172 



INSTITUTE OF SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY PUBLICATION NO. 6 



villains in the story are Colonel Jesus Villanue- 

 va Barriga, and a puppet in Tzintzuntzan named 

 Andres Aparicio. The Colonel, representing the 

 citizens of Quiroga who had designs on the land 

 nearest their town (which they maintain was 

 taken from them illegally at an earlier date), 

 advanced Aparicio as the new president of the 

 Comuniclad Indigena, and by means of the time- 

 honored practice of vote-buying, at $2 to $3 per 

 citizen, persuaded the farmers of Tzintzuntzan 

 to turn out Villagomez in favor of Aparicio. 

 Dates are not definite, but this action appears to 

 have taken place between 1883 and 1885. 



Almost immediately the Colonel told the new 

 president that the communal lands still held by 

 the town would be expropriated by the Govern- 

 ment if they were not sold. In a meeting of the 

 Comunidad Indigena, it was decided to sell 

 rather than lose all through expropriation. Again 

 the data are not cleai', especially as to the re- 

 lationship between the communal nonagricultur- 

 al lands and the now privately owned agricul- 

 tural terrains. As a result of this threat and 

 misrepresentation, aided and abetted by the lo- 

 cal cacique of Tzintzuntzan, one Juan Fuentes, 

 who threatened to punish any dissenters, sale 

 of lands to Quiroga was approved, and apparent- 

 ly many people, thinking they were selling the 

 nonagricultural lands, were thus swindled out 

 of their milpas. Presumably at the same time 

 the slower but equally insidious process of pur- 

 chase of private lands by large hacienda own- 

 ers was going on; the techniques involved are 

 too well known to need repeating. This period 

 is known, in popular language today, as "the 

 period of the first usurpation." 



Subsequently, Aparicio sold the Cerro de Pe- 

 dricio, a meadow on the west side of Tariaqueri 

 hill, to Cucuchucho. At an unknown date pre- 

 vious to 1902, Colonel Villanueva "bought" 

 most of the hill of Yahuaro, and as the result 

 of a dispute with Ihuatzio in 1901-02 the land 

 known as Agua Azul, comprising the entire south 

 side of Tariaqueri, was lost. This is known as 

 "the period of the second usurpation." In the 

 third and final period, the Tarascans of La Vuel- 

 ta and Ojo de Agua obtained most of the choice 

 lakeshore lands which had remained to the 

 villagers. Actually, there is no evidence that 

 illegal practices were used in this case; 

 probably the greater industry of the Tarascans 

 resulted in their slow accumulation of choice 



lands. Nevertheless, when feeling sorry for him- 

 self the Tzintzuntzeno scrapes together all pos- 

 sible evidence. In the first years of the 20th 

 century the final step was taken, which was the 

 sale of communal lands, largely nonagricultur- 

 al, which still remained in Tariaqueri, to peo- 

 ple in Tzintzuntzan itself. This division was 

 said to have been done at night, by means of 

 falsifications of stamps and titles. Nicolas Cal- 

 vo, successor to Aparicio, was responsible for 

 this depredation. 



Thus, by the time of the Mexican Revolution 

 Tzintzuntzan had lost a large part of its best 

 agricultural lands, and most of its communal 

 nonagricultural lands. Fifteen years later, when 

 the formation of the new ejido was in process, 

 the town was credited with having 948 hectares 

 of pequeaas propiedades, or private lands, 

 owned by members of the community, and 148 

 hectares of wooded and pasture land (the latter 

 negligible) owned communally by the Comuni- 

 dad Indigena. The stage was now set for chapter 

 two in the story. 



The legal basis for the restoration or alloca- 

 tion of lands to pueblos under the modern ejido 

 system is too well known to justify lengthy dis- 

 cussion. In brief, the idea was to restore lands 

 to pueblos which had been despoiled during the 

 latter half of the 19th century, and to allocate 

 land to other pueblos in need of it, even though 

 they might never have owned communal proper- 

 ty. The first concrete step was the presidential 

 decree of January 6, 1915, in which Carranza 

 began to carry out his declaration of intentions 

 of land reforms set forth in the Plan de Vera- 

 cruz of December 12, 1914. 



The legal machinery for putting the decree into 

 effect consisted of a .National Agrarian Commission, 

 State Agrarian Commissions for each state and as 

 many Special Executive Committees (local village 

 committees) as might be necessary. Petitions for 

 either the restoration or dotation of ejidos were to 

 be presented in the first instance directly to the gov- 

 ernors of the states .... Upon being approved by 

 the governor after due investigation by the State 

 Agrarian Commission, the petitioning village should 

 through its Executive Committee be given immediate 

 possession of its land. This possession, however, 

 would be considered provisional until such time as 

 the case could be reviewed by the National Agrarian 

 Commission. Final title would be granted by the Pres- 

 ident of the Reiniblic upon the recommendation of 

 the National Commission. [Simpson, 1937, p. 58.] 



This decree was embodied in Article 27 of 



