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Interpreting the Expropriation of Indian Pueblo Lands in Porfirian Mexico: The Unexamined Legacies of Andrés Molina Enríquez

2002; Duke University Press; Volume: 82; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-82-1-69

1527-1900

Emilio Kourí,

Politics and Society in Latin America

In 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 Porfirio Díaz 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 significance 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 Porfiriato, 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 Porfiriato."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— national or regional—that can at least suggest the scale, scope, and chronology of these developments. An extensive bibliographic search turns up approximately 15 articles—written over the course of four decades—directly 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 book-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 specific research it has thus far generated seems strikingly meager.Consider also the highly influential 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 Tan-nenbaum's 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 final 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.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, José L. Cossío, Fernando González Roa, José Covarrubias, Lucio Mendieta, José Valadés, and Jesús Silva Herzog, as well as to Daniel Cosío Villegas's monumental Historia moderna de México, which devotes only 13 of its thousands of pages to what Moisés González Navarro labeled "el empeño desamortizador."5 Each of these books has its own special virtues, and their aggregate contribution to the understanding of Mexico's rural problems is both significant 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 (baldíos) 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, 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 quirky character, given that it was shaped by state-specific legislation. Thus the privatization of the baldíos has recently received some well-deserved scholarly attention, but the study of pueblo disentailment remains in its infancy.6Remarkably, 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 Tepoztlán in Morelos, or Naranja in Michoacán; 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 find that general histories of the revolution and its Porfirian antecedents reflect these deficiencies. Alan Knight's 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 finally unable to get past the opacity that continues to characterize these matters and can only be dispelled by more specific 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.9There is some irony in this, since a preoccupation with issues of land tenure and agrarian conflict—what Mexican writers call la cuestión agraria— has long dominated scholarship on Mexico's rural past, and also because much of the original rationale and justification for the enactment of postrevolution-ary 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 Porfirio Díaz (the much vaunted Pax Porfiriana), which at last 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 baldíos. A third and final development was the rapid growth of the Mexican economy—and hence of business opportunities—in the course of the Porfiriato, 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 significant, 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 refine 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 first one consists of a firm 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 Porfiriato is not only essentially correct but also—for all practical purposes—complete, since the nature of the conflict it portrays was essentially preordained. In this context, further research—case 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 Porfirian 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 specifically 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 idées fixes about the nature of pueblos and their inhabitants which served as the basis—already during the late Porfiriato —for the formulation of a generic explanation of disentailment and its consequences. Here the key figure was Andrés Molina Enríquez, the positivist social critic whose categorical formulations about the inherent social characteristics of the so-called pueblos de indígenas 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 first 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 histori-ographic 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 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 Porfirian pueblos.At the heart of any analysis of the history of an idea, there is, inevitably, a question of definition. 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 definitions, 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 specifically 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 (categoría política) 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 jurídica, the right to appear in court). A pueblo was hence a place granted such a categoría política, which was in turn managed by a polity constituted with personalidad jurídica. The two concepts were distinct, albeit internally related, and the word could be used to describe either, or both at once.Significantly, the extensive derecho indiano that developed in the wake of the conquest effectively restricted the category of "pueblo" so that it would apply exclusively to Indian villages and polities. As historian Bernardo García Martínez 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 cédulas devoted to settlement policy would sometimes refer to poblar un pueblo de españoles (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 centuries, 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 indígena, bearer of the group's personalidad jurídica.13 Today, Indian polities are frequently called comunidades, but—as García Martínez has pointed out—the retroactive adoption of this term (now laden with implied sociocultural meanings) would be anachronistic. In viceregal times, the term el común (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 definition. 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 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 común repartimiento. Even though in reality villages seldom managed to conform to those standards, these became in effect the legal definition 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 specifically 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 categoría política. In that sense, therefore, a pueblo was its lands.16This is, in brief, how "pueblo" was originally defined. 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 república de indios, itself predicated (and justified) on the belief that Indians as a class of people were supposedly akin to minors, rústicos, 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 jurídica and categoría política) was the boldest expression of this otherwise largely unfulfilled social philosophy. In the eyes of the Spanish letrados who crafted these colonial institutions, the specific legal character given to the Indian pueblos merely reflected—and was hence especially appropriate for—the particular civilizational characteristics of their inhabitants. As will be seen, centuries later Andrés Molina Enríquez 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.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 Spain's colonial legislation remained in force for half a century after the achievement of Mexican independence (1821–71), including—as it turns out—some of the core legal rules and structures that had defined the old pueblos. Although the cabil-dos were replaced by ayuntamientos and the notion of two separate republics was formally abandoned, Indian polities retained their personalidad jurídica, 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. Significantly, it was precisely these two defining 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 influential 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, José María Luis Mora, Mariano Otero, Melchor Ocampo, Ignacio Ramírez, Ponciano Arriaga, Vicente Riva Palacio, Justo Sierra, Wistano Luis Orozco, and Andrés Molina Enríquez. 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 comprehensive fashion. He was Andrés Molina Enríquez (1868–1940), 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 Enríquez's ideas, it would be useful to survey what came before him.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 Mexico's rural identity, as well as a prominent fixture of the postrevolutionary political discourse. Some have also come to regard the pueblos as the last repositories of a "México pro-fundo."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 specific analysis and discussion. Molina Enríquez's work bucked this longstanding trend, making pueblos an object worthy of attention. Before La reforma y Juárez (1906) and Los grandes problemas nacionales (1909), the intellectual approach to pueblo-related matters was typically indirect, focusing narrowly on two persistently conflictive 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 Jovellanos's enlightened Informe sobre la ley agraria (1795). Influenced variously by Adam Smith and the French physiocrats, Jovellanos made a compelling argument in favor of the radical liberalization of Spain's 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 baldíos and terrenos concejiles (municipal lands), which he thought should be privatized.19 His proposals were taken up by the hapless Cortes de Cádiz, with little success.20 In New Spain, Jovellanos's 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 republic's 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 benefits of desamortización—a better distribution of property, i