Ejido System

Mexico’s collective land-tenure institution, consolidated in the post-revolutionary period and codified in Article 27 of the 1917 Constitution. Ejidos combined individual family parcels with communal lands and were the primary vehicle of agrarian redistribution from Cárdenas (1934–40) onward. Legally, ejido land was inalienable, unseizable, and imprescriptible — the institutional counterweight to latifundismo.

Recent scholarship (notably Gabriela Torres-Mazuera) has complicated the common narrative that Salinas’s 1992 reform “ended” the ejido. Less than 1% of ejido land was formally privatized in the decade after 1992; the ejido has actually grown in number. Instead, commodification proceeds through “legal fictions” — loopholes, informal transactions, and bureaucratic exceptions that transfer de facto control to private investors while the formal ejido structure remains on paper. This reframing is central to understanding land dispossession in the NAFTA era.