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.
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 Kouri, 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