Remaking Indigenous Pueblos: Land, Property, and Community in 19th-Century Mexico

On June 25th, 1856 the acting President of Mexico, Ignacio Comonfort issued one of the most consequential laws of the century. It was called the Disentailment of Mortmain, known by historians as the “Lerdo law”. The law sought to radically transform the Colonial-era legislation (1535-1821) that, according to the reformers, prevented the emergence of a liberalized land market. Among other “corporations”, indigenous communities held communal property; its members could not sell the land they worked, just benefit from its use. Historians have long considered the Lerdo law as the starting point of a long, and often violent, process that would change the land tenure and use in the late nineteenth century leading to an increasing concentration in land property. However, only rarely have researchers looked at the immediate aftermath of the Ley Lerdo. In the towns, villages, and communities of the valley of Mexico, thousands of farmers appeared before local courts to claim individual property over the parcels they held, leaving a significant paper trail that has not yet been studied by historians. In my doctoral dissertation, I systematically analyze this body of sources of about eight hundred documents. In this paper, I present some of the findings of my research focusing on two main aspects. The patterns of land tenure and use before the law was issued, and the collective responses to the law in four municipalities (Tlahuac, Coyoacan, San Angel, Xochimilco) that reconfigured indigenous communities from within. With this, I seek to fill some gaps in the historiography about local history of indigenous communities in the late nineteenth century.