International Journal of Urban and Regional Research | 2021
THE IMPACT OF MEXICO\n ’S\n LAND REFORM ON PERIURBAN HOUSING PRODUCTION\n : Neoliberal or Neocorporatist?
Abstract
Changes to Mexico’s Constitution in the 1990s marked the end of agrarian reform and the Revolutionary land regime which had allowed beneficiaries to work but not to sell their land. New legislation allowed individual parcels of ejido land to be converted into private property. Many observers link this ‘privatization’ with a transformation of the periurban landscape resulting from private developers’ construction of mass ‘social housing’ developments: a classic example of neoliberal urbanism. We examine evidence for the Mexico City Metropolitan Area, finding that, although some developments do occupy former ejido land, developers mostly prefer private property, including former haciendas. Private sector interests are wary of the ejido for reasons that stem from its place in the corporatist political system that characterized twentieth-century Mexico, and the patchwork of privatized individual parcels clashes with developers’ land acquisition strategies. Ejidatarios often prefer to retain control over their land, selling plots piecemeal. Our findings demonstrate the continuing significance of urban informality––on a scale that exceeds the development of ejido land for formal housing––and the intertwining of formal and informal. We interpret these interrelated processes of housing production as legacies of corporatism, underlining the significance of political influences on Latin American neoliberalism. Introduction In the early 1990s a major change to Mexico’s Revolutionary land regime was announced. The agrarian reform initiated during the Revolution and written into Article 27 of the country’s 1917 Constitution was to be dismantled in a set of legislative changes collectively known as ‘the reforms to Article 27’. A new Agrarian Law (1992) enabled ejido communities (those receiving inalienable land grants in the country’s agrarian reform) to remove land from the tenure regime which had allowed them to inherit and work but not to sell, mortgage or let it. By adopting ‘full dominion’ over their own parcels, ejidatarios (named rights-holders in an ejido) could convert them into individual private property. As Mexico’s agrarian communities––some 29,700 ejidos and 2,300 comunidades, many of them indigenous––owned over half the national territory, these changes had the potential to produce dramatic changes in the country’s urban development (Jones and Ward, 1998; RAN, 2019).1 For some observers, that potential became a reality. They connect the reform of Article 27––the ‘privatization’ of the ejido2––with a remarkable transformation of 1 We consider only ejidos, as communities cannot alienate property. The backlog of petitions for land was such that ejidos and communities are still being created, even in the Mexico City Metropolitan Area. 2 Despite official rhetoric about ‘social property’, ejidos are the private property of an agrarian community (Azuela, 1989). The 1992 reforms are more accurately described as allowing formal ‘individualization’ of ejido property, but we use ‘privatization’ to acknowledge the widespread use of this term and the link to broader debates. VARLEY AND SALAZAR 2 Mexico’s periurban landscape. This striking change saw sprawling, architecturally homogeneous developments of small oneor two-storey houses appear around and well beyond the edge of the country’s cities (Eibenschutz and Goya, 2009). Growth in the built-up area of the major cities has far outstripped their demographic growth in recent decades (SEDESOL, 2012). The instantly recognizable ‘social housing’ projects driving this expansion are built by private developers and financed through mortgages issued to lower-income purchasers by one of the country’s provident funds, especially INFONAVIT, the National Workers’ Housing Fund Institute, to which employers make contributions amounting to 5% of formal workers’ salaries.3 They represent a radical departure from the existing model of housing production, which, for the poor, mostly involved self-help construction on illegally purchased land. When processes such as the 1992 reforms and the radical changes to Mexico’s periurban landscape coincide, it is tempting to attribute one to the other: developers’ demand for cheap peripheral land must have been met by the sale of privatized ejido holdings. Many commentators assert that indeed it was––a textbook example of neoliberal urbanism (Sánchez, 2012; Olivera, 2015b; Boudreau et al., 2016; Pradilla, 2016; Chávez, 2018; Salinas and Prado, 2018; Merchand, 2019; Villaseñor et al., 2019). The urbanization of ejido property has been described as a product of accumulation by dispossession and a necessary condition for the new housing model (Salinas, 2009: 25–6; Bojórquez and Ángeles, 2014). No evidence is generally provided to support these assertions. Authors rarely cite the literature that does record specific instances of new housing developments on ejido land (e.g. Maya, 2004, on the Mexico City Metropolitan Area; Alcántara, 2007, on Colima; Núñez, 2011, on Jalisco; Bojórquez and Ángeles, 2014, on Baja California Sur; Olivera, 2015a, on Morelos; Villaseñor et al., 2019, on Michoacán). To address this omission, we examine the evidence for the Mexico City Metropolitan Area. Our findings reveal that, although some projects occupy former ejido land, developers have mostly targeted private property. Indeed, in some cases housing occupies the remains of an old hacienda that have been left undeveloped, although they are surrounded by ejido land that was taken from the hacienda after the Revolution. We consider why these twentyfirst-century housing developments can, in some senses, be called heirs of the hacienda. Our findings shed light on broader debates about neoliberal urbanism and, in particular, the impact of neoliberalization––understood as ‘a politically guided intensification of market rule and commodification’ (Brenner et al., 2010: 184)––on the relationship between formal and informal modes of production of urban space. Empirically, we first review the response to opportunities for the urbanization of ejido land presented by the 1992 Agrarian Law. In so doing, we update valuable earlier studies (Jones and Ward, 1998; Procuraduría Agraria, 1999; Cruz, 2001; Maya, 2004). Most of these made no mention of the new housing developments; but, two decades later, it is an apt moment to reassess the reform’s impact on urban development. To do so, we created two databases. First, we built a database for all ejidos in the Metropolitan Area of Mexico City [strictly, the Valley of Mexico], with data from PHINA, the Padrón e Historial de Núcleos Agrarios [Census and Record of Agrarian Communities]. PHINA is maintained by the Registro Agrario Nacional [National Agrarian Register, RAN] and catalogues changes to the holdings of each community. It records the area in different categories, including individual parcels, common-use areas and urban zones, mapped in the accompanying Geospatial Information System [RAN-SIG] over base layers from Google Maps.4 We examined Google satellite imagery to identify the type of development taking place. 3 ‘Social (interest) housing’ costs at most 118 times the monthly minimum salary. Repayments cannot exceed 30% of household income (Janoschka and Salinas, 2017). 4 RAN-SIG still maps privatized parcels within the ejido boundaries. When distinguishing private from ejido property, we refer to land that has never belonged to an ejido. THE IMPACT OF MEXICO’S LAND REFORM ON PERIURBAN HOUSING PRODUCTION 3 A second database compiles information from the Gaceta del Gobierno del Estado de México [State of Mexico Government Gazette] on all housing projects authorized in the 59 municipalities of the State which, together with 16 in Ciudad de México/CDMX (the former Federal District) and one (Tizayuca) from the State of Hidalgo, constitute the Metropolitan Area (see inset, Figure 1).5 Entries include all developments dedicated wholly or partially to housing and defined as conjuntos urbanos according to the State’s 1993 Law of Human Settlements. Including higher-income developments, 401 conjunto authorizations had been issued to the end of February 2018. We identified the location of all but two, allowing comparison with RAN-SIG maps. This innovative method enables us to compare the contributions of private and ejido property to Mexico’s new housing developments. Finally, we also draw on an analysis of RAN-SIG ejido landholding categories mapped onto urban enumeration districts (AGEBs) in what we could call the ‘periurban fringe’ of the Metropolitan Area (the State of Mexico municipalities and Tizayuca).6 Neoliberalism and (in)formality Scholarship on the restructuring of periurban Mexico has adopted different approaches to understanding neoliberalism. Ethnographic accounts take up the Foucauldian emphasis on governmentality identified by Larner (2003) as one such approach, asking how the new housing model produces subjects as well as spaces (e.g. Inclán, 2013; López, 2016). Those focusing on land and finance take a political economy or (neo)Marxist approach (e.g. Soederberg, 2015; Reyes, 2020). One recent article endorses both neo-Marxist and governmentality approaches, without depicting the latter as the local, poststructural, analytic counterpart to global, structural explanations (Boudreau et al., 2016). The authors also reject the notion of a thorough break with the past, emphasizing the partial nature of change. ‘Crisis-driven and continuity-driven explanations’ are not related in a linear fashion, the former succeeding the latter, since changes can be reversed (ibid.: 2388). Overall, ‘persistent practices over time’ are highlighted (ibid.). The emphasis on continuity draws on Patricia Martin’s (2007: 52–4) criticisms of ‘economistic’ analyses equating Latin American neoliberalism with the demise of import substitution industrialization (ISI) after the 1982 debt crisis. Such accounts ‘cede ... explanatory power to mechanistic workin