3-5+kourí

Interpreting the Expropriation of Indian Pueblo Lands in Porrian Mexico: The Unexamined Legacies of Andrs Molina Enrquez
Emilio H. Kour
n the course of the nineteenth century, communal forms of land ownership almost disappeared from the Mexican countryside. According to the historia patria that is deeply ingrained in the popular imagination of Mexico, this was a fateful development, because during the long rule of Porrio Daz the demise of communal land tenure produced widespread landlessness and rural injustice, conditions that acted as catalysts for the Mexican Revolution. For the most part, scholarly interpretations have concurred with this assessment. Yet considering the signicance generally attached to this historic transformation in patterns of land tenure, it is remarkable to discover that the process has not until now been analyzed in any detail. Although it is clear that the lands of many pueblos were privatized during the Porriato, there is still one hundred years later very little concrete understanding of how this happened and what it meant. More than two decades ago, David Brading called attention to the fact that in general we know remarkably little about changes in land tenure during the Porriato.1 With respect to the disentailment of pueblo lands, his assessment remains true today. Indeed, a review of the historical literature reveals a glaring paucity of research on this question. There is not a single published monograph devoted to the privatization of village lands, nor are there any reliable statistics
I would like to thank Brodie Fischer, John Womack, John Coatsworth, Aurora Gmez, John Watanabe, Jeremy Adelman, Erika Pani, Jennie Purnell, Gil Joseph, and HAHR s anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions. Research for this article was provided by a faculty fellowship from Dartmouth College. i. D. A. Brading, Introduction: National Politics and the Populist Tradition, in Caudillo and Peasant in the Mexican Revolution, ed. D. A. Brading (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1980), 13.
Hispanic American Historical Review 82:1 Copyright 2002 by Duke University Press
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national or regional that can at least suggest the scale, scope, and chronology of these developments. An extensive bibliographic search turns up approximately 15 articleswritten over the course of four decadesdirectly concerned with one or another aspect of village disentailment.2 As a body of research, however, they do not amount to very much, since most consist primarily of general overviews of the relevant legislation and policies, and hence reveal little about what may have taken place. Only a handful of those articles generally the most recent ones contain research-based case studies (for example, on Sultepec, Ocoyoacac, Papantla, Zacapu, and San Juan Parangaricutiro), and these, while suggestive, are for the most part fairly brief. A number of book2. The articles are listed by year of publication, starting with the earliest: Moiss Gonzlez Navarro, Indio y propiedad en Oaxaca, Historia Mexicana 8, no. 2 (1958); Moiss Gonzlez Navarro, Tenencia de la tierra y poblacin agrcola (1877 1960), Historia Mexicana 18, no. 1 (1969); Donald J. Fraser, La poltica de desamortizacin en las comunidades indgenas, 1856 1872, Historia Mexicana 21 (1972); Robert Knowlton, La individualizacin de la propiedad corporativa civil en el siglo XIX: Notas sobre Jalisco, Historia Mexicana 28, no. 1 (1978); Jos Velasco Toro, Indigenismo y rebelin totonaca en Papantla, 1885 1896, Amrica Indgena 39, no. 1 (1979); Margarita Menegus Bornemann, Ocoyoacac: Una comunidad agraria en el siglo XIX, Historia Mexicana 30, no. 1 (1980); Sergio Florescano, El proceso de destruccin de la propiedad comunal de la tierra y las rebeliones indgenas en Veracruz, 1826 1910, La Palabra y el Hombre 52 (1984); Jean Meyer, La Ley Lerdo y la desamortizacin de las comunidades en Jalisco, and Moiss Franco Mendoza, La desamortizacin de bienes de comunidades indgenas en Michoacn, in La sociedad indgena en el centro y occidente de Mxico, ed. Pedro Carrasco et al. (Zamora: El Colegio de Michoacn, 1986); Victoria Chenaut, Comunidad y ley en Papantla a nes del siglo XIX, in La costa totonaca: Cuestiones regionales II, ed. Luis Mara Gatti and Victoria Chenaut (Mexico City: Secretara de Educacin Pblica/Centro de Investigaciones Superiores en Antropologa Social, 1987); Jos Velasco Toro, La poltica desamortizadora y sus efectos en la regin de Papantla, Veracruz, La Palabra y el Hombre 72 (1989); Robert Knowlton, La divisin de las tierras de los pueblos durante el siglo XIX: El caso de Michoacn, Historia Mexicana 40, no. 1 (1990); Frank Schenk, La desamortizacin de las tierras comunales en el estado de Mxico (1856 1911): El caso del distrito de Sultepec, Historia Mexicana 45, no. 1 (1995); Michael T. Ducey, Liberal Theory and Peasant Practice: Land and Power in Northern Veracruz, Mexico, 1826 1900, in Liberals, The Church, and Indian Peasants: Corporate Lands and the Challenge of Reform in NineteenthCentury Spanish America, ed. Robert H. Jackson (Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1997); Antonio Escobar Ohmstede and Jaqueline Gordillo, Defensa o despojo? Territorialidad indgena en las Huastecas, 1856 1930, in Estudios campesinos en el Archivo General Agrario, ed. Antonio Escobar Ohmstede et al. (Mexico City: Secretara de Educacin Pblica/Centro de Investigaciones Superiores en Antropologa Social, 1998); and Jennie Purnell, With All Due Respect: Popular Resistance to the Privatization of Communal Lands in Nineteenth-Century Michoacn, Latin American Research Review 34, no. 1 (1999). There may well be a few more.
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length studies address the subject, though mostly just in passing, and even those are rather few.3 Given the importance of the subject, the amount of specic research it has thus far generated seems strikingly meager. Consider also the highly inuential studies of land tenure in Mexico produced by a succession of American scholars between 1920 and 1950 the works of George McBride, Helen Phipps, Frank Tannenbaum, Eyler Simpson, and Nathan Whetten.4 They are still in many ways quite useful, and Tannenbaums oeuvre in particular remains an obligatory point of reference for historians seeking to examine the agrarian aspects of the revolution and the beginnings of state-led land reform. Yet when it comes to understanding the evolution of the process of communal disentailment its chronology, its regional and local variations, and even its nal outcomes these studies offer scant guidance. They rely on isolated examples, selected anecdotes, and broad generalizations to produce a stark picture of village land expropriation that is at once intuitively compelling and largely unsubstantiated. These books undoubtedly have numerous merits, but they do not provide a satisfactory explanation of how, when, where, or why the lands of the pueblos were (or were not) privatized.
3. See, Andrs Lira, Comunidades indgenas frente a la ciudad de Mxico: Tenochlitlan y Tlatecolco, sus pueblos y barrios, 1812 1919 (Mexico City: El Colegio de Mxico; El Colegio de Michoacn, 1983); Frans J. Schryer, The Rancheros of Pisaores: The History of a Peasant Bourgeoisie in T wentieth-Century Mexico (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1980); idem, Ethnicity and Class Conict in Rural Mexico (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1990); Jean A. Meyer, Esperando a Lozada (Mexico City: Colegio de Michoacn, 1984); Daniel Nugent, Spent Cartridges of Revolution: An Anthropological History of Namiquipa, Chihuahua (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993); Victoria Chenaut, Aquellos que vuelan: Los totonacos en el siglo XIX (Mexico City: Secretara de Educacin Pblica/Centro de Investigaciones Superiores en Antropologa Social; INI, 1995); Allen Wells and Gilbert M. Joseph, Summer of Discontent, Seasons of Upheaval: Elite Politics and Rural Insurgency in Yucatn, 1876 1915 (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1996); and Jennie Purnell, Popular Movements and State Formation in Revolutionary Mexico: The Agraristas and Cristeros of Michoacn (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1999). It should be noted that this situation is now beginning to change. William Roseberry studied village disentailments in the Ptzcuaro area of Michoacn, Jennie Purnell is doing the same in Oaxaca, and I have done so for Papantla in The Business of the Land (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, forthcoming). 4. George McBride, The Land Systems of Mexico ( New York: The American Geographical Society, 1923); Helen Phipps, Some Aspects of the Agrarian Question in Mexico: A Historical Study, University of Texas Bulletin 2515 (1925); Frank Tannenbaum, The Mexican Agrarian Revolution ( New York: Macmillan, 1929); Eyler N. Simpson, The Ejido: Mexicos Way Out (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1937); and Nathan Whetten, Rural Mexico (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1948).
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Much the same can be said regarding the works of their Mexican counterparts. This assessment applies to the writings of authors as diverse as Wistano Luis Orozco, Jos L. Cosso, Fernando Gonzlez Roa, Jos Covarrubias, Lucio Mendieta, Jos Valads, and Jess Silva Herzog, as well as to Daniel Coso Villegass monumental Historia moderna de Mxico, which devotes only 13 of its thousands of pages to what Moiss Gonzlez Navarro labeled el empeo desamortizador.5 Each of these books has its own special virtues, and their aggregate contribution to the understanding of Mexicos rural problems is both signicant and indisputable. However, their discussions of the disentailment and expropriation of pueblo lands are not especially illuminating. Despite some differences in emphasis and approach, their analyses have much in common: they tend to be vague, sketchy, and generalizing, as if the reader needed only to be reminded of something that was already well-known and understood; they typically stress the explanatory importance of broad legal and political factors (for example, the intentions, uses and abuses of the law, the tricks of the powerful) at the expense of other considerations, and they often rely on questionable inductive inferences (for example, the growing size of haciendas and the number of disentailed hectares) in order to reach their conclusions about what must have happened with the lands of the pueblos. In sum, their treatment of village land disentailment leaves a lot to be desired. In this context, it is also worth noting that a number of these writers (American as well as Mexican) lump together the privatization of public lands (baldos) and that of communal village properties, arguing that both were part and parcel of the same ideological project. Although it is true that in some cases public land surveying concessions were used to expropriate village lands,
5. See, for example, Wistano Luis Orozco, Legislacin y jurisprudencia sobre terrenos baldos, 2 vols. ( Mexico City: Imp. de El Tiempo, 1895); Jos L. Cosso, Cmo y por quienes se ha monopolizado la propiedad rstica en Mxico? (Mexico City: Tip. Mercantil, 1911); Jos L. Cosso, Monopolio y fraccionamiento de la propiedad rstica (Mexico City: Tip. de J. M. Linares, 1914); Fernando Gonzlez Roa and Jos Covarrubias, El problema rural de Mxico (Mexico City: Tip. de la Secretara de Hacienda, 1917); Fernando Gonzlez Roa, El aspecto agrario de la revolucin mexicana (Mexico City: Dir. de Talleres Grcos, 1919); Lucio Mendieta y Nuez, El problema agrario de Mxico, 8th ed. (Mexico City: Ed. Porra, 1964); Jos Valads, El porrismo: Historia de un rgimen, 3 vols. (Mexico City: Antigua Lib. Robredo, 19411948); Jess Silva Herzog, El agrarismo mexicano y la reforma agraria (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Econmica, 1959); Moiss Gonzlez Navarro, El porriato: La vida social; and Luis Gonzlez, La repblica restaurada: Vida social, in Historia moderna de Mxico, ed. Daniel Coso Villegas, 10 vols. (Mexico City: Ed. Hermes, 1958 1972) See also the texts collected in Jess Silva Herzog, ed., La cuestin de la tierra, 4 vols. (Mexico City: Instituto Mexicano de Investigaciones Econmicas, 1960 1962).
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this cannot be taken to mean as some of these texts imply that the two processes were ultimately one and the same. It would be erroneous to blur this basic distinction. Whereas the former was a centrally managed federal enterprise, the latter had a much more heterogeneous and quirk y character, given that it was shaped by state-specic legislation. Thus the privatization of the baldos has recently received some well-deserved scholarly attention, but the study of pueblo disentailment remains in its infancy.6 Remarkably, this is true even in the case of villages, which for one reason or another have been the subject of considerable research, such as Anenecuilco and Tepoztln in Morelos, or Naranja in Michoacn; an attentive rereading of the studies in question shows that a clear picture of the process (not the outcome) of land disentailment and alienation in these pueblos is still lacking.7 In view of this state of affairs, it is not surprising to nd that general histories of the revolution and its Porrian antecedents reect these deciencies. Alan Knights The Mexican Revolution, for instance, makes an unusually concerted effort to shed light on some of the central questions concerning pueblo land privatizations (causes, chronology, regional and typological patterns, outcomes, and consequences), but it is nally unable to get past the opacity that continues to characterize these matters and can only be dispelled by more specic research. National agrarian histories face this obstacle as well.8 In sum, it is evident that the privatization of village lands has not yet been the subject of detailed inquiry.9
6. See Robert H. Holden, Mexico and the Survey of Public Lands: The Management of Modernization, 1876 1911 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois Univ. Press, 1994). 7. On Anenecuilco, see Jess Sotelo Incln, Raz y razn de Zapata (Mexico City: Ed. Etnos, 1943); John Womack Jr., Zapata and the Mexican Revolution ( New York: Knopf, 1969); Arturo Warman, Y venimos a contradecir: Los campesinos de Morelos y el estado nacional (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropologa e Historia, 1976); and Alicia Hernndez, Anenecuilco: Memoria y vida de un pueblo (Mexico City: El Colegio de Mxico, 1991). Tepoztln, by contrast, retained many of its lands, but it is not clear how. See Robert Redeld, Tepoztln: A Mexican Village (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1930); Oscar Lewis, Life in a Mexican Village: Tepoztln Restudied (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1951); and Claudio Lomnitz, Evolucin de una sociedad rural (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Econmica, 1982). On Naranja, see Paul Friedrich, Agrarian Revolt in a Mexican Village (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1970). 8. Alan Knight, The Mexican Revolution, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986), 1:94; see also John Tutino, From Insurrection to Revolution in Mexico: Social Bases of Agrarian Violence, 1750 1940 (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1986); and Enrique Semo, ed., Historia de la cuestin agraria mexicana: La tierra y el poder, 1800 1910 (Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno; CEHAM, 1988). 9. In this regard, see Friedrich Katzs brief but suggestive discussion of pueblo
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There is some irony in this, since a preoccupation with issues of land tenure and agrarian conict what Mexican writers call la cuestin agraria has long dominated scholarship on Mexicos rural past, and also because much of the original rationale and justication for the enactment of postrevolutionary agrarian reforms (the ejido restitutions and grants) came to rest squarely on an interpretation of what happened to village communities and their ancestral lands in the aftermath of the Reforma of the 1850s. One might thus have reasonably imagined that historians would have already endeavored to document and explain precisely how villages and then villagers wound up losing their lands. Nevertheless, these avowedly crucial episodes of change have remained almost entirely unexplored. What was the reason? Why the paradox? On one level, the answer would appear to be relatively simple, and to many Mexicans and Mexicanists perhaps even obvious. If historians have not felt compelled to study the process of communal land privatization up close, it is largely because they have not yet seen any pressing need to do so, since there is already or so it has seemed a fairly sound general account of how, why, and when the pueblos lost their lands, and of the social repercussions of these dispossessions.10 Granted, the explanation in question is at best generic or paradigmatic in character lacking in contingent detail, often devoid of local actors, short on process, and dim about regional variation but it is nonetheless widely perceived to be essentially accurate, a more or less reliable portrayal of how and why villages became landless. According to this generic argument, three historical developments combined to produce the successive disentailment, dismemberment, and alienation of communal village lands across Mexico. First was the portentous ascendancy of Liberal ideology, with its anticommunitarian insistence on the link between individual private property, citizenship, and social progress, which became crystallized in the laws of the Reforma (in particular the Lerdo Law) and in the Constitution of 1857. Second was the more or less sweeping consolidation of state power during the government of Porrio Daz (the much vaunted Pax Porriana), which at last
disentailment and its consequences in his The Liberal Republic and the Porriato, 1867 1910, in The Cambridge History of Latin America, ed. Leslie Bethell (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986). 10. It is incorrect to afrm that documentary sources for this type of inquiry are lacking. In fact, a good number of state and local archives possess extensive records concerning village land disentailments. Making sense of them may well be a laborious and involved task, but that is a different matter.
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enabled the aggressive implementation of Liberal ideas about landownership through legislation and policies designed to break up corporate village holdings as well as to survey and privatize baldos. A third and nal development was the rapid growth of the Mexican economy and hence of business opportunities in the course of the Porriato, which brought about an increase in the value of land and stirred the ravenous greed of the hacendado and of all those with dreams of becoming one. Together, these hostile ideological, political, and economic forces are said to have doomed communal tenure and sometimes entire village polities to extinction. This is, in a nutshell, the standard account. Undoubtedly, these historical developments were quite signicant, and the generic story of ruthless dispossession that has been invariably deduced from them is surely compelling; but why have historians not been moved to test, apply, document, or rene this paradigmatic account by studying in detail particular instances of it? Clearly, there is nothing in the nature of the generic argument that would preclude or render such inquiries needless. The reason lies elsewhere, in a series of extraneous assumptions about pueblos and their inhabitants that have become perhaps unwittingly an integral albeit unexamined part of the accepted story. For now at least, it is simplest to describe these assumptions in the form of three preconceived notions. The rst one consists of a rm belief in the idea that pueblo inhabitants or community members were (nearly) always and everywhere opposed in principle as well as in practice to the privatization of village lands. In other words, villagers qua villagers were bound to reject and resist any effort at disentailment, and thus the breakup of communal holdings could only result from external imposition. The second one holds that at the very least in predominantly Indian regions this professed resistance to any change in the system of landownership inevitably took on an overtly ethnic character (that is, as ethnic solidarity), so that the divide between those (outsiders) who promoted disentailment and those (insiders) who would not have it was a cultural one. And the third notion, a corollary of the previous two, is that the reason behind this generalized opposition among villagers was the defense of community. Whether or not any of these ideas hold true in one or many cases is in the end an empirical question; as blanket statements, however, they are merely assumptions, their thick axiomatic veneer notwithstanding. And yet these suppositions have made it possible to believe that the generic explanation of what happened to villages during the Porriato is not only essentially correct but also for all practical purposes complete, since the nature of the conict it portrays was essentially preordained. In this context, further research case
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studies, for instance would at best have illustrative or anecdotal value, representing only the local versions or variations of an already well-known general theme. And in that case, why should anyone seriously bother, except perhaps antiquarians or cronistas de pueblo? Underpinned by such a priori judgments, the generic account of Porrian disentailment cum expropriation becomes complete. Thus one imagines a pitched battle being fought across the republic. On one side stood the pueblos, each internally united in its refusal, defending the integrity of their communities by resisting honorably the mandates for change being imposed from the outside. On the other stood the government, capitalists, and all sorts of would-be landlords, well-armed with laws, self-serving ideas of progress, rurales, and railroads, deeply imbued with racist paternalism and seldom immune to the lucrative allure of corrupt deals and legalistic manipulations. By hook or by crook, victory goes (in most cases) to the powerful; the pueblos shrink or even crumble, awaiting sullenly the day of their revenge, while the hacienda proliferates and prospers, fueled by the misery of new peons and jornaleros. This is, in distilled fashion, the story that has long been told. Since the impetus for change is represented as being external to the economic and social life of the pueblos, it becomes less important to inquire about it (except, perhaps, when it comes to chronicling modes of resistance). It is no wonder, then, that there is so little research specically on the history of village land disentailments. Yet, as indicated, the paradigmatic version of this history rests on weak foundations (that is, questionable or unexamined assumptions). This essay aims to suggest how this came to be. It does so by tracing and analyzing the obscure intellectual origins of the ides xes about the nature of pueblos and their inhabitants which served as the basis already during the late Porriato for the formulation of a generic explanation of disentailment and its consequences. Here the key gure was Andrs Molina Enrquez, the positivist social critic whose categorical formulations about the inherent social characteristics of the so-called pueblos de indgenas would prove decisive, in the short as well as in the long run. As will be seen, it was the author of Los grandes problemas nacionales (1909) who rst made an explicit link between the alleged common cultural traits of pueblo dwellers and an explanation of how disentailment policies had affected them and their ancestral lands. Despite the crude social evolutionism that inspired it, this was a concept that was made to last. This essay is both a study in the history of ideas and an exercise in historiographic analysis. In neither case does it purport to be exhaustive; its primary goal is to bring attention to a serious, overlooked gap in historical knowledge and scholarship, and to provide an explanation for it. Its purpose is not only
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diagnostic but also prescriptive. By exposing weaknesses in the prevalent account of the causes and consequences of village land privatization, this article seeks also to draw attention to the existence of many unanswered questions about the social and economic history of Porrian pueblos.
The Meaning of Pueblo
At the heart of any analysis of the history of an idea, there is, inevitably, a question of denition. In this case, the question is a seemingly simple one: what is a pueblo? Clearly, many answers could be given, some sociological or anthropological, others political, and still others geographic. The term is as vague as it is elastic, burdened by a long history of overlapping and evolving usages. Think of terms such as el pueblo, un pueblo, or los pueblos, each of which now carries various possible and contrasting meanings. Etymology does not offer much guidance in this instance, since the Latin term populus, from which pueblo is derived, is just as capacious. Translated into English, meanwhile, pueblo accepts two broad denitions, one as village or town, the other as people. That bifurcation of meanings is quite useful here, but beyond establishing this basic distinction linguistic inquiries once again lead nowhere, since both people and village possess the same inherent ambiguousness as does pueblo. Thus it seems necessary to approach the question historically. In Mexico, the term pueblo originated specically as a juridical concept, a proud offspring of that vast and heterogeneous body of Spanish colonial law, procedure, and social architecture that came to be known as derecho indiano. It referred both to a place and to the polity to which the aforesaid space or territory had been assigned that is, to the village and to the people who would reside therein. In each case, the designation of pueblo had an explicitly legal character. Pueblo qua village was a particular political status (categora poltica) bestowed on certain places, one of several categories that formed a hierarchical scale of more or less nucleated dwelling spaces (villa, ciudad, real). Pueblo qua polity or collectivity referred to a legally recognized human association or corporation, to a group of people possessing juridical standing (locus standi, personalidad jurdica, the right to appear in court). A pueblo was hence a place granted such a categora poltica, which was in turn managed by a polity constituted with personalidad jurdica. The two concepts were distinct, albeit internally related, and the word could be used to describe either, or both at once. Signicantly, the extensive derecho indiano that developed in the wake of
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the conquest effectively restricted the category of pueblo so that it would apply exclusively to Indian villages and polities. As historian Bernardo Garca Martnez has noted, the use of this word to label villages was then relatively uncommon back in Spain, and predominantly Spanish settlements in the newly conquered territories were not to be called pueblos. In New Spain, only la puebla de Los Angeles (now Puebla, founded in 1531) came close, but its political status was from the start as it had to be a different one.11 Although royal ordenanzas and cdulas devoted to settlement policy would sometimes refer to poblar un pueblo de espaoles (Ordenanzas of 1573), these chartered towns always received other titles (villa, ciudad ), leaving pueblo in its twin legal meanings to designate only their Indian counterparts.12 In this way, pueblo soon became synonymous with pueblo de Indios. Pueblo-polities and their corresponding pueblo-villages were both creatures of the conquest. In the course of the sixteenth and early seventeenth cen-
11. Bernardo Garca Martnez, Los pueblos de la sierra: El poder y el espacio entre los indios del norte de Puebla hasta 1700 (Mexico City: El Colegio de Mxico, 1987), 78 9 nn. 2324. For supporting evidence, see Rafael Altamira y Crevea, Diccionario castellano de palabras jurdicas y tcnicas tomadas de la legislacin indiana (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autnoma de Mxico, 1987), 260 62. Note that puebla was then an acceptable variant of pueblo or poblacin. On the founding of Puebla, see Franois Chevalier, Signicacin social de la fundacin de la puebla de Los Angeles (Puebla: Centro de Estudios Histricos de Puebla, 1957). 12. Jos Mara Ots Capdequ, Estudios del derecho espaol en las Indias (Bogot: Ed. Minerva, 1940), 150 64; and Mariano Galvn Rivera, Ordenanzas de tierras y aguas, o sea Formulario geometrico-judicial para la designacion, establecimiento, mensura, amojonamiento y deslinde de las poblaciones y todas suertes de tierras, sitios, caballerias y criaderos de ganados mayores y menores, y mercedes de agua: Recopiladas benecio y obsequio de los pobladores, ganaderos . . . y toda clase de predios rsticos de las muchas y dispersas resoluciones dictadas sobre la materia, y vignetes hasta el dia en la Repblica Mexicana, 4th ed. (Mexico City: Librera del Portal de Mercaderes, 1851), esp. chap. 6. For background, see Jos Mara Ots Capdequ, Manual de historia del derecho espaol en las Indias (Buenos Aires: Losada, 1945); and Silvio Zavala, Las instituciones jurdicas en la conquista de Amrica, 3d ed. (Mexico City: Ed. Porra, 1988). For a seventeenth century perspective on these questions, see Juan de Solrzano Pereira, Politica indiana, compuesta por el doct. d. Juan de Solorzano Pereyra . . . Dividida en seis libros, en los quales con gran distincion, y estudio se trata, y resuelve todo lo tocante al descubrimiento, descripcion, adquisicion, y retencion de las mesmas Indias, y su govierno particular, assi cerca de las personas de los indios, y sus servicios, tributos, diezmos, y encomiendas, como de lo espiritual, y eclesiastico cerca de su doctrina: patronazzo real, iglesias, prelados, prebendados, curas seculares, y regulares, inquisidores, commissarios de cruzada, y de las religiones . . . Con dos indices muy distintos, y copiosos . . . Sale en esta tercera impression ilustrada por el licenc. d. Francisco Ramiro de Valenzuela (Madrid: M. Sacristan, 1736 1739).
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turies, numerous Indian pueblo-polities were constituted as legal entities, many on the basis of the old pre-Hispanic altepeme, others as a result of the congregaciones or reducciones carried out by Spanish authorities as part of their population policy. The political expression of these new corporations was to be the colonial cabildo indgena, bearer of the groups personalidad jurdica.13 Today, Indian polities are frequently called comunidades, but as Garca Martnez has pointed out the retroactive adoption of this term (now laden with implied sociocultural meanings) would be anachronistic. In viceregal times, the term el comn (the membership) was often used instead, and comunidad in an Indian context tended to refer concretely only to the obligatory cajas de comunidad, the locked treasury chests that held the members collective capital.14 In all other respects, the scope and meaning of community remained open to local denition. This is to say that the colonial pueblo-polity came into being primarily as an imposed legal structure of social incorporation, and not (necessarily) as an organically cohesive social organization. These pueblo-polities would naturally have to occupy a certain territory where members might live and farm, and over which the collectivity could legally exercise a series of more or less exclusive use rights. Those spaces were the pueblo-villages, which were supposed to encompass both residential areas (often subdivided hierarchically into cabeceras and sujetos) as well as additional farm, pasture, and forest lands categorized according to their social purpose. In practice, Indian polities secured title to these village lands in a variety of ways for example, by claiming ancient consuetudinary land rights or presenting preconquest documents, through royal grants (mercedes) and composiciones, or by purchase as well as denuncia. To protect villages from encroachment, royal authorities gradually enacted a succession of laws designed to
13. For details, and for a sense of the complexity and diversity of the processes that led to the formation of pueblo-polities, see, for example, Charles Gibson, Tlaxcala in the Sixteenth Century ( New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1952), esp. chap. 4; idem, The Aztecs Under Spanish Rule (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1964), esp. chaps. 2, 3, 7; Garca Martnez, Los pueblos de la sierra; Silvio Zavala and Jos Miranda, Instituciones indgenas en la colonia, in La poltica indigenista en Mxico: Mtodos y resultados, ed. Alfonso Caso et al. (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional Indigenista, 1954), esp. chaps. 1, 4; and James Lockhart, The Nahuas After the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, Sixteenth Through Seventeenth Centuries (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1992), chap. 2. 14. In practice, observes Garca Martnez, the concept of community generally had a tangible meaning, denoting as community assets the common or public assets of a collectivity. See Garca Martnez, Los pueblos de la sierra, 102 3 n. 99. See also Altamira y Crevea, Diccionario, 84.
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regulate the minimum extension, character, and quality of the lands that a pueblo-village ought to comprise. Following Iberian precedent, village lands became formally subdivided into various categories, such as fundo legal, ejido, montes, and tierras de comn repartimiento. Even though in reality villages seldom managed to conform to those standards, these became in effect the legal denition of the Indian pueblo as a territory.15 Thus while it is true that the word pueblo (as in village) was often used colloquially to refer specically to the nucleated head settlement (the fundo legal of the cabecera, el pueblo), and not necessarily to its outlying domains (sometimes described as las tierras del pueblo), this should not confuse the fact that from a juridical point of view a pueblo-village and its tierras were one and the same thing, a named territory with a given categora poltica. In that sense, therefore, a pueblo was its lands.16 This is, in brief, how pueblo was originally dened. It is worth recalling that these juridical concepts evolved as part of an Indian settlement policy designed both to congregate native people and to keep their residential spaces separate from those of Spaniards. Underlying these policies was the grand (and ultimately illusory) notion of a separate repblica de indios, itself predicated (and justied) on the belief that Indians as a class of people were supposedly akin to minors, rsticos, and miserables, all of whom as immature, uncivilized, or inferior beings required special protection and tutelage from the Crown.17 The establishment (in a legal sense) of Indian pueblos (with their own personalidad jurdica and categora poltica) was the boldest expression of this otherwise largely unfullled social philosophy. In the eyes of the Spanish letrados who crafted these colonial institutions, the specic legal character given to the Indian pueblos merely reected and was hence especially appropriate for the particular civilizational characteristics of their inhabitants. As will be seen, centuries later Andrs Molina Enrquez would attribute great wisdom to the forging of this explicit linkage between legal forms of association, on the one hand, and social standing, on the other.
15. See Ordenanzas of the Marquz de Falces (26 May 1567), and the Cdulas Reales of 4 June 1687 and 12 July 1695. In Galvn Rivera, Ordenanzas de tierras e aguas, chap. 12. For a discussion of the legal constitution of pueblo-villages (in theory and in practice), see Gibson, The Aztecs Under Spanish Rule, chap. 10; and Zavala and Miranda, Instituciones indgenas en la colonia, 122 32. 16. The lack of precisely dened village boundaries an altogether common and problematic occurrence did not invalidate the conceptual denition of pueblo-villages. 17. For details, see Zavala and Miranda, Instituciones indgenas en la colonia, 108 10; Garca Martnez, Los pueblos de la sierra, 97 8; and Zavala, Las instituciones jurdicas en la conquista de Amrica, chap. 4.
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If the preceding discussion of the meanings of pueblo seems a bit extraneous or too formal, it is perhaps because today historians and anthropologists have come to favor an altogether different understanding of the subject, one that emphasizes the analysis of pueblo social relations, ethnicity, and cultural identity, often at the expense of its more institutional aspects. In other words, the study of pueblos qua ethnic communities is now generally much more appealing to scholars than that of pueblos qua legal bodies. No doubt there are many compelling intellectual and historical reasons behind this dramatic shift in focus, but be that as it may it is nevertheless essential not to lose sight of the original legal tenor of the concept, even if other facets of pueblo history now appear to be far more important. There are two main reasons for this. First, much of New Spains colonial legislation remained in force for half a century after the achievement of Mexican independence (182171), including as it turns out some of the core legal rules and structures that had dened the old pueblos. Although the cabildos were replaced by ayuntamientos and the notion of two separate republics was formally abandoned, Indian polities retained their personalidad jurdica, at least in principle, and Indian village lands notwithstanding the sporadic efforts of some state governments remained for the most part entailed, still a collective patrimony protected from legal alienation. Signicantly, it was precisely these two dening features of the Indian pueblos (juridical standing and village land entailment), both inherited from colonial legislation, which the Liberal reforms of the 1850s and the Constitution of 1857 sought to eradicate. To the architects of the Reforma, the legal basis of pueblo social organization was clearly a matter of considerable interest. Second, prior to 1910, the most inuential interpretations (scanty as they were) of the evolution and contemporary situation of Indian pueblos ( peoples and lands) were nearly always produced by lawyers: Manuel Abad y Queipo, Jos Mara Luis Mora, Mariano Otero, Melchor Ocampo, Ignacio Ramrez, Ponciano Arriaga, Vicente Riva Palacio, Justo Sierra, Wistano Luis Orozco, and Andrs Molina Enrquez. In this respect, Francisco Pimentel (mainly a linguist) was a notable exception. Given their training, they generally attributed great explanatory importance to the legal aspects of pueblo life, and in most cases saw legal reform as one of the principal remedies for the particular problems they were seeking to elucidate. To them, the pueblo was palpably a legal institution; outside of this context, it is impossible to understand their arguments. While a number of these men wrote in the decades following the Reforma, and thus had the opportunity to consider in detail the disentailment decrees and their consequences for the pueblos, only one did so in a more or less com-
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prehensive fashion. He was Andrs Molina Enrquez (18681940), an intellectually ambitious local judge and notary public from the State of Mexico, whose points of view about the effects of the disentailment laws on Indian pueblos would frame the discussion of these questions for his generation and beyond. But before examining Molina Enrquezs ideas, it would be useful to survey what came before him.
The Pueblo in Nineteenth-Century Social Thought
In the years following 1910, the Zapatista uprising in Morelos and other outbreaks of rural rebellion elsewhere in Mexico prompted urgent politico-ideological discussions and negotiations concerning the future of pueblos as social institutions, the results of which were partially expressed in the Constitution of 1917 and in subsequent agrarian legislation. Since then, pueblo has become a core concept in the popular representation of Mexicos rural identity, as well as a prominent xture of the postrevolutionary political discourse. Some have also come to regard the pueblos as the last repositories of a Mxico profundo.18 But it was not always so. Prior to the revolution, pueblos held no such distinction; indeed, for nearly a century following the onset of the struggles for independence, they elicited remarkably little specic analysis and discussion. Molina Enrquezs work bucked this longstanding trend, making pueblos an object worthy of attention. Before La reforma y Jurez (1906) and Los grandes problemas nacionales (1909), the intellectual approach to pueblorelated matters was typically indirect, focusing narrowly on two persistently conictive social issues: land disentailment and the place of Indians in national life. The debate over the merits of disentailment began in earnest at the close of the eighteenth century, after the publication in Spain of Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanoss enlightened Informe sobre la ley agraria (1795). Inuenced variously by Adam Smith and the French physiocrats, Jovellanos made a compelling argument in favor of the radical liberalization of Spains land laws as a means of stimulating economic growth and social advancement. His main targets were the vast clerical estates and civil mayorazgos, which he believed should be disentailed, as well as the baldos and terrenos concejiles (municipal lands), which
18. The expression is borrowed from Guillermo Bonl Batalla, Mxico profundo: Una civilizacin negada (Mexico City: Secretara de Educacin Pblica; Centro de Investigaciones Superiores en Antropologa Social, 1987).
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he thought should be privatized.19 His proposals were taken up by the hapless but Cortes de Cdiz, with little success.20 In New Spain, Jovellanoss ideas were readily embraced in certain circles, where following independence they were gradually adapted to local interests and conditions. Whereas Jovellanos had regarded civil entailment (mayorazgos) as the greatest hindrance (estorbo) to the development of Spanish agriculture, his Mexican disciples came to see clerical property in mortmain as the biggest obstacle. For two whole generations of Liberals, the legal disentailment of church estates became a common and urgent objective, the key to ensuring the young republics freedom and progress. In addition, these reformers faced the question of how to treat the Indian pueblo-villages, whose lands like those belonging to church institutions were also entailed and held corporately, even though in other respects they functioned quite differently. Jovellanos had not made any particular reference to them, but they came to be regarded as being in some ways akin to the terrenos concejiles whose privatization he had urged, and as such their disentailment also formed a part of the new Mexican Liberal credo. It was thus, by association with other forms of corporate privilege, that the pueblo-villages became embroiled in a larger ideological struggle over disentailment that would culminate in the wars of the Reforma. And it was therefore mostly in the dogmatic and narrow context of arguments about the expected social benets of desamortizacin a better distribution of property, increased investment, productivity and prosperity, agricultural improvements, local democracy that the subject of the communal pueblo-villages would be broached. These commentaries were usually brief and generic, alluding mainly to the archetypal pueblo languishing in the yoke of entailment, awaiting to be released from this colonial form of tutelage. An early mention of pueblos in this context can be found in the representaciones of Abad y Queipo, and later discussions lie scattered in the works of Mora and other notable Liberals of his time, as well as in the deliberations of the Constitutional Congress of 1856.21
19. Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, Informe sobre la Ley Agraria (Madrid: Instituto de Estudios Polticos, 1955), pt. 1. In many respects Jovellanoss Informe built on proposals put forward by an earlier generation of Bourbon reformers, notably Pedro Rodrguez de Campomanes. For further discussion, see Richard Herr, The Eighteenth-Century Revolution in Spain (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1958). 20. For details, see Francisco Toms y Valiente, El marco poltico de la desamortizacin en Espaa (Barcelona: Ariel, 1977). 21. Manuel Abad y Queipo, Representacin sobre la inmunidad personal del clero, in En favor del campo, ed. Heriberto Moreno Garca (Mexico City: Secretara de Educacin Pblica. 1986), 123 35; Charles A. Hale, Mexican Liberalism in the Age of Mora, 18211853
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In Moras resonant view, the pueblos were, in effect, monasteries of Indians, a lapidary phrase that masterfully encapsulated the limited scope of this analytical perspective.22 The lands of the pueblos needed to be legally disentailed, just like the properties of the monasteries, and for precisely the same reasons. Similarly, nineteenth-century reections on the living conditions of Indians and on the character of their relationship to the new country of Mexico touched on the pueblo as an institution only tangentially. For the most part, native peoples were treated as though they were a single race of backward, ignorant, lazy, and obstinate individuals whose lives were lled with misery and exploitation. Some considered this uniform degradation as Francisco Pimentel would call it to be beyond repair, while others viewed legal initiatives and education as likely remedies. To the extent that the current plight of Indians was regarded as being the product of lingering colonial habits, trying to reform those practices was an appealing solution; in this context, the allegedly deleterious effects of pueblo-polity organization would at times come up for criticism. Mora, for instance, bemoaned the isolation imposed on Indians by pueblo life as well as their status as minors under the law and in
( New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1968), chaps. 4, 7, 8; Mariano Otero, Ensayo sobre el verdadero estado de la cuestin social y poltica que se agita en la repblica mexicana (Mexico City: Imp. de Ignacio Cumplido, 1842); Ponciano Arriaga, Obras completas (Mexico City: Instituto de Investigaciones Jurdicas, Universidad Nacional Autnoma de Mxico, 1992); and Francisco Zarco, Historia del congreso extraordinario constituyente de 1856 y 1857, 2 vols. (Mexico City: Imp. de Ignacio Cumplido, 1857). As Molina Enrquez himself has noted, there was initially some disagreement and vacillation among Liberals concerning the practical wisdom of privatizing communal lands. In the state of Mexico, the Gobernacin commission of the Constituent Congress decided in 1824 not to push for outright village land privatization, worrying that villagers might then wind up selling or losing their individual land parcels. Against Moras objections, the commissions recommendations (land rentals to villagers) were approved. But this was at bottom a dispute over strategy and process, not principles, and in any case, Moras more intransigent views would prevail soon enough. See Dictamen de la comisin de gubernacin sobre sealar y dar propios y arbitrios a los pueblos del estado de Mxico (Mexico City: Imp. a cargo de M. Rivera, 1824); Actas del congreso constituyente del estado libre de Mxico, 10 vols. (Mexico City: n. p., 1824 31); Andrs Molina Enrquez, La reforma y Jurez: Estudio histrico-sociolgico (Mexico City: Tip. de la Viuda de Francisco Daz de Len, 1906), 67 69; Molina Enrquez, Los grandes problemas nacionales (Mexico City: Imp. de A. Carranza e Hijos, 1909), 56 57; and Hale, Mexican Liberalism in the Age of Mora, 229 33. 22. En todo esto, wrote Mora, se ve la mano e inujo del clero regular que quiso instituir la sociedad civil sin su base fundamental que es la propiedad, y fundar en Amrica otros tantos monasterios cuantos eran los pueblos o congregaciones de sus neotos. Jos Mara Luis Mora, Mjico y sus revoluciones (Paris: Lib. de Rosa, 1836), 1:198.
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terms of land tenure, both central features in the original design of the pueblos. Similarly, Lorenzo de Zavala blamed the embrutecimiento of Indians on the paternalistic character of Spanish institutions such as the pueblo, while Lucas Alamn described local Indian pueblo government as being generally tyrannical. Writing shortly after the Reforma, Francisco Pimentel the only nineteenth-century thinker who produced a book-length analysis of the contemporary situation of the Indian race (1864) faulted the laws of the Indies for their lack of laissez faire in regard to the natives. He argued that the pueblos pernicious communal system hindered the development of a sentiment of individuality, without which economic progress and the advancement of civilization were impossible.23 In the end, however, these blights were all regarded as colonial legacies that had been or were being already modied by means of the law. As Mora himself proudly claimed in 1836, these errors have totally disappeared with independence, which granted equal rights to all castes and races, and if equality had not yet been achieved, it was only due to the difculty of redressing in a few days the evils caused by many centuries of debasement. In a similar vein, Pimentel would remark nearly 30 years later that while the community system has not yet been totally extirpated, the Reforma laws had brought about a notable change in that direction.24 In
23. Ibid., 1:197 207; Lorenzo de Zavala, Ensayo histrico de las revoluciones de Mxico desde 1808 hasta 1830 (Mexico City: Imp. a cargo de Manuel N. de la Vega, 1845), 1:12 15; Moiss Gonzlez Navarro, Instituciones indgenas en el Mxico independiente, in La poltica indigenista en Mxico: Mtodos y resultados (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional Indigenista, 1954), 1:209 18; and Francisco Pimentel, Memoria sobre las causas que han originado la situacin actual de la raza indgena de Mxico y medios de remediarla, in Dos obras de Francisco Pimentel (Mexico City: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes 1995), 139 42. It is interesting to note that although many eloquent words were devoted on a multitude of occasions to decrying the widespread exploitation of Indians in independent Mexico, most referred specically to the deplorable situation of the peons and jornaleros who worked in the haciendas, and not to life in the pueblos, about which very little was ever said. See, for instance, Ponciano Arriagas ery speech during the constitutional debates concerning the passage of Article 27, in Francisco Zarco, Historia del congreso extraordinario, 1:547 55. 24. Mora, Mjico y sus revoluciones, 1:66 8; Pimentel, Memoria sobre las causas, 153. Pimentels largely generic judgments on the Indian race are quite revealing in this respect, as he wrote at a time when Mexican archeology, linguistics, and ethnography were making rapid advances, to which he himself made notable contributions. His rst linguistic studies were published in the early 1860s, just as he was writing the Memoria and at the same time that Manuel Orozco y Berra was carrying out his pioneering research on the cultures and languages of ancient Mexico. Despite the extraordinary cultural diversity
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other words, the pueblo as a legally constituted (and enforced) social institution was they were convinced well on its way to extinction and was no longer of special concern, except perhaps only in so far as old (and bad) habits sometimes die hard.25 The pueblos did not fare any better as objects of analysis during the Repblica restaurada and for most of the Porriato, despite the fact that the governments disentailment policies were at last being visibly enforced in many states, sometimes in conictive fashion. In a sense, this is not surprising, given that those land repartos represented the nal demise of the collective landholdings that had originally given juridical meaning to the Indian pueblos (their personalidad jurdica had already been abolished as part of the Reforma). If the pueblos (thus dened) were or would soon be nonexistent, why write about them? In that spirit, the two monumental histories of Mexico that were composed in the course of the Porriato Mxico a travs de los siglos (1887 89), edited by Vicente Riva Palacio, and Mxico, su evolucin social
and complexity that these investigations were documenting, Pimentel persisted in characterizing Indians as being essentially the same, which suggests that he ultimately attributed great explanatory power to the social effects of the legal norms around which the pueblos were uniformly constituted in colonial times. He may not have been a lawyer, but those legal denitions prevailed on him all the same. For context, see Francisco Pimentel, Cuadro descriptivo y comparativo de las lenguas indgenas de Mxico, 2 vols. (Mexico City: Imp. de Andrade y Escalante, 1862 1865); Manuel Orozco y Berra, Geografa de las lenguas y carta etnogrca de Mxico, precedidas de un ensayo de clasicacin de las mismas lenguas y de apuntes para las inmigraciones de las tribus (Mexico City: Imp. de Andrade y Escalante, 1864); and idem, Historia antigua y de la conquista de Mxico (Mexico City: Tip. de G. A. Esteva, 1880). 25. In this context of neglect, the short-lived agrarian laws of the second empire, which attempted to reverse (albeit only in part) the Liberal policies of disentailment, represent a notable, if ineffectual exception. The Law of November 1, 1865 granted the pueblos juridical standing, but only with a limited character. The Law of June 26, 1866 (meant to reform the ley Lerdo) preserved the communal character of some pueblo lands (for example, montes), but insisted on the Liberal idea of dividing all village farmlands into individual private plots (with some restrictions placed on the subsequent sales of these lands, however). And the agrarian law of 16 September 1866 offered to grant lands for ejidos and fundos legales to pueblos lacking in them, lifting also the restrictions previously imposed on their juridical standing. See Manuel Fabila, Cinco siglos de legislacin agraria en Mxico (Mexico City: Banco Nacional de Crdito Agrcola, 1941), 147 55; also Jaime del Arenal, La proteccin del indgena en el segundo imperio mexicano: La Junta Protectora de las Clases Menesterosas, Ars Iuris 6 (1991); and Erika Pani, Verdaderas gures de Cooper o pobres inditos infelices? La poltica indigenista de Maximiliano, Historia Mexicana 47, no. 3 (1998).
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(1900 2), edited by Justo Sierra made almost no mention of the Indian pueblos after independence.26 Sierras own extensive historical oeuvre ignores the subject altogether. The social problem of the Indian race, he announced in 1889, is a problem of nutrition and education; let them eat more beef and less chile, let them learn the useful and practical lessons of science, and the Indians will transform themselves: that is all there is to it. The legal, economic, and political hindrance that the pueblo may have once represented was now out of the way, and the Indian social problem that remained to be solved was largely a matter of reforming individuals, with better schools, a better diet, and Sierra would add through mestizaje.27 One partial exception to this dominant pattern of neglect was Wistano Luis Orozcos Legislacin y jurisprudencia sobre terrenos baldos, published in 1895. A young lawyer trained in Guadalajara, Orozco sought to trace in rigorous detail the evolution of public land legislation in Mexico back to its Spanish origins, mainly in order to show that many of the colonization and baldos laws enacted since independence had disregarded and even contradicted some of the most basic principles around which a regime of property had been established in colonial times. The consequence, he noted, was legal chaos, which, in turn, bred widespread uncertainty regarding the validity of all property titles. After independence, Orozco wrote, we fell into an almost complete ignorance of the legislation that had governed the occupation of public lands; successive revolutionary powers laid down ambiguous and incomplete rules concerning colonization, without tomorrows laws taking yesterdays into account, and the Derecho de tierras y aguas came to resemble a veritable labyrinth of Daedalus, for which Ariadnes thread is missing.28 But learned
26. Vicente Riva Palacio, Mxico a travs de los siglos. Historia general y completa del desenvolvimiento social, poltico, religioso, militar, artstico, cientco y literario de Mxico desde la antigedad ms remota hasta la poca actual, 5 vols. (Mexico City: Ballesc y Comp., 1887 1889); and Justo Sierra, Mxico, su evolucin social, 3 vols. (Mexico City: Ballesc, 1900 1902). 27. Justo Sierra, Mxico social y poltico: Apuntes para un libro, in Obras Completas (Mexico City: Univ. Nacional Autnoma de Mxico, 1991), 9:126 27; See also Sierras own contributions to Mexico, su evolucin social, collected in a single volume as Evolucin poltica del pueblo mexicano (Mexico City: La Casa de Espaa en Mxico, 1940); and Justo Sierra, Jurez, su obra y su tiempo (Mexico City: Ballesc, 1905 6). On the Indian question in general, see, Martin S. Stabb, Indigenism and Racism in Mexican Thought, 1857 1911, Journal of Inter-American Studies 1, no. 4 (1959); T. G. Powell, Mexican Intellectuals and the Indian Question, 1876 1911, HAHR 48, no. 1 (1968); and Charles A. Hale, The Transformation of Liberalism in Late Nineteenth-Century Mexico (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1989), 219 38. 28. Wistano Luis Orozco, Legislacin y jurisprudencia sobre terrenos baldos, 2 vols. (Mexico City: Imp. de El Tiempo, 1895), 653.
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and meticulous as his jurisprudential treatise undoubtedly was, Orozcos aim was not solely to serve as a scholarly Theseus, guiding his readers past the intricate detours and dead ends of legal history. He was also determined to demonstrate that the application of some of these ill-conceived laws in particular Juarezs public lands law of 20 July 1863 had unwittingly facilitated the concentration of land in the hands of a few powerful hacendados and speculators. The result, he argued, was not only increased social inequity and injustice but also economic stagnation, since large estates were inherently wasteful and unproductive institutions. At the time, only a few people one of them being Molina Enrquez appear to have read Orozcos lengthy legal study, but in due course it would come to be regarded by many as the most important and insightful contemporary critique of the haciendas and of the Porrian land policies that abetted their inordinate growth. While the book was primarily dedicated as stated in the title to the story of the terrenos baldos, buried within its pages lay a compact yet suggestive discussion concerning the legality of the procedures governing the division of the ejidos that belonged to the pueblos. A new public lands law (enacted 26 March 1894) had devoted 3 of its 79 articles to these procedures (improperly so, in Orozcos view), and he saw this as an opportunity to comment on what was happening with the lands of the pueblos. With the abolition of the pueblo-polities personalidad jurdica, many states had put the ayuntamientos in charge of breaking up all communal landholdings including the ejidos into individual private plots; in many cases, the ayuntamientos would also issue the respective property titles. The new law in question sanctioned this practice (Arts. 6769), to which Orozco objected on various grounds. To begin with, he claimed, only the federal government not the states or the municipalities had jurisdiction over the disposition of disentailed properties. Second, it was contradictory to state that the pueblos as civil corporations had lost their legal standing, only to grant that standing to the ayuntamientos, which were also corporate bodies. Third, the property titles handed out as a result of these repartos were legal aberrations, willfully ignoring all antecedents, lacking technical land descriptions, and not properly notarized. At this point, in typical fashion, Orozco glided from legal criticism to social denunciation. Those decient titles, he wrote, were usually mere printed forms lled in by a clerk in the shadows of the cities and at the behest of some speculator without ever actually seeing the lands that were being adjudicated. These lands would thus end up in the hands of ruthless people, who acquire them in exchange for a few fanegas of corn or some worthless foodstuff from a store, and at times most shamelessly and unjustly through violent
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usurpation. Orozco concluded that it was not only illegal but also a wretched idea to put municipal ofcers in charge of dividing the old pueblo lands because these so-called vecinos were always people unrelated and even hostile to the communities of Indians, which was equivalent to turning over in shackles these eternal victims of our racial superiority to greedy men intent on humiliating and ruining them.29 In light of the prevailing silence surrounding the question of the pueblos in Porrian intellectual circles, Orozcos remarks acquire a special signicance, hinting as they do at the social and legal conicts plaguing the process of village land disentailment, conicts that more prominent social analysts had declined to see or consider. Perhaps the pueblos should not have been written off so soon after all. Still, these critical reections amount to no more than a brief aside in Orozcos work; only 37 of the books 1154 pages dealt with the pueblos, and of those, all but 11 simply reproduced a variety of related documents.30 As the century drew to a close, the pueblo remained a rather forgotten subject, Orozcos grave admonitions notwithstanding.31 Andrs Molina Enrquezs writings would change all that.
29. Ibid., 441 44, 1105 111. 30. Ibid., 441 44, 1105 111, and 1113 138. In 1914, as the revolution raged on, Orozco would publish a separate treatise devoted entirely to pueblo land legislation. See Wistano Luis Orozco, Los ejidos de los pueblos (Mexico City: Ed. El Caballito, 1975). 31. This is in no way to suggest that there was no other discussion of pueblo-related matters during the late nineteenth-century, for indeed there was plenty. In the radical press, in anarchist circles, and among Catholic social reformers, for instance, addressing the grievances of village farmers and hacienda workers was certainly a high priority. It is therefore not hard to nd printed denunciations of rural injustice and oppression, calls for radical reform or even revolution in the countryside, plans to improve the livelihood and working conditions of campesinos and peones, and evidence of meetings, rallies, conferences, and pamphlets variously devoted to diagnosing and trying to resolve Mexicos rural problem. For the most part, however, these dissenting voices did not make the defense of pueblos qua social (and legal) institutions a centerpiece of their critical discourses and alternative programs. Instead, their analyses and proposals tended to concentrate primarily on the plight of people, whether as individuals, as families, as a social class, or as a racial group, and not so much (or at all) on the fate of an institution, which for many smacked of colonial backwardness and subjugation. Hence, when these social critics did discuss rural institutions, their focus of attention was generally the hacienda, not the pueblo. In this dissident context, too, Molina Enrquezs ideas represented a signicant departure.
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Andrs Molina Enrquez
Andrs Molina Enrquez was born on 30 November 1868 in the Villa of Jilotepec (Mexico State), the creole and mestizo-dominated cabecera of an old farming and ranching district heavily populated by Otom Indians, one hundred miles northwest of Mexico City and not far from the border with the nascent state of Hidalgo. He was the son of Francisca Enrquez, scioness of a once-wealthy local family, and Anastasio Molina, the towns notary public. His father was active in local Liberal circles, and even served as diputado (1872 73) from Jilotepec in the state legislature. When Andrs was eleven years old, he joined an older brother as a student at the prestigious Instituto Literario del Estado de Mxico in Toluca; he had to be given a scholarship, since the family, it seems, could not afford to pay his tuition. Thanks in good measure to Ignacio Ramrez, who had once taught there, the Instituto boasted a high academic reputation, as well as solid Liberal credentials. Just as Molina was beginning his studies, a new curriculum inspired by the doctrines of positivism was introduced. He spent the next ve years there, taking courses in Mathematics, French, Latin, Morals and Civics, Universal Geography and Cosmography, English, Greek Civilization, Spanish, Physics, Chemistry, World and Mexican History, German, Logic, and Literature. Hoping to become a lawyer, he attended the Escuela Nacional de Jurisprudencia in Mexico City, since the Instituto renamed Cientco y Literario in 1886 had eliminated law degrees as part of its recent curricular reform. By the time he left Toluca in 1885, young Andrs Molina had acquired a broad scientic education, probably as rigorous and modern an intellectual training as could then be obtained in Mexico.32
32. A detailed biography of Andrs Molina Enrquez has yet to be written. For details of his life, see Stanley F. Shadle, Andrs Molina Enrquez: Mexican Land Reformer of the Revolutionary Era (Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press, 1994); Alvaro Molina Enrquez, foreword to Antologa de Andrs Molina Enrquez (Mexico City: Ed. Oasis, 1969); Renato Molina Enrquez, Andrs Molina Enrquez: Conciencia de Mxico, Boletn Bibliogrco de la Secretara de Hacienda y Crdito Pblico, 15 Aug. 1955; Antonio Huitrn Huitrn, ed., Andrs Molina Enrquez: La propiedad agraria en Mxico (Toluca: Gobierno del Estado de Mxico, 1987), esp. appendix of documents; Andrs Molina Enrquez (Toluca: Gobierno del Estado de Mxico, Coleccin Testimonios del Estado de Mxico, 1979); Mara del Carmen Reyes, Detalles de la vida y obra de Andrs Molina Enrquez, Boletn del Archivo General del Estado de Mxico 9, no. 3 (1981); and Alfonso Snchez Arteche, Molina Enrquez: La herencia de un reformador (Toluca: Instituto Mexiquense de Cultura, 1990). For an extensive bibliography of works by and about Molina, see Shadle, Andrs Molina Enrquez, 143 54. On the Instituto de Toluca, see Aurelio J. Venegas, El Instituto Cientco y Literario del
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Between 1885 and 1891, Molina studied for three years at the National Law School, which he left without obtaining a degree. It is not clear why he did not nish, or what he did for the remaining three years, though some have suggested that he was perhaps forced to work full-time for a living. In April 1891, back in Toluca, Molina was licensed as a notary public; soon thereafter, he returned to Jilotepec, wherein early 1892he took over his ailing fathers legal business.33 The next six years Molina would spend working as a notario, initially in Jilotepec, then briey in Toluca, and nally in the southern district of Sultepec, a mountainous mining zone surrounded by agricultural pueblos, where he resided for most of this period. As it turns out, the communal lands of many of these villages had recently been privatized, and the new individual lot titles that had been issued to pueblo members (often just the kind of document that Orozco was denouncing as spurious) were already being bought and sold. As a notary public, Molina was expected to bear legal witness to and maintain a public record of these transactions through which Indians (in most cases) were selling away their lands. Alfonso Snchez Arteche has gone over a number of the protocolos that Molina Enrquez wrote during those years, showing that these ex-communal land title transfers came before him on a regular basis.34 The experience clearly made a deep impression on him. A decade later, he would reconstruct these events in Los grandes problemas nacionales: I can personally testify to this, based on what I witnessed during nine years in various small towns. . . . Many of the Indians who received lands did not get to own their lots even for a single day, and if one were to look into the question of sale prices, one would nd that a certain lot was acquired for a few pieces of bread, another for a few quarts of corn,
Estado de Mxico (1927; reprint, Mexico City: Biblioteca Enciclopdica del Estado de Mxico, 1979); Elizabeth Buchanan Martn del Campo, El Instituto de T oluca bajo el signo del positivismo, 1870 1910 (Toluca: Univ. Autnoma del Estado de Mxico, 1981); and Margarita Garca Luna, El Instituto Literario de T oluca: Una aproximacin histrica (Toluca: Gobierno del Estado de Mxico, 1987). 33. Snchez Arteche, Molina Enrquez, 154; and Huitrn Huitrn, Andrs Molina Enrquez, appendix doc. 4. 34. Snchez Arteche suggests that Molina resigned his rst post (in Jilotepec) after refusing to legalize a land transaction orchestrated by a town merchant because he regarded it as being egregiously abusive, and even usurpatory. See his Molina Enrquez, 154 68; and Shadle, Andrs Molina Enrquez, 15 20. On Sultepec, see Frank Schenk La desamortizacin de las tierras comunales en el estado de Mxico (1856 1911): El caso del distrito de Sultepec, Historia Mexicana 45, no. 1 (1995).
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and most of the rest for a few pitchers of pulque or a few quarts of aguardiente.35 In July 1898, Molina left Sultepec for a post in the administration of Governor Villada. By then, he had been writing newspaper articles for several years, and had even briey published his own paper, Sultepecs La Hormiga.36 While in Toluca, he resumed his legal studies at the Instituto, where law was once again being taught. After passing all the required courses and professional exams, he nally received his law degree on 14 September 1901.37 A year later, he was appointed interim district judge in Tlalnepantla, and immediately had to rule on a dispute over the ownership of some farmlands, in which an individual was suing various vecinos of the pueblo of San Miguel Chiconautla. The plaintiffs lawyer argued that the defendants title to the lands in question given to the pueblo as part of a settlement negotiated in back in 1897 was simply not valid, since the law clearly stated that pueblos had no personalidad jurdica and hence were not allowed to possess such lands. The plaintiff, moreover, had his own individual property title, issued to him by the jefe poltico as part of a reparto. Judge Molina Enrquez nevertheless sided with the pueblo, using his ruling to call into question both the original logic and the subsequent interpretation of Article 25 of the Lerdo Law (25 June 1856), which denied pueblos any legal standing. In due course, the State Superior Court overturned his decision, and the Supreme Court ratied the reversal.38 Molinas stint as a judge in Tlalnepantla lasted no more than a year; he went on to serve for a few months as district judge and notary public in El Oro de Hidalgo, a mining town on the western edge of the state, but by mid-1904 he had abandoned the bench and settled in Mexico City, where he would practice law in association with Luis Cabrera, whom he had apparently met back in Tlalnepantla. By then his unusual ideas and inuential friendships had started to earn him recognition in some intellectual circles, and he had become an honorary member of the Sociedad Mexicana de Geografa y Estadstica. At
35. Andrs Molina Enrquez, Los grandes problemas nacionales (Mexico City: Imp. de A. Carranza e Hijos, 1909), 58. 36. Renato Molina Enrquez, Andrs Molina Enrquez: Conciencia de Mxico; and Reyes, Detalles de la vida y obra de Andrs Molina Enrquez, 65 6. 37. Huitrn Huitrn, Andrs Molina Enrquez, appendix, doc. 5. 38. For a discussion of this case, see Snchez Arteche, Molina Enrquez, 181 88. The conict was probably far more complex than it might seem at rst, since it apparently featured members of the same family on both sides of the legal argument.
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this point, his story becomes better known. In 1906 Molina Enrquez published La reforma y Jurez: Estudio histrico-sociolgico, an essay propounding a distinctively original interpretation of Mexicos nineteenth-century history; afterwards, he began serializing his Estudios de Sociologa Mexicana in the newspaper El Tiempo. These were preliminary drafts of what eventually became Los grandes problemas nacionales, publishedauspiciously, in retrospectin 1909.39 This biographical outline helps to explain the origin of Molina Enrquezs interest in the plight of the pueblos, and it also gives some indication of the kinds of practical remedies that his writings would propose. The divided racial world of his native Jilotepec, his fathers social liberalism, bearing witness to the injustices legal and otherwise engendered in the process of pueblo land divisions all of these experiences would deeply inuence his understanding of Mexicos rural ills. In and of themselves, however, they do not explain his peculiar conceptualization of the problems that lay before him, and in particular how against the grain of Mexicos prevailing intellectual trends he came to see the preservation of pueblos (in the old juridical sense) as essential for social peace and progress. In order to do that, it is also necessary to examine Molinas diverse intellectual inuences, the lenses through which he ltered both what he saw in his native Mexico state and what he thought about the larger historical context within which these recent events had to be interpreted. This is a task made difcult not only by the inherent complexity of the subject but also by the paucity of research on these questions. What follows now is therefore only a preliminary attempt to map out though not, for the most part, to detail or disentangle the main sources of Molinas analysis (in addition, of course, to his own rst-hand observations). For the sake of simplicity, they may be divided into four clusters: the positivism of Comte and Spencer; the biological evolutionism of Darwin and Haeckel; the historical school of jurisprudence; and the literature on Mexican history and ethnology. Each will be briey described in turn. Like most educated Mexicans of his time, Molina Enrquez was heavily inuenced by the theories of Comte and Spencer. He learned his positivism at the Instituto in Toluca, where a belief in the scientic basis of knowledge, in
39. Renato Molina Enrquez, Andrs Molina Enrquez: Conciencia de Mxico; Snchez Arteche, Molina Enrquez, 189, 203 4, 21112; Alvaro Molina Enrquez, foreword to Antologa de Andrs Molina Enrquez, 12 13. See also Andrs Molina Enrquez, La cuestin del da: La agricultura nacional (Mexico City: Imp. La Espaola, 1902); and idem, La Reforma y Jurez: Estudio histrico-sociolgico (Mexico City: Tip. de la Viuda de Francisco Daz de Len, 1906).
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the inexorable march of progress, and in the structure of society as a natural organism had become the foundation of all learning; in this sense, Molina was a positivist even before he knew it. It appears that he eventually read everything that he could nd by or about both Comte and Spencer, but his aversion to citations makes it hard to know exactly what that was. Still, Comtes imprint is clearly visible. A little known text called Clasicacin de las ciencias fundamentales (1920) was Molinas attempt to grapple with and improve upon Comtes theories and classication of knowledge, and La reforma y Jurez echoing Comtes three stages divided Mexican history into three successive developmental periods.40 Of all the new sciences, sociology which he described as the study of the formation of human collectivities attracted him the most, and he came to consider himself primarily a sociologist, much in the way that Comte had dened it. Molinas methodological emphasis on social groups as units of analysis, his conception of the state as an important agent of social development, his insistence on the social character of property, and his barely disguised social paternalism, all bear a distinctively Comtean inuence. Indeed, as Charles Hale has observed, the positivism of Molina Enrquez, like that of Sierra, was in some respects more Comtean than Spencerian, particularly in its conception of state and society.41 At the same time, Molina was wholly taken with Spencers notion of the universality of evolution and its application to the understanding of the history of human societies. Moreover, in Hales words, Spencers thought had a descriptive ethnographical dimension that was lacking in Comte, and he helped Mexicans focus attention on the peculiarities of their society within the universal scheme of evolution. This appealed to Molina Enrquez; on those rare occasions in which his main pre-1910 works refer directly to Spencers writings, they do so specically in this ethnological context.42 A fascination with evolution also drew Molina to Darwin, whose theory of natural selection he readily embraced, using it to explain the evolution of cer40. Andrs Molina Enrquez, Clasicacin de las ciencias fundamentales (Mexico City: Antigua Imp. de Murgua, 1920). 41. Hale, The Transformation of Liberalism, 260. Hales book provides the best analysis yet of the reception of positivism in Mexico, and it succeeds in clarifying the main differences between Comtean and Spencerian ideas as these were interpreted in a Mexican context, esp. chaps. 78. But see also Leopoldo Zea, El positivismo en Mxico, 2 vols. (Mexico City: El Colegio de Mxico, 1943). 42. Hale, The Transformation of Liberalism, 213; Molina Enrquez, La Reforma y Jurez, 18 19, 31. Molina Enrquezs Los grandes problemas mentions neither Spencer nor Comte by name.
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tain physiological traits among Mexicos native peoples. In Los grandes problemas, he cites a good number of Darwins works, including The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man.43 A more direct and pervasive inuence, however, would come from the works of Ernst Haeckel (18341919), a German zoologist and philosopher who publicized and defended the theory of organic evolution in Germany. Haeckels interpretations of and elaborations on Darwins ideas shaped Molinas thought in signicant ways. In particular, two of Haeckels formulations seem to have struck Molina as insightful. One was the fundamental biogenetic law, which stated, that ontogenesis is a brief and rapid recapitulation of phylogenesis, determined by the physiological functions of heredity (generation) and adaptation (maintenance).44 In other words, the development patterns of individual organisms, Haeckel explained, essentially replicate those in the historic evolution of the species to which they belong. Viewing both societies at large and the social groups within them as evolutionary organisms, Molina would employ the biogenetic law to make sense of the long-term historical development of Mexico as a nation and of the various socio-ethnic collectivities that formed a part of it. Molina also adopted Haeckels philosophical monism, the belief that all matter organic and inorganic was ultimately one and the same. To show this, Haeckel early on elaborated a controversial carbon theory, which sought to explain how inorganic carbon compounds could have spontaneously generated movement, thus becoming the organic basis of all life in the universe. The variegated development of these organic forces in the context of specic ambient conditions would then set in motion the evolution of species. In Los grandes problemas, Molina would borrow (and adapt) this theory to explain the origin of those large [human] groups that are generally called razas, including the various
43. Molina Enrquez, Los grandes problemas, 35, 249 52, 255 58. Molina read Darwin in French and English, as well as in Spanish. On Darwinism in Mexico, see Roberto Moreno, La introduccin del darwinismo en Mxico, Anuario de Historia 8 (1975); idem, La polmica del darwinismo en Mxico, siglo XIX: Testimonios (Mexico City: Univ. Nacional Autnoma de Mxico, 1984); Rosaura Ruiz Gutirrez, Positivismo y evolucin: Introduccin del darwinismo en Mxico (Mexico City: Univ. Nacional Autnoma de Mxico, 1987), esp. 164 64; and Thomas F. Glick, Science and Society in Twentieth-Century Latin America, in The Cambridge History of Latin America, ed. Leslie Bethell (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994), vol. 6, bk. 1:470 72. 44. Ernst Haeckel, The Riddle of the Universe, trans. Joseph McCabe ( New York: Harper & Brothers, 1900), 81. These ideas were rst expounded in Haeckel, Generelle Morphologie der Organismen, 2 vols. (Berlin: Reimer, 1866); and idem, Naturliche Schopfungsgeschichte (Berlin: Reimer, 1868).
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native peoples of Mexico. In the end, Haeckels intricate biological arguments would provide the foundation or so Molina thought for one of Los grandes problemas most important analytic claims; namely, that the mutual afnities and attractions that give rise among those individuals who form a particular group to what is called social cohesion have an organic origin.45 While Molina Enrquezs reliance on positivist social theories and on Darwins and Haeckels biological evolutionism has long been recognized, the enormous inuence that the ideas of the historical school of jurisprudence (knowingly or otherwise) appear to have exerted upon his work has been universally ignored.46 The term historical jurisprudence refers to a method of analysis and criticism made prominent by the studies on the history of Roman law published by the German scholar Friedrich Karl von Savigny during the rst half of the nineteenth century. In the aftermath of the wars against Napoleon, jurist Anton Thibaut had urged the enactment of a single civil code for all the German states. Savigny vigorously opposed the idea of a codication based on the abstract principles of natural law, arguing that a nations law reects both its history and its particular state of civilization, and thus should not be modied arbitrarily. Closely paraphrasing Savignys famous reply to Thibaut in On the Vocation of Our Age for Legislation and Jurisprudence (1814), legal scholar Hermann Kantorowicz wrote, The historical school teaches that the contents of the law are necessarily determined by the whole past of the nation, and therefore cannot be changed arbitrarily. Thus, like the language, the manners, and the constitution of a nation, all law is exclusively determined by the nations peculiar character, by what was later called the Volksgeist. Like language, manners, and constitution, law has no separate existence, but is a simple
45. Molina Enrquez, Los grandes problemas, 8, 34 6, 272 84; Ernst Haeckel, The History of Creation ( New York: D. Appleton, 1976). On Haeckel, see Wilhelm Blsche, Haeckel: His Life and Work (London: T. F. Unwin, 1906); Rollo Handy, Haeckel, Ernst Heinrich, in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy ( New York: Macmillan, 1967), 3:399 402; and John T. Merz, A History of European Thought in the Nineteenth Century, 4 vols. (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1896 1914). 46. See Arnaldo Crdova, El pensamiento social y poltico de Andrs Molina Enrquez, prologue to Molina Enrquez, Los grandes problemas nacionales (Mexico City: Era, 1978); Agustn Basave Bentez, Mxico mestizo: Anlisis del nacionalismo mexicano en torno a la mestizolia de Andrs Molina Enrquez (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Econmica, 1992); James L. Hamon and Stephen R. Niblo, Precursores de la revolucin agraria en Mxico: Las obras de Wistano Luis Orozco y Andrs Molina Enrquez (Mexico City: Secretara de Educacin Pblica, 1975); and Shadle, Andrs Molina Enrquez.
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function or facet of the whole life of the nation. . . . Thus, law is always organically connected with the development of social life. . . . The real remedy for the deciencies of German law was to apply strictly historical methods, and thus to purify the original Roman law from its delement through modern ignorance and indifference. History alone, Savigny declared, is the road to the understanding of our own conditions.47 In this view, both law and society were the subjects of parallel processes of evolution (in a nonbiological sense), and rigorous historical analysis was the means through which the true meaning of existing laws could be ascertained. Savigny himself applied these ideas to the study of Roman law; his works of scholarship, in particular Das Recht des Besitzes (1803) and the massive Geschichte des rmischen Rechts im Mittelalter (181531), revolutionized the eld of jurisprudence. It is unlikely that Molina ever read Savigny directly, although most of his studies of Roman law were available in French and English translations, as well as to a lesser extent in Spanish. There is no doubt, however, that Molinas understanding of the relationship between law and social development ( particularly, as will be seen, in the case of the pueblos) bears a remarkable resemblance to what was propounded by the historical school, especially with respect to its underlying philosophy. Indeed, Kantorowiczs description of Savignys ideas could be applied to Molinas just as well, replacing Germany with Mexico and Roman with Spanish law.48 But exactly how and when the historical approach to jurisprudential analysis found its way into Mexico is a question that has yet to be answered. It is quite possible that Molina became engaged with some of these ideas through the writings of Laboulaye, Ahrens, Bluntschli, or Laveleye, which were well known in Mexican legal circles.49
47. Hermann Kantorowicz, Savigny and the Historical School of Law, Law Quarterly Review 53 (1937). See also Friedrich Karl Savigny, Vom Beruf unserer Zeit fur Gesetzgebung und Rechtswissenschaft (Heidelberg: Mohr, 1828). 48. In Los grandes problemas, 29, Molina Enrquez began his discussion of the history of Spanish land legislation in Mexico with the following remark: El instinto jurdico espaol, tan desarrollado a nuestro entender, que slo el romano le super. 49. See Edouard Laboulaye, Essai sur la vie et les doctrines de Frederic Charles de Savigny (Paris: A. Durand, 1842); idem, Histoire du droit de propriet fonciere en occident (Paris: A. Durand, 1839); Heinrich Ahrens, Curso de derecho natural, o de losofa del derecho, 6th ed. (Paris: A. Bouret., 1876); idem, Enciclopedia juridica, 3 vols. (Madrid: Lib. de V. Surez, 1878); Johann Caspar Bluntschli, Derecho pblico universal, 3 vols. (Madrid: F. Gngora y Co., 1880); and Emile de Laveleye, De la propriet et de ses formes primitives (Paris: Lib. G. Bailliere, 1874).
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Another likely conduit would be Spanish legal historiography the studies of Eduardo de Hinojosa, Rafael Altamira y Crevea, and other scholars similarly inuenced by Savigny. Molina Enrquez may have come across these works in law school, on his own or perhaps through his friends at the Escuela Nacional de Jurisprudencia. Regardless, it seems clear that Savignys analytical approach became an important albeit unacknowledged part of Molinas thinking.50 Finally, it is also worth noting that Molina was familiar with the long historiography and with the budding ethnography of Mexico. He had read Zavala, Mora, Otero, Ocampo, Pimentel, Orozco y Berra, Riva Palacio, Sierra, and Bulnes. In addition, he had studied the writings of Jovellanos and Orozco, as well as diverse works on native peoples, from Hubert Bancrofts The Native Races to Elie Recluss Les primitifs.51 Despite his small-town origins and occupations, Molina was evidently a very learned man. Weaving together his experiences, his observations, his readings, and his convictions, Molina Enrquez went on to produce a new interpretation of Mexican history in which the pueblo, as a sociolegal institution, would play a central role, and where the Reforma, despite its many other virtues, would be portrayed as a clumsy and ultimately disastrous legal effort to strip Indian pueblos of a juridical status that betted their evolutionary needs. But the story that Molina wanted to tell begins much earlier, with an account of the rise of humans and the development of agriculture in the high central plateaus of Mexico.
50. Charles Hale has briey alluded to the inuence of the historical school of law in Mexico, but only in the specic context of Laboulayes constitutionalism; see his The Transformation of Liberalism, 8, 82, 94, 205, 214, 251. Molina Enrquez was familiar with the recent historical works of Mexican jurists such as Manuel Ortiz de Montellano, Jacinto Pallares, Isidro Rojas, and Miguel Macedo. See Manuel Ortiz de Montellano, Gnesis del derecho mexicano (Mexico City: Tip. de T. Gonzlez, Sucs., 1899), which was written in the 1870s; Jacinto Pallares, ed., Legislacin federal complementaria del derecho civil mexicano (Mexico City: Tip. Artstica de R. Riveroll, 1897); idem, Curso completo de derecho mexicano, o exposicin losca, histrica y doctrinal de toda la legislacin mexicana (Mexico City: I. Paz, 1901); and Isidro Rojas, Evolucin del derecho en Mxico (Mexico City: Imp. Mellado & Pardo, 1900). As examples of Spains late-nineteenth-century legal historiography, see Eduardo de Hinojosa, Historia general del derecho espaol (Madrid: Tip. de los Hurfanos, 1887); and Rafael Altamira, Historia de la propiedad comunal (Madrid: J. Lpez Camacho, 1890). 51. Hubert Howe Bancroft, The Native Races at the Pacic States of North America (San Francisco: History Co., 1886); and Elie Reclus, Les primitifs: Etudes dethnologie compare (Paris: Schleicher Frres et Cie., 1885). Students of Molinas work have sometimes confused Elie with his well-known brother, the famous geographer and anarchist activist Elise Reclus.
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Following Haeckel, Molina believed that carbonic exchanges were the key to understanding organismic evolution; in the case of humans, this meant nutrition. Thus, the possibilities of agriculture would determine the ability of a given people to evolve in the direction of complexity, both in terms of individual physiology and with respect to their social arrangements. In short, agriculture was the key to civilization. Agriculture, in turn, depended on the conditions imposed by the environment, and hence the latter would dene the kind of social evolution that could take place within any given zone. In general, different territories would allow for different degrees of group evolution. In Mexico, Molina argued, the lay of the land had severely restricted the potential for agricultural development, except in the central highland plateaus, which he baptized la zona fundamental de los cereales. It was therefore in this area that human societies would evolve the furthest.52 Surveying the extraordinary variety of tribes or pueblos that Orozco y Berra had documented as existing at the time of the conquest, Molina observed: These tribes occupied their own areas, spoke mostly different languages, and were in very diverse stages of evolutive development. Each evolved in relation to the conditions of the terrain in which they lived, and some among them who occupied the privileged spaces of la zona fundamental de los cereales had managed to reach a relatively advanced stage of evolution.53 Molina also believed that just as different terrains would produce different evolutive results, cohabitation under similar environmental circumstances would yield social cohesion. In his own words, social forces of a completely organic origin . . . establish the mutual afnities and attractions that give rise among all of the units in one particular zone to what we have called social cohesion; this, in turn, gives rise to the formation of a group within which harmonious relations are born and established, making the whole into an organism.54 Collectivities, like individuals, were organic beings shaped by the forces of evolution. This, he concluded, was not only the origin of races, but also beyond that of tribal (or ethnic) identity. For these reasons, Molina would conceive of Indian pueblos (which he considered the colonial embodiments of
52. Molina Enrquez, Los grandes problemas, 7 11. 53. Ibid., 16 25. 54. Ibid., 35. Sociology, Molina would go on to explain, is precisely the study of these harmonious relations.
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these human units) as being essentially cohesive and harmonious social formations, largely devoid of serious internal conicts or fractures. The character of a social groups property relations, Molina went on to explain, was the clearest expression of the level of evolution that it had reached. Since this idea lies at the heart of Molinas understanding of Indian pueblos, his argument is worth quoting at length: Given the close link that is found among groups of people everywhere between the conditions of production of the elements that provide the necessary carbon that is vital for combustion to all the units of those groups of people, on the one hand, and the stage of development that such groups manage to attain, on the other . . . it is clear that as these groups become more advanced, they develop a rmer, more precise, and more complex relationship with the lands they occupy: they grow, lets put it that way, wider and deeper roots in that territory, and it becomes for that reason harder to cut off those roots and to evict them.. . . All of the juridical ties that are called property rights emanate from that relationship between a territory and the population that occupies it.55 In short, the territorial context of agricultural production, the pace of social evolution, and the character of property rights were all thus perfectly correlated. It is worth noting that in this view the content of property rights was determined by historical conditions, and as such, Molina would later argue, it should only be modied in accordance with the evolution of said conditions. There was, moreover, an ascending scale of progress regarding the evolution of property rights, from the absolute lack of any notion of such rights, to individual property based on securities, which in our judgment represents the highest form of territorial domain. It was therefore possible, Molina thought, to classify degrees of social evolution in terms of the prevailing forms of rights over landed property. To illustrate his argument, Molina prepared a chart (see table 1) showing the various historical phases of territorial possession alongside the stages of evolution to which each corresponded. As can be seen, Molina concluded, simply by placing any peoples in one of the ten stages of social development identied in the preceding table, one can learn right away their approximate evolutive age.56 This he regarded as an important scientic advance. He then proceeded to catalogue pre-Hispanic
55. Ibid., 25. 56. Ibid., 26 7.
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Table 1: Historical Phases of Territorial Possession and Corresponding Stages of Evolution

Periodo de dominio territorial 1o. Falta absoluta de toda nocin de derecho 1o. territorial 2o. Nocin de la ocupacin, pero no de la 1o. posesin 3o. Nocin de la posesin, pero no de la 1o. propiedad Estados de desarrollo Sociedades nmadas Sociedades sedentarias, pero movibles Sociedades de ocupacin comn no denida Sociedades de ocupacin comn limitada Sociedades de posesin comunal sin posesin individual Sociedades de ocupacin comunal con posesin individual Sociedades de propiedad comunal Sociedades de propiedad individual Sociedades de crdito territorial Sociedades de titulacin territorial duciaria
4o. Nocin de la propiedad 1o. 5o. Derechos de propiedad territorial, 1o. desligados de la posesin territorial 1o. misma
Source: Reprinted from Molina Enrquez, Los grandes problemas nacionales (Mexico City: Imp. de A. Carranza e Hijos, 1909), 27.
indigenous societies in this fashion; most of the tribes occupying the zona fundamental were in stage three ( possession), with some beginning to reach the fourth ( property), while those on the fringes of this zone tended to be in the second (occupation), and northern peoples generally remained in the rst (no notion whatsoever of property rights). However, he cautioned, precise classications were hard to do, since in many cases one stage coexisted with another. Nevertheless, Molina continued, it was clear that not even the most advanced among these peoples had acquired a full sense of property (that is, written titles). Spaniards, by contrast, had already reached that stage. After the conquest, Spanish authorities failed to recognize any of these developmental distinctions, and instead grouped all indigenous people into a single category, namely, Indians. This was understandable, Molina thought, given the enormous evolutive distance that separated Spaniards from indigenous peoples, which made it hard for the new arrivals to discern many local differences. Beyond that, the Spanish government had wisely understood the signicance of this atraso evolutivo; it was cause for admiration, Molina wrote, that Spaniards had managed to give the Indians a treatment adequate for their evolutive age. Therein, moreover, lay the root of their success, for in recognizing that differences in stages of evolution reect differences in orga-
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nization, the Spanish authorities were able, in effect, to devise social institutions well suited to the Indians organizational capacities.57 Chief among them, of course, was the pueblo. Molina understood well the juridical structure of colonial pueblo communities, as he called them, and the reasons that underlay it. In his view, the uniform legal regime of communal property on which pueblos were based had represented something new for some of the peoples on whom it had been imposed, used as they had been to mere possession, occupation, or even less. Hence, it was not always a perfect t, but in such cases the Spaniards had shown some exibility in its application.58 On the whole, however, and especially for the indigenous peoples of the zona fundamental, Molina was convinced that the establishment of pueblos (in both legal senses) had been a felicitous policy. Given the Indians evolutive backwardness, no other form of organization could have better served their interests. As he put it, Far from having been prejudicial, the communal regime has been benecial for the Indians. Communal property, consisting of the Indian village fundos, the ejidos, and the terrenos de repartimiento despite being continually invaded and diminished by the Spaniards, and despite being composed of poor lands has nevertheless sustained the life of the Indians in an admirable way. Communal property has had two indisputable advantages: it preserved forever the land that the Indian cultivates, and it motivated every Indian in a community to defend the common land, which was the only effective means of defense that the Indians could deploy against the Spaniards. If the land had been divided individually, fairly or not, among Spaniards and Indians, and if the latter had been freed from the tutelage that forbade them to sell their lands, there is absolutely no doubt that there would no longer be a single square centimeter of land in the hands of Indians, and not a single Indian left in the republic.59 In this way, Molina Enrquez turned on its head a long and deeply entrenched line of argumentation from Zavala and Mora to Pimentel and Sierra which blamed the paternalistic logic behind the institution of the colonial pueblo for much of the ignorance and backwardness that was said to per-
57. Molina Enrquez, La Reforma y Jurez, 24 5. 58. Molina Enrquez, Los grandes problemas, 116 17. 59. Molina Enrquez, La Reforma y Jurez, 30.
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vade Indian life. The pueblo, Molina asserted, had not been the problem, but rather the solution.60 The coming of independence, Molina continued, had not altered this state of affairs. Independent Mexico, he wrote, has not managed to nd a more efcacious means of assisting the Indian race than that of the community. Predictably, therefore, he regarded Liberal efforts to abolish the legal standing of Indian polities and to break up their communal landholdings as being profoundly misguided, this despite the fact that he revered Jurez and considered the expropriation of church holdings a gigantic step in the direction of national progress. Like his own father, Molina embraced the general aims of the Reforma, but on the question of the Indian pueblos he had decidedly forged his own separate path. For him, it was inevitable that the implementation of the ley Lerdo would have disastrous consequences, since the Indians who received land lots from the repartos were bound to lose them. Their evolutive age precluded any other outcome. No poda ser de otro modo, he wrote, because community offered the Indians notable advantages . . . [giving them] a way to make a living regardless of their stage of evolution, from that of a savage horde to that of a polity incorporated to civilization. These lands yielded many resources, which the Indians could enjoy without much effort, without capital, and what is more important without any appreciable detriment to the land. Once the land had been divided, however, those who were not ready, lacked the means, or did not know how to take advantage of their new private patrimony (which, incidentally, carried with it a host of scal obligations) saw no option but to sell, since they still had to make a living, and the free resources that had been available in community were no longer theirs to be had. Most Indians, Molina explained, irremediably found themselves in this situation, and sooner or later their fracciones ended up in the hands of the mestizos. At that point, bereft of land and livelihood he ominously concluded these Indians ceased to be peaceful men, turning into mercenary soldiers ready to follow any old agitator.61 To put an end to this grievous process, the pueblos
60. Ibid., 25. In the same vein, Molina Enrquez dismissed Sierras view of education as the solution to the Indian problem, stating that it made no sense to try to traverse, in period of ten or fteen years, two or three thousand years of evolutionary backwardness. 61. All quotations in this paragraph are from Molina Enrquez, Los grandes problemas, 57 8.
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would have to be reconstituted. And only a strong central government in full possession of the vast powers of territorial domain that had been legally inherited from the Spanish Crown could accomplish this pressing social task. Herein, in sum, lies the source of the generic explanation of disentailment and its consequences, as well as the buried ideological inspiration for a program of agrarian reform that would bring back some of the core juridical features of the colonial Spanish pueblos (now renamed ejidos), just when the old Liberals and new Porrians who fought against them imagined that they would have at last been rooted out.
Inuence of Molina Enrquezs Ideas
Molina Enrquezs sui generis rendering of pueblo history and identity would eventually be adopted by a host of revolutionary ideologues, politicians, and pioneer scholars of the countryside, including most notably Frank Tannenbaum, whose classic studies of the Mexican revolution came to reect many important aspects of Molinas peculiar thought. By the early 1930s, this conceptualization of the history of post-Reforma pueblos had quietly found its way not only into the ofcial account of the grievances that led to (and justied) the popular, agrarian revolution, but also signicantly into the new agrarian reform legislation. Among scholars, too, it would acquire a new lease on life. Embedded in Tannenbaums profoundly inuential oeuvre, Molina Enrquezs reductionist tenets about the character of the old pueblos would inadvertently nd their way obliquely and overtly into the work of successive generations of rural historians. These twin processes of ideological diffusion in law and in historical interpretation are both complex and extensive; tracing them in full detail would require another essay altogether.62 What follows now is therefore only a brief outline of these developments, sketching the manner in which Molinas ideas inuenced agrarian legislation and historical interpretation about the pueblos during and after the revolution. Molinas sociohistorical analysis found its way into land reform legislation thanks largely to the work of his friend Luis Cabrera, a professor and dean of the national law school who went on to serve as diputado during Maderos presidency and then became an inuential advisor and cabinet minister under
62. This article is part of a longer work in progress, a study of the evolution of the idea of the Indian pueblo in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Mexican thought, law, and political discourse.
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Carranza. As Cabrera openly acknowledged on a number of occasions, Molina was the principal source of his agrarian ideas; in his estimation, Los grandes problemas nacionales was the single most important analysis of rural Mexicos social and economic problems produced prior to the revolution.63 Cabrera rst brought Molinas interpretation of pueblo history and character into the legislative process as part of his now famous speech introducing a land reform bill before the House of Representatives on 3 December 1912, the text of which was published soon thereafter as La reconstitucin de los ejidos de los pueblos. At the time, one of the legislatures most pressing concerns was dealing with the land issues raised by the Zapatista rebellion in nearby Morelos. Cabreras solution was to propose the reconstitution of pueblo communal landholdings, a measure he thought would effectively bring an end to those rural upheavals. In so doing, Cabrera explicitly endorsed and embraced several key aspects of Molinas historical and sociological arguments. At least ve deserve to be mentioned: rst, that it was necessary to give lands not to individuals, but to social groups; second, that the pueblos had to be given back their juridical standing; third, that communal landholdings, once reconstituted, had to be made legally inalienable; fourth, that the origin of village land loss could be traced back to (and ultimately explained by) the disentailment laws of 1856, which were a very serious and very big mistake that had led inevitably to the absolute impoverishment of the pueblos; and fth, that the federal government had the authority (and the duty) to grant communal lands to those pueblos that were in need of it.64 Although Cabreras proyecto de ley diverged somewhat in practical and procedural terms from the comprehensive agrarian reforms that Molina was himself then advocating, Cabreras law was nevertheless unmistakably the conceptual offspring of Los grandes problemas.65
63. See Luis Cabrera, El balance de la revolucin, in Luis Cabrera: Terico y crtico de la Revolucin, ed. Eugenia Meyer (Mexico City: Secretara de Educacin Pblica, 1972), 106, 113; idem, La reconstitucin de los ejidos de los pueblos (Mexico City: Tip. de Fidencio S. Soria, 1913), reprinted in La cuestin de la tierra, ed. Jess Silva Herzog, 4 vols. (Mexico City: Instituto Mexicano de Investigaciones Econmicas, 1960 1962), 2:284. 64. Cabrera, La reconstitucin de los ejidos de los pueblos, 2:286, 306, 281, 289 90, 302 10. 65. For Molina Enrquezs own proposals around that time, see his Plan de Texcoco (1911), reproduced in Shadle, Andrs Molina Enrquez; and idem, Filosofa de mis ideas sobre reformas agrarias; see also Wistano Orozco, La cuestin agraria, in Herzog, La cuestin de la tierra; Andrs Molina Enrquez, Esbozo de la historia de los primeros diez aos de la revolucin agraria de Mxico, 5 vols. (Mexico City: Talleres Grcos del Museo Nacional de Arqueologa, Historia y Etnografa, 1937), 5:85 95, 112 18; and Luis Cabrera, El balance de la revolucin, 112 14.
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This bills prospects died with Madero, but Cabrera went on to become Carranzas trusted advisor, the intellectual engine of Carrancismo.66 In that capacity, it was Cabrera who drafted the constitutionalist decree of 6 January 1915, which became the foundation of Mexicos postrevolutionary agrarian legislation.67 This text, too, bore clearly the distinctive imprint of Molinas thought. The laws preamble portrayed village and villagers landlessness as a direct result of the implementation (legal and otherwise) of the ley Lerdo, a ruinous process facilitated by the denial of juridical standing to pueblos mandated by Article 27 of the 1857 Constitution. To remedy this situation and as the only effective way to ensure peace in the countryside (in the context of powerful Zapatista and Villista challenges to Carranzas rule), the decree established a mechanism for the expropriation of lands to be restituted or simply granted (in all cases inalienably) to pueblos currently in need of them. Both as a matter of belated justice and for the expedient sake of rural pacication, the pueblos would now be legally enabled to reconstitute their holdings.68 The specic historical interpretation of village land expropriation that framed this fundamental decree has since become very familiar, even commonplace, but it was certainly not well known or widely accepted at the time. It was altogether absent, for instance, from the Zapatistas rival Plan de Ayala (1911), which, quite to the contrary, paid homage to the immortal code of 57, written with the revolutionary blood of Ayutla.69 Years later, Molina wrote that the decree
66. Eugenia Meyer, Luis Cabrera, 42. 67. Ever since, January 6th has been considered a holy day of ofcial agrarismo. On Cabreras authorship, see Pastor Rouaix, Gnesis de los artculos 27 y 123 de la constitucin poltica de 1917, 2d ed. (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Estudios Histricos de la Revolucin Mexicana, 1959), 57 58. 68. For the text of this decree, see Manuel Fabila, Cinco siglos de legislacin agraria en Mxico (Mexico City: Banco Nacional de Crdito Agrcola, 1941), 270 74. 69. See the Plan de Ayala, especially Articles 1, 6, 7, and 9, in Fabila, Cinco siglos de legislacin agraria en Mxico, 214 17. By the time the Zapatistas issued their own agrarian law (26 October 1915), however, the notion that 1856 was a watershed year (in a disastrous sense) for the history of communal landholding had become a part of their rhetoric. See Article 1 of their ley agraria, in Womack, Zapata and the Mexican Revolution, 405 11. It should be noted that there are other signicant philosophical differences between the Law of 1915 and Zapatista land laws (for example, on the role of government in the management of pueblo land affairs), but these cannot be explored here. Molinas historical interpretation of disentailment was also absent from the Proyecto de ley agraria prepared for Carranza by Pastor Rouaix and Jos Novelo in December of 1914, which was in many ways signicantly different from Cabreras. See Rouaix and Novelo, Estudio sobre la cuestin agraria, proyecto de ley, in Herzog, La cuestin de la tierra, 3:357 93.
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of 1915s exposition of motives reect[ed] the principal arguments made in my book Los grandes problemas nacionales . . . concerning the problem of property with respect to Indians. In this he was right; the laws diagnosis of the land problem was evidently derived from his sociohistorical ideas, even if the remedies it prescribed did not follow all of his recommendations.70 In this regard, it is telling that Luis Cabrera had Molina Enrquez appointed to the National Agrarian Commission set up by the decree of 1915 to carry out the redistribution of land to the pueblos.71 Through his work in the C. N. A., and thanks to Cabreras continued support, Molina Enrquez became a well-known gure in Carrancista agrarian circles. Thus, in early 1917, he was asked to join a small commission charged with drafting a new Article 27 for the Constitutional Convention assembled in Queretaro. An initial proposal put forth by Carranza had been deemed unacceptable, because it remained too close to the strict precepts regarding private property espoused back in 1857 and did not address the social demands for substantial land tenure reform forthrightly enough. Since time was very short, Molina Enrquez was asked to come up with a whole new text for Article 27, which he quickly composed. By all accounts (including Molinas), the other members of this working group found the logic and formulation of his draft too abstruse, and hence it was set aside. The commission then worked feverishly to put together yet another draft of the article, for which Molina alone wrote the preamble (in essence, a concise statement of his own theories). When it was nished, just ten days after the group had rst convened, it was submitted for consideration by the Congress. After a congressional committee hurriedly made a number of changes, for the most part minor ones, the diputados constituyentes quickly discussed and then approved the new Article 27.72 There has been some debate concerning the role that Molina played in drafting Article 27. Admirers such as Frank Tannenbaum no doubt encouraged by Molinas own bold claims came to consider him the author of Article 27, while other participants in the process in particular Pastor Rouaix
70. Molina Enrquez, Esbozo de la historia de los primeros diez aos de la revolucin agraria, 5:158 61. For a discussion of the decree of 1915, see Simpson, The Ejido, 58 62; and Shadle, Andrs Molina Enrquez, 67 69. 71. He remained a member of the C. N. A. until mid-1918. For details, see Shadle, Andrs Molina Enrquez, 76 87. 72. For details, see Rouaix, Gnesis, 143 215; Molina Enrquez, Esbozo de los primeros diez aos de la revolucin agraria, 5:167 77; and E. Victor Niemeyer, Revolution at Queretaro: The Mexican Constitutional Convention of 1916 1917 (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1974).
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and Jos Natividad Macas have sought to minimize the importance of his contribution.73 It is clear that the constitutional decision to recognize and reconstruct communal landholdings was above all a pragmatic response to the unyielding demands of popular insurrectionary movements, and not at least not primarily the product of deeply considered intellectual arguments. Whereas the old Article 27 (1857) had denied all corporate bodies the right to own property, the new one stated that property could take a variety of forms (modalidades), in accordance with the public interest. In this way, communal landholding became legal once again, and the pueblos regained their juridical standing, a status now also extended to other similar corporations, such as rancheras, condueazgos, and congregaciones. The Zapatistas had long insisted as had Molina on the legalization of pueblo land rights, and it was ultimately their persistent armed struggle and not Molinas writings that made this a reality. When the constituyentes of 1917 endorsed these sections of Article 27, they did so as a means of resolving an immediate sociopolitical problem, and not because they knew or cared about Molinas elaborate social analysis.74 Nonetheless, Molinas intellectual inuence on the text of Article 27 is not hard to detect; both the historical justication and the sociojuridical basis for the restoration of communal land rights provided therein can be traced back directly to his ideas. First, Article 27 ratied the provisions and rationale of Luis Cabreras decree of 6 January 1915, granting them the status of constitutional law. In so doing, the constitution effectively validated Molinas historical explanation of the consequences of disentailment. Second, Article 27 legalized communal landholding not simply by saying as the Zapatistas had done that this was what villagers demanded, but rather on the basis of an abstract notion of modalidades that reected Molinas sociojuridical arguments.75
73. See Tannenbaum, The Mexican Agrarian Revolution, 180; Anita Brenner, The Wind that Swept Mexico (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1943), 55; Rouaix, Gnesis, 148 64; Molina Enrquez, Esbozo de los primeros diez aos de la revolucin agraria, 5:17177; Lucio Mendieta, Los antecedentes del artculo 27 constitucional, El Universal, 2 Oct. 1946; Jos N. Macas, Quin fue el autor del artculo 27 constitucional, El Universal, 20 Sept. 1937; Molina Enrquez, El Lic. Macas y el artculo 27 de la Constitucin, El Universal, 23 Sept. 1937; Jos N. Macas, La paternidad del artculo 27 de la Constitucin, El Universal, 27 Sept. 1937; and Shadle, Andrs Molina Enrquez, 69 75. 74. For the text of Article 27, as approved, see Fabila, Cinco siglos de legislacin agraria en Mxico, 307 11. Earlier versions can be found in Rouaix, Gnesis, 164 84. See also Diario de los debates del Congreso Constituyente (Mexico City: Secretara de Gobernacin, 1917). 75. The term modalidades was not Molina Enrquezs. It was added by the congressional committee that revised the original proyecto de ley as a way of clarifying and
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Molina outlined the logic behind this concept in the preamble he wrote for the proyecto de ley his commission presented to the Congress, saying that since there were in fact different classes of territorial rights in existence throughout Mexico, this was a reality that the law could no longer ignore.76 This was precisely what Los grandes problemas had endeavored to demonstrate. An even clearer expression of this underlying rationale can be found in an insightful little essay entitled El espritu de la constitucin de Quertaro, which Molina published in 1922 along with a series of other texts (mostly his) intended to explain the origin and meaning of Article 27.77 There Molina wrote that the constitution had effectively recognized that different kinds of private territorial rights were necessary for the various groups in the national population which in fact represent differences in stages of evolution. In this way, he went on to explain, Article 27 had acknowledged the reality that those communities generically called pueblos were still a part of the national life, and had thus established the bases upon which these communities could continue their progressive evolution. In short, given the existence of varying degrees of legal capacity among social groups, the state had a right (and an obligation) to regulate the form of private property, to impose modalidades on private property, all for the public good.78 This is what the new constitution aimed to do. Thus it is evident that Molinas formative ideas regarding pueblos (their history, character, and needs) were by and large incorporated into the agrarian legislation of the victorious constitutionalists. Lodged therein, these tenets would help to dene some of the basic features of ejido land reform for decades to come government tutelage, the inalienability of land grants, and a bureaucratic adherence to the idea that these communities old or new constituted inherently cohesive and harmonious social bodies, to name a few. With regard to pueblos, the decree of 1915 and the new Article 27 con-
highlighting a fundamental idea already contained therein, namely, the regulation of forms of private property. See Rouaix, Gnesis, 184 85, 176 77. 76. For the full text of Molina Enrquez Exposicin de motivos, see Rouaix, Gnesis, 164 69. 77. See Boletn de la Secretara de Gobernacin 1, no. 4 (1922). This issue of the Boletn was edited by Molina Enrquez, and was entirely devoted to Article 27. 78. Molina Enrquez, El espritu de la Constitucin de Quertaro, Boletn de la Secretara de Gobernacin 1, no. 4 (1922):8 9; in the same issue of the Boletn, see Introduccin, 2 3, and Memorandum (22 Mar. 1918), 92. See also Tannenbaum, The Mexican Agrarian Revolution, 189 203; Simpson, The Ejido, 62 72; and Whetten, Rural Mexico, 116 23.
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tained not only prospective solutions to an urgent social problem, but also for those who cared to look an implicit (and unsubstantiated) historical and sociocultural denition of the problem itself. It consisted of a generic account of post-Reforma disentailment and its disastrous consequences, itself based on a series of assumptions about the cultural characteristics of pueblo inhabitants. Molinas work was the principal source of this conceptualization. For many intellectuals and scholars trying to make sense of the roots and meaning of Mexicos land tenure reforms, these prominent laws offered not just a guide to the present, but also a compelling representation of the recent past. Legitimated in this way, Molinas historical interpretation of village land loss would become widely accepted among intellectuals sympathetic to the revolution; after all, given that this legislation was crafted largely to address the grievances of rebellious villagers, how could its description of the cause of those grievances be anything but accurate?79 Some writers (mostly Mexican) endorsed the account in question simply by reference to the new agrarian laws, while others (largely American) traced the source of these insights back to Molina Enrquezs obscure writings, which read in this context appeared profoundly incisive and foresightful. In either case, the outcome was more or less the same: Molinas sui generis views regarding the plight of the pueblos were consistently adopted and disseminated knowingly or not by a wide array of writers and scholars, so much so that in time they would become nearly a truism. A few notable examples will sufce to make this pattern evident. The special case of Luis Cabrera has already been discussed, but it bears mentioning once more, because it was Cabrera who effectively translated Molinas sociohistorical arguments into an authoritative rationale for legal action, thus enabling this process of ideological diffusion to get underway. Absent Cabrera, the fate of Molinas historical analysis might well have been a very different one. Another early example of the adoption of Molinas ideas regarding pueblos can be found in Fernando Gonzlez Roas El problema rural de Mxico (with Jos Covarrubias, 1917) and Aspecto agrario de la revolucin mex-
79. A related matter concerns the extent to which Molinas views on the history of pueblos reected, coincided with, contradicted, or inuenced the ideas that villagers themselves had (or came to have, particularly after the Revolution) about the history of their own pueblos lands. In other words, did Molinas formulations have any impact beyond intellectual circles? What were the connections between evolving popular conceptions of village history, on the one hand, and the story of disentailment and despoliation that became embedded in the new agrarian laws, on the other? These important questions, while beyond the scope of this essay, merit a study in their own right.
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icana (1919). Although his proposals regarding agrarian reform were in many ways quite different from those championed by Molina, he readily accepted the latters characterization of the post-Reforma pueblos. The Indians, he wrote, were not prepared, socially or historically, for private property, and were thus incapable of holding on to it. Village disentailment was a mistaken policy with a predictable result; it was he added, citing Spencer like taking a sh out of the water to force it to breathe the air just because lungs are more perfect organs than gills. In Mexico, communal landholding remained an absolute necessity, given the stage of civilization in which many peoples nd themselves. Accordingly, he praised Cabreras 1912 speech (which the 1919 book quoted at length), the decree of 1915, and the new Article 27 for identifying the appropriate solution to this particular problem, since it is evident that land can only be given to those who are capable of holding on to it, and backward peoples can only do this through communal property, under protective legislation.80 Molina himself could not have said it better. A few years later, Lucio Mendieta published El problema agrario de Mxico (1923), a chronological analysis of the evolution of land tenure laws and practices in the course of Mexican history; continually updated, expanded, and reprinted well into the 1970s, it remains still a very inuential text on such questions. In it, Mendieta essentially repeated the generic explanation of pueblo land loss and decay. Borrowing Molinas language and concepts, he alluded to the disastrous consequences of village land disentailment, explaining that the Reforma laws had disregarded the evolutive state of Indians by placing individual private property in the hands of the inferior peoples of this country (the Indians), who were culturally and economically incapable of holding on to it, let alone developing it.81 The result was landlessness. The agrarian laws of the revolution were now attempting to rectify that unjust situation, ensuring at the same time that it would not occur again. Unlike his counterpart under the laws of the Reforma, Mendieta concluded, todays Indian can not alienate the lands given to him, because the Constitution forbids him to do so.82 That same year, the American Geographical Society published George
80. Gonzlez Roa and Covarrubias, El problema rural de Mxico, 60, 75 76, 142 48; and Gonzlez Roa, El aspecto agrario de la Revolucin Mexicana, 216 23, 235 39, 310 13. 81. Mendieta y Nuez, El problema agrario de Mxico, 86 8, 126, 140. Disastrous is exactly how Molina had described the effects of the Reforma laws on Indian pueblos. See Molina Enrquez, Los grandes problemas, 56. 82. Mendieta y Nuez, El problema agrario de Mxico, 141.
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McBrides The Land Systems of Mexico (1923), based on the authors dissertation. This was the rst detailed study in English of Mexicos modern landholding institutions and tenure patterns, emphasizing both their historical development and the revolutionary efforts to transform them currently underway. McBride must have read Los grandes problemas with some care and interest, since he cited it on a variety of subjects. Not surprisingly, his analysis of what happened to villages, villagers, and their lands in the aftermath of the Reforma coincided almost entirely with Molina Enrquezs, though he did not say so explicitly. [The landholding pueblos] death knell was sounded by the Reforma, he wrote. Unaccustomed to any other system than their ancient communalism and unable to understand the signicance of the attempted measures, most of the Indian pueblos made every effort to oppose or evade the execution of the law. Where the reform measures were carried out, the results were predictable: failing to understand the signicance of the change or unable to rise to the plane of individual proprietorship, the inhabitants of many towns lost their holdings almost as soon as they received them. The government was now attempting to undo some of this harm by restoring collective landholding through the ejido program. Although McBride regarded communal tenure as being somewhat at variance with modern conceptions of property and generally considered unsatisfactory from an economic viewpoint, he nevertheless concluded that it was an appropriate solution in the Mexican case, arguing that it is, however, the system most easily understood by the agricultural Indians . . . who, however unfortunate it may seem, are still in a primitive stage of social advancement and are consequently unable to stand on the same footing as the whites and the more enlightened of the mestizos.83 Another American dissertation, Helen Phippss Some Aspects of the Agrarian Question in Mexico: A Historical Study (1925), told in some ways a very similar story. Although Phipps unlike her predecessors did not make the socio-cultural character of Indians explicitly a centerpiece of her historical explanation, her reliance on Molinas work was nevertheless extensive, and it clearly inuenced her account of pueblo disentailment. The great defect of the Reform Laws, she wrote, was their inclusion of the property of civil communities in the process of expropriation, thus . . . depriving Indian villages and others of communal lands. Communal landholding, she quoted Molina as saying, had notable advantages for the Indians; although the communal lands
83. McBride, The Land Systems of Mexico, 129 36, 175 76.
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were usually sterile and of poor quality, yet they offered the natives a means of livelihood at all stages of their development, from savage horde to village incorporated into civilized life. Disentailment had thus dealt a mortal blow to the villages, for while some of the villages that were so fortunate as to possess clear-sighted leaders, saved themselves from ruin by depositing their individual titles in the care of a trusted cacique and resuming communal life . . . by far the greater number, when presented with titles which meant nothing to them, bartered them for a dollar or two, a sack of corn, or a quantity of liquor. And even the Indian who was sufciently advanced to grasp the ideas of private property and written title, and who tried to cling to his lot, had great difculty in doing so, especially if the land was good, since others would covet it and he lacked the capital to make it pay off.84 There were also echoes of Molinas distinctive views in Phippss interpretation of the new agrarian laws; regarding the deeper meaning of these land reforms, she wrote, As Spain attempted to conserve and adapt the civilization that she found, so now, after a long parenthesis of pitiless exploitation, the reawakened conscience of Mexico has striven to conserve, to reconcile and to adapt; to turn the hands of the clock back one hundred years, and to repair in some measure the injustice that a century had heaped upon the Indian masses.85 While all of these early studies effectively propagated various key aspects of Molinas ideas about pueblos and their history, none did so as openly, as completely, or as successfully as did the works of Frank Tannenbaum. Unlike Mendieta, McBride, and Phipps, Tannenbaum had had a chance to read Molina Enrquezs exegetical commentaries on the spirit of Article 27 (in the 1922 Boletn), and they evidently cast a deep spell on him, in part perhaps because he sympathized with the corporatist social philosophyof Comtean origin, Molina would argue on which they were inspired.86 As a result, Tannenbaum wholeheartedly embraced and championed Molinas reading of Article 27, and thereby also his interpretation of pueblo history and character.87 Both The
84. Phipps, Some Aspects of the Agrarian Question in Mexico, 28 9, 91 2, 112 28. For comparison, see Molina Enrquez, Los grandes problemas, 57 8. 85. Phipps, Some Aspects of the Agrarian Question, 148. 86. For a discussion, see Charles A. Hale, Frank Tannenbaum and the Mexican Revolution, HAHR 75, no. 2 (1995); Tannenbaum, The Mexican Agrarian Revolution, 178 81; and Molina Enrquez, El espritu de la constitucin, 6. 87. In so doing, he relied as well on the works on McBride, Mendieta, Gonzlez Roa, and Covarrubias, all of whom had already adopted Molinas account.
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Mexican Agrarian Revolution (1929) and Peace by Revolution (1933) became showcases for these ideas; in their pages, Los grandes problemas nacionales acquired an intellectual prominence it had never enjoyed before. Until the breakup of the common lands [of the pueblos] as a result of the legislation of 1857 and as a result of the activities of the Daz regime, Tannenbaum wrote in The Mexican Agrarian Revolution, [communal] land ownership and land use was probably . . . predominant, but these policies inevitably proved disastrous to the villages, since in fact, the survival of the villages up to the Daz regime was due to their communal character. Without it, the individual Indian proved himself a helpless child and transferred his title to his little plot of land for a good drink of aguardiente, not knowing the import of the transaction.88 As in Los grandes problemas, the logic of this argument was essentially cultural. Prior to the Reforma, the pueblos were cohesive, even harmonious social institutions, with traditional rules and practices everyone could understand; outside of this adaptive cultural context, Indians simply did not know how to operate. That is why disentailment was bound to be so devastating. As Tannenbaum explained in Peace by Revolution, The destruction of common land ownership really resulted not merely in serious interference with the internal unity of the village community, with its internal discipline and traditions, but in effect reduced the standard of well-being of the villagers. The common ownership of land provided wood for re, for the making of charcoal. . . . It provided pasture for animals both large and small. . . . Possession and use of the land was easy and natural. If one had tools and some capital, he tilled. If misfortune deprived him of these he earned his income by making charcoal or pottery, or nding other uses for the natural resources within the village boundaries. The division of the lands automatically reduced each individual to the limits of his own little parcel, made for the development of social and economic classes within the village, for facility of sale or transfer to the easier enhancement of the surrounding estates. . . . Instead of having to confront a community jealous and on watch for its lands the hacienda now had an individual who was a prey to all sorts of inuences that could not be exercised against a community. The centuries of communal tradition and communal usufruct made the individual Indian an easy prey.89
88. Tannenbaum, The Mexican Agrarian Revolution, 14, 68. 89. Frank Tannenbaum, Peace by Revolution: An Interpretation of Mexico ( New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1933), 140. On pages 13941 the author does little more than paraphrase or quote Molina.
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It was on the basis of these assumptions about pueblos that Tannenbaum was able to conclude (without needing to do much additional research) that the denial to corporate bodies of the right to own property became the legal basis for the despoliation of the lands of Indian villages which in their turn became a source of discontent leading towards the revolution of 1910.90 In Tannenbaums estimation, Molina had managed not only to identify one of the main sources of Mexicos agrarian malaise, but also to formulate a remedy for it. As he put it, Los grandes problemas was up to the present, the most important single study of Mexican social problems, whose author had played an important role in the writing of Article 27 of the new Constitution of 1917 which, in a large measure, is an application of his ideas to the land problem of Mexico.91 Accordingly, his explanation and defense of the juridical principles underlying Article 27 relied almost exclusively on the writings of Molina, both in the Boletn of 1922 and in the preamble to the original proyecto de ley. Endorsing Molinas stated rationale, he wrote, Article 27, it is obvious, has created a variety of new legal forms of landholding. . . . It seems true that the formula was developed to meet the special social and legal needs of the multifarious groups of different cultural levels that make up the Mexican community. They needed a property concept that would be broad enough to include the primitive notion of ownership characteristic of a wandering Indian group, knowing temporary possession, but having no notion of legal ownership, as well as one that could cover the needs of modern corporate and private ownership.92 As Molina had explained, these modalidades represented in effect a legal recognition of the age-old Indian corporate groups that lie embedded in the body politic of Mexico.93 For Tannenbaum, this was the revolutions mandate, and it was a just and reasonable one. Thanks in good measure to the broad inuence of Frank Tannenbaums writings, Molinas interpretation of pueblo disentailment would become canonical, in U.S. academic circles and beyond. Over time, Molinas founda90. Tannenbaum, The Mexican Agrarian Revolution, 177. 91. Tannenbaum, Peace by Revolution, 118. Earlier, Tannenbaum had called Molina the author of Article 27. See also Frank Tannenbaum, Mexico: The Struggle for Peace and Bread ( New York: Knopf, 1950), esp. chaps. 6, 9. 92. Tannenbaum, The Mexican Agrarian Revolution, 177 203 (emphasis mine); and idem, Peace by Revolution, 168 70. 93. Tannenbaum, The Mexican Agrarian Revolution, 176 7.
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tional role would fade from view, largely as a paradoxical consequence of the fact that his ideas about the old pueblos had managed to gain such wide acceptance. When Eyler Simpson published The Ejido: Mexicos Way Out (1937), Molinas arguments had already attained the status of a well-established historical truth, which Simpson summarized with the terse phrase the cold rape of the pueblos. By way of explanation, Simpson asserted that by and large, the effect of the Reform on the vast majority of the landholding villages was little short of disastrous, due to the deliberate inclusion in the Constitution of 1857 of civil communities in the list of corporate bodies forbidden to hold lands, which led inevitably to the break-up of hundreds of communal groups and the loss of their property to the ever greedy land monopolists.94 More than six decades later, this is in essence the story that continues to be told.
Conclusion
Widely acknowledged as one of the most signicant social developments in the decades leading up to the Revolution of 1910, the process of Porrian village land disentailment and expropriation has nevertheless failed to generate much scholarly research. This essay has sought to explain how this paradoxical state of affairs came into being and why it needs to be modied. A generic account of how, why, and to whom the pueblos had lost their lands had already been formulated by the late Porriato. Its main source was Andrs Molina Enrquez, whose ideas about Indian pueblos and their history would become predominant. Given the special cultural characteristics of pueblo inhabitants, Molina concluded, it was inevitable that village disentailment would result in widespread landlessness. The victorious revolutionaries adopted this interpretation, wrote it into their laws, made it ofcial; students of Porrian rural history also accepted it, and for the most part looked no further. Theirs was a powerful story of ruthless despoliation and systematic injustice, with Indians as the (mostly) helpless victims and rapacious outsiders as the insatiable landgrabbers. It was not hard to nd scattered evidence of such abuses, as there were indeed plenty, and the agrarian grievances voiced by many of the country people who fought in the revolution could be construed as giving additional credence to that clear-cut version of the past. The revolutions land reform
94. Simpson, The Ejido, 24 5, 29 (emphasis mine). His discussion is based almost entirely on the works of McBride and Phipps. Not surprisingly, Simpsons analysis of Article 27 is taken straight from Tannenbaum and Molina (62 74). For comparison, see also Nathan Whetten, Rural Mexico, 85 86, 114 23.
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laws, moreover, invested this story with great authority. As a consequence, few scholars, then or since, have felt the need to document or rene let alone challenge this well-entrenched interpretation of Porrian village history. It should now be clear, however, that Molina Enrquezs inuential historical analysis of the disentailment process rests largely on a series of buried sociocultural assumptions that cannot be accepted as valid. The organically harmonious nature of village social relations, the intrinsic character of ethnic solidarity and cohesion, a cultural inability to understand the notion of private property these are concepts that historians no longer take for granted. And without the aid of these preconceived ideas, the traditional interpretation of pueblo land disentailment manages in the end to explain very little. Thus, as it turns out, much of the history of village land privatizations during the Porriato has yet to be researched and written. What explains the move to privatize village lands in pueblos that were never threatened by haciendas? Were hacendados the only ones who beneted from the breakup of communal property, or did a class of villagers also prot? What role did socioeconomic differentiation within villages play in these processes? Why were some pueblo land divisions conictive and protracted, while others were not? Why and how were some avoided altogether? Many such important questions await an answer. Perhaps now the study of Porrian pueblos will at last begin to transcend the enduring ideological legacies of Andrs Molina Enrquez.

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Interpreting the Expropriation of Indian Pueblo Lands in Porrian Mexico: The Unexamined Legacies of Andrs Molina Enrquez

HAHR / February / Kour

Interpreting the Expropriation of Indian Pueblo Lands

HAHR / February / Kour

Interpreting the Expropriation of Indian Pueblo Lands

HAHR / February / Kour

Interpreting the Expropriation of Indian Pueblo Lands

HAHR / February / Kour

Interpreting the Expropriation of Indian Pueblo Lands

HAHR / February / Kour

Interpreting the Expropriation of Indian Pueblo Lands

HAHR / February / Kour

Interpreting the Expropriation of Indian Pueblo Lands

HAHR / February / Kour

Interpreting the Expropriation of Indian Pueblo Lands

HAHR / February / Kour

Interpreting the Expropriation of Indian Pueblo Lands

HAHR / February / Kour

Interpreting the Expropriation of Indian Pueblo Lands

HAHR / February / Kour

Interpreting the Expropriation of Indian Pueblo Lands

HAHR / February / Kour

Interpreting the Expropriation of Indian Pueblo Lands

HAHR / February / Kour

Interpreting the Expropriation of Indian Pueblo Lands

HAHR / February / Kour

Interpreting the Expropriation of Indian Pueblo Lands

HAHR / February / Kour

Interpreting the Expropriation of Indian Pueblo Lands

HAHR / February / Kour

Interpreting the Expropriation of Indian Pueblo Lands

HAHR / February / Kour

55. Ibid., 25. 56. Ibid., 26 7.

Interpreting the Expropriation of Indian Pueblo Lands

Table 1: Historical Phases of Territorial Possession and Corresponding Stages of Evolution

HAHR / February / Kour

Interpreting the Expropriation of Indian Pueblo Lands

HAHR / February / Kour

Interpreting the Expropriation of Indian Pueblo Lands

HAHR / February / Kour

Interpreting the Expropriation of Indian Pueblo Lands

HAHR / February / Kour

Interpreting the Expropriation of Indian Pueblo Lands

HAHR / February / Kour

Interpreting the Expropriation of Indian Pueblo Lands

HAHR / February / Kour

Interpreting the Expropriation of Indian Pueblo Lands

HAHR / February / Kour

Interpreting the Expropriation of Indian Pueblo Lands

HAHR / February / Kour

Interpreting the Expropriation of Indian Pueblo Lands

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