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180 9 Scholars focusing on the intersection between law and gender tend to give attention to those aspects of the legal system that create and/or perpetuate hierarchical social relations based upon idealized notions of femininity, masculinity, and heteronormativity. In some instances, discrimination, unequal treatment, or power structures based upon naturalized conceptions of sexual difference are more or less explicit in laws, court procedures, jurisprudence, and so forth. In other contexts, the ideas that sustain a gendered asymmetry of rights and obligations are profoundly implicit; they can only be exposed by peeling away layers of constructed signification to reveal what Appignanesi and Garratt (1995, 80), in their discussion of Derrida’s strategy of deconstruction, describe as “the underlayers of meaning.” The new court system created in conjunction with the 1992 constitutional reforms that ended Mexico’s postrevolutionary agrarian reform project is a prime example of legal practices that are usually seemingly gender-neutral. For the most part, men and women use the new agrarian courts to settle disputes and validate their rights without being treated differently on the basis of sex or sexual preference . And yet the concepts employed in the present agrarian legal system—oftentimes created in the early twentieth century (or even earlier)—remain deeply gendered.1 This chapter analyzes the discourse found in a number of recent (1993–2004) agrarian district court rulings from the coffee-producing region of Central Veracruz , in order to identify a number of taken-for-granted concepts that gender present-day property rights, work, and daily life in rural Mexico. Specifically, it highlights some central constructs that underpin agrarian law, including the concepts of ejidatario (land reform beneficiary), agrarian family, and ejido parcel (land grant). In doing so, it makes two observations. First, legal discourse and the language of daily life in the agrarian reform sector are mutually constituted. That is, these historical constructs are shared The Archaeology of Gender in the New Agrarian Court Rulings HELGA BAITENMANN Chap-09.qxd 4/7/07 10:58 AM Page 180 by all actors both inside the agrarian courtroom and outside (in rural communities throughout Mexico, in ejido assembly halls, in rural households, and so forth). Plaintiffs and defendants, judges and witnesses, court officials and court users, all employ the concept of ejidatario or ejidataria, talk about land parcels, and speak about an individual’s positions within the family and how these positions shape her or his legal status in regard to land. The second observation is that these shared, gendered concepts are deeply enduring. Indeed, they have persisted for almost a century, despite profound changes in the nature of the agrarian reform. Even after a major paradigm shift in 1992, in which the nature of agrarian property was altered in important ways, these early twentieth-century concepts surface again and again in present-day court hearings. These concepts are particularly likely to endure because they are difficult to discern. The concluding section of this chapter takes up these two observations to challenge some of the analytical foundations of the study of law and gender as an academic subdiscipline. The Agrarian Court System Mexico’s twentieth-century agrarian reform was one of the most wide-ranging and long-lasting in the nonsocialist world. To distribute land, the architects of the reform created a new body of law, a hierarchical administrative structure, and a series of intricate administrative practices that remained operational for over seven decades. Starting in 1915, what has come to be known as the postrevolutionary agrarian reform has been held together, bestowed coherence, and awarded permanence by its legal system, which operates in parallel with other legal frameworks such as mercantile, civil, penal, and labor law. Agrarian legislation —composed of hundreds of statutes, decrees, and regulations—became a distinct body of law practiced by a new cadre of legislators and jurists. To implement these laws, state planners constructed a multilevel administrative apparatus under the jurisdiction of the federal executive, with its own agencies at state and national levels and diverse administrative offices, consultative bodies, and archives. Between 1915 and 1992, this increasingly complex agrarian bureaucracy expropriated and redistributed over half of Mexico’s total surface area to 3.5 million individuals and their families, organizing them into almost thirty thousand ejidos and agrarian communities (the land and labor arrangements that were the principal vehicles for land distribution) (Secretaría de la Reforma Agraria 1998, 313).2 In 1992, as many Latin American countries began to privatize their land reform sectors, the Mexican...

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