Legal Fictions and the Commodification of Ejido Land in Mexico

Torres-Mazuera’s introduction of “legal fictions” as an analytic category for understanding post-1992 ejido commodification. She shows that despite predictions that the Salinas counter-reform would dissolve the ejido, ejidos have increased in number, and between 1993 and 2023 only 2,058 ejidos (7.2% of the national total) entered formal tenure conversion. The real mechanism of dispossession is not formal privatization but a system of loopholes, informal transactions, and bureaucratic exceptions that transfer de facto control to private investors while the formal ejido structure remains on paper. The article is also notable for documenting that roughly 25% of ejido parcel rights are now held by women — a gender dimension of contemporary tenure awaiting fuller historical treatment.