Gabriela Torres-Mazuera

Anthropologist at CIESAS whose work on Mexico’s ejido sector is reshaping how scholars understand post-1992 land commodification. Her 2025 Journal of Peasant Studies article introduces the analytic concept of “legal fictions” — legal constructs that create “a false world according to nature or social reality, but true according to the law” — to explain how ejido land is being commodified without formal privatization.

Torres-Mazuera documents that between 1993 and 2023, only 2,058 ejidos (7.2% of the national total) entered the formal tenure-conversion process, partitioning 6,148,211 hectares (8% of total ejido communal lands). The headline finding is that the most important mechanism of land commodification is not formal conversion but the accumulation of loopholes, informal transactions, and bureaucratic exceptions through which de facto control passes to private investors while the formal ejido structure remains on paper. Her data also reveal that roughly 25% of ejido parcel rights are now held by women — a gender dimension of contemporary tenure that awaits fuller historical contextualization.