Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies

Contributors to this volume examine how rural restructuring in Querétaro affects the organization of agroindustries and the productive strategies of small farmers in the ejido and private sectors, reshapes labor markets, and changes state-campesino relations. Contributors: Manuel Carlos, Alberto García Espejel, Juan José Gutiérrez Alvarez, Martha Otilia Olvera Estrada, Sergio Quesada Aldana, Gaspar Real Cabello, and Alfonso Serna Jiménez .

Under the new agrarian policies and economic rules of Article 27, implemented in January 1992, the customary patters of political patronage and loyalty in the countryside no longer operate as before. Campesions now are challenged to think and act like entrepreneurs who assume investment risks in order to successfully participate in competitive markets. But most possess neither the economic resources nor worldviews to be the “campesino entrepreneurs” sought by the government or by the leaders of the Confederación Nacional Campesina (CNC) and the Confederación Nacional de Productores Rurales (CNPR), the two campesino confederations affiliated to the ruling PRI. This contradiction between campesino worldviews and neoliberal economic reforms defines the unprecedented challenge to the traditional legitimacy held by both organizations. Sugarcane growers represent a distinct social group, and the essays in this volume will examine the particular implications of the current transformation for the social and political options of Mexico’s sugarcane growers.

This book, and the seminar on which it is based, were conceived as elements of a dialogue on the future of the Mexican countryside. Rural Mexico, like the rest of Mexican society, is changing rapidly in response to a variety of circumstances, many of which are very imperfectly understood. This book focuses on a central element in the livelihood of most rural people - the production and consumption of maiz - and on a key component of macroeconomic policy reform, that which has been concerned with reducing the cost and increasing the efficiency of the maize provisioning system of the country. The concerted effort to restructure the entire maize pricing and marketing system, which has gone forward in conjunction with a broad ranging agricultural policy reform, affects the economic options, as well as the levels of living, of many different kinds of people in the Mexican countryside, and it does so in complex ways.

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.