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With All Due Respect: Popular Resistance to the Privatization of Communal Lands in Nineteenth-Century Michoacán

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2022

Jennie Purnell
Jennie Purnell*
Affiliation:
Boston College
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Abstract

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Thearticle explores popular opposition to the nineteenth-century liberallaws thatmandated privatization ofthecommunal lands held byIndian communities in Mexico. It argues that peasants in Michoactin responded to the reparto withacomplex mixtureof resistance, negotiation, andaccommodation in attempts to retain local control over the definition and distribution of property rights and to defend local religious and political institutions. The first section provides a briefoverview of liberal thinkingand legislation on the privatization of communal lands, highlighting the legal and ideological ambiguities and contradictions that provided opportunities for resistance and negotiation. The second section explores howand why peasants sooften opposed the reparto in Michoacdn, stressing the complex natureof popular resistance and state responses to it. Thethirdsection offers a briefoverview of nineteenth-century agrarian development in Michoactin as background for thetwo case studies of the politics of privatization at thelocal level. Zacapu peasants managed to delay thereparto for thirty-five years but ended up losing muchof theirlandto statetax officials and neighboring landowners. SanJuan Parangaricutiro successfully retained its substantial woodlands as communal property, evenas local mestizo elites appropriatedthe best of cultivated landas private property. Thearticle concludes with a comparative analysis of the liberal reparto in the two communities, linking the different outcomes to peasant partisanship in theagrarian andpolitical struggles of theMexican Revolution.

Type
Research Article
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 34 , Issue 1 , 1999 , pp. 85 - 121
Copyright
Copyright © 1999 by the University of Texas Press

Footnotes

*

I would like to thank Christopher Boyer, Gilbert Joseph, Jeffrey Rubin, Lynn Stephen, and the anonymous LARR reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article. I would also like to acknowledge support provided through two Boston College Research Expense Grants. Portions of this article will appear in my forthcoming book, to be published by Duke University Press.

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