Indigenous Territoriality at the End of the Social Property Era in Mexico

Notwithstanding widespread legal recognition and titling of indigenous lands in Latin America, sweeping neoliberal property regime reforms are quietly changing communal tenure and resource use patterns. Indigenous communities in Mexico have had lands rights in the form of ejidos and comunidades agrarias, "social properties" that are held collectively regardless of ethnicity. These territories have undergone tremendous changes through a national land certification program called PROCEDE. We combined census and cadastral data for the Huasteca Potosina region into a geographic information system to analyze land tenure outcomes at a regional scale. Relative to non-native communities, indigenous communities have tended to resist privatization. Nonetheless, many Teenek, Nahua and other indigenous communities have partitioned their communal lands, leading to the further fragmentation of what was once a large, contiguous cultural region.