Kouri

Interpreting the Expropriation of
Indian Pueblo Lands in Porfirian Mexico:

The Unexamined Legacies of
Andrés Molina Enríquez
Emilio H. Kourí
I 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 Porfirio Díaz the demise
of communal land tenure produced widespread landlessness and rural injus-
tice, 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 hun-
dred 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 —
I would like to thank Brodie Fischer, John Womack, John Coatsworth, Aurora Gómez,
John Watanabe, Jeremy Adelman, Erika Pani, Jennie Purnell, Gil Joseph, and HAHR ’s
anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions. Research support 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
70 HAHR / February / Kourí
national or regional — that can at least suggest the scale, scope, and chronol-
ogy of these developments. An extensive bibliographic search turns up approx-
imately 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 lit-
tle about what may have taken place. Only a handful of those articles — gener-
ally 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-
2. The articles are listed by year of publication, starting with the earliest: Moisés
González Navarro, “Indio y propiedad en Oaxaca,” Historia Mexicana 8, no. 2 (1958);
Moisés González Navarro, “Tenencia de la tierra y población agrícola (1877 –1960),”
Historia Mexicana 18, no. 1 (1969); Donald J. Fraser, “La política de desamortización en las
comunidades indígenas, 1856 –1872,” Historia Mexicana 21 (1972); Robert Knowlton, “La
individualización de la propiedad corporativa civil en el siglo XIX: Notas sobre Jalisco,”
Historia Mexicana 28, no. 1 (1978); José Velasco Toro, “Indigenismo y rebelión totonaca en
Papantla, 1885 –1896,” América Indígena 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 destrucción de la propiedad comunal de la tierra y las
rebeliones indígenas en Veracruz, 1826 –1910,” La Palabra y el Hombre 52 (1984); Jean
Meyer, “La Ley Lerdo y la desamortización de las comunidades en Jalisco,” and Moisés
Franco Mendoza, “La desamortización de bienes de comunidades indígenas en
Michoacán,” in La sociedad indígena en el centro y occidente de México, ed. Pedro Carrasco et al.
(Zamora: El Colegio de Michoacán, 1986); Victoria Chenaut, “Comunidad y ley en
Papantla a fines del siglo XIX,” in La costa totonaca: Cuestiones regionales II, ed. Luis María
Gatti and Victoria Chenaut (Mexico City: Secretaría de Educación Pública/Centro de
Investigaciones Superiores en Antropología Social, 1987); José Velasco Toro, “La política
desamortizadora y sus efectos en la región de Papantla, Veracruz,” La Palabra y el Hombre 72
(1989); Robert Knowlton, “La división de las tierras de los pueblos durante el siglo XIX: El
caso de Michoacán,” Historia Mexicana 40, no. 1 (1990); Frank Schenk, “La desamortización
de las tierras comunales en el estado de México (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 Nineteenth-
Century Spanish America, ed. Robert H. Jackson (Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press,
1997); Antonio Escobar Ohmstede and Jaqueline Gordillo, “¿Defensa o despojo?
Territorialidad indígena en las Huastecas, 1856 –1930,” in Estudios campesinos en el Archivo
General Agrario, ed. Antonio Escobar Ohmstede et al. (Mexico City: Secretaría de
Educación Pública/Centro de Investigaciones Superiores en Antropología Social, 1998);
and Jennie Purnell, “ ‘With All Due Respect’: Popular Resistance to the Privatization of
Communal Lands in Nineteenth-Century Michoacán,” Latin American Research Review 34,
no. 1 (1999). There may well be a few more.
Interpreting the Expropriation of Indian Pueblo Lands 71
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 spe-
cific research it has thus far generated seems strikingly meager.
Consider also the highly influential studies of land tenure in Mexico pro-
duced by a succession of American scholars between 1920 and 1950 — the
works of George McBride, Helen Phipps, Frank Tannenbaum, Eyler Simp-
son, 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.
3. See, Andrés Lira, Comunidades indígenas frente a la ciudad de México: Tenochlitlán y

Tlatecolco, sus pueblos y barrios, 1812 –1919 (Mexico City: El Colegio de México; El Colegio
de Michoacán, 1983); Frans J. Schryer, The Rancheros of Pisaflores: The History of a Peasant
Bourgeoisie in Twentieth-Century Mexico (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1980); idem,
Ethnicity and Class Conflict in Rural Mexico (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1990); Jean A.
Meyer, Esperando a Lozada (Mexico City: El Colegio de Michoacán, 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: Secretaría de Educación Pública/Centro de Investigaciones Superiores
en Antropología Social; INI, 1995); Allen Wells and Gilbert M. Joseph, Summer of
Discontent, Seasons of Upheaval: Elite Politics and Rural Insurgency in Yucatán, 1876 –1915
(Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1996); and Jennie Purnell, Popular Movements and State
Formation in Revolutionary Mexico: The Agraristas and Cristeros of Michoacán (Durham: Duke
Univ. Press, 1999). It should be noted that this situation is now beginning to change.
William Roseberry studied village disentailments in the Pátzcuaro area of Michoacán,
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: Mexico’s Way Out (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1937); and Nathan
Whetten, Rural Mexico (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1948).
Much the same can be said regarding the works of their Mexican counter-
parts. 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 Vil-
legas’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 disentail-
ment 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 con-
clusions 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,
5. See, for example, Wistano Luis Orozco, Legislación y jurisprudencia sobre terrenos
baldíos, 2 vols. (Mexico City: Imp. de El Tiempo, 1895); José L. Cossío, ¿Cómo y por quienes
se ha monopolizado la propiedad rústica en México? (Mexico City: Tip. Mercantil, 1911); José
L. Cossío, Monopolio y fraccionamiento de la propiedad rústica (Mexico City: Tip. de J. M.
Linares, 1914); Fernando González Roa and José Covarrubias, El problema rural de México
(Mexico City: Tip. de la Secretaría de Hacienda, 1917); Fernando González Roa, El aspecto
agrario de la revolución mexicana (Mexico City: Dir. de Talleres Gráficos, 1919); Lucio
Mendieta y Nuñez, El problema agrario de México, 8th ed. (Mexico City: Ed. Porrúa, 1964);
José Valadés, El porfirismo: Historia de un régimen, 3 vols. (Mexico City: Antigua Lib.
Robredo, 1941–1948); Jesús Silva Herzog, El agrarismo mexicano y la reforma agraria
(Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1959); Moisés González Navarro, “El
porfiriato: La vida social”; and Luis González, “La república restaurada: Vida social,” in
Historia moderna de México, ed. Daniel Cosío Villegas, 10 vols. (Mexico City: Ed. Hermes,
1958 –1972). See also the texts collected in Jesús Silva Herzog, ed., La cuestión de la tierra, 4
vols. (Mexico City: Instituto Mexicano de Investigaciones Económicas, 1960 –1962).
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 enter-
prise, the latter had a much more heterogeneous and quirk y 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.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 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 out-
come) 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, out-
comes, 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 spe-
cific 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 Jesús Sotelo Inclán, Raíz y razón 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 Antropología e Historia, 1976); and Alicia Hernández,
Anenecuilco: Memoria y vida de un pueblo (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 1991).
Tepoztlán, by contrast, retained many of its lands, but it is not clear how. See Robert
Redfield, Tepoztlán: A Mexican Village (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1930); Oscar
Lewis, Life in a Mexican Village: Tepoztlán Restudied (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1951);
and Claudio Lomnitz, Evolución de una sociedad rural (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura
Económica, 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 cuestión agraria mexicana: La tierra y el poder, 1800 –1910 (Mexico City:
Siglo Veintiuno; CEHAM, 1988).
9. In this regard, see Friedrich Katz’s brief but suggestive discussion of pueblo
There 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 ances-
tral lands in the aftermath of the Reforma of the 1850s. One might thus have
reasonably imagined that historians would have already endeavored to docu-
ment and explain precisely how villages — and then villagers —wound up los-
ing their lands. Nevertheless, these avowedly crucial episodes of change have
remained almost entirely unexplored. What was the reason? Why the para-
dox?
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 prop-
erty, 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
disentailment and its consequences in his “The Liberal Republic and the Porfiriato,
1867 –1910,” in The Cambridge History of Latin America, ed. Leslie Bethell (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986).
10. It is incorrect to affirm 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.
enabled the aggressive implementation of Liberal ideas about landownership

through legislation and policies designed to break up corporate village hold-
ings 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 oppor-
tunities — 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, polit-
ical, 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 unex-
amined 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 impo-
sition. The second one holds that — at the very least in predominantly Indian
regions — this professed resistance to any change in the system of landowner-
ship 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 general-
ized 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 sup-
positions 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, repre-
senting 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 communi-
ties 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 prolif-
erates 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 conse-
quences. 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.
The Meaning of “Pueblo”
At the heart of any analysis of the history of an idea, there is, inevitably, a ques-
tion 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 anthropo-
logical, 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 ambigu-
ousness 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 terri-
tory 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 crea-
tures of the conquest. In the course of the sixteenth and early seventeenth cen-
11. Bernardo García Martínez, Los pueblos de la sierra: El poder y el espacio entre los indios
del norte de Puebla hasta 1700 (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 1987), 78 – 9 nn. 23–24.
For supporting evidence, see Rafael Altamira y Crevea, Diccionario castellano de palabras
jurídicas y técnicas tomadas de la legislación indiana (Mexico City: Univ. Nacional Autónoma
de México, 1987), 260 – 62. Note that “puebla” was then an acceptable variant of “pueblo”
or “población.” On the founding of Puebla, see François Chevalier, Significación social de la
fundación de la puebla de Los Angeles (Puebla: Centro de Estudios Históricos de Puebla,
1957).
12. José María Ots Capdequí, Estudios del derecho español en las Indias (Bogotá: Ed.
Minerva, 1940), 150 – 64; and Mariano Galván 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 à beneficio y obsequio de los pobladores, ganaderos . . . y
toda clase de predios rústicos de las muchas y dispersas resoluciones dictadas sobre la materia, y
vignetes hasta el dia en la República Mexicana, 4th ed. (Mexico City: Librería del Portal de
Mercaderes, 1851), esp. chap. 6. For background, see José María Ots Capdequí, Manual de
historia del derecho español en las Indias (Buenos Aires: Losada, 1945); and Silvio Zavala, Las
instituciones jurídicas en la conquista de América, 3d ed. (Mexico City: Ed. Porrúa, 1988). For a
seventeenth century perspective on these questions, see Juan de Solórzano 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).
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 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 comu-
nidad 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 incorpora-
tion, 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 pre-
senting preconquest documents, through royal grants (mercedes) and composi-
ciones, or by purchase as well as denuncia. To protect villages from encroach-
ment, 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; García Martínez,
Los pueblos de la sierra; Silvio Zavala and José Miranda, “Instituciones indígenas en la
colonia,” in La política indigenista en México: Métodos 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 García Martínez, “the concept of community generally had
a tangible meaning, denoting — as community assets — the common or public assets of a
collectivity.” See García Martínez, Los pueblos de la sierra, 102 – 3 n. 99. See also Altamira y
Crevea, Diccionario, 84.
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 sel-
dom 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.16
This 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 inhabi-
tants. 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.
15. See Ordenanzas of the Marquéz de Falces (26 May 1567), and the Cédulas Reales of
4 June 1687 and 12 July 1695, in Galván 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
indígenas en la colonia,” 122 – 32.
16. The lack of precisely defined village boundaries — an altogether common and
problematic occurrence — did not invalidate the conceptual definition of pueblo-villages.
17. For details, see Zavala and Miranda, “Instituciones indígenas en la colonia,”
108 –10; García Martínez, Los pueblos de la sierra, 97 – 8; and Zavala, Las instituciones jurídicas
en la conquista de América, chap. 4.
If the preceding discussion of the meanings of “pueblo” seems a bit extra-

neous 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 Mexi-
can 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 pre-
cisely 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 contem-
porary situation of Indian pueblos ( peoples and lands) were nearly always pro-
duced 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 com-
prehensive fashion. He was Andrés Molina Enríquez (1868–1940), an intellec-

tually 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.
The Pueblo in Nineteenth-Century Social Thought
In the years following 1910, the Zapatista uprising in Morelos and other out-
breaks of rural rebellion elsewhere in Mexico prompted urgent politico-ideo-
logical 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 strug-
gles for independence, they elicited remarkably little specific analysis and dis-
cussion. 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
18. The expression is borrowed from Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, México profundo: Una
civilización negada (Mexico City: Secretaría de Educación Pública; Centro de
Investigaciones Superiores en Antropología Social, 1987).
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 genera-
tions 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 institu-
tions —were also entailed and held corporately, even though in other respects
they functioned quite differently. Jovellanos had not made any particular refer-
ence 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 disentail-
ment 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 dis-
entailment that would culminate in the wars of the Reforma. And it was there-
fore mostly in the dogmatic and narrow context of arguments about the
expected social benefits of desamortización — 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 Políticos, 1955), pt. 1. In many respects Jovellanos’s Informe built on proposals put
forward by an earlier generation of Bourbon reformers, notably Pedro Rodríguez de
Campomanes. For further discussion, see Richard Herr, The Eighteenth-Century Revolution
in Spain (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1958).
20. For details, see Francisco Tomás y Valiente, El marco político de la desamortización
en España (Barcelona: Ariel, 1977).
21. Manuel Abad y Queipo, “Representación sobre la inmunidad personal del clero,”
in En favor del campo, ed. Heriberto Moreno García (Mexico City: Secretaría de Educación
Pública. 1986), 123 – 35; Charles A. Hale, Mexican Liberalism in the Age of Mora, 1821–1853
In Mora’s resonant view, the pueblos were, in effect, “monasteries of Indians,”

a lapidary phrase that masterfully encapsulated the limited scope of this ana-
lytical 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 reflections on the living conditions of Indi-
ans 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 filled with misery
and exploitation. Some considered this uniform “degradation”— as Francisco
Pimentel would call it — to be beyond repair, while others viewed legal initia-
tives 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 cuestión social y política que se agita en la república mexicana (Mexico City:
Imp. de Ignacio Cumplido, 1842); Ponciano Arriaga, Obras completas (Mexico City:
Instituto de Investigaciones Jurídicas, Univ. Nacional Autónoma de México, 1992); and
Francisco Zarco, Historia del congreso extraordinario constituyente de 1856 y 1857, 2 vols.
(Mexico City: Imp. de Ignacio Cumplido, 1857). As Molina Enríquez 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 gobernación
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 Mora’s objections, the commission’s recommendations (land
rentals to villagers) were approved. But this was at bottom a dispute over strategy and
process, not principles, and in any case, Mora’s more intransigent views would prevail soon
enough. See Dictamen de la comisión de gubernación sobre señalar y dar propios y arbitrios a los
pueblos del estado de México (Mexico City: Imp. a cargo de M. Rivera, 1824); Actas del congreso
constituyente del estado libre de México, 10 vols. (Mexico City: n. p., 1824 – 31); Andrés Molina
Enríquez, La reforma y Juárez: Estudio histórico-sociológico (Mexico City: Tip. de la Viuda de
Francisco Díaz de León, 1906), 67 – 69; Molina Enríquez, 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 influjo del clero regular que quiso
instituir la sociedad civil sin su base fundamental que es la propiedad, y fundar en América
otros tantos monasterios cuantos eran los pueblos o congregaciones de sus neofitos.” See
José María Luis Mora, Méjico y sus revoluciones (Paris: Lib. de Rosa, 1836), 1:198.
terms of land tenure, both central features in the original design of the pueb-
los. Similarly, Lorenzo de Zavala blamed the embrutecimiento of Indians on the
paternalistic character of Spanish institutions such as the pueblo, while Lucas
Alamán described local Indian pueblo government as being generally tyranni-
cal. Writing shortly after the Reforma, Francisco Pimentel — the only nine-
teenth-century thinker who produced a book-length analysis of “the contem-
porary 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 pueblo’s
pernicious communal system hindered the development of a “sentiment of
individuality,” without which economic progress and the advancement of civi-
lization were impossible.23 In the end, however, these blights were all regarded
as colonial legacies that had been — or were being — already modified 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
difficulty 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 histórico de las revoluciones de México
desde 1808 hasta 1830 (Mexico City: Imp. a cargo de Manuel N. de la Vega, 1845), 1:12 –15;
Moisés González Navarro, “Instituciones indígenas en el México independiente,” in La
política indigenista en México: Métodos y resultados (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional
Indigenista, 1954), 1:209 –18; and Francisco Pimentel, “Memoria sobre las causas que han
originado la situación actual de la raza indígena de México 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 specifically 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 Arriaga’s fiery speech during the constitutional
debates concerning the passage of Article 27, in Zarco, Historia del congreso extraordinario,
1:547 – 55.
24. Mora, Méjico y sus revoluciones, 1:66 – 8; Pimentel, “Memoria sobre las causas,” 153.
Pimentel’s 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 first 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
other words, the pueblo as a legally constituted (and enforced) social institu-
tion 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
República restaurada and for most of the Porfiriato, despite the fact that the
government’s disentailment policies were at last being visibly enforced in
many states, sometimes in conflictive fashion. In a sense, this is not surprising,
given that those land repartos represented the final demise of the collective
landholdings that had originally given juridical meaning to the Indian pueblos
(their personalidad jurídica had already been abolished as part of the Reforma).
If the pueblos (thus defined) 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 Porfiriato — México a través de los sig-
los (1887 – 89), edited by Vicente Riva Palacio, and México, su evolución 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 definitions prevailed on him all the same. For context, see Francisco Pimentel,
Cuadro descriptivo y comparativo de las lenguas indígenas de México, 2 vols. (Mexico City: Imp.
de Andrade y Escalante, 1862 –1865); Manuel Orozco y Berra, Geografía de las lenguas y
carta etnográfica de México, precedidas de un ensayo de clasificación 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 México (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 legislación agraria en
México (Mexico City: Banco Nacional de Crédito Agrícola, 1941), 147 – 55; also Jaime del
Arenal, “La protección del indígena en el segundo imperio mexicano: La Junta Protectora
de las Clases Menesterosas,” Ars Iuris 6 (1991); and Erika Pani, “¿‘Verdaderas figures de
Cooper’ o ‘pobres inditos infelices’? La política indigenista de Maximiliano,” Historia
Mexicana 47, no. 3 (1998).
(1900 – 2), edited by Justo Sierra — made almost no mention of the Indian
pueblos after independence.26 Sierra’s 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, eco-
nomic, 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 bet-
ter diet, and — Sierra would add — through mestizaje.27
One partial exception to this dominant pattern of neglect was Wistano
Luis Orozco’s Legislación y jurisprudencia sobre terrenos baldíos, published in
1895. A young lawyer trained in Guadalajara, Orozco sought to trace in rigor-
ous 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 baldíos
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 prop-
erty titles. After independence, Orozco wrote, “we fell into an almost com-
plete ignorance of the legislation that had governed the occupation of public
lands; successive revolutionary powers laid down ambiguous and incomplete
rules concerning colonization, without tomorrow’s laws taking yesterday’s into
account, and the Derecho de tierras y aguas came to resemble a veritable
labyrinth of Daedalus, for which Ariadne’s thread is missing.”28 But learned
26. Vicente Riva Palacio, México a través de los siglos. Historia general y completa del
desenvolvimiento social, político, religioso, militar, artístico, científico y literario de México desde la
antigüedad más remota hasta la época actual, 5 vols. (Mexico City: Ballescá y Comp.,
1887 –1889); and Justo Sierra, México, su evolución social, 3 vols. (Mexico City: Ballescá,
1900 –1902).
27. Justo Sierra, “México social y político: Apuntes para un libro,” in Obras Completas
(Mexico City: Univ. Nacional Autónoma de México, 1991), 9:126 – 27; See also Sierra’s own
contributions to Mexico, su evolución social, collected in a single volume as Evolución política
del pueblo mexicano (Mexico City: La Casa de España en México, 1940); and Justo Sierra,
Juárez, su obra y su tiempo (Mexico City: Ballescá, 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, Legislación y jurisprudencia sobre terrenos baldíos, 2 vols.
(Mexico City: Imp. de El Tiempo, 1895), 653.
and meticulous as his jurisprudential treatise undoubtedly was, Orozco’s 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 par-
ticular Juarez’s public lands law of 20 July 1863— had unwittingly facilitated
the concentration of land in the hands of a few powerful hacendados and spec-
ulators. 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 Enríquez — appear to have read Orozco’s 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
Porfirian land policies that abetted their inordinate growth.
While the book was primarily dedicated — as stated in the title — to the
story of the terrenos baldíos, buried within its pages lay a compact yet sugges-
tive discussion concerning the legality of the procedures governing the divi-
sion 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 Orozco’s view), and he saw this as an opportunity to com-
ment on what was happening with the lands of the pueblos. With the abolition
of the pueblo-polities’ personalidad jurídica, many states had put the ayun-
tamientos 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. 67–69), 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 ante-
cedents, lacking technical land descriptions, and not properly notarized. At
this point, in typical fashion, Orozco glided from legal criticism to social
denunciation. Those deficient titles, he wrote, “were usually mere printed
forms filled 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 adju-
dicated.” 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
usurpation.” Orozco concluded that it was not only illegal but also a wretched
idea to put municipal officers 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 shack-
les 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 Porfirian intellectual circles, Orozco’s remarks acquire a special significance,
hinting as they do at the social and legal conflicts plaguing the process of vil-
lage land disentailment, conflicts 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 reflections amount to no more than a
brief aside in Orozco’s work; only 37 of the book’s 1154 pages dealt with the
pueblos, and of those, all but 11 simply reproduced a variety of related docu-
ments.30 As the century drew to a close, the pueblo remained a rather forgot-
ten subject, Orozco’s grave admonitions notwithstanding.31 Andrés Molina
Enríquez’s 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 find 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 Mexico’s
“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 Enríquez’s ideas represented a significant
departure.
Andrés Molina Enríquez
Andrés Molina Enríquez was born on 30 November 1868 in the Villa of Jilote-
pec (Mexico State), the creole and mestizo-dominated cabecera of an old
farming and ranching district heavily populated by Otomí Indians, one hun-
dred miles northwest of Mexico City and not far from the border with the
nascent state of Hidalgo. He was the son of Francisca Enríquez, scioness of a
once-wealthy local family, and Anastasio Molina, the town’s notary public. His
father was active in local Liberal circles, and even served as diputado (1872 –73)
from Jilotepec in the state legislature. When Andrés was eleven years old, he
joined an older brother as a student at the prestigious Instituto Literario del
Estado de México 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 Igna-
cio Ramírez, 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 intro-
duced. He spent the next five 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 Científico y Literario in 1886— had eliminated law
degrees as part of its recent curricular reform. By the time he left Toluca in
1885, young Andrés Molina had acquired a broad “scientific” education, prob-
ably as rigorous and modern an intellectual training as could then be obtained
in Mexico.32
32. A detailed biography of Andrés Molina Enríquez has yet to be written. For details
of his life, see Stanley F. Shadle, Andrés Molina Enríquez: Mexican Land Reformer of the
Revolutionary Era (Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press, 1994); Alvaro Molina Enríquez,
foreword to Antología de Andrés Molina Enríquez (Mexico City: Ed. Oasis, 1969); Renato
Molina Enríquez, “Andrés Molina Enríquez: Conciencia de México,” Boletín Bibliográfico de
la Secretaría de Hacienda y Crédito Público, 15 Aug. 1955; Antonio Huitrón Huitrón, ed.,
Andrés Molina Enríquez: La propiedad agraria en México (Toluca: Gobierno del Estado de
México, 1987), esp. appendix of documents; Andrés Molina Enríquez (Toluca: Gobierno del
Estado de México, Colección Testimonios del Estado de México, 1979); María del Carmen
Reyes, “Detalles de la vida y obra de Andrés Molina Enríquez,” Boletín del Archivo General
del Estado de México 9, no. 3 (1981); and Alfonso Sánchez Arteche, Molina Enríquez: La
herencia de un reformador (Toluca: Instituto Mexiquense de Cultura, 1990). For an extensive
bibliography of works by and about Molina, see Shadle, Andrés Molina Enríquez, 143 – 54.
On the Instituto de Toluca, see Aurelio J. Venegas, El Instituto Científico y Literario del
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 finish, 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, where—in early 1892—he took over his ailing father’s
legal business.33 The next six years Molina would spend working as a notario,
initially in Jilotepec, then briefly in Toluca, and finally 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 docu-
ment 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 Sánchez Arteche has gone over a
number of the protocolos that Molina Enríquez wrote during those years, show-
ing 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 find that a certain lot was
acquired for a few pieces of bread, another for a few quarts of corn,
Estado de México (1927; reprint, Mexico City: Biblioteca Enciclopédica del Estado de
México, 1979); Elizabeth Buchanan Martín del Campo, El Instituto de Toluca bajo el signo del
positivismo, 1870 –1910 (Toluca: Univ. Autónoma del Estado de México, 1981); and
Margarita García Luna, El Instituto Literario de Toluca: Una aproximación histórica (Toluca:
Gobierno del Estado de México, 1987).
33. Sánchez Arteche, Molina Enríquez, 154; and Huitrón Huitrón, Andrés Molina
Enríquez, appendix doc. 4.
34. Sánchez Arteche suggests that Molina resigned his first 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 Enríquez,
154 – 68; and Shadle, Andrés Molina Enríquez, 15 – 20. On Sultepec, see Frank Schenk “La
desamortización de las tierras comunales en el estado de México (1856 –1911): El caso del
distrito de Sultepec,” Historia Mexicana 45, no. 1 (1995).
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 briefly published his own paper, Sultepec’s 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
finally 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 plaintiff’s
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 jurídica and
hence were not allowed to possess such lands. The plaintiff, moreover, had his
own individual property title, issued to him by the jefe político as part of a
reparto. Judge Molina Enríquez nevertheless sided with the pueblo, using his
ruling to call into question both the original logic and the subsequent inter-
pretation 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 ratified the reversal.38
Molina’s 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 prac-
tice law in association with Luis Cabrera, whom he had apparently met back in
Tlalnepantla. By then his unusual ideas and influential friendships had started
to earn him recognition in some intellectual circles, and he had become an
honorary member of the Sociedad Mexicana de Geografía y Estadística. At
35. Andrés Molina Enríquez, Los grandes problemas nacionales (Mexico City: Imp. de A.
Carranza e Hijos, 1909), 58.
36. Renato Molina Enríquez, “Andrés Molina Enríquez: Conciencia de México”; and
Reyes, “Detalles de la vida y obra de Andrés Molina Enríquez,” 65 – 6.
37. Huitrón Huitrón, Andrés Molina Enríquez, appendix, doc. 5.
38. For a discussion of this case, see Sánchez Arteche, Molina Enríquez, 181– 88. The
conflict was probably far more complex than it might seem at first, since it apparently
featured members of the same family on both sides of the legal argument.
this point, his story becomes better known. In 1906 Molina Enríquez pub-
lished La reforma y Juárez: Estudio histórico-sociológico, an essay propounding a
distinctively original interpretation of Mexico’s nineteenth-century history;
afterwards, he began serializing his Estudios de Sociología Mexicana in the news-
paper El Tiempo. These were preliminary drafts of what eventually became Los
grandes problemas nacionales, published—auspiciously, in retrospect—in 1909.39
This biographical outline helps to explain the origin of Molina Enríquez’s
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 father’s social liberalism, bearing witness to
the injustices — legal and otherwise — engendered in the process of pueblo
land divisions — all of these experiences would deeply influence his under-
standing of Mexico’s 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 Mexico’s 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 Molina’s diverse intellectual influences, the lenses through which
he filtered 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 difficult not only by the inherent complexity
of the subject but also by the paucity of research on these questions. What fol-
lows now is therefore only a preliminary attempt to map out — though not, for
the most part, to detail or disentangle — the main sources of Molina’s analysis
(in addition, of course, to his own first-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 briefly described in turn.
Like most educated Mexicans of his time, Molina Enríquez was heavily
influenced by the theories of Comte and Spencer. He learned his positivism at
the Instituto in Toluca, where a belief in the scientific basis of knowledge, in
39. Renato Molina Enríquez, “Andrés Molina Enríquez: Conciencia de México”;

Sánchez Arteche, Molina Enríquez, 189, 203 – 4, 211–12; Alvaro Molina Enríquez, foreword
to Antología de Andrés Molina Enríquez, 12 –13. See also Andrés Molina Enríquez, La cuestión
del día: La agricultura nacional (Mexico City: Imp. La Española, 1902); and idem, La reforma
y Juárez: Estudio histórico-sociológico (Mexico City: Tip. de la Viuda de Francisco Díaz de
León, 1906).
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 every-
thing that he could find by — or about — both Comte and Spencer, but his
aversion to citations makes it hard to know exactly what that was. Still,
Comte’s imprint is clearly visible. A little known text called Clasificación de
las ciencias fundamentales (1920) was Molina’s attempt to grapple with — and
improve upon — Comte’s theories and classification of knowledge, and La
reforma y Juárez— echoing Comte’s “three stages”— divided Mexican history
into three successive developmental periods.40 Of all the new sciences, sociol-
ogy —which he described as the study of “the formation of human collectivi-
ties”— attracted him the most, and he came to consider himself primarily a
sociologist, much in the way that Comte had defined it. Molina’s methodolog-
ical 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 char-
acter of property, and his barely disguised social paternalism, all bear a distinc-
tively Comtean influence. Indeed, as Charles Hale has observed, “the posi-
tivism of Molina Enríquez, 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 Spencer’s notion of the uni-
versality of evolution and its application to the understanding of the history of
human societies. Moreover, in Hale’s words, “Spencer’s thought had a descrip-
tive ethnographical dimension that was lacking in Comte, and he helped Mex-
icans focus attention on the peculiarities of their society within the universal
scheme of evolution.” This appealed to Molina Enríquez; on those rare occa-
sions in which his main pre-1910 works refer directly to Spencer’s writings,
they do so specifically 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 cer-
40. Andrés Molina Enríquez, Clasificación de las ciencias fundamentales (Mexico City:
Antigua Imp. de Murguía, 1920).
41. Hale, The Transformation of Liberalism, 260. Hale’s 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. 7–8. But, see also Leopoldo Zea, El positivismo en México, 2 vols.
(Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 1943).
42. Hale, The Transformation of Liberalism, 213; Molina Enríquez, La reforma y Juárez,
18 –19, 31. Molina Enríquez’s Los grandes problemas mentions neither Spencer nor Comte
by name.
tain physiological traits among Mexico’s native peoples. In Los grandes proble-
mas, he cites a good number of Darwin’s works, including The Origin of Species
and The Descent of Man.43 A more direct and pervasive influence, however,
would come from the works of Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), a German zoolo-
gist and philosopher who publicized and defended the theory of organic evo-
lution in Germany. Haeckel’s interpretations of — and elaborations on — Dar-
win’s ideas shaped Molina’s thought in significant ways. In particular, two of
Haeckel’s 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 func-
tions of heredity (generation) and adaptation (maintenance).”44 In other words,
the development patterns of individual organisms, Haeckel explained, essen-
tially 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
Haeckel’s philosophical monism, the belief that all matter — organic and inor-
ganic —was ultimately one and the same. To show this, Haeckel early on elab-
orated 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 develop-
ment of these organic forces in the context of specific 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 Enríquez, 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 introducción del darwinismo en México,” Anuario de Historia 8 (1975); idem,
La polémica del darwinismo en México, siglo XIX: Testimonios (Mexico City: Univ. Nacional
Autónoma de México, 1984); Rosaura Ruiz Gutiérrez, Positivismo y evolución: Introducción del
darwinismo en México (Mexico City: Univ. Nacional Autónoma de México, 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 first expounded in Haeckel, Generelle
Morphologie der Organismen, 2 vols. (Berlin: Reimer, 1866); and idem, Naturliche
Schopfungsgeschichte (Berlin: Reimer, 1868).
native peoples of Mexico. In the end, Haeckel’s 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 affinities
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 Enríquez’s reliance on positivist social theories and on
Darwin’s and Haeckel’s biological evolutionism has long been recognized, the
enormous influence that the ideas of the historical school of jurisprudence
(knowingly or otherwise) appear to have exerted upon his work has been uni-
versally 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
first 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 codifica-
tion based on the abstract principles of natural law, arguing that a nation’s law
reflects both its history and its particular state of civilization, and thus should
not be modified arbitrarily. Closely paraphrasing Savigny’s 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 consti-
tution of a nation, all law is exclusively determined by the nation’s pecu-
liar character, by what was later called the Volksgeist. Like language, man-
ners, and constitution, law has no separate existence, but is a simple
45. Molina Enríquez, Los grandes problemas, 8, 34 – 6, 272 – 84; and Ernst Haeckel, The
History of Creation ( New York: D. Appleton, 1976). On Haeckel, see Wilhelm Bölsche,
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 Córdova, “El pensamiento social y político de Andrés Molina
Enríquez,” prologue to Molina Enríquez, Los grandes problemas nacionales (Mexico City: Era,
1978); Agustín Basave Benítez, México mestizo: Análisis del nacionalismo mexicano en torno a la
mestizofilia de Andrés Molina Enríquez (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1992);
James L. Hamon and Stephen R. Niblo, Precursores de la revolución agraria en México: Las
obras de Wistano Luis Orozco y Andrés Molina Enríquez (Mexico City: Secretaría de Educación
Pública, 1975); and Shadle, Andrés Molina Enríquez.
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 deficiencies of German law was to apply strictly historical
methods, and thus to purify the original Roman law from its defilement
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 evo-
lution (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 römischen Rechts im Mittelalter (1815–31), revolutionized the field
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
Molina’s understanding of the relationship between law and social develop-
ment ( particularly, as will be seen, in the case of the pueblos) bears a remark-
able resemblance to what was propounded by the historical school, especially
with respect to its underlying philosophy. Indeed, Kantorowicz’s description
of Savigny’s ideas could be applied to Molina’s 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 Enríquez began his discussion of the history
of Spanish land legislation in Mexico with the following remark: “El instinto jurídico
español, tan desarrollado a nuestro entender, que sólo el romano le superó.”
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 proprieté fonciere en occident (Paris: A.
Durand, 1839); Heinrich Ahrens, Curso de derecho natural, ó de filosofía del derecho, 6th ed.
(Paris: A. Bouret, 1876); idem, Enciclopedia juridica, 3 vols. (Madrid: Lib. de V. Suárez,
1878); Johann Caspar Bluntschli, Derecho público universal, 3 vols. (Madrid: F. Góngora y
Co., 1880); and Emile de Laveleye, De la proprieté et de ses formes primitives (Paris: Lib. G.
Bailliere, 1874).
Another likely conduit would be Spanish legal historiography — the studies of

Eduardo de Hinojosa, Rafael Altamira y Crevea, and other scholars similarly
influenced by Savigny. Molina Enríquez 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 Savigny’s analytical approach
became an important — albeit unacknowledged — part of Molina’s thinking.50
Finally, it is also worth noting that Molina was familiar with the long his-
toriography 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 Bancroft’s The Native
Races to Elie Reclus’s Les primitifs.51 Despite his small-town origins and occu-
pations, Molina was evidently a very learned man.
Weaving together his experiences, his observations, his readings, and his
convictions, Molina Enríquez 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 befitted 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 briefly alluded to the influence of the historical school of law in
Mexico, but only in the specific context of Laboulaye’s constitutionalism; see his The
Transformation of Liberalism, 8, 82, 94, 205, 214, 251. Molina Enríquez 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, Génesis del
derecho mexicano (Mexico City: Tip. de T. González, Sucs., 1899), which was written in the
1870s; Jacinto Pallares, ed., Legislación federal complementaria del derecho civil mexicano
(Mexico City: Tip. Artística de R. Riveroll, 1897); idem, Curso completo de derecho mexicano, o
exposición filosófica, histórica y doctrinal de toda la legislación mexicana (Mexico City: I. Paz,
1901); and Isidro Rojas, Evolución del derecho en México (Mexico City: Imp. Mellado &
Pardo, 1900). As examples of Spain’s late-nineteenth-century legal historiography, see
Eduardo de Hinojosa, Historia general del derecho español (Madrid: Tip. de los Huérfanos,
1887); and Rafael Altamira, Historia de la propiedad comunal (Madrid: J. López Camacho,
1890).
51. Hubert Howe Bancroft, The Native Races at the Pacific States of North America (San
Francisco: History Co., 1886); and Elie Reclus, Les primitifs: Etudes d’ethnologie comparée
(Paris: Schleicher Frères et Cie., 1885). Students of Molina’s work have sometimes
confused Elie with his well-known brother, the famous geographer and anarchist activist
Elisée Reclus.
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 indi-
vidual physiology and with respect to their social arrangements. In short, agri-
culture was the key to civilization. Agriculture, in turn, depended on the con-
ditions imposed by the environment, and hence the latter would define the
kind of social evolution that could take place within any given zone. In gen-
eral, 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 extraordi-
nary 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 evolu-
tion.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 affinities 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 har-
monious relations are born and established, making the whole into an organ-
ism.”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 Enríquez, 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.”
these human units) as being essentially cohesive and harmonious social forma-
tions, largely devoid of serious internal conflicts or fractures.
The character of a social group’s 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 Molina’s 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 firmer, more precise, and
more complex relationship with the lands they occupy: they grow, let’s
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 rela-
tionship 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 corre-
lated. 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 modified in accordance with the evolution of said conditions.
There was, moreover, an ascending scale of progress regarding the evolu-
tion 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 along-
side 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 identified in the preceding table, one
can learn right away their approximate evolutive age.”56 This he regarded as an
important scientific advance. He then proceeded to catalogue pre-Hispanic
55. Ibid., 25.

56. Ibid., 26 –7.
Table 1: Historical Phases of Territorial Possession and Corresponding Stages

of Evolution
Periodo de dominio territorial Estados de desarrollo
1o. Falta absoluta de toda noción de derecho Sociedades nómadas

1o. territorial Sociedades sedentarias, pero movibles
2o. Noción de la ocupación, pero no de la Sociedades de ocupación común no
1o. posesión definida
Sociedades de ocupación común limitada
3o. Noción de la posesión, pero no de la Sociedades de posesión comunal sin
1o. propiedad posesión individual
Sociedades de ocupación comunal con
posesión individual
4o. Noción de la propiedad Sociedades de propiedad comunal
1o. Sociedades de propiedad individual
5o. Derechos de propiedad territorial, Sociedades de crédito territorial
1o. desligados de la posesión territorial Sociedades de titulación territorial
1o. misma fiduciaria
Source: Reprinted from Molina Enríquez, 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 first
(no notion whatsoever of property rights). However, he cautioned, precise
classifications 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 indige-
nous peoples, which made it hard for the new arrivals to discern many local
differences. Beyond that, the Spanish government had wisely understood the
significance 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 reflect differences in orga-
nization,” the Spanish authorities were able, in effect, to devise social institu-
tions 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 com-
munities,” 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 fit, but in such cases the Spaniards had
shown some flexibility in its application.58 On the whole, however, and espe-
cially for the indigenous peoples of the zona fundamental, Molina was con-
vinced that the establishment of pueblos (in both legal senses) had been a felic-
itous 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 benefi-
cial 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 Indi-
ans 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 cen-
timeter of land in the hands of Indians, and not a single Indian left in the
republic.59
In this way, Molina Enríquez 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 Enríquez, La reforma y Juárez, 24 – 5.

58. Molina Enríquez, Los grandes problemas, 116 –17.
59. Molina Enríquez, La reforma y Juárez, 30.
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 find a
more efficacious means of assisting the Indian race than that of the commu-
nity.” 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 Juárez and
considered the expropriation of church holdings a gigantic step in the direc-
tion 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 decid-
edly forged his own separate path. For him, it was inevitable that the imple-
mentation 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 podía 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 patri-
mony (which, incidentally, carried with it a host of fiscal 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 Enríquez dismissed Sierra’s 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 fifteen years, two or three thousand years of evolutionary backwardness.”
61. All quotations in this paragraph are from Molina Enríquez, Los grandes problemas,
57 – 8.
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 inher-
ited 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 pro-
gram of agrarian reform that would bring back some of the core juridical fea-
tures of the colonial Spanish pueblos (now renamed ejidos), just when the old
Liberals and new Porfirians who fought against them imagined that they
would have at last been rooted out.
Influence of Molina Enríquez’s Ideas
Molina Enríquez’s 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 Tan-
nenbaum, whose classic studies of the Mexican revolution came to reflect
many important aspects of Molina’s peculiar thought. By the early 1930s, this
conceptualization of the history of post-Reforma pueblos had quietly found its
way not only into the official account of the grievances that led to (and justi-
fied) the popular, agrarian revolution, but also — significantly — into the new
agrarian reform legislation. Among scholars, too, it would acquire a new lease
on life. Embedded in Tannenbaum’s profoundly influential oeuvre, Molina
Enríquez’s reductionist tenets about the character of the old pueblos would
inadvertently find their way — obliquely and overtly — into the work of succes-
sive 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 Molina’s
ideas influenced agrarian legislation and historical interpretation about the
pueblos during and after the revolution.
Molina’s 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 Madero’s
presidency and then became an influential 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.
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 Mexico’s
social and economic problems produced prior to the revolution.63 Cabrera
first brought Molina’s 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 reconstitución de los ejidos de los pueb-
los. At the time, one of the legislature’s most pressing concerns was dealing
with the land issues raised by the Zapatista rebellion in nearby Morelos. Cabr-
era’s solution was to propose the reconstitution of pueblo communal landhold-
ings, 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 Molina’s historical and sociological arguments. At least five deserve
to be mentioned: first, 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 fifth, that the federal gov-
ernment had the authority (and the duty) to grant communal lands to those
pueblos that were in need of it.64 Although Cabrera’s proyecto de ley diverged
somewhat in practical and procedural terms from the comprehensive agrarian
reforms that Molina was himself then advocating, Cabrera’s law was neverthe-
less unmistakably the conceptual offspring of Los grandes problemas.65
63. See Luis Cabrera, “El balance de la revolución,” in Luis Cabrera: Teórico y crítico de
la Revolución, ed. Eugenia Meyer (Mexico City: Secretaría de Educación Pública, 1972),
106, 113; idem, La reconstitución de los ejidos de los pueblos (Mexico City: Tip. de Fidencio S.
Soria, 1913), reprinted in La cuestión de la tierra, ed. Jesús Silva Herzog, 4 vols. (Mexico
City: Instituto Mexicano de Investigaciones Económicas, 1960 –1962), 2:284.
64. Cabrera, La reconstitución de los ejidos de los pueblos, 2:286, 306, 281, 289 – 90,
302 –10.
65. For Molina Enríquez’s own proposals around that time, see his Plan de Texcoco
(1911), reproduced in Shadle, Andrés Molina Enríquez; and idem, “Filosofía de mis ideas
sobre reformas agrarias; see also Wistano Orozco, “La cuestión agraria,” in Herzog, La
cuestión de la tierra; Andrés Molina Enríquez, Esbozo de la historia de los primeros diez años de
la revolución agraria de México, 5 vols. (Mexico City: Talleres Gráficos del Museo Nacional
de Arqueología, Historia y Etnografía, 1937), 5:85 – 95, 112 –18; and Luis Cabrera, “El
balance de la revolución,” 112 –14.
This bill’s prospects died with Madero, but Cabrera went on to become
Carranza’s 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 Mexico’s postrevolutionary agrarian
legislation.67 This text, too, bore clearly the distinctive imprint of Molina’s
thought. The law’s 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 man-
dated 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 Carranza’s rule), the decree estab-
lished 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 pacification, the
pueblos would now be legally enabled to reconstitute their holdings.68 The
specific 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. Meyer, Luis Cabrera, 42.

67. Ever since, January 6th has been considered a “holy day” of official agrarismo. On
Cabrera’s authorship, see Pastor Rouaix, Génesis de los artículos 27 y 123 de la constitución
política de 1917, 2d ed. (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Estudios Históricos de la
Revolución Mexicana, 1959), 57 – 58.
68. For the text of this decree, see Manuel Fabila, Cinco siglos de legislación agraria en
México (Mexico City: Banco Nacional de Crédito Agrícola, 1941), 270 –74.
69. See the Plan de Ayala, especially Articles 1, 6, 7, and 9, in Fabila, Cinco siglos de
legislación agraria en México, 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 significant 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. Molina’s historical
interpretation of disentailment was also absent from the Proyecto de ley agraria prepared for
Carranza by Pastor Rouaix and José Novelo in December of 1914, which was in many ways
significantly different from Cabrera’s. See Rouaix and Novelo, “Estudio sobre la cuestión
agraria, proyecto de ley,” in Herzog, La cuestión de la tierra, 3:357 – 93.
of 1915’s exposition of motives “reflect[ed] the principal arguments made in

my book Los grandes problemas nacionales . . . concerning the problem of prop-
erty with respect to Indians.” In this he was right; the law’s 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 Enríquez 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 Cabrera’s continued sup-
port, Molina Enríquez became a well-known figure 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 unac-
ceptable, 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 Enríquez was asked to come up with a whole new text for Article 27,
which he quickly composed. By all accounts (including Molina’s), 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 fever-
ishly 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 finished, just ten days after the group had first 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 diputa-
dos 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 encour-
aged by Molina’s own bold claims — came to consider him “the author of Arti-
cle 27”, while other participants in the process — in particular Pastor Rouaix
70. Molina Enríquez, Esbozo de la historia de los primeros diez años de la revolución
agraria, 5:158 – 61. For a discussion of the decree of 1915, see Simpson, The Ejido, 58 – 62;
and Shadle, Andrés Molina Enríquez, 67 – 69.
71. He remained a member of the C. N. A. until mid-1918. For details, see Shadle,
Andrés Molina Enríquez, 76 – 87.
72. For details, see Rouaix, Génesis, 143 – 215; Molina Enríquez, Esbozo de los primeros
diez años de la revolución agraria, 5:167 –77; and E. Victor Niemeyer, Revolution at Queretaro:
The Mexican Constitutional Convention of 1916 –1917 (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1974).
and José Natividad Macías — 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
rancherías, condueñazgos, 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 Molina’s 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 Molina’s elaborate social analysis.74
Nonetheless, Molina’s intellectual influence on the text of Article 27 is not
hard to detect; both the historical justification and the sociojuridical basis for
the restoration of communal land rights provided therein can be traced back
directly to his ideas. First, Article 27 ratified the provisions and rationale of
Luis Cabrera’s decree of 6 January 1915, granting them the status of constitu-
tional law. In so doing, the constitution effectively validated Molina’s 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 reflected Molina’s 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, Génesis, 148 – 64; Molina
Enríquez, Esbozo de los primeros diez años de la revolución agraria, 5:171–77; Lucio Mendieta,
“Los antecedentes del artículo 27 constitucional,” El Universal, 2 Oct. 1946; José N.
Macías, “Quién fue el autor del artículo 27 constitucional,” El Universal, 20 Sept. 1937;
Molina Enríquez, “El Lic. Macías y el artículo 27 de la Constitución,” El Universal, 23
Sept. 1937; José N. Macías, “La paternidad del artículo 27 de la Constitución,” El Universal,
27 Sept. 1937; and Shadle, Andrés Molina Enríquez, 69 –75.
74. For the text of Article 27, as approved, see Fabila, Cinco siglos de legislación agraria
en México, 307 –11. Earlier versions can be found in Rouaix, Génesis, 164 – 84. See also
Diario de los debates del Congreso Constituyente (Mexico City: Secretaría de Gobernación,
1917).
75. The term modalidades was not Molina Enríquez’s. It was added by the
congressional committee that revised the original proyecto de ley as a way of clarifying and
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 through-
out 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 lit-
tle essay entitled “El espíritu de la constitución de Querétaro,” 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 territo-
rial 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 “communi-
ties 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 Molina’s 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 define 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, Génesis, 184 – 85, 176 –77.
76. For the full text of Molina Enríquez’ Exposición de motivos, see Rouaix, Génesis,
164 – 69.
77. See Boletín de la Secretaría de Gobernación 1, no. 4 (1922). This issue of the Boletín
was edited by Molina Enríquez, and was entirely devoted to Article 27.
78. Molina Enríquez, “El espíritu de la Constitución de Querétaro,” Boletín de la
Secretaría de Gobernación 1, no. 4 (1922):8 – 9; in the same issue of the Boletín, see
“Introducción,” 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.
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 definition 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 inhabi-
tants. Molina’s work was the principal source of this conceptualization. For
many intellectuals and scholars trying to make sense of the roots and meaning
of Mexico’s land tenure reforms, these prominent laws offered not just a guide
to the present, but also a compelling representation of the recent past. Legiti-
mated in this way, Molina’s 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 griev-
ances 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 Enrí-
quez’s obscure writings, which — read in this context — appeared profoundly
incisive and foresightful. In either case, the outcome was more or less the
same: Molina’s sui generis views regarding the plight of the pueblos were con-
sistently 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 tru-
ism. A few notable examples will suffice 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
Molina’s sociohistorical arguments into an authoritative rationale for legal
action, thus enabling this process of ideological diffusion to get underway.
Absent Cabrera, the fate of Molina’s historical analysis might well have been a
very different one. Another early example of the adoption of Molina’s ideas
regarding pueblos can be found in Fernando González Roa’s El problema rural
de México (with José Covarrubias, 1917) and Aspecto agrario de la revolución mex-
79. A related matter concerns the extent to which Molina’s views on the history of
pueblos reflected, coincided with, contradicted, or influenced 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 Molina’s 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.
icana (1919). Although his proposals regarding agrarian reform were in many
ways quite different from those championed by Molina, he readily accepted
the latter’s 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 “mis-
taken policy” with a “predictable result”; it was — he added, citing Spencer —
“like taking a fish 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 find themselves.” Accordingly, he praised Cabrera’s 1912 speech
(which the 1919 book quoted at length), the decree of 1915, and the new Arti-
cle 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 México
(1923), a chronological analysis of the evolution of land tenure laws and prac-
tices in the course of Mexican history; continually updated, expanded, and
reprinted well into the 1970s, it remains still a very influential text on such
questions. In it, Mendieta essentially repeated the generic explanation of
pueblo land loss and decay. Borrowing Molina’s language and concepts, he
alluded to the “disastrous consequences” of village land disentailment, explain-
ing 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 situ-
ation, ensuring at the same time that it would not occur again. “ Unlike his
counterpart under the laws of the Reforma,” Mendieta concluded, “today’s
Indian can not alienate the lands given to him, because the Constitution for-
bids him to do so.”82
That same year, the American Geographical Society published George
80. González Roa and Covarrubias, El problema rural de México, 60, 75 –76, 142 – 48;
and González Roa, El aspecto agrario de la revolución mexicana, 216 – 23, 235 – 39, 310 –13.
81. Mendieta y Nuñez, El problema agrario de México, 86 – 8, 126, 140. “Disastrous” is
exactly how Molina had described the effects of the Reforma laws on Indian pueblos. See
Molina Enríquez, Los grandes problemas, 56.
82. Mendieta y Nuñez, El problema agrario de México, 141.
McBride’s The Land Systems of Mexico (1923), based on the author’s dissertation.
This was the first detailed study in English of Mexico’s modern landholding
institutions and tenure patterns, emphasizing both their historical develop-
ment 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 Enríquez’s, though he did not say so
explicitly. “[The landholding pueblo’s] death knell was sounded by the
Reforma,” he wrote. “Unaccustomed to any other system than their ancient
communalism and unable to understand the significance 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 significance 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 view-
point,” 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 Phipps’s “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 Molina’s work was nevertheless extensive, and it
clearly influenced her account of pueblo disentailment. “The great defect of
the Reform Laws,” she wrote, “was their inclusion of the property of civil com-
munities 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.
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 pos-
sess clear-sighted leaders, saved themselves from ruin by depositing their indi-
vidual 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 sufficiently advanced to grasp the ideas of pri-
vate property and written title, and who tried to cling to his lot, had great dif-
ficulty 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
Molina’s distinctive views in Phipps’s 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
Molina’s ideas about pueblos and their history, none did so as openly, as com-
pletely, or as successfully as did the works of Frank Tannenbaum. Unlike
Mendieta, McBride, and Phipps, Tannenbaum had had a chance to read Molina
Enríquez’s exegetical commentaries on the “spirit” of Article 27 (in the 1922
Boletín), and they evidently cast a deep spell on him, in part perhaps because he
sympathized with the corporatist social philosophy—of Comtean origin, Molina
would argue — on which they were inspired.86 As a result, Tannenbaum whole-
heartedly embraced — and championed — Molina’s 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 Enríquez, 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 Enríquez, “El espíritu de la constitución,” 6.
87. In so doing, he relied as well on the works on McBride, Mendieta, González Roa,
and Covarrubias, all of whom had already adopted Molina’s account.
Mexican Agrarian Revolution (1929) and Peace by Revolution (1933) became show-
cases 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 Díaz regime,” Tannen-
baum 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 Díaz 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 har-
monious 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 devastat-
ing. 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 stan-
dard of well-being of the villagers. The common ownership of land pro-
vided wood for fire, 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 misfor-
tune deprived him of these he earned his income by making charcoal or
pottery, or finding other uses for the natural resources within the village
boundaries. The division of the lands automatically reduced each indi-
vidual 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 trans-
fer 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 influences
that could not be exercised against a community. The centuries of com-
munal 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 139–41 the author does little more than
paraphrase or quote Molina.
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 Tannenbaum’s estimation, Molina had managed not only to identify
one of the main sources of Mexico’s 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 writ-
ings of Molina, both in the Boletín of 1922 and in the preamble to the original
proyecto de ley. Endorsing Molina’s stated rationale, he wrote,
Article 27, it is obvious, has created a variety of new legal forms of land-
holding. . . . It seems true that the formula was developed to meet the
special social and legal needs of the multifarious groups of different cul-
tural levels that make up the Mexican community. They needed a prop-
erty concept that would be broad enough to include the primitive notion
of ownership characteristic of a wandering Indian group, knowing tem-
porary possession, but having no notion of legal ownership, as well as
one that could cover the needs of modern corporate and private owner-
ship.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 revolution’s mandate,
and it was a just and reasonable one.
Thanks in good measure to the broad influence of Frank Tannenbaum’s
writings, Molina’s interpretation of pueblo disentailment would become
canonical, in U.S. academic circles and beyond. Over time, Molina’s founda-
90. 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.
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 accep-
tance. When Eyler Simpson published The Ejido: Mexico’s Way Out (1937),
Molina’s arguments had already attained the status of a well-established histor-
ical 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 significant social developments in

the decades leading up to the Revolution of 1910, the process of Porfirian vil-
lage 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 modified. A generic
account of how, why, and to whom the pueblos had lost their lands had already
been formulated by the late Porfiriato. Its main source was Andrés Molina
Enríquez, 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 interpre-
tation, wrote it into their laws, made it official; students of Porfirian rural his-
tory 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 land-
grabbers. It was not hard to find 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 revolution’s 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, Simpson’s 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.
laws, moreover, invested this story with great authority. As a consequence, few
scholars, then or since, have felt the need to document or refine — let alone
challenge — this well-entrenched interpretation of Porfirian village history.
It should now be clear, however, that Molina Enríquez’s influential histor-
ical 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 Porfiri-
ato has yet to be researched and written. What explains the move to privatize
village lands in pueblos that were never threatened by haciendas? Were hacen-
dados the only ones who benefited from the breakup of communal property,
or did a class of villagers also profit? What role did socioeconomic differentia-
tion within villages play in these processes? Why were some pueblo land divi-
sions conflictive 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 Porfirian pueblos will at last begin to transcend the
enduring ideological legacies of Andrés Molina Enríquez.

Kouri

Hochgeladen von

Dokumentinformationen

Originalbeschreibung:

Originaltitel

Copyright

Verfügbare Formate

Dieses Dokument teilen

Dokument teilen oder einbetten

Freigabeoptionen

Stufen Sie dieses Dokument als nützlich ein?

Sind diese Inhalte unangemessen?

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

Kouri

Hochgeladen von

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

Interpreting the Expropriation of

Indian Pueblo Lands in Porfirian Mexico:

I n the course of the nineteenth century, communal forms of land ownership

Hispanic American Historical Review 82:1

3. See, Andrés Lira, Comunidades indígenas frente a la ciudad de México: Tenochlitlán y

There is some irony in this, since a preoccupation with issues of land

enabled the aggressive implementation of Liberal ideas about landownership

diagnostic but also prescriptive. By exposing weaknesses in the prevalent account

The Meaning of “Pueblo”

the conquest effectively restricted the category of “pueblo” so that it would

turies, numerous Indian pueblo-polities were constituted as legal entities,

If the preceding discussion of the meanings of “pueblo” seems a bit extra-

prehensive fashion. He was Andrés Molina Enríquez (1868–1940), an intellec-

The Pueblo in Nineteenth-Century Social Thought

he thought should be privatized.19 His proposals were taken up by the hapless

In Mora’s resonant view, the pueblos were, in effect, “monasteries of Indians,”

and complexity that these investigations were documenting, Pimentel persisted in

and meticulous as his jurisprudential treatise undoubtedly was, Orozco’s aim

29. Ibid., 441– 44, 1105 –111.

Andrés Molina Enríquez

I can personally testify to this, based on what I witnessed during nine

39. Renato Molina Enríquez, “Andrés Molina Enríquez: Conciencia de México”;

the inexorable march of progress, and in the structure of society as a natural

native peoples of Mexico. In the end, Haeckel’s intricate biological arguments

Another likely conduit would be Spanish legal historiography — the studies of

52. Molina Enríquez, Los grandes problemas, 7 –11.

In short, the territorial context of agricultural production, the pace of social

55. Ibid., 25.

Table 1: Historical Phases of Territorial Possession and Corresponding Stages

1o. Falta absoluta de toda noción de derecho Sociedades nómadas

57. Molina Enríquez, La reforma y Juárez, 24 – 5.

community offered the Indians notable advantages . . . [giving them] a

would have to be reconstituted. And only a strong central government in full

Influence of Molina Enríquez’s Ideas

Carranza. As Cabrera openly acknowledged on a number of occasions, Molina

66. Meyer, Luis Cabrera, 42.

of 1915’s exposition of motives “reﬂect[ed] the principal arguments made in

The destruction of common land ownership really resulted not merely in

88. Tannenbaum, The Mexican Agrarian Revolution, 14, 68.

As Molina had explained, these modalidades represented in effect a legal

90. Tannenbaum, The Mexican Agrarian Revolution, 177.

Widely acknowledged as one of the most signiﬁcant social developments in

Das könnte Ihnen auch gefallen