ABSTRACT
Andres Molina Enriquez worked within a long tradition of nineteenth-century Liberals who sought new relations of landholding and the breakup of the hacienda as a means of encouraging economic development. He was a strong proponent of land reform and a central contributor to the formulation of Article 27 of the Constitution of 1917. However, he did not support the Cárdenas administration’s focus on the elide as the most important component of agrarian reform. While communal lands were generally barren and of poor quality, they offered the indigenous people themselves a way to live out all stages of their evolution, from that of being savage hordes to that of being a people incorporated into general civilization. In the analysis of Mexican history, Molina Enriquez focuses on what he considers to be key historical moments: the period after 1821 and the Reform Era.
