GENDER, FOREST LAND TENURE, AND AGRARIAN GOVERNANCE IN MEXICO: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS ORIENTED TOWARD PUBLIC POLICY

• DOI: 10.37572/EdArt_2403269251

• Palavras-chave: Women; Equality; Right to Property; Customs and Practices.

• Keywords: Women; Equality; Right to Property; Customs and Practices.

• Abstract:

  Throughout Mexico's history, women's participation in the agrarian domain has been constant and effective, as women have fought on equal terms in various social armed conflicts, through which large territorial extensions were recovered and distributed equitably among family heads. However, faced with an Agrarian Law decontextualized from an egalitarian reality and tailored to the conditions of the 1950s, it opened the criteria for communities and ejidos to be governed by customary laws, thereby intensifying exclusion and discrimination in a more radical manner. Current legislation stipulates the terms "owner," "possessor," and "children," considering males preferentially, thereby nullifying women's rights, even though constitutional decrees specify such rights. It is taken into account that women can only access property if they are heads of household, but under Agrarian Law and customary practices, only when widowed is she considered a possessor until one of her male children reaches majority age; if she has no male child, her rights would be diminished, as she would be excluded from the ejidal and/or communal nucleus. In the context of Mexico's current government, characterized by a greater presence of women in high-level political and administrative power spaces, a structural contradiction persists between the discourse of substantive equality and the material reality of agrarian rights. While female leadership has been promoted in institutional spheres and public decision-making, this symbolic and normative preference has not translated into substantive transformations in social land ownership or community forest governance. The gender gap in access to agrarian property continues to be reproduced through rooted practices and patriarchal structures that limit women's effective access to property, control over forest resources, and ejidal and communal decision-making bodies. This dissociation evidences that women's political empowerment, without structural reform of the agrarian regime and its implementation mechanisms, is insufficient to guarantee substantive equality in access to land and the management of common goods, constituting one of the main pending challenges for agrarian public policy with a human rights and gender focus.

• Número de páginas: 18