LAND RECUPERATION AND CONFLICT ON THE MARGINS OF STATE FORMATION IN NORTHERN CHIAPAS¹

1. This article draws on doctoral research undertaken between October 2001 and June 2003. The first period of fieldwork (until July 2002) was funded by the University of Manchester, whereas the second period was completed thanks to a grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research (Gr. 6934). I thank the other contributors to this issue and the two anonymous Identities reviewers for their insightful comments.

Abstract

Drawing on a historical and anthropological study of peasant indigenous land recovery and rural conflict, this paper explores the particular forms acquired by the formation, development, and crisis of the post-revolutionary Mexican State in the Maya Chol region of northern Chiapas. A combination of archival and ethnographic research, including local storytelling, on the ejido of El Limar offers a contextualized case study of the State as a contradictory, uneven, and conflictive process of domination and struggle, entailing multiple political, economic, and cultural dimensions. This is thus a contribution to de-centered analyses of State formation, yet a contribution that can only be made by situating local conflicts and relationships within broader political and institutional contexts. The combination of local and global levels of power and domination will be approached by a focus on agrarian law as a common terrain of cultural and material struggle. This focus provides a good analytical thread throughout the historical reconstruction of El Limar, enabling us to describe the combination of legal and illegal means used by differentiated local groups in their attempts to secure greater control over land and then to link such description to an analysis of State formation. The divisions, conflicts, and potential for struggle created through changing and contradictory institutions and legal apparatuses are thus central to the regionally and culturally differentiated construction of regime politics across Mexico.

Key Words:

• local histories
• rural conflict
• State formation
• Mexican studies

Notes

1. This article draws on doctoral research undertaken between October 2001 and June 2003. The first period of fieldwork (until July 2002) was funded by the University of Manchester, whereas the second period was completed thanks to a grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research (Gr. 6934). I thank the other contributors to this issue and the two anonymous Identities reviewers for their insightful comments.

2. The Mexican ejido is both a territorial unit and an association of independent producers created in accordance with laws formulated during the 1910–1920 Revolution. Despite their collective landholding status, nearly all the ejidos in Mexico have been broken up into parcels assigned to individual producers who hold usufructuary rights over them (Chevalier and Buckles 1995: 15–16, 31, 39 n.16).

3. Derived from the word castellano or Castilian (an inhabitant of the Castile region in Spain), this term is used by Chol speakers to refer both to persons of wholly European origin and to mestizos or people of mixed European and Native American descent speaking Spanish.

4. National Agricultural Registration (RAN). Tuxtla, EXP. 427-D, 10 August 1932.

5. National Agricultural Registration (RAN). Tuxtla, EXP. 427-D, the ejidatarios of El Limar to the president of the Local Agrarian Commission, 15 January 1934.

6. RAN. Tuxtla, EXP. 940-A, the ejidatarios of El Limar to C. Ing. Efraín A. Gutiérrez, Governor of Chiapas, 28 January 1937, and Dictamen issued by the Comisión Agraria Mixta, 27 September 1952.

7. Lázaro Cárdenas visited the Chol region in February 1934 during his pre-electoral tour, of which there are still fond memories among the first Limarean ejidatarios' sons. Their narratives also express bewilderment at the subsequent indifference to which successive ejido enlargement petitions were subjected.

8. Archivo Histórice de Localidades (AHL) 2003: Consulta Alfanumérica, Localidad El Limar, and Localidad El Coloquil. From the 1930s through to 1950 El Coloquil appears as a settlement in official censuses.

9. Most of the names used here are real names. When I have chosen other names to protect the identities of the people mentioned, I do not indicate this in the text.

10. See Chevalier and Buckles (1995) for a study of the transformation of native forms of authority in Veracruz—where traditional modes of organization gave way to civil-religious hierarchies dominated by caciques, who redistributed some of their wealth to gain legitimacy in contexts of increasing stratification and conflict developing along class lines.

11. In 1950 there were still the same 165 ejido right-holder places of the 1934 endowment, while the local population had risen to 1,326 inhabitants, including Coloquileans, who for the first time were counted as residents of El Limar in that year; in 1970, still with the same number of right-holders, El Limar and its Coloquil quarter comprised more than 1,500 inhabitants (AHL 2003: Consulta Alfanumérica, Localidad El Limar, and Localidad El Coloquil).

12. RAN. Tuxtla, EXP. 940-A, Ing. Alfonso García Guerrero to the President of the Comisión Agraria Mixta, 28 September 1951.

13. RAN. Tuxtla, EXP. 940-A, Dictamen issued by the Comisión Agraria Mixta, 27 September 1952 and EXP. 427— “Sobrantes,” the Regional Delegate to the Director of DAAC in Mexico City, 2 December 1964.

14. RAN. Tuxtla, EXP. 427— “Sobrantes,” the Executive Committee of the El Limar ejido to the Regional Delegate of DAAC, 5 October 1964. As it is clear from some of the narratives mentioned later, Coloquileans were among those “outsiders” who paid for using lands in the commons.

15. RAN. Tuxtla, EXP. 427-D, DAAC Document, 28 September 1972.

16. RAN. Tuxtla, EXP. 427-D, the Local Promoter of Agrarian Development to the Regional Delegate of the SRA at Tuxtla, 19 November 1975.

17. RAN. Tuxtla, EXP. 427-D, Antonio Peñate Alvarez to the President of the Republic, 10 February 1981. Peñate found that the official had obtained a sum of money from the Limareans as a “prerequisite” for incorporating El Yaqui into the ejido regime, which would protect the coproperty against the Tumbaltecan occupants.

18. In fact, only two of the ranches that remained from the old La Preciosa, of just four and 49 hectares, were still owned by one of Carlos Uhlig's grandsons and his mother, respectively. As most of the Uhligs had left El Limar to pursue commercial ventures in provincial towns, the other two properties were sold to a son of Alfonso Mena's (51 hectares) and to a trader from Tila town (124 hectares). Such ranchers were obviously by far less politically and economically powerful than the finca owners of the early twentieth century, although, owing to the small size of their properties, they continued to have government authorities on their side against peasant demands for expropriation during the 1980s and early 1990s.

19. RAN. Tuxtla, EXP. 3758-A, Dictamen issued by the Comisión Agraria Mixta, 18 April 1990. Nonetheless, ejidatarios still recalled that the four small ranches had resulted from the partition by which the Uhligs had avoided the expropriation of La Preciosa forty years earlier. After 1991 the official announcement that there were “no more lands to redistribute in Mexico”—stemming from Salinas' constitutional amendments—dealt a last blow to Limareans' hopes of expanding their ejido through the expropriation of the ranching properties.

20. RAN. Tuxtla, EXP. 3758-A, the Executive Committee of the El Limar ejido to President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, 24 August 1990. Appealing to the president of the nation was also consistent with spatial imaginings, which, locating “evil” in local and regional offices and bureaucrats, constructed the national power center as devoid of and standing above corruption (a construction doubtless reinforced by the personal encounters of Limareans with self-serving officials and brokers).

21. It is significant that Mena was murdered in 1964 by a young limareño who had received primary education at a boarding school established in the municipality of Salto de Agua. Mena's murderer belonged to a new generation of literate indigenous leaders who had started to contend for posts of local influence, challenging the monopoly of caxlan caciques over intermediation with external authorities.

22. RAN. Tuxtla, EXP. 3758-A, Eulalio Hernández, owner of El Canutillo ranch, to José P. González Blanco, governor of Chiapas, 30 April 1990.

23. RAN. Tuxtla, EXP. 427-D, the members of Coordinating Body of Mayan Peoples in Struggle for Their Liberation (COLPUMALI), A. C., El Limar, to Julio César Ruiz, interim governor of Chiapas, 1 January 1996. One of Manuel Bellos' brothers, also active in the 1994 coloquilero movement, was arrested and sent to prison for three years. Anselmo López himself was about to suffer the same fate, fearing at first that I might be a judicial policeman sent to El Coloquil to apprehend him.

24. Secretary of Agricultural Reform (SRA). Tuxtla, Expediente: Handing over of the San Antonio, El Canutillo, Durango de Villa, and Tepeyac ranches to the hamlet of Primero de Enero, 21 August 1999.

RAN. Tuxtla. Registro Agrario Nacional, Delegación Chiapas, Tuxtla Gutiérrez.

SRA. Tuxtla. Archivo de la Secretaría de la Reforma Agraria, Delegación Chiapas, Tuxtla Gutiérrez.