Ejido

People awarded ejidos in the modern era farm them individually in parcels and collectively maintain communal holdings with government oversight.

[4] In central Mexico following the Spanish conquest of the Aztec empire (1519-1521), indigenous communities remained largely intact, including their system of land tenure.

[5] Spaniards applied their own terminology to indigenous community lands, and early in the colonial era began calling them ejidos.

When the Liberals came to power in 1855, they embarked on a major reform that included the expropriation and sale of corporate lands, that is, those held by indigenous communities and by the Roman Catholic Church.

Under liberal general Porfirio Díaz, who seized power through a coup in 1876, policies aimed at promoting political stability and economic prosperity with the motto "order and progress" led to the expansion of large haciendas, forcing many villages to lose their lands and leaving the peasantry landless.

In particular, many peasants in the state of Morelos under the leadership of Emiliano Zapata waged war against the presidency of Francisco I. Madero, a wealthy landowner whose reformist political movement sought to oust the regime of Porfirio Díaz; Victoriano Huerta, the leader of a reactionary coup that ousted and assassinated Madero; and Venustiano Carranza, a wealthy landowner who led the Constitutionalist faction, which defeated all others.

Under Cárdenas, land reform was "sweeping, rapid, and, in some respects, structurally innovative... he promoted the collective ejido (hitherto a rare institution) in order to justify the expropriation of large commercial estates.

As part of a larger program of neoliberal economic restructuring that had already been weakening support for ejidal and other forms of small-scale agriculture and negotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), President Carlos Salinas de Gortari in 1992 pushed legislation through Congress that modified article 27 of the Mexican Constitution to permit the privatization and the sale of ejidal land.