Once upon a time historians wrote of ‘civil disentailment’ in nineteenth-century Mexico – the break-up of corporate landholdings and the adjudication of the land to individual owners – as a simple story of a modernising government implementing a legal reform that (for good or for ill) did away with the traditional social practices of an indigenous peasant sector. We no longer think of disentailment as a simple story. Among other things, we now know that many indigenous peasants acquired land titles during the disentailment process (but others really lost their land), that disentailment often pitted peasant sectors against each other (but prompted other communities to group together around the defence of property rights) and that much indigenous land in Mexico had been individually owned long before the application of the disentailment laws (but other land really had been held by corporations in common). We know this because historians have carried out fine-grained local and regional studies looking at the actual effects of various disentailment laws (of which the famous 1856 Lerdo Law was only one) on various types of landholdings and from various social perspectives. It is this project the volume under review also pursues.
If judged in terms of the richness and variety of its empirical contributions, La desamortización civil desde perspectivas plurales is undoubtedly a success. In 12 chapters dealing with the civil disentailment process in central, western and southern Mexico (and an additional chapter on Guatemala), the contributors marshal new archival evidence that testifies to both the complexity of the disentailment process and its centrality to Mexico's social and political development in the late nineteenth century. In a chapter about three municipalities (Santiago Tuxtla, San Andrés Tuxtla and Catemaco) in Veracruz, for example, Eric Léonard identifies a conflict between different kinds of capitalist interests during the disentailment process (Chapter 3). Whereas cotton merchants benefitted from the continuation of a communal system of land tenure, which allowed them to buy their product from a broad base of peasant producers, sugar and tobacco planters pushed for privatisation, which would allow them to consolidate their businesses on larger holdings. However, in a chapter about civil disentailment in Chiapas, María Dolores Palomo Infante shows that sugar planters were also capable of agitating for the survival of communal property – if they happened to be the ones who were using it (Chapter 12). Opposing the break-up of the ejido (municipal lands) of Ocosingo, that town's municipal government – ‘with help from the population's principal vecinos [heads of household]’ – argued that privatisation would harm those residents who ‘have comfortably planted sugar cane in the ejido for many years’ (p. 509; this and all subsequent translations by the book review author). Here, a local elite was controlling the best corporate lands and feared a loss of that control if land was privatised.
While the contributors combine their interest in civil disentailment with a variety of analytical concerns, some of their findings do form a pattern. Collectively, the chapters advance arguments about the relationship of civil disentailment to politics, agrarian capitalism and peasant protest that help to synthesise previous research and will be useful guideposts for future studies.
The argument about politics is that civil disentailment was a way of redistributing power from local to more central institutions of government. Municipalities, previously in charge of distributing land and adjudicating land claims, naturally lost that prerogative once all land had been individually titled. They also lost their status as legal actors with the capacity of collective representation (Romana Falcón Vega, Chapter 1) and the ability to raise public funds by renting out town lands (Gloria Camacho Pichardo, Chapter 5; Eduardo Botello Almaraz and J. Édgar Mendoza García, Chapter 10). But a loss of local governmental capacity was not only a result of civil disentailment – it was a feature of disentailment itself. Municipal governments were not as a rule responsible for adjudicating town lands (this point is not entirely clear, as the chapters are surprisingly vague on the mechanics of privatisation), allowing higher authorities – either jefes politicos (district chiefs) or even provincial governors – to award land to powerful outsiders (Falcón Vega, Chapter 1; Camacho Pichardo, Chapter 5; Marco Almazán Reyes, Chapter 8).
Authorities that awarded land to powerful outsiders contributed to the expansion of agrarian capitalism in Mexico at a time when the country became increasingly integrated into Atlantic commodity markets. That expansion forms the second of the book's guiding themes. As the editors note in their introduction, ‘privatisation was more prevalent in regions and areas where market mechanisms were more widespread and where, as a consequence, there were more incentives’ (p. 47). The study of disentailment and capitalist development is one area where recent scholarship has reinforced a main tenet of the old ‘black legend’ about land privatisation, as local studies confirm a relationship between violent and irregular processes of privatisation and the presence of powerful entrepreneurial interests. Mendoza García's contribution nevertheless follows recent studies that have also noted the formation of a class of small- and medium-scale property owners among local beneficiaries of disentailment (Chapter 4). Agrarian capitalism was a complex and multifaceted phenomenon, and it would be fascinating to see more studies that, like Mendoza García's chapter, explore its impact on small agrarian producers.
The third theme that unites a number of this volume's chapters is peasant protest. When peasants protested against outside pressure on their landholdings (to which the disentailment laws contributed), they often stressed the violent nature of that pressure. For example, indigenous residents of the municipality of Temascaltepec, in Mexico State, reported being driven into hiding by the threats of a neighbouring landowner (Almazán Reyes, Chapter 8). Nevertheless, peasants seldom agitated against the disentailment laws as such. Instead, peasant rebels directed their ire at what they perceived as the violent and illegal way those laws had been implemented (Falcón Vega, Chapter 1; Diana Birrichaga Gardida, Chapter 6).
Perhaps what was at stake in peasant rebellions in late nineteenth-century Mexico was less corporate disentailment as such than it was the centralisation of power that accompanied disentailment – a centralisation that challenged peasants’ access to efficient legal rights and protections. Against violent and encroaching landlords, it was difficult to find protection in regional tribunals, which were both farther away and more likely to be under landlord control than local tribunals. As peasants in Chalco-Amecameca put it in 1867, ‘we've been through all possible procedures […] making countless sacrifices, and, over the years, we have seen favouritism towards hacendados [landowners] […] and we are convinced that we will never be able to recover our land this way’ (pp. 96–7).
