Matters of Justice

Helga Baitenmann is an associate fellow of the Institute of Latin American Studies at the University of London. She is the coeditor of Decoding Gender: Law and Practice in Contemporary Mexico.

"Matters of Justice should be studied as a general course-correction in our understanding of how pueblos, land, and governance intersected during a formative period in Mexico's history."-Morgan Veraluz, New Mexico Historical Review "Because of the care with which she reconstructs the implementation of the early agrarian reform, Baitenmann's book will be required reading for those teaching or writing about the history of the Mexican Revolution for many years to come."-Timothy M. James, H-LatAm "Baitenmann excels at grounding her argument in exhaustive archival research within the context of the broader literature."-M. Becker, Choice “Richly researched and carefully argued, Matters of Justice sheds new light on the agrarian reforms born of the Mexican Revolution, showing how changing political circumstances and unforeseen practical difficulties turned widespread calls for village land restitution into a makeshift system of executive land grants that bypassed judicial sanction and gave birth to a new institution, the Mexican ejido. A must-read for every historian of modern Mexico.”-Emilio KourÍ, author of A Pueblo Divided: Business, Property, and Community in Papantla, Mexico “A landmark history of the Mexican agrarian reform’s juridical underpinnings and the logistical considerations that shaped its execution. Matters of Justice punctures historiographical shibboleths and paints a new portrait of what lawmakers believed the land reform was and how it should be executed. It provides crisp insight into how communities learned to navigate the land reform’s sometimes labyrinthine legal structures.”-Christopher Boyer, author of Political Landscapes: Forests, Conservation, and Community in Mexico “A much-needed corrective to the first decade of agrarian reform in Revolutionary Mexico. . . . Because the foci shift seamlessly between the federal district and the countryside, the result is a multivocal and balanced assessment of agrarian reform that, despite its shortcomings, contradictions, and inconsistencies, set the course of Mexican rural policy for the next eighty years.”-John J. Dwyer, author of The Agrarian Dispute: The Expropriation of American-Owned Rural Land in Postrevolutionary Mexico

• List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Hidden Histories of Revolutionary Agrarian Reform1. The Inherent Difficulties of Winning Pueblo Land and Water Suits in Nineteenth-Century Mexico2. Pueblo Land and Water Claims during the Madero Administration, 1911–19133. The Zapatista Land Reform, 1911–19164. The Constitutionalist Land Reform in the Absence of the Judiciary, 1914–19175. The Return of the Judiciary in Uncertain Times, 1917–19246. The Morelos Laboratory, 1920–1924Epilogue: Zapatista and Constitutionalist Agrarian Reforms ComparedGlossaryNotesBibliographyIndex