Author Archives: Emilio Kourì

About Emilio Kourì

Emilio Kourì is professor and chair of history and director of the Katz Center for Mexican Studies at the University of Chicago. He is the author of various books about Mexico, including A Pueblo Divided: Business, Property, and Community in Papantla, Mexico (Stanford, 2004), which won the 2005 Bolton-Johnson Prize for the best book on the history of Latin America. He is currently finishing a book about the origins and historical meaning of Mexico’s community-based twentieth-century agrarian reform.

On the Mexican Ejido

Abstract: Mexico’s indigenous villages (pueblos) have long been held as examples of functioning moral economies, spaces governed by principles of relative equity, reciprocity, communal landholding and collective responsibility. Guided by this enduring representation, the massive agrarian reform that followed the Revolution of 1910 created thousands of collective land grant communities (ejidos). This essay argues that the conception of pueblos and ejidos as natural, culturally-bound moral economies is founded on a longstanding historical mischaracterization of village social relations, and it outlines the complex intellectual and historiographic Continue reading → Continue reading →