Abstract:
From 1992 to 2006, the Mexican government, through its PROCEDE program, surveyed over nine million individually-held parcels within social property communities, creating for the first time a single rural land cadastre which will gradually merge with the existing urban and private registry as parcels are fully privatized. The participatory research mapping (PRM) component of the México Indígena project (and First Bowman Expedition), a collaboration among U.S., Canadian, and Mexican geographers, university students from the Universidad Autónoma de San Luis Potosí, and trained community representatives, includes two products from study sites in the Huasteca Potosina region (completed) and Sierra Norte of Oaxaca (in process): community maps, and GIS data layers of property transactions since PROCEDE. Comparing PROCEDE cadastral maps (and legal registry updates) with PRM community maps and property transaction data reveals severe, potentially conflictive discrepancies between the neoliberal model and local knowledge and practice, and between the neoliberal ideal of transparency and the reality of state obfuscation. Mexican indigenous communities continue to demonstrate their historical capacity to adapt to (and proactively define) land tenure change, but they must now adjust their strategies in the post-PROCEDE era of state-directed property standardization.
