ejido

Ejido comes from Spanish ejido, from Latin exitus — the way out, the exit, the common land outside the village gates where animals were pastured and villagers had shared rights. In medieval Castile, the ejido was the common grazing land at the edge of every town, managed collectively under the oversight of the municipal council. The word traveled to colonial Mexico, where it took on new meaning amid the land conflicts of the post-conquest centuries.

The Mexican Revolution of 1910–1920 was fought in large part over land. The hacienda system had concentrated enormous holdings in the hands of a few thousand families while millions of indigenous and mestizo campesinos worked as virtual serfs. Emiliano Zapata's rallying cry — 'Tierra y Libertad' (Land and Liberty) — demanded the restitution of communal lands that indigenous communities had held before and after the conquest but had been steadily stripped of during the 19th century.

The Constitution of 1917, shaped by revolutionary demands, established the ejido as the central instrument of land reform: collective landholding units in which community members had use rights to individual plots but could not sell the land, which belonged to the collective. Between 1917 and 1992, the Mexican government redistributed roughly 100 million hectares — more than half the country's surface area — to some 28,000 ejidos. It was the largest agrarian reform in the Western Hemisphere.

In 1992, under NAFTA pressures, Mexico's government amended the Constitution to allow ejido land to be privatized, rented, and eventually sold. Critics predicted — correctly — that this would accelerate the transfer of ejido land to corporate agriculture and real estate development, repeating the 19th-century process the revolution had reversed. The debate over Article 27 and the fate of ejidos remains one of the most contested questions in Mexican political life, tangled with questions of indigenous sovereignty, food security, and what land is for.