Publisher's Synopsis
Reappraising the Mexican agrarian reform - the most comprehensive transformation of a land tenture system achieved under capitalism in Latin America - this book discredits ""official"" history and explains why an apparently radical movement produced only limited gains for the previously disposessed peasantry. Markiewicz shows that the reform, begun as an attempt to quell the revolution of the landless, sought to delay or prevent - not to facilitate - land distribution. Her examination of the 1934-1940 period demonstrated that peasant gains under Lazaro Cardenas were largely reversible and even illusory; and the years 1940-1946, usually represented as a period of reaction to ""cardenismo"", are seen as a natural extension of the conditions that prevailed during the late 1930s. Markiewicz also disputes the widely held notion that the ""campesino"" and the ejido possess a unique - and uniquely Mexican - potential to catalyse positive social change.
