Reviews
The End of Agrarian Reform in Mexico by Billie DeWalt and Martha Rees, with Arthur Murphy, Center for U.S.Mexican Studies, University of California, San Diego, 76 pp., $10 (paper). In 1990...
...This volume also includes two shorter essays, one by Luis Hemrnndez-a frequent NACLA contributor-which provides additional background analysis, much of it culled from first-hand experience with the coffee growers of the Chiapas region...
...This proximity is, of course, fraught with tensions...
...They emphasize the general lack of support given to ejidos by governmental financial structures, and the bind ejidatarios found themselves in when they faced well-heeled, capital-intensive competition from the private sector...
...The principal mechanism of the abolition of land redistribution was the reform of Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution which had been the legal basis of the old system...
...As Jorge Castafieda argues in one of the volume's best essays, California is becoming "dedemocratized," as a small, privileged Anglo minority determines the fate of a largely poor, disenfranchised Latino population...
...The rebellion therefore signals a crisis of legitimation both for the process of economic liberalization, and for the state and its targeted social programs...
...California is Mexico's second-largest trading partner (after Texas), and the two region's economies are increasingly linked through the transnational production networks of U.S.-based firms...
...California's Mexico connection has intensified over the past 20 years...
...This fifth brief volume in the Transformation of Rural Mexico series is an analysis of the most dramatic of the political explosions occasioned-most immediately-by the ongoing political-economic changes in the countryside...
...As the Califomian economy has taken a nosedive, anti-immigrant sentiment in the state has blossomed...
...He offers a lucid critical discussion of agrarian modernization and its accompanying political reforms, the dramatic modifications in rural land-tenure systems, and the recent process of peasant political organizing...
...Rebellion in Chiapas by Neil Harvey, with additional essays by Luis Herndndez Navarro and Jeffrey W. Rubin, Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, University of California, San Diego, 62 pp., $7 (paper...
...Immigration from Mexico--of a more permanent character than in earlier decades-continues unabated...
...This has potentially disastrous consequences...
...Free-market reforms, says Harvey, have excluded Chiapas peasants from many markets, and brought about a feeling of abandonment by the state...
...DeWalt and Rees discuss the nature of the ejido, the decision-making structures, ambiguities of land titles, and conflictresolution structures...
...One Californian in five today is of Mexican heritage...
...Political science tends to use the nation-state as its building block of analysis...
...Lowenthal and Burgess' collection of incisive case studies of the relationship between California and Mexico explores this fertile theoretical ground...
...Despite its minimally critical perspective, there is a wealth of accessible information here for non-specialists with an interest in the current turbulence in rural Mexico...
...Harvey locates the Zapatista rebellion in the multiple context of current global restructuring, the rural changes catalogued by earlier monographs in this series, and the long tradition of Mexican peasant uprisings...
...They also discuss the land market which, despite the regulations and laws which prohibited it, flourished in an informal manner...
...The authors in this volume try to untangle the myths that fuel the antiimmigrant backlash, and, from a variety of perspectives, show how the Mexico-California connection can benefit both regions...
...The Salinas reforms end peasant entitlement to land and essentially privatize the ejido...
...In a comparison with the COCEI movement of Juchitin, Jeffrey Rubin assesses the likelihood that the Zapatistas might become powerful enough on a regional level to become pro-peasant mediators in disputes with the federal government...
...The Ejido Reform Research Project of the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies was established to trace the consequences of the momentous changes in the Mexican countryside flowing from this reform...
...Modern capitalist development has meant, however, that national borders are becoming ever more permeable, and economic and social relations are taking on a distinctly transnational cast...
...In 1990 and 1991, the Mexican government passed a series of measures effectively ending the agrarian reform whose origins lay in Emiliano Zapata's famous dictum: "The land belongs to those who work it...
...They detail all the negatives of the old system: the ubiquity of boundary disputes, the nature of intra-ejido conflicts, the general exclusion of women from the decision-making process, and the frequent domination of ejidos by local political bosses, or powerful individuals within the ejido structure...
...The End of Agrarian Reform in Mexico is the third in the series Transformation of Rural Mexico, published by the Project...
...The California-Mexico Connection edited by Abraham F. Lowenthal and Katrina Burgess, Stanford University Press, 1993, 364 pp., $45 (cloth), $16.95 (paper...
...DeWalt and Rees pretty much accept the Salinas reforms as a fait accompli, and end each section of their monograph with a small list of recommendations to Mexican policymakers, the gist of which is "not so fast...
Vol. 28 • July 1994 • No. 1
