of all rural enterprises (predios rísticos) between 1940 and 1982 in the archives of the municipal land tax offices (Recaudacción de rentas, hereafter referred to as ARR) of the municipios of Atlapexco and Yahualica. The land registry offices of Huautla, Huazalingo and Huejutla did list some communities as well, some of which were listed as ejidos only after 1984 – Yahualica, Huautla and Huejutla.

8 Younger peasants of both ethnic groups, although quite knowledgeable about who had real access to various pieces of land, were especially misinformed about the official legal status (or statutes) of such land, although many literate mestizos with primary education, including school-teachers, also do not fully understand the official legal categories of landholdings that apply to Mexico as a whole, much less the history of the land tenure of their own home villages. One older, illiterate Nahuatl peasant was probably more cognizant about the true nature of the legal system; in replying to my enquiries about the origins of his ejido in the northern part of Huejutla, he replied, ‘it is the papers that talk’.

9 The regional historian Teodomiro Manzano, in the first part of his Anales del Estado de Hidalgo (Pachuca, Hidalgo, 1922)Google Scholar mentions that the highland district of Zacualtipán became part of the district of Huejutla in 1849 and that this new district was subsequently enlarged in 1865 with a new capital in Jímenez (in the state of San Luis Potosí) during the French occupation of Mexico. When the state of Hidalgo was formed in 1869, the district of Huejutla included parts of the present districts of Metztitlan and Molango but by 1871 it was reduced to its present size. See Uribe, José García, Recorriendo el Estado de Hidalgo (Mexico, D.F., Gráficos Olimpo, 1979), p. 32.Google Scholar

10 The colonial history of the alcaldía mayor of Yahualica is described in detail by de Gortari, Luka in Pueblos indios en la Jurisdictión de la Alcaldía Mayor de Yahualica (1650–1800). Cuadernos de la Casa Chata no. 80 (Mexico, CIESAS, 1983).Google Scholar Huejutla was a corregimiento in 1580 and became an alcaldía mayor (with jurisdiction over part of Huazalingo) sometime at the beginning of the 17th century. See Isaac, Piña P., ‘Huejutla: épocas precortesiana y colonial’, (n.d.). Instituto Científico y Literario, Universidad Autónoma de Hidalgo.Google Scholar

11 De Gortari, Pueblos Indios…, op. cit., pp. 64–70.

12 Various documents relating to wills and litigations, located in the district judicial offices of Huejutla (Archivo histórico del Juzgado de Primera Instancia de Huejutla, hereafter referred to as AJPI) refer to such haciendas in terms of these monetary values. Some of these haciendas, such as Tecoluco Calpan (Huautla), San Felipe (Orizatlán) and Teacal (Huejutla) were condueñazgos as described by George McBride, McCutcheon, The Land Systems of Mexico (New York, Octagon Books, 1971), pp. 103–4.Google Scholar

13 See Wolf, Eric, ‘Closed Corporate Peasant Communities in Mesoamerica and Central Java’, in Southwest J. of Anthrop., no. 131, (1957) pp. 1–18Google Scholar and Tax, Sol (ed.) The Heritage of Conquest (Glencoe, Illinois, Free Press, 1962)Google Scholar. Although Wolf and other scholars first analyzed this civil-religious hierarchy as a levelling mechanism that prevented the development of class differences in Indian communities, more recent historians and ethnographers have argued that such traditional institutions are not necessarily incompatible with a process of internal class differentiation. See Cancian, Frank, Economics and Prestige in a Mayan Community (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1965)Google Scholar; Chamoux, Marie-Noëlle, Indiens de la Sierra (Paris, Editions L'Harmattan, 1981), pp. 350–64.Google Scholar

14 Information about such labour rents were obtained through numerous interviews in Nahuatl with older informants who had actually lived in such haciendas prior to 1910. See also Stiles, Neville, ‘Nahuatl in the Huasteca Hidalguense: A Case Study in the Sociology of Language’, Ph.D. thesis, Centre for Latin American Linguistic Studies, University of St Andrews, Scotland (1982), p. 46.Google Scholar The assumption was made that the relations of production in such haciendas would not have changed that much between the late colonial period and the early 1920s, when pre-revolutionary forms of exploitation still continued.

15 ‘Autos por los Naturales de Apoxochilco’, a manuscript (in Nahuatl) included in appendix one of Neville Stiles, ‘Nahuatl…’, op. cit.. (pp. 369–82), together with a translation into English, deals with a litigation in 1582 between the inhabitants of an Indian pueblo and a cattle estancia owned by Alonso Ortiz de Zuñiga. Archivo General de la Natión, Mexico, Ramo de Tierras vol. 2867, Exp. 41: Fs. 52 Huejutla, P°.

16 The municipios of San Felipe Orizatlán, Atlapexco and Cuacuilco were all erected in 1870 although the latter two were subsequently amalgamated with Yahualica and Huejutla respectively. Periódico Oficial del Estado de Hidalgo, no. 93 (28 12), 1870.Google Scholar

17 Numerous former landowners have shown me the original títulos de Anaya, corresponding to the properties they have lost (which they have kept for possible future litigation or for nostalgia); most of these titles were originally made out to people with Indian surnames and they all bear the date of 1888 as that of the original granting of private titles. In some cases, each title corresponded to a specific numbered lot. ‘Información ad perpetuam, promovido por el Sr. Antonio Sánchez, vecino de Mecatlan’, mpio. de Yahualica, 20 marzo, 1928. AJPI, Huejutla.

18 The juez conciliador, a position that was replaced with that of juez menor in the 1980s, was still the authority who made up all such documents legalizing the sale of parcels of land within these communal boundaries right up until the mid 1970s. Only wealthier farmers, however, eventually had their deeds officially registered with a notary in Huejutla and paid their taxes in an individual manner.

19 A sociedad is legally a private property owned by several people who constitute socios or partners. In some cases such sociedades originated in the purchase of an already privately owned estate by the majority of inhabitants who had already established their residence on such a property. This form of property was also commonly used in mestizo municipios. See Schryer, Frans, The Rancheros of Pisaflores (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1980), p. 44.Google Scholar

20 AJPI, ‘escritura de convenio entre los indígenas vecinos de Ixcatlán y Tehuetlán con los llamados de razón constituyendose en sociedad’.

21 Interviews conducted in both Spanish and Nahuatl with Francisco Naranjo, Tecolotitla, 8 August, 1981; Luís San Juan Aguado, Yahualica, 30 September, 1981; Camilo Ortega, Huazalingo, 2 June, 1984; José Lara, Mesa Larga, 1 June, 1984. Only inhabitants of villages who fulfilled these obligations to their administrative centres were allowed to carry out slash-and-burn cultivation and to collect firewood in sections of land set aside for common use, regardless of how such land was legally registered. The majority of these same ‘communal’ peasants also regularly worked for wages on privately owned ranchos in order to earn money to buy many of the necessities of daily life.

22 Anaya, Canuto E., Bosquejo Geográfico-Histórico de la Diócesis de Tulancingo (Guadalupe Hidalgo, D. F., La Hidalguense, 1918), p. 51Google Scholar. Another rebellion which broke out in the nearby town of Tamazunchale, S.L.P. spread northward to Ciudad Maíz. See Schryer, Frans, ‘La Sierra de Jacala: Ranchos and Rancheros in Northern Hidalgo’, in Benjamin, Thomas and McNellie, William (eds.), Other Mexico: (Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press, 1984).Google Scholar

23 Schryer, Frans, ‘A Ranchero Economy in Northwestern Hidalgo, 1880–1920’, in Hispanic American Historical Review, vol. 59, no. 3, pp. 418–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

24 For the Huejutla region see Vargas, Eutiquio Mendoza, Gotitas de Placer y Chubascos de Amargura (Mexico, D.F., Gráficas Galeza, 1960)Google Scholar. For the Sierra de Jacala region see Schryer, Frans J. 1980, ‘The Role of the Rancheros of Central Mexico in the Mexican Revolution’, in Canadian Journal of Latin American Studies vol. 4, no. 7, (1979) pp. 21–41.Google Scholar

25 Interviews in Nahuatl with Teodilo Gómez, Mecatlan, 16 April, 1982 and in Spanish with Juvencio Oajaca, 30 October, 1981; Camarino Ramos, Huautla, 4 May, 1983; Daniel Salazar, on various occasions in Mexico City. The charging of personal taxes, as well as municipal taxes on agricultural production were also recorded in some of the older padrones of the 1920s and 1930s. ARR of Yahualica.

26 Numerous older peasants, mainly Nahuatl-speaking, remember clearly how each village within the boundaries of haciendas had to send groups of women for a week at a time, mainly to wash clothes and to cook in the houses owned by local landowners. That this custom still continued as late as the 1930s was further confirmed by interviews in Spanish with mestizo teachers and merchants, such as Nicolas Hernández, Atlapexco, 5 November, 1981 and Daniel Hernández, 24 May, 1982.

27 All the files relating to the original petitions and subsequent granting of such ejidos (first provisionally by the state governor in 1940 and later by presidential decree, mainly in 1955), are available in the historical archives of the Land Reform Secretariat (previous known as the Departamento de Asuntos Agrarios y Colonización). Although theoretically accessible to the public for consultation, I was denied access to these archives in 1981 and 1982 (these archives, which had been transferred from Mexico City to Pachuca, were not opened until 1985!) However, in 1983 and 1984 I was finally given permission by another official to consult the archives of the Comisión Agraria Mixta of the state of Hidalgo which had copies of many of these same documents.

28 General Juvencio Nochebuena, the most influential ranchero and politician of the region, personally supervised the repartition of various haciendas, including those of Tamoyon and Tepotzco and for this reason is still considered a ‘friend of the peasants’ in many parts of the northern zone.

However, his role in implementing Cárdenas' land reform in the formerly predominant communal zone was quite different. For example, while he ordered a Nahuatl-speaking landowner in Tenexco to sell parts of his 600 hectares estate to a sociedad of 12 neighbours, he turned a blind eye on the failure to implement the granting of what later became fictitious ejidos, although some of the petitions for such ejidos and all the documents accepting the provisional grants were signed by his own ranchero relatives or his political henchmen (such as Pedro Vélez and Pedro Larragoiti). ACAM (all the documents relating to ejidos in Yahualica and Atlapexco).

While Juvencio Nochebuena, who owned one of the largest ranchos in the southern region, did ‘give away’ a portion of his own land to the peasants of Atlapexco and Tecolotitla, he also regularly ordered Indian peasants from a large number of villages to work (clearing) the pastures on his own private estate or to bring him wood.

Middle-aged or older men in practically every one of the 30-plus hamlets and villages I visited in the municipios of Atlapexco and Yahualica told me about how they had personally worked either without remuneration (except for a shot of aguardiente or local liquor) or for wages which they were forced to accept in advance.

29 Narciso Naranjo, a retired school teacher who lives in Huautla, told me how all schoolteachers were ordered to help organize land reform petitions and how he personally accompanied several engineers and peasants from several villages in Atlapexco and Huautla to measure ‘village boundaries’. His brother, who owned a small rancho inside the ejido of Achiquihuixtla, upon asking at that time what implications such legal procedures would have for the status of the farm he had inherited from his father, was told that the creation of an ejido would not change anything; in 1979 his sons were told by the peasants of this village that they had to either move to the village of Achiquihuixtla or else leave their isolated homestead, which they did.

30 ACAM, ramo ejidal, exp. 1463 (Cochotla); exp. 1419 (Tenexco).

31 The general secretary of the Regional Agrarian Committee and subsequently representative of League of Indian Communities for the district was a ranchero (who owned several hundred hectares of land) from the mestizo village of Huitznopala (which was located inside the boundaries of the Nahuatl ‘ejido’ of Zoquitipan). He later became presidente municipal of Huejutla and was assassinated by political enemies of Juvencio Nochebuena in 1945.

32 According to a former ‘comisariado’ of the Nahuatl village of Mesa Larga, who had also been a small landowner, the position of comisariado was created in order to make sure that no irregularities occur in the buying or selling of land titles and that no one be deprived of his land by force. In contrast, the previously landless peasants-turned-pistoleros who became members of agrarian committees in Yahualica and Mecatlan, usurped previously unclaimed communal land as their own or used their political position to charge fees or to confiscate part of the harvest of their more humble and peaceful neighbours. In still other villages, such as Santa María the same comisariado served for so many years that everyone forgot that this post even existed and I was on one occasion told in a facetious manner that the people in charge of this post ‘were in charge of organizing dances’.

33 According to the tax collector for the municipio of Atlapexco in 1982, the jueces of villages which had their own section of land in the form of a sociedad (even though these villages were anexos of pueblos that had been turned into ‘ejidos’) were the first to present themselves to his office each year to pay the taxes for the property that they owned in common.

34 ACAM, ramo comunal, exp. 5–2214 (Santa Teresa), exp. 5–2238 (Tlalchiyuahualica), exp. 5–2239 (Mecatlan). See also Periódico Oficial del Estado de Hidalgo, no. 20, 24 06 (1965).Google Scholar

35 The four ejidos in question, Barrio Hondo, Barrio Bajo, Barrio Alto and Barrio del Salto between them shared the central plaza. Theoretically, the hospital was located in one ejido, the Catholic church in another and the kindergarden in yet another!

36 See Feder, Ernest, ‘La irracional competencia entre el hombre y el animal por los recursos agricolas en los paises subdesarrollados’, in Trimestre Económico, vol. 47, no. 1 (1980)Google Scholar and Frans Schtyer, The Rancheros of Pisaflores op. cit.

37 Interviews with Cleto Mendoza, Huejutla, 12May, 1985 and with comisariado of the ejido of La Corrala, La Corrala, 16 June, 1985.

38 Letter from Pascual Ruiz to Ing. Jorge Cruickshank García, n.d. (circa 1973) in the personal archives of José Baron Larios, curato, Atlapexco. These events were also reconstructed on the basis of extensive interview with peasants as well as former landowners from the villages of Pepeyocatitla, Olma, and Yahualica; I spent at least a month in each of these places.

39 Echeverría also set up a Program for Integrated Rural Development that included credit for peasant producers, in order to eliminate middlemen, and an extensive, labour-intensive rural road building project that raised wages in marginal areas. See Hellman, Judith, Mexico in Crisis (New York, Holmes and Meier, 1983).Google Scholar

During Echeverría's term of office, a combination of radical rhetoric and a failure to carry out a truly comprehensive programme of economic reform resulted in massive inflation which eventually created greater suffering for Mexico's peasant population. Ibid., pp. 214–15.

40 Declaratión de Nicolás Hernández Hernández, 28 julio, 1975 in personal archives of José Barón Larios. See also Consenso no. 23 (11. 1977), 213Google Scholar and Reveles, José, ‘Ahi vienen los indios’ in Proceso no. 70 (05, 1978), pp. 20–21.Google Scholar

41 Ibid, and Castillo, Heberto, ‘Caminos de violencia en Huejutla’ in Proceso no. 79, (1978).Google Scholar

42 Interviews with Agustín Castillo (former member of Consejo Supremo Nahuatl and presently an employee of the land reform office in Huejutla), 14 May, 1985 and with professor Juventino Huexotl, Chililico, 3 May, 1985.

Similar divisions between comuneros and ejidatarios also occurred in Panacaxtlán (where the peasants from their anexo of Teacal wanted an ejido) and more recently in Ixcatlán, which is the Nahuatl pueblo with the largest number of anexos (approximately 40) in the district of Huejutla.

43 Interviews with Marcelo Hernández (the lawyer representing the comuneros), Huejutla, 3 May, 1985 and Nicolas Hernández (one of the comuneros), 5 May, 1985.

44 Letter from Ing. Cesar Mancilla Guzmán to Banco de Crédito Rural, Sa., 27 November 1975, ACAM, exp. 984 (Mecatlan); Letter from Gandy, legal advisér to the Banco de Crédito Rural to Comisión Agraria Mixta, 7 August, 1978, ACAM, exp. 1532 (Zoquitipan).

45 The URECHH was founded at a meeting in the village of Limontitla in 1979 with the help of former PMT organizers. Interview, Modesto Hernández Medina (president of the URECHH), Huejutla, 3 June, 1985. This independent peasant organization subsequently became closely linked to Rosell de la Lama, governor of Hidalgo. Its principal peasant leader, Benito Hernández of the village of La Corrala was assassinated on 11 October, 1983. Miguel Angel Chapa, Granados, ‘Plaza Pública’, Unomásuno (12 10. 1983)Google Scholar. There are two theories concerning who had this leader assassinated; some people argue that he was shot on the order of local caciques who had lost their land while others are convinced that the government itself arranged his assassination because he was becoming too radical and independent (for example that same year peasants of the URECHH had attacked the offices of the CNC and the PRI in Huejutla). The local authorities have not yet been able to determine who was responsible for this nor any of the other politically motivated assassinations in the region. The fact that none of these mysteries has been solved (which leaves the cause of such murders open to a wide range of interpretations by the different sides in the complex local disputes) probably makes it easier for the government to manage this difficult and politically sensitive region!

46 The president of the URECHH and the head of the local branch of the PST (Partido Socialista de los Trabajadores) each claimed that their organizations were responsible for the threefold proposal of amnesty for jailed peasant leaders, legalization of the land and recognition of local peasant organizations.

47 For example, in the prosperous ejido of Chalahuiapan, where a group of peasants who did not have their own parcels of land (those with derechos a salvo) joined the URECHH and invaded a nearby farm, against the wishes of the more conservative and very traditional peasants who belonged to the CNC.

48 ‘Se exproprarán 18 mil hectareas en Hidalgo’ in Unomásuno, (25 08, 1981).Google Scholar

49 Although less valuable sections of some of these estates had already been invaded by members of Nahuatl communities on their borders, their more fertile plains were so well protected with armed guards (and if necessary, the army), that even the most militant peasants were unwilling to risk antagonizing their very rich and powerful absentee owners. Interview, Teodolo Martínez, La Coneja, 4 May, 1985.

50 Collective ejidos were first set up in regions of large scale commercial agriculture by Lázaro Cárdenas in the 1930s in order to take advantage of economies of scale. Luís Echevería and his successors again promoted such collective ejidos throughout rural Mexico in the 1970s in order to offset a crisis of agriculture. However, when the government announced it planned to set up collective ejidos throughout the Huasteca, a number of peasant organizations as well as local private cattlemen associations protested this policy which they felt would result in the manipulation of illiterate peasants by unscrupulous bureaucrats. See article by Serdo, Mario García in Unomásuno (3 October, 1981).Google Scholar

51 The decision to collectivize these two ejidos was part of a larger project to build an ‘ecological micropolis’, that would concentrate all housing, schools and social services in a single semi-urban centre that would include members of 7 different ejidos, including the new ejidos set up for enclavados as well as existing Nahuatl ejidos in the northern part of the municipio of Orizatlan. Two schoolteachers (also new ejidatarios) in charge of part of this project are sons of a mestizo landowner (who had also been a rural school teacher) in the municipio of Huazalingo and whose properties had been invaded by the Nahuatl community of Santa Maria of Huazalingo. He in turn is the son of a wealthy mestizo ranchero (also an enclavado) whose family owned the hamlets of Cuatapa and Tempexquite which are anexos of the Nahuatl village of Tenexco which officially became an ejido in 1966. Other members of this same family, however (they all have the surname of Ramírez), were impoverished peasants who became agrarians in the 1970s and evicted their more prosperous relatives, including their own uncle, from both of these villages.

52 The owners of these remaining farms, which were included in the expropriation ordered for the region, were in turn provided with some monetary compensation or invited to become members of still other ejidos! The former landowner who refused to have anything to with the micropolis project is a small merchant who had been a landowner in the mestizo village of Arenal in the municipio of Yahualica. After he and many other enclavados (including the grandfather of the Ramírez brothers) left this project, the school teachers in charge of two of the new ejidos (whose membership at one point dwindled down to five members) had to invite ‘real peasants’ to come and join them in their new ejidos.

53 Tlalchiyahualica is one of the Nahuatl communities that has been politically divided since the mid-1970s when a group of militant peasants invaded several properties owned by mestizo landowners. The analysis of data from a survey of all economically active males, carried out by the author between 1982 and 1984, indicates that the agrarians are poorer, landless peasants with strong aspirations to improve their economic position, whose potential upward mobility had been completely blocked by the conversion of most arable land within their former communal boundaries into pastures by both mestizo rancheros and wealthy Nahuatl peasants who possessed títulos de Anaya. These agrarians had first joined the CAM, later the PST and in 1985 belonged to the URECHH. Their conservative opponents, who had at various times attempted to prevent the actual transformation of their village from a fictitious into a real ejido, presently control the comisariado with the blessing of Land Reform officials who have not yet divided their ejido into parcels of equal size.

54 The Secretary of Land Reform and its predecessors has always played a passive role in the regulation of land tenure disputes and has generally only carried out orders from influential politicians. Most peasants as well as landowners I spoke to complained about the constant vaccilation of local officials from this Ministry and their inability to solve local land tenure problems.

55 Many landowners have always operated stores and acted as middlemen, but after the expropriation, this became their primary occupation (although some of them also bought ranches in the neighbouring state of Veracruz). The wealthiest former landowner who lives in Huejutla now owns the local cinema, has had several offices and apartment buildings constructed. All of the former landowning farmers and ranchers from the town of Atlapexco today operate stands or buy produce from peasants during their busy market day.

56 See Collins, Hugh, Marxism and Law (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1982)Google Scholar, particularly pp. 17–34.

57 These conflicts over interpretation of the law, which are an expression of a broader class struggle, are especially prevalent in ethnically diverse rural region of Mexico inhabited by Indian peasants where irregularities in the implementation of a series of land reforms have resulted in ambiguous titles and gross discrepancies between de jure and de facto land tenure. See also Binford, Leigh, ‘Political Conflict and Land Tenure in the Mexican Isthmus of Tehuantepec’, Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. 17, part 1 (1985).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

58 This point has also been made by the historian E. P. Thompson in his study of agrarian conflicts in England in the eighteenth century. Whigs and Hunters (The Origins of the Black Act) (London, Allen Lane, 1975), pp. 258–69.Google Scholar

59 Such an approach (within a broader Marxist perspective) has been proposed by Chambliss, William and Seidman, Robert in Law, Order and Power (Addison-Wesley)Google Scholar, especially on pp. 144–8.

60 In a paper entitled ‘Dependency, Autonomy and the Articulation of Power’ Hamza Alavi has emphasized that a truly dialectical Marxist approach must combine a systems (structuralist) and a voluntarist (action) approach. Centre of Developing Areas Studies, McGill University, Working Paper no. 7 (1975).