The governing board of the San Carlos ejido in the municipality of Manuel Benavides has given people who owe money on land agreements one month to contact the community’s treasurer and reach payment arrangements.
The announcement may sound unusual to readers in the United States because an ejido is a distinctly Mexican form of landholding that does not have a direct U.S. equivalent.
Ejidos are a form of social or communal land ownership recognized under Mexico’s Constitution and Agrarian Law. They became especially important following the Mexican Revolution, when large estates were broken up and land was redistributed to rural communities.
An ejido is not simply a ranch, subdivision or local government. It is a legally recognized agrarian community with its own territory and governing structure. Land within an ejido can include individually assigned parcels, land reserved for the community’s settlement and land held for common use. Mexico’s Agrarian Law describes common-use land as supporting the economic life of the ejido.
The ejidal assembly, made up of members known as ejidatarios, is the community’s highest governing authority. An elected comisariado ejidal represents the ejido and carries out decisions made by the assembly. That explains the references in the San Carlos announcement to both the “Asamblea” and “Mesa Directiva.”
The system also means that buying or transferring ejido land can be considerably different from buying an ordinary privately owned lot in Texas. Depending on the legal status of a particular piece of land, a transaction may involve transferring agrarian rights rather than simply signing a conventional deed. Mexico’s National Agrarian Registry, or RAN, records matters including parcel rights, transfers, succession and, where legally authorized, issuance of private-property titles.
Mexican law allows ejido parcels to move into full private ownership through prescribed procedures, but that does not mean every parcel within an ejido is automatically private property or freely transferable. The legal status of the particular land matters.
Against that background, the San Carlos announcement is essentially about unfinished land transactions within this agrarian system.
The governing board said that after reviewing accounts from previous administrations, it discovered several land agreements that had not been paid in full. It is giving the debtors one month to approach the ejido treasurer and reach an agreement. The board said it will not publish their names for the time being.
The ejido also announced that its assembly and governing board will not sell additional land until the outstanding situations involving those properties are resolved, despite interest from prospective buyers.
Mexico’s National Agrarian Registry maintains records relating to ejidos, their boundaries and the rights associated with parcels and common-use land. The agency describes itself as responsible for documentary legal certainty involving ejidal and communal land tenure.
For West Texas readers, the simplest way to understand an ejido is this: it is a legally recognized community land system in which the community, its assembly and individual members can each have particular rights in the land. It should not be assumed to work like ordinary fee-simple private property on the Texas side of the border.
