Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies

The Zapatistas, in 1994, forced the world and certainly people within Mexico to pay attention to longstanding problems in land inequities and dissatisfaction with the December 1991 modifications to the agrarian reform codes embodied in Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution. To facilitate the proposed changes in landholdings in Mexico’s approximately 29,000 ejidos and indigenous communities, a new government office was created, the Procuraduría Agraria. This paper begins by first discussing the creation and functioning of the Procuraduría Agraria, the steps communities go through in the certification process, and the agrarian history of the three field sites chosen. It then focuses on how generational and gender differences have affected the reception of the certification program in the three field sites and ends by suggesting some possible long-term outcomes of the certification process and their meaning for men and women in the communities studied.