ABSTRACT
With more than thirty languages spoken, Mexico is a diverse country with a complex and fascinating history. Mexico is part of Mesoamerica, the term used by anthropologists to refer to the area of Middle America with an indigenous heritage. After the conquest of Mexico by Spain in 1521, the indigenous peoples of Mexico endured three centuries of Spanish colonialism. After independence in 1821 there was a struggle between the creoles (the white descendants of the Spaniards), who wanted to preserve their wealth and power, and the mestizos (mixed descendants of Indians and Spaniards) and Indians, who wanted to improve their social status (Carmack et al. 1996:216-217). The period of liberal reforms began under the two terms of Benito Juárez (1854-1862, 1867-1872), a mestizo with Indian ancestry, and was crystallized under the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz (1872-1910). During this period the hacienda was the primary means to achieve the ideals of capitalist economic development and modernization. The hacienda system, in which products such as coffee, bananas, cattle, and henequen were cultivated by wage laborers (or indebted peons) for export to the United States and Europe, expanded during the period of liberal reforms. The land used was often taken from peasants who depended upon it for subsistence. The negative social consequences of the liberal reforms and the hacienda system for peasants led to social upheaval in the form of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1917). In the
post-revolutionary period a program of land redistribution was instituted whereby land was returned to peasant communities in the form of communal land grants called ejidos. In 1992, under the presidency of Salinas de Gortari, the ejido system was challenged by a revision of the constitution that allowed for the privatization of these lands. While some towns and villages in Mexico have sold off their ejidal lands, others have refused to do so.
