Teachers as State-Builders: The Role of Teachers in Mexico’s Land Reform

• In Event: Policing and the State in Latin America

Abstract

Large-scale land redistribution is more likely to happen under autocracy, as constitutional checks and balances seldom work in non-democratic regimes. Specifically, the autocrat expropriates agricultural property when the landed elites split from the ruling coalition and become a threat to the autocrat in the early years of tenure. In this article, I problematize this conventional wisdom. I argue that autocratic elite splits do not automatically produce large-scale redistributions of property; often, the autocrat must create the institutional capacity to penetrate society and mobilize communities for land reform. The elite split hypothesis assumes that there is a segment of the population demanding to redistribute land and that the autocrat allies with this group by expropriating the wealthy. However, the existence of demand for land cannot be taken for granted. I support this claim with the case of Chiapas, a peripheral region of Mexico where the 1910 revolution did not happen. Chiapas lacked significant grassroots agrarian mobilization despite its extreme concentration of land. Moreover, the agricultural workers were allied with the estate owners to defend their livelihood and the indigenous communities of the hills were deeply distrustful of Mexican society. To incorporate Chiapas into the post-revolutionary regime, the leaders in Mexico City send primary teachers to mobilize agricultural workers and indigenous communities to request land. The teachers helped rural dwellers to navigate the complicated legal process of land petitioning and communicated that the authorities supported them against the intimidation of estate owners. In this article, I achieve two things. First, I present the case of Chiapas, explaining how the post-revolutionary state turned primary school teachers into political agitators. Second, I test a key empirical implication of my argument, the relationship of school presence with land petitions, using original microdata at the municipality level. This article not only contributes to clarifying the conditions under which the large-scale redistribution of property is politically possible; also contributes to understand the policy-making process of autocracies and the relationship of public services to regime durability.

Author

• Manuel Cabal, University of Chicago