Browsing by Author "Purnell, Jennie"

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Popular Resistance to the Privatization of Communal Lands in 19th Century Michoacan
(1995) Purnell, Jennie
"This paper examines the dynamics of popular resistance to the 19th century liberal land reform in the center-west state of Michoacan. It begins with a brief overview of liberal thinking with respect to the privatization of communal land, and then looks at the characteristics of popular resistance to the disamortization laws passed at the state and national level. This general discussion is followed by a case study of the politics of privatization in the village of Zacapu, located in the municipio of the same name, in what would later become the agrarista heartland of Michoacan. The villagers of Zacapu managed to delay the implementation of the reform for some three decades, from 1869, when state officials began to apply concerted pressure on the communities to carry out the reform, until 1904, when the process was finally completed with the distribution of individual titles. The cost of that resistance was, however, extremely high: during this same period, Zacapu lost much of its communal land to neighboring haciendas, either through the auspices of the state, which seized and auctioned off some of the land for non-payment of back taxes assessed on undivided property, or through fraudulent deals struck between a minority faction within the community and outsiders. As elsewhere throughout Michoacan, Zacapu's experience with the liberal reform was decisive in explaining its partisanship in the revolutionary conflicts of the 1910s and 1920s: together with some of their neighbors from Naranja, Tirandaro, and Tarejero, and under the leadership of Primo Tapia, many Zacapu villagers participated in the region's agrarista movement, petitioning for, and ultimately recovering, at least some of the lands lost through both legal and illegal maneuvers associated with the liberal reform."
With All Due Respect: Popular Resistance to the Privatization of Communal Lands in Nineteenth-Century Michoacan
(1999) Purnell, Jennie
"The article explores popular opposition to the nineteenth-century liberal laws that mandated privatization of the communal lands held by Indian communities in Mexico. It argues that peasants in Michoacan responded to the reparto with a complex mixture of resistance, negotiation, and accommodation in attempts to retain local control over the definition and distribution of property rights and to defend local religious and political institutions. The first section provides a brief overview of liberal thinking and legislation on the privatization of communal lands, highlighting the legal and ideological ambiguities and contradictions that provided opportunities for resistance and negotiation. The second section explores how and why peasants so often opposed the reparto in Michoacan, stressing the complex nature of popular resistance and state responses to it. The third section offers a brief overview of nineteenth-century agrarian development in Michoacan as background for the two case studies of the politics of privatization at the local level. Zacapu peasants managed to delay the reparto for thirty-five years but ended up losing much of their land to state tax officials and neighboring landowners. San Juan Parangaricutiro successfully retained its substantial woodlands as communal property, even as local mestizo elites appropriated the best of cultivated land as private property. The article concludes with a comparative analysis of the liberal reparto in the two communities, linking the different outcomes to peasant partisanship in the agrarian and political struggles of the Mexican Revolution."