ABSTRACT
The "agrarian question" in Mexico was the focus of a protracted debate in the 1970s and was reenacted in the 1980s. This chapter discusses each side's characterization of the agrarian social structure and the resulting political conclusions. It proposes alternative questions and hypotheses that reframe the agrarian question. The chapter challenges class-reductionist assumptions in the main stances of the debate, arguing that regional cultures, state intervention, and leadership types are also crucial in determining political class formation. Class reductionism has been a prevalent problem in the Mexican debate to the extent that political implications have been derived from economic class positions, regardless of which criterion—presence of wages or access to land—is viewed as the chief determinant in characterizing the agrarian structure. The chapter presents some schemes depicting ideal-typical causal models and hypotheses of the campesinista and the proletarista views.
