ABSTRACT
The modern Mexican ejido connotes restitution of lands and liberties lost—an "exit" or way out of continuing poverty for peasants through state-directed planned agricultural modernization, after land redistribution per se proved to be insufficient to stimulate economic dynamism and fulfil the revolutionary promise of social justice in the countryside. Depeasantization in Campeche differs substantially from that in many other regions of rural Mexico. The severely decapitalized and often demoralized casualties of the industry of disasters in regions such as Campeche, where agricultural modernization has been more fiction than reality, are unlikely to be able to join the ranks of market-competitive peasants in the foreseeable future. The crisis has triggered a series of adaptations at the household level that tend to involve manipulation of long–standing strategies for economic survival rather than the invention of new ways of dealing with adversity.
