Collecting Ideals: Re-envisioning ejidos as climate-action platforms

Abstract

Established by constitutional decree in 1917, ejidos were considered on of the most successful outcomes of the Mexican Revolution's fight to redistribute land back to the indigenous populations in a collective land tenure system or 'commons.' After decades of operation in which neoliberal critics claimed that ejidatarios were insufficiently productive, the Mexican authorities reformed the constitution to allow privatization of ejidal lands. The 1992 NAFTA agreement further incentivized the commodification of such lands, and many ejidos were dismantled or transformed into private property.

While ejidos have been studied by many disciplines, from agrarian law or social-economics to ethnography, urban scholars who have examined their impact on urbanization have focused primarily on ejidos in the periphery of large cities, arguing that ejidal transformation is a key determinant of urban sprawl and intensifying metropolitan inequality. In "Collecting Ideals: Re-envisioning ejidos as climate-action platforms" I argue that ejidos, have and are still playing a major role in the urbanization and development of more rural settings in Mexico, particularly in regions with small towns. I further argue that ejidal dynamics in such regions have their own peculiarities -- particularly in terms of the potential impacts of ejidal privatization on the natural and built environment -- and thus that urban designers and planners need special tools to manage and guide the impact of ejidal production on urbanization in such settings.

More specifically, I hypothesize that ejidos -- which still comprise 52% of Mexico's land -- could play a major role in Mexico's fight to confront climate change in the twenty first century, in a manner that is fair and equitable to its common owners, particularly if the equation of water supply is solved. To support this claim, my thesis uses mapping as a critical device to first spatialize and visualize the different outcomes of ejido privatization. Using the case of Apan, Hidalgo -- in the Pachuca sub-basin region -- I propose a series of measures to guide ejidal development in quasi-rural settings. After developing the Latourian concept of a critical zone to guide such processes, I propose the development of "common platform" for stakeholder engagement that could help visualize different scenarios and accommodate common interests to ensure water sovereignty for all.