Land Reform in Mexico

Land reform in Mexico followed the Mexican Revolution, given constitutional force by Article 27 of the 1917 Constitution, which restored land seized from indigenous and peasant villages under earlier hacienda expansion and established the ejido, a form of communal land grant to villages of twenty or more members, typically combining collectively held land, individually farmed parcels and a shared urban zone. Conceived as a means of addressing the unequal land distribution that had helped trigger the Revolution, the reform conveyed more than half of Mexico' s total land area to ejidos over the course of the 20th century, making it one of the largest land redistributions carried out anywhere in the Americas, before a 1992 constitutional amendment allowed ejido land to be privatized and sold.