A Pueblo Divided: Business, Property, and Community in Papantla, Mexico (review)

This book is a landmark in Mexican rural history. Activists and professional historians have long argued that the nineteenth-century privatization of indigenous communal lands was the original sin that laid the ground for the agrarian strife of the twentieth century. Many also claimed that this privatization drove the political mobilizations of indigenous peasants even before the Revolution. Nevertheless, very few historians have actually studied the process through which indigenous lands were privatized, and their findings have been published mostly as tantalizing but sketchy articles. In this book we finally have the first intensive study of how the lands of a particular locality became private property.

The history of land in Papantla was driven mostly by a single lucrative export crop, vanilla, and thus Kourí begins by explaining how vanilla became an important international commodity. Vanilla was originally a wild plant but as demand increased people began to plant the vines and pollinate them artificially, dramatically increasing yields. It was originally used to flavor chocolate but later most Mexican vanilla was exported to the United States for the newly industrial production of ice cream. From vanilla Kourí moves to a thorough analysis of the geography, climate, and people of the region. The Totonac population was extremely dispersed, eschewing nucleated settlements. Population density was low because slash and burn agriculture required large reserves of land. The geography, climate, isolation, and dispersed population of the region made it unattractive to Spanish entrepreneurs and conflicts over land were limited. Kourí then describes the intricate economy of vanilla. He traces trends in vanilla exports and explains the roles of Papantla's immigrant merchants and Totonac producers, who used the cash earnings to bolster their traditional way of life. The Totonacs, however, were also divided among themselves, and the growing vanilla economy exacerbated these differences. Competition, speculation, and theft made communal solidarity more tenuous.

These initial chapters set the scene for the crucial chapters on land privatization. The first analyzes the initial attempts to break up communal lands. A vanilla boom made the control of land more important just as Mexico's liberal politicians campaigned to privatize communal lands, and the actual division was driven by a myriad of competing business interests. In Veracruz the liberal state legislature allowed village lands to be divided into condueñazgos in which large parcels were each controlled by a group of shareholders. In Papantla, these condueñazgos allowed prosperous Indians who enjoyed usufruct rights to large amounts of communal land to maintain their social position. Powerful indigenous leaders, often themselves liberal military veterans, promoted the formation of condueñazgos. The brief history of the condueñazgos was marred by strife. Many younger Indians never received shares and the authorities, who actually governed land use within these private associations, rarely represented all shareholders and often imposed restrictions and fees on land use. The state government levied stiff taxes on the population, and bloody rebellion broke out. Disenfranchised Totonacs who sought to reduce taxes and return to the era of communal lands were repressed.

In the 1890s the condueñazgos themselves were partitioned. The state government made a renewed commitment to privatization, but relatively prosperous Totonac farmers and local merchants gave the process most of its impetus. They were opposed by those who did not have condueñazgo shares, as well as many farmers in more remote regions of the district. Both the opponents and advocates of further privatization sought allies among competing groups and individuals in local, state, and national politics. Several times the conflict over privatization led to rebellion and repression. The massive delineation of lands also provided ample opportunities for corruption. Privatization was pushed through in a local society that was deeply divided, and political assassination became commonplace. In the end, Papantla's 17 condueñazgos were divided into around 3,500 private parcels. Roughly two thirds of the land ended up in the hands of Totonac family...