Geography, Politics and Economics in the Liberal Privatization of the Meseta Purépecha, 1851-1914

This article critically examines the way the historiography has approached the study of communal land privatizations in Mexico in the second half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. It contends that, despite its many achievements and with few exceptions, the bulk of the literature in the past three and a half decades has tended to adopt a distinctly piecemeal perspective. As a result, careful examination of the causes, the general context, and the unfolding of land privatization has been neglected. The article thus offers a general analytical framework based on five key factors. This framework, together with evidence from notary archives and sources from local, state and federal actors, are used to analyze the history of communal land privatizations in a region known as meseta purépecha or Tarascan Plateau—a highland region of the state of Michoacán, Mexico, with a high percentage of indigenous population and where communal land tenure has long-standing roots. The central argument is that land privatizations were not the predictable result of systematic and coherent liberal land policies, as it is often assumed, but the result of two very particular historical junctures, the first one of which (1868-1875) revolved around the privatization of agricultural lands, while the second one (1885-1914) revolved around the privatization of communal forests