ABSTRACT

The inalienability of peasants’ lands became a central component of the Mexican post-revolutionary state. Public intellectuals invented a legal notion that became a credible way of representing peasants’ property, even if it was wrong in strictly legal terms. The intellectual debate about the inalienability of rural land is one thing, but the way it actually works in local contexts is something different. Urbanization is usually understood as “the increase of the population in urban agglomerations in relation to that in rural areas”. However, there is also the “urbanization of the rural world”, in the sense that rural communities increasingly depend on public goods that, historically, had been distinctive of urban life. The reform has also changed the conditions of land tenure regularization in settlements created through land sales. The sacred link between peasants and nation had been broken, and fears of disintegration of agrarian communities dominated the public sphere.