Certified Insecurity of Indigenous Lands in Mexico: An Approach from the Racial Property Regime Focus

Abstract

The 1990s marked the neoliberal shift that impacted agrarian policies in Mexico and Latin America. It involves the replacement of the peasant demand and land redistribution toward bureaucratic and entrepreneurial requirements for legal security of the same tenure. Subsequently, various countries undertook agricultural certification and titling programs, financed by international institutions, which heralded a new model of economic development. At the same time, and in a contradictory manner, multiple Latin American constitutions recognized, under the multicultural aegis, the collective rights for indigenous peoples, as well as new legal figures, designated as indigenous, for territorial protection.

To what extent has neoliberal agrarian certification guaranteed legal certainty for peasant and indigenous people and communities in Mexico? And how effective was the legal recognition of indigenous peoples’ rights under the multicultural turn in defending collective territory? In this text, we aim to answer these questions by resuming the intersecting discourses of property and alterity regimes through which the hegemonic and counter-hegemonic uses and effects of indigenous identity, ejido, and community categories are contrasted.