Priorities of the State in the Survey of the Public Land in Mexico, 1876-1911

Priorities of the State in the Survey of the Public Land in Mexico, 1876-1911
Author(s): Robert H. Holden

Source: The Hispanic American Historical Review , Nov., 1990, Vol. 70, No. 4 (Nov.,
1990), pp. 579-608
Published by: Duke University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2516574
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Priorities of the State in the Survey of

the Public Land in Mexico, 1876-1g91
ROBERT H. HOLDEN
HE private companies hired by the Mexican governments

of Presidents Manuel Gonzalez and Porfirio Diaz to sur-
vey public lands from about i88o to 11go were both the
agents and the beneficiaries of the greatest single turnover of public lands
in the nation's history. In a single decade, from 1883 to 1893, survey com-
panies received as compensation 18.4 million hectares of public land-
one-third of all the land they surveyed, or about one-tenth the total area
of Mexico. Over the entire period, from 1878 to 1908, about 50 companies
received some 2i. 2 million hectares of public lands, which at the compen-
sation rate of 3 to 1 implied that roughly 63.6 million hectares had been
surveyed.' The historical literature of the period correctly emphasizes the
most salient features of the surveys, namely, their explosive pace, the
enormous areas of land the companies disposed of, and the government's
method of compensating them. References to the complaints about the
surveys from landholders both rich and poor, as well as to the compa-
nies' unjust enrichment derived from their supposed "insider" status, have
enhanced the notoriety of the infamous compaiiias deslindadoras.'
1. Unless otherwise specified, the sources consulted for the transfer of public lands
throughout this article were Secretaria de Fomento, Menoria presentada al Congreso de
la Uni6n . . . , 1877-82, 1883-85, 1892-96, 1897-1900, 1905-1907, 1907-1908, 1908-1909
and Direcci6n General de Estadistica, Anuario estadistico de la Republica Mexicana, 1893,
1897, 1901, 1906.
2. Miguel Mejia FernAndez's assertion that communal land was usurped "en gran es-
cala . . . en virtud de la acci6n vanddlica de las compafiias deslindadoras . . ." is typical.
See his Politica agraria en Mexico en el siglo XIX (Mexico City, 1979), 231. Also see Helen
Phipps, Some Aspects of the Agrarian Question in Mexico: A Historical Study (Austin,
1925), 111-115; George McC. McBride, Land Systenis of Mexico (New York, 1923), 74-81;
Andres Molina Enriquez, Los grandes probleias nacionales (Mexico City, 1909), 87, 89;
Mois6s Gonzalez Navarro, El porfiriato: La vida social, in Historia moderna de Mexico,
8 vols. in 9, Daniel Cosio Villegas, gen. ed. (Mexico City, 1955-74), i88; Jesus Silva Herzog,
El agrarismo nwexicano y la reform agraria: Exposicion y critica (Mexico City, 1959),
117; Nathan L. Whetten, Rural Mexico (Chicago, 1948), 87; Eyler N. Simpson, The Ejido:
Mexico's Way Out (Chapel Hill, 1937); Marco Bellingeri and Isabel Gil Sanchez, "Las estruc-
turas agrarias bajo el porfiriato," in Mexico en el siglo XIX (1821-1910): Historia econ6inica
y de la estructura social, Ciro Cardoso, ed. (Mexico City, 1980), 315.

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580 I HAHR I NOVEMBER I ROBERT H. HOLDEN
This essay offers a preliminary assessment of the two primary themes
regularly referred to in the literature on the subject: the impact of the
companies on the landholders in the territories where they operated and
their connections with the Porfirian state. Most of the data on which it is
based were gathered in a seven-month investigation in 1984-85, primarily
in the Archivo de Terrenos Nacionales (ATN) of the Secretaria de Re-
forma Agraria in Mexico City, an archive that had generally been off limits
to scholars.3 The ATN, located in the basement corner of a multistory
building occupied by the secretariat at Bolivar 145, was severely damaged
in the September 1985 earthquake. Virtually all of the nineteenth- and
twentieth-century records of public land transfers were stored and up-
dated in this archive, a working repository that was attended by a full-time
staff of five people. Because of the earthquake, some of the records may
have been destroyed; many were moved to a storage facility. The archive
appeared to contain all of the federal executive branch documents gen-
erated by the surveys, which had been supervised by the Secretarfa de
Fomento. In addition to the survey documents, papers generated by other
activities connected to the disposition of public lands-such as the coloni-
zation program and records of land claims-were deposited in the ATN.
Tens of thousands of files classified by state were organized according to
"deslindes," colonials "baldios," "permisos a extranjeros," "nacionales en
compra, and so on.
For the purposes of this project, research was limited to files classified
as "deslindes" and "contratos originates." They contained an extremely
wide range of papers produced by the surveys, including documents writ-
ten by Fomento officials, by the survey contractors, by landholders in
the areas affected by the surveys, and by the judicial authorities who
supervised the surveys. Copies of contracts, descriptions of land surveyed,
official court records of litigation, and correspondence among Fomento
officials, the surveyors, and landholders were the principal sources for
this project, which to my knowledge was the first systematic investigation
of the survey companies not limited to secondary sources. In addition,
I consulted the records of the Archivo Historico of the Archivo Gen-
eral de Notarias del Distrito Federal (NOT) and the Coleccion General
Porfirio Diaz (CPD) in the library of the Universidad Iberoamericana in
Mexico City.
In the pages that follow, I will present archival evidence that the
prerevolutionary Mexican state exercised much more autonomy from the
3. Citations to the Archivo de Terrenos Nacionales (hereafter ATN) are followed by the
abbreviated name of the state under which the documents are filed: CHIH = Chihuahua,
SIN = Sinaloa, SON = Sonora, DUR = Durango, TAB = Tabasco, CHIAP = Chiapas.

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PUBLIC LAND SURVEY IN MEXICO 581
economic interests represented by the survey companies than the histori-

cal literature has generally attributed to it. Moreover, the evidence does
not support the longstanding view that the surveys resulted in the wide-
spread usurpation of land held either by peasants or by market-oriented
producers. In fact, the state frequently acted to protect peasants and
other landholders from the companies. Economic incentives to avoid two
kinds of conflict-with landholders and with the generally unsympathetic
officials of the Secretaria de Fomento who supervised and regulated the
companies-seem to have transcended the incentives that occasionally
tempted the companies to steal privately held land. However, the con-
clusions of this article regarding conflict over land focus strictly on the
activities of the survey companies themselves. As will be explained in
more detail below, not only were many other entrepreneurs active in the
public land market at the time, but the survey companies often sold the
land they acquired to third parties, whose activities were not the focus of
this investigation.
The Discovery and Disposition of the Public Lands,

1877-191 1
A tremendous surge in public land transfers gradually took shape in

the late 1870s, peaked in the mid-iL88os, and finally collapsed in the mid-
,gos. It was administered by a government driven by three key objectives:
promoting rapid economic growth, enhancing the security of the country's
borders, and acquiring more revenue to balance a chronically underfi-
nanced budget. Control of the public lands was the responsibility of the
Secretaria de Fomento, which, at the same time, was pouring money
into railroad construction, a telegraph system, colonization projects, and
the modernization of agriculture and mining. More than a third of the
1883-84 federal budget, for example, was assigned to Fomento. "With
no established economic priorities, with no trained staff, the Department
of Fomento plunged bravely-if blindly-into a large-scale program of
government promotion of economic development."4
In the view of Mexican authorities, the discovery and transfer of public
lands would promote economic growth because the vast quantity of land
owned by the government was by definition unproductive, except under
two conditions: when it was being rented or temporarily exploited under
a special permit (such as those issued for the cutting of timber), or when
it was being used illegally (in which case the state was deprived of the
4. Don M. Coerver, "The Perils of Progress: The Mexican Department of Fomento

During the Boom Years 1880-1884," Inter-Amnerican Economic Affair-S, 31:2 (Autumn 1977),
passim, 44.

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582 | HAHR I NOVEMBER I ROBERT H. HOLDEN
revenue from its sale or rental). Privatized land became a resource capable
of attracting all-important development capital. But merely selling public
land was not enough; it also had to be clearly differentiated from private
property, and private properties differentiated from each other, for land
to be a safe investment, free from the threat of constant litigation or vio-
lence. The vagueness of the property boundaries cited in most land titles
was widely recognized as an obstacle to economic growth.5
Swifter development of land along Mexico's international borders was
particularly important for the country's defense. In 1890, the government
reversed a decision to forbid survey-company activities within one hun-
dred kilometers of the Guatemalan border, reasoning that "se trata de la
vitalidad de un estado fronterizo de la Repuiblica [i.e., Chiapas] que nece-
sita capitales y brazos inteligentes para aprovechar la riqueza de su extenso
territorio," especially in southern Chiapas, where "existen dilatados de-
siertos que es indispensable poblar" in order to secure the border.6 On the
northern frontier, two security threats had dominated the Mexican state's
interest in colonizing the border region since 1846: the expansion of the
United States and invasions by Apache bands.
Finally, expanded state revenues to balance the budget would be
achieved by the sale of surveyed public land as well as by the anticipated
economic growth. As the head of Fomento, Gen. Carlos Pacheco, noted
in a memorandum to a subordinate in 1885, the government's goal was
to "adquirir el mayor numero de terrenos posible,"8 by which he meant
public land that was duly surveyed and available to be sold. A Fomento
circular to all survey companies in 1885 urged them to finish their work
"con la brevedad posible para que el gobierno pueda disponer de la parte
que le corresponded de esos mismos terrenos, movilizando esta riqueza pi'-
blica."9 When a federal judge in Durango delayed sending the record of
4. Don M. Coerver, "The Perils of Progress: The Mexican Department of Fom-iento

During the Boom Years 1880-1884," Inter-Amer-ican Econoomic Affairs, 31 (Autumn 1977),
passim, 44.
5. When Jes6s Valenzuela's company surveyed Chihuahua's Abasolo canton in 1884, the
surveyor found Pedro Zuloaga's claim to 158,867 hectares for his Hacienda de Santa Cata-
lina "absurdo." The surveyor described the problem in his report to the court: "Sin duda
es uno de los numerosos casos en los cuales los titulos primordiales citan como esqulinas 'tin
cerro' o 'una sierra' o 'oun arroyo' o 'una sabaneta' y otras semejantes seflas naturales o cosas
indefinidas, que se pueden hallar en cualquiera parte de la superficie del mundo . See
ATN, CHIH 1.71/10, court file. Also see Adolfo Diaz Rugama's assessment of rural property
boundaries of the time as "un verdadero caos," in his authoritative Prontuario de leyes, regla-
mnentos, circulates y deinds disposiciones vigentes relatives a . . . la Secretaria de Fomento
(Mexico City, 1895), vii.
6. ATN, CHIAP 84797, pp. 76-77.
7. See the documents reproduced in Francisco F. de la Maza, C6digo de colonizaci6n
y terrenos baldios de la Repsiblica Mexicana (Mexico City, 1893), 360-364, 368-398.
8. ATN, CHIH 77415, pp. 57-58.
9. De la Maza, C6digo, 962.

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a survey to Fomento for its approval in 1887, a message from President

Diaz to the Secretarla de Justicia urged it be forwarded as soon as pos-
sible, "pues tanto la empresa como el gobierno sufren perjuicios con la
demora."'0
Achieving these objectives called for two distinct efforts. The first con-
sisted of the continuation of the public land claims procedure established
by President Juarez in the public land law of July 20, 1863, under which
Mexico disposed of 17.3 million hectares of public land between 1878
and 1908, selling up to 2,500 hectares to claimants who were also re-
quired to survey it themselves. Repealed inl 1894, the law was replaced
by that of March 26, 1894, under which public land could be purchased
outright from the government without going through the cumbersome
claims process. Such sales were limited to what was specified in the act
as "terreno national," i.e., public land already surveyed. Under the 1894
law, Mexico sold an additional 5.2 million hectares of such land between
1894 and L908.11
The second line of action was to survey public land under govern-
ment auspices. The surveys made it possible to identify the public lands
rapidly, increased the value of the land surveyed, and thus enabled the
government to sell specified lots at prices higher than it charged under the
land-claims program, which required the claimants to do their own sur-
veys.12 Moreover, by granting the survey companies one-third of the land
they surveyed, the government released an enormous amount of vacant
land to the market in a relatively brief period. This in itself was expected
to stimulate the subdivision and resale of the land, as in fact appears to
have been the case.'3
Not only would the surveys clarify the limits of private and public prop-
erties, but turning government-authorized surveyors loose on the country-
side would presumably give property holders an incentive to act quickly to
perfect obscurely worded or inaccurate titles, or to file a claim to the land
they were working (if it were in fact public) under the claims procedure
of the 1863 land law, since the companies were charged with identifying
lo. ATN, DUR 9053, cuad. 1, Fomento to Justicia, Mar. 24, 1887.
il, For the 1863 law, see de la Maza, C6digo, 729-735; the 1894 law is reproduced
in Wistano Luis Orozco, Legislaci6n y jurispriidencia sobre terrenos baldios (Mexico City,
i895), 587-617. A third option, exclusively the privilege of individuals who already pos-
sessed the land in question, was the arrangement of a cornposici6n with the government; see
Orozco, Legislaci6n, 403 ff
12. See Robert H. Holden, "The Mexican State Manages Modernization: The Survey
of the Public Lands in Six States, 1876-1911" (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1986),
272-274, for evidence that the government sold surveyed land at a higher price than unsur-
veyed land.
13. For evidence that company-acquired land was quickly subdivided and resold, see
Holden, "The Mexican State," 259-272.

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all untitled land. Exploiters of the "terrenos baldios," or land that was
never titled and therefore in the public domain, who "lost" it to the com-
panies had only themselves to blame for not having submitted a claim to
the property that they were using illegally anyway, the government rea-
soned. As President Diaz told the governor of Nuevo Le6n in 1889, "no
hay duda que si los deslindadores se aprovechan de grandes extensiones
territoriales, es por la indolencia de los ciudadanos, que no se apresuran a
gestionar en la forma debida sus pretensiones." Small holders, the presi-
dent said, should hasten to make use of the advantages provided by the
law to "actuales poseedores"; in at least one case, he promised to hold
off the work of a survey company until the holders of the land threatened
by the company filed claims to it.'4 In 1896, a Fomento functionary noted
that pressure from Rafael Garcia Martinez's survey company was the best
way to force holders of land in Villa Ocampo, Durango, to "perfeccionar
sus titulos," which would also benefit the treasury. "Es casi seguro que
nunca traten de legalizar sus titulos si no se ven obligados a ello, quedando
indefinidamente en posesi6n de aquellos terrenos sin que el Gobierno
pueda percibir el valor de ellos." The opinion was seconded by Fomento's
legal advisor, to whom "lo principal y capital" was the acquisition "para la
Naci6n [de] lo que justa y legalmente le pertenece. 15
Patterns of Survey Company Activities, Compensation,

and Ownership
According to a tabulation by Jose L. Cossio, the governments of Por-

firio Diaz and Manuel Gonzalez issued a total of 169 survey concessions (or
contracts the words are used interchangeably) for public lands through-
out the country, all but two before 1892.16 The data presented here are lim-
ited to public land surveys conducted in six states from 1876 to 19LL. These
states-Chihuahua, Sonora, Sinaloa, Durango, Chiapas, and Tabasco-
were chosen because they were among those with the highest proportions
of surveyed land. The records of land titles in the ATN indicate that a
total of 11,310,586 hectares of land was granted to the companies in com-
pensation for surveys in the six states, implying they surveyed some 33.9
million hectares, or slightly more than half the estimated total for the
entire nation.
In the six-state study area, the records of the Secretaria de Fomento,
which supervised the surveys, indicate that 59 concessions to survey pub-
14. Colecci6n General Porfirio Diaz (hereafter CPD), 41/7.15/245-246, 263-264.

15. ATN, DUR 1.71/20, pp. 39-48.
i6. The original tabulation can be found in Jose L. Cossio, eC6ino y por quienes se ha
monopolizado la propiedad rfistica en Mexico? (Mexico City, 1966), 78-94.

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lic lands in Chihuahua, Durango, Sonora, Sinaloa, Chiapas, and Tabasco

were awarded before 19LL, as summarized in Table I. All of them were
issued between 1879 and 9go0. The i88os saw the greatest activity, with
all but three concessions issued between 1879 and 1890. One-third of the
59 were awarded during the presidency of Manuel Gonzalez.
The 59 concessions were actually issued to just 49 different business
organizations, since some held more than 1. Of the 59 concessions, 19,
or one-third, were transferred to another firm with Fomento's permis-
sion. Twelve of the 17 firms that acquired these transferred concessions
never received an original concession from the government; they entered
the business only as buyers of another holder's right to survey. Only one
contractor, the foreigner Luis Huller, appeared to make a determined
effort to acquire as many contracts as possible. He ended up with 9 survey
contracts, all of which the British-owned Mexican Land Colonization Co.
eventually acquired. Despite the appearance of a lively market in resale
of survey contracts, getting one from Fomento was evidently not difficult.
Requests for survey concessions were turned down in only six cases. The
government seemed to encourage competition, furthermore, by issuing
concessions that overlapped in both time and space.
Two striking patterns emerge: the high proportion of concessions that
were awarded but never implemented, and the low proportion of active
survey companies that acquired any land in compensation for their labors.
In 20 of the original 59 concessions, no land was ever surveyed and the
concession itself was never transferred. At least I out of 3 concessions,
therefore, was never activated. Of the 6i firms that held at least i conces-
sion, only 26 ever acquired land in compensation for a survey, or about
one out of every five companies (see Table 11).17 (The others did survey
work, but it was either rejected by the government, never finished, or fin-
ished by 1 of the 26 when the concession was transferred.) Both of these
patterns indicate a surprisingly low success rate for a class of entrepre-
neurs conventionally depicted as benefiting from their close ties to the
country's political elite.
Titles granting land in compensation ranged widely in size across the
six states, as Table III illustrates. Such great variations in the size of com-
pensatory titles (and thus of zones surveyed) were due to differences in the
overall proportion of vacant land in each state and in the degree to which it
was uninterrupted by private holdings or other claims. The comparatively
higher cost of surveying small zones explains why most of Sinaloa's pub-
lic land was not measured until after Lgoo, when increasing land values
17. Not counted is Bulnes Hmnos., whose titles were revoked by the Diaz government.

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586 j HAHR I NOVEMBER I ROBERT H. HOLDEN
TABLE I: Survey Contracts Issued by Fomento in Six-State Study Area
T= transfer
Contractor Year State F = foreign a
Guillermo Andrade 1889 Sonora

Antonio As6nsolo 1884 Chihuahua, Durango
Jose MarIa Becerra 1886 Sinaloa T
Adolfo Bulleb 1884 Sonora T
Bulnes Hmnos. 1884 Chiapas, Tabasco
Bulnes Hmnos. 1884 Chiapas, Tabasco
Bulnes Hmnos. 1888 Tabasco
Jose Maria Calder6n 1889 Durango T
Jose Cdrdenasb 1889 Tabasco
Lauro Carrillo 1888 Sonora
Joaquin Casaswis 1887 Durango

Luis Ceballosb 1886 Chihuahua, Sonora,
Sinaloa, Durango
Hip6lito Charles 1889 Sonora
Carlos Conantb 1890 Sonora T
Rafael Cruzb 1881 Sonora
Vicente Dard6n b 1889 Tabasco
Jesus Diaz Gonzdlezb 1883 Chihuahua T
F. Gallestegui & J. Navab 1887 Durango
Mariano Gallego 1883 Sinaloa T
Telesforo Garciab 1883 Durango
Telesforo Garciab 1883 Sonora T

Telesforo Garciab 1883 Sinaloa T
Telesforo Garciab 1883 Sinaloa T
T. Garcia & Jesus Merazb 1883 Durango
Rafael Garcia Martinez 1883 Durango, Sinaloa F
Jose Maria Garza Galdnb 1879 Chihuahua
Ignacio G6mez del Campob 1883 Sonora T
I. G6mez del Campo &
Ram6n Guerrero 1882 Chihuahua
Patricio G6mez del Campo,
A. Asfinsolo & Macmanusb 1883 Chihuahua
Andres Guttb 1886 Chiapas T
Luis Huller 1886 Sonora T, F

Jose IJligo 1886 Chihuahua
Manuel Jamet & Jaime Sastreb 1883 Tabasco
Luis Martinez de Castro 1899 Sinaloa, Chiapas
Luis Martinez de Castro 1901 Sinaloa, Chiapas F
Federico Mendez Rivasb 1883 Chiapas, Tabasco T
Federico Mendez Rivasb 1886 Tabasco
Meza Hmnos. 1882 Durango
Juan B. Ochoab 1879 Chihuahua, Durango
Francisco Olivares 1887 Sonora F
Francisco Olivares b 1889 Sonora

Plutarco Ornelas 1883 Sonora, Durango
Manuel Peniche 1885 Sonora T, F
Manuel Peniche 1885 Sonora T, F
Rosendo Pinedab 1885 Chiapas

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TABLE I: Continued
T= transfer
Contractor Year State F = foreign"
Carlos Quaglia &

Luis Garcia Teruelb 1885 Sonora T
Andres Quijanob 1890 Sonora
Dernetrio Salazarb 1886 Durango
Demetrio Salazarb 1885 Durango
Reftigio Salazarb 1889 Sonora
Manuel Sanchez Mdrimolb 1887 Tabasco T

Ignacio Sandoval 1886 Chihuahua
L. Sandoval & Enrique Pacheco 1890 Chihuahua, Sinaloa
Manuel Thomas y Terdnb 1885 Tabasco T
Antonio Tovarb 1890 Durango
Eduardo Valdezb 1885 Sonora, Sinaloa T
Rodolfo Valdez Quevedob 1888 Chihuahua
Jes6s Valenzuela et al. 1882 Chihuahua
Jose Valenzuela 1891 Sinaloa
Total contracts: 59
Source: Archivo de Terrenos Nacionales, Secretaria de Reforma Agraria, Mexico City.

Notes: In those concessions in which the owners clearly maintained shares in the new enter-
prise, the concessions are not counted as transfers.
a. Transfer means the concession holder transferred it to another party. Foreign indicates
some foreign investment in concession; the proportion varied from a minority share to all
shares.
b. No evidence that contractor carried out any surveys under this contract.
made it economical to do so.'8 Chihuahua's titles were issued the earliest

of any of the states; three-quarters were signed before 1887. Four-fifths of
Sinaloa's were issued after Lgoo.
Among those concession holders that did receive land in compensa-
tion, the most notable feature was the extraordinarily high level of re-
gional concentration. Concessions were usually limited to a single state
or a specified area within a state;'9 only 12 of the 59 concessions specifi-
cally authorized surveying in more than one state. Throughout the Dfaz
era, moreover, in the states of Chihuahua, Durango, Sonora, Sinaloa,
and Chiapas, the number of companies compensated for surveys in each
district-as seen in Table IV averaged only 1.57. The number of titles
issued for compensation in each of these districts, excluding all Sinaloa
districts, averaged just 2.3.20 In no state did more than seven survey com-
i8. See Aniceto Villarnar, Las leyes federales vigentes sobre tierras, bosques, aguas,
ejidos, colonizaci6n y el gran registro de la propiedad (Mexico City, 190o).
19. Half of the concessions (30) were limited to a substate zone.
20. Sinaloa was excluded because more titles were issued for that state 156 than for

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TABLE II: Ranking of Survey Companies in Six States by Land Titled in
Compensation
Contractor Hectares titled
Jes6s Valenzuela y Soc. 3,001,551

*FraIlcisco Olivares 1,648,395
Ignacio G6mez del Campo
y Ram6n Guerrero 1,268,983
*Mexican Land Colonization Co. 958,139
*Manuel Peniche 651,034
Ignacio Sandoval 633,528
Antonio Astinsolo 596,364
*Rafael Garcia Martinez 563,954
Joaquin Casas'is 207,608
Policarpo Valenzuela 204,944

*Luis Martinez de Castro 185,400
*Sinaloa Land Co. 104,923
Jose Maria Calder6n 95,680
*Luis Huller 94,665
Lauro Carrillo 78,332
International Co. 55,982
Jesus Diaz Gonzdlez 22,920
Plutarco Ornelas 20,284
Mariano Gallego 18,687

Ignacio Sandoval & E. Pacheco 17,984
Jose Iniigo 14,835
Jose Maria Becerra 12,049
Hip6lito Charles 10,283
Natalia Valenzuela de Saracho 9,190
Manuel Martinez del Rio 9,031
Guillermo Andrade 7,240
Total 10,491,985
Median 95,173
Note: Excludes eight titles to 818,601 hectares later nullified by the Diaz government.
*Indicates presence of foreign capital.
panies benefit, a misleadingly high figure in any event since it includes

companies later acquired by others in the same state. In most districts,
then, one or two concession holders dominated the survey business.
Foreign capital played a considerable if not commanding role in
the modernizing program of the Porfirian period.2' Thus, it is surprising
to discover that in only 6 of the 59 original concessions was there evidence
all five other states combined (104). Most of Sinaloa was surveyed after Lgoo, long after sur-
veying in the rest of the country had practically ended. The zones surveyed there, and thus
the parcels titled, were much smaller than elsewhere, as noted above.
21. Roger D. Hansen, The Politics of Mexican Development (Baltimore, 1971), 14-18.

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TABLE III: Average Compensation by State, 1883-1911
State Average title (hectares)
Chihuahua 207,619
Sonora 117,400
Chiapas 78,548
Durango 56,877
Tabasco 29,063
Sinaloa 1,527
Source: Table IV.
TABLE IV: Survey Activity by District in Six States
Compensation
District (in hectares) Companies Titles
Chiapas
San Crist6bal 0
Comitan & Libertad 197,184 1 1
Soconusco 130,940 2 3
Tuxtla & Chiapa 197,184 1 1
Simojovel 0
Tonala 162,481 1 2
Pichucalco 88,037 1 1
Chil6n 120,235 1 2
Tuxtla 94,665 1 1
Palenque 0
Total 942,580 5 12a
Chihuahua
Galeana 1,022,501 2 2
Iturbide 259,742 2 2
Hidalgo 0
Bravos 393,623 1 1
Abasolo 138,764 1 1
Degollado 496,048 1 2
Guerrero 108,908 1 1
Ray6n 222,943 2 2
Matamoros 0
Andres del Rio 246,311 1 1
Mina 633,528 1 2
Balleza 225,246 1 1
Allende 2,354 1 2
Jimenez 367,683 1 2
Camargo 199,284 1 2
Meoqui 334,594 1 1
Rosales 0
Victoria 0
Aldama 173,749 1 2
Ojinaga 365,204 1 1
Total 5,190,482 6 25

132.248.9.41 on Tue, 27 Oct 2020 05:16:14 UTC
TABLE IV: Continued
Compensation
Tabascob
San Juan Bautista 0
Cardenas
Comalcalco
Jonuta
Cunduacan
Frontera
Huimanguillo
Jalapa de Mendez 0
Jalpa 0
Macuspana
Nacajuca
Tacotalpa
Teapa
Balancan
Total 465,002 2 16
Durango
Durango 529,313 2 8
Nombre de Dios 0
Mezquital 373,686 2 2
Santiago Papasquiaro 347,699 1 1
Cuencame 0
San Juan de Guad 0
El Oro 38,821 1 1
Mapimi 0
Nazas 0
San Juan del Rio 4,228 1 1
Tamazula 0
Inde 107,995 1 10
San Dimas 5,119 1 1
Total 1,421,944 4 25'
Sonora
Hermosillo & Ures 646,274 1 1
Guaymas 175,720 1 7
Alamos 971 1 1
Moctezuma 457,248 2 2
Altar 1,009,361 2 2
Arispe 405,845 2 3
Magdalena 161,154 2 8
Sahuaripa 195,831 2 2
Total 3,052,404 7 26
Sinaloa
Culiacan 42,678 4 20
Concordia 519 1 1
Mazatlan 5,182 1 3
San Ignacio 8,741 2 7
Cosala 16,395 2 16

132.248.9.41 on Tue, 27 Oct 2020 05:16:14 UTC
TABLE IV: Continued
Compensation
Rosario 0
Mocorito 29,277 3 18
Badiraguato 56,047 3 38
Sinaloa 16,712 2 17
Fuerte 62,623 5 36
Total 238,174 7 156
Grand total 11,310,586 31 260
Source: Same as Table I.

Notes: Not all titles indicate surveys in their respective districts, because surveyors occasion-
ally (though very infrequently) requested compensation in other districts. The total quantity
of land titled in compensation is higher than that in Table II because eight titles to 818,601
hectares later nullified by the Diaz government are included in this tabulation, Some coml-
panies are counted more than once because they received titles in more than one state. The
authority for district names is Ministerio de Fomento, Colonizaci6n, Industria v Comercia,
Division municipal de la Republica Me.xicana (Mexico City, 1889).
a. The districts for two titles issued for land in Chiapas and Durango, granting 13,505 and
15,083 hectares, respectively, were not identified.
b. All Tabasco titles were issued to land that included parts of one to four different districts,
making an analysis by district impossible.
in the archival records of investments by foreigners; only i concession was

awarded outright to a foreigner, Luis Huller. However, foreigners later
acquired io additional concessions from their original recipients; Huller
alone acquired 8 of the ilo, passing them on to other foreign-owned succes-
sor companies. Of the 26 contractors that received land in compensation,
6 (about i in 4) were either totally foreign or dominated by foreigners.22
It is true that foreign-dominated or -controlled firms did receive land far
out of proportion to their number, acquiring 3,513,138 hectares or one-
third of all the land given in compensation for surveys, as reported in
Table II. The fact that most of them operated under concessions that had
been transferred to them by Mexican nationals (and not issued originally
to them by the government), together with the low overall success rate of
contractors, suggests that one reason for the prominence of foreigners was
the inadequacy of the domestic capital and technical resources available
for surveying the public lands. Nevertheless, while foreigners may have
profited disproportionately from the survey policy, there is no evidence
22. The six were Francisco Olivares, the Mexican Land Colonization Co., Manuel
Peniche, the Sinaloa Land Co., Luis Huller, and the International Co. Of course, some
Mexican contractors and investors may well have been acting on behalf of foreign capitalists,
without it being disclosed in the archival record.

132.248.9.41 on Tue, 27 Oct 2020 05:16:14 UTC
that the level of foreign domination that prevailed in, say, the construction
and operation of the railroads or in mining could be found in the survey
of public land, which was largely a domestic industry.
Nearly all the concessions were actually partnerships or joint-stock
companies, typically divided among at least 5 to ilo individuals, though
the only active British-owned survey company, the Land Company of
Chiapas, Ltd., claimed 85 stockholders. The Mexican concessionaires and
their partners generally surveyed in the region in which they lived, and
were typically among the privileged individuals of their region army
officers, intellectuals, lawyers, merchants, miners, and other businessmen
who often held other government concessions and political offices such as
congressional seats.23 The most successful were well-connected entrepre-
neurs who tended to dominate the surveys of particular substate regions.
Yet wealth and close ties to the ruling elite by no means guaranteed suc-
cess. A concession to survey in Durango held by the Cia. Descubridora
de Terrenos Baldios attracted the greatest participation by elite figures
of any survey company in the six states, yet it was among the least suc-
cessful. The firm's stockholders included Porfirio Dfaz himself (during the
Gonzalez administration) as well as Carlos Pacheco, the minister of Fo-
mento (the agency that supervised the surveys); Manuel Romero Rubio,
Dfaz's newly acquired father-in-law; and a wagonload of generals. But the
opposition of landholders in Durango to the surveys was so strong that
it practically paralyzed the company's work. The stockholders agreed to
turn over the management of the firm to two successful Chihuahua sur-
veyors, in return for two-thirds of all the land the company might receive
in compensation.24
Land Usurpation and the State
The historiography of the Porfirian period has traditionally character-

ized government officials as the accomplices (if not the captives) of a class
of modernizing entrepreneurs politicians who winked at illegal conduct
and various forms of intemperate behavior even while sharing the spoils.
How does this image compare with the archival evidence relating to the
state's management of the public land survey program?
This question will be easier to answer if the statutory history of the pro-
gram and its administrative procedures are reviewed first. Two separate
federal laws, those of May 31, 1875 and December 15, 1883 (which re-
23. Holden, "The Mexican State," chap. 3.

24. CPD, 7/2/476-478; ATN, DUR 1.322/17, Meza to Fomento, Apr. 22, 1883 and
Romero Rubio to Fomento, June iil, 1884; Archivo General de Notarias del Distrito Federal,
Jose Maria Velasquez (no. 732), July 25, 1884, pp. 16-24.

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placed the former), provided the statutory basis for survey authorizations
and contracts. Colonization was the principal objective of both laws. Few
surveys were authorized under the brief, two-sentence provision of the
1875 law that empowered the president to appoint "comisiones explora-
doras. .. para obtener terrenos colonizables con los requisites que deben
tener de medicion, avaluio y descripcion." The comisiones were to be com-
pensated with "la tercera parte de dicho terreno o de su valor....`25
The 1883 legislation controlled the survey of public land until 1902, when
President Diaz forbade any further use of private survey companies,26 and
was the basis for most of the concessions issued. Like the 1875 law, Arti-
cle I of the 1883 legislation expressly linked the surveys to colonization.
But the colonization program proved ineffective,27 and in practice most of
the survey companies were not required to colonize but only to survey
any baldios they could find in the area specified in the contract.
The president was empowered to authorize companies to survey the
baldios, to transport colonists to the land, and to establish them there.
Once authorized to survey in a particular state or substate jurisdiction
(commonly a distrito), the companies had to seek a second authoriza-
tion from the federal judge in whose jurisdiction the baldios were to be
found, and before whom the companies had to first designate as pre-
cisely as possible the location of the baldios they wanted to survey. To
discourage the companies from upsetting "indebidamente los duefios de
la propiedad territorial," Fomento insisted in 1883 that when they sought
the judge's authorization, they make their designations of land to be sur-
veyed "con positives fundamentos de la existencia" of baldios.28 From this
point, until all the documents were returned to Fomento for its approval,
control of the survey operations was generally in the hands of the judi-
ciary, although judges, survey companies, and aggrieved property holders
wrote constantly to the ministry for advice and assistance. The federal
25. Orozco, Legislaci6n, 804. Jose L. Cossio's nationwide tabulation of survey contracts
indicates that the first contract was not issued until i88i, when 4 were let. But the present
study, confined to six states, found 2 issued inl 1879. Cossio claims 20 contracts before 1884
(and therefore probably under authority of the 1875 law), or about 12 percent of the total
of 169.
26. Diaz abolished a practice that had already fallen into disuse. In the preceding ten
years, only three companies had been awarded survey contracts, and about 87 percent of all
the land that would ever be given to survey companies had already been granted more than
nine years before. The decree of 1902 is discussed in more detail below; for its wording, see
Villamar, Las eyes.
27. The reasons for the failure of colonization have been enumerated at length else-
where. See, among others, Diego G. L6pez Rosado, Historia y pensamiento econ6nlico de
Mexico, 2 vols. (Mexico City, 1968), I, 202-203 and Gonzalez Navarro, La colonizaci6n en
Mexico, 1877-1910 (Mexico City, 1960).
28. De la Maza, C6digo, 932.

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judge ordered the judge of an inferior court, usually one on the district or
municipal level, to supervise the actual survey.
The archival record indicates that property holders in the affected zone
were commonly notified to present their titles or other documents proving
ownership or at least continuous possession at a certain location on a spe-
cific date, usually under the supervision of the local judge, who frequently
accompanied the surveying parties. Once the individuals cited made their
appearance, documents were presented and the survey proceeded, with
the local judge entering a record of events. Typically, the judicial record
of a survey in the ATN documents the notification of property holders,
their appearance before the judge as the surveyors progressed through the
territory to be measured, the evaluation of the documents by the judge
or survey company, the placement of markers indicating property lines,
and the property holders' statement of either opposition or conformidad
with the placement of the markers. (Inhabitants of the area usually agreed
to the location of the markers; if they did not, a hearing was held before
the federal judge, who ruled on the validity of their property claims.) After
the local judge sent the papers to the federal judge, the latter ordered the
publication of notices in the state government's official newspaper, three
times in 30 days, as well as their posting in public places, giving any per-
sons who considered their rights infringed by the survey 30 days after the
last publication date to appear before the judge. When opposition sur-
faced, it was almost always because a property holder believed that land
declared baldio by a company was in fact property titled to him.
After the survey was completed and the court had fulfilled its obli-
gations, the entire file was sent to Fomento, where officials reviewed it
for compliance with the procedural formalities. The contracts typically re-
quired the surveyors to begin work within three months, to finish within
three or five years, and to pay all the costs of the "apeo, deslinde, frac-
cionamiento de terrenos y levantamiento de los planos correspondientes,"
which were to be sent to Fomento along with the judicial proceedings.
Judging by the memoranda produced by Fomento officials, their main
interest was in determining whether opposition to the survey had ap-
peared and whether it had been resolved. If opposition was still pending,
the ministry would sometimes rule directly on the validity of a claim,
bypassing the judiciary, or it might mediate a settlement between the
company and the property holder.29
Let us first take up the question of land usurpation by the surveyors.
The quantity and variety of complaints that turned up in Fomento's survey
29. This description of survey operations is based on the engineers' reports and judicial
records of surveys on file in the ATN.

132.248.9.41 on Tue, 27 Oct 2020 05:16:14 UTC
company files indicate that rural property holders, whether latifundis-

tas, rancheros, or peasant communities, had the freedom to register their
opposition and found it within their means to do so. The volume of protests
uncovered in the archives a total of 133 shows that formal resistance
to a survey was not an extraordinary event.30 There was no evidence that
either local authorities or the survey companies forcefully prevented rural
landholders from complaining: of the complaints found in the six states,
none mentioned a threat of violence to enforce compliance with a survey.
Precisely the opposite tendency was seen the companies and local au-
thorities complained that property holders, including peasant and Indian
communities, threatened to revolt or to drive the surveyors away, and
sometimes so intimidated the surveyors that they fled for their lives. Prop-
erty holders resisted nonviolently as well, refusing to answer summonses
or to submit documents in the court hearings that accompanied the sur-
veys, and thus delaying the proceedings for months or years, to the great
annoyance of the surveyors. They achieved a similar result by submitting
fraudulent or spurious claims, or by filing a claim on public land and then
not bothering to carry it out, which also blocked the surveys.
Even if complaints were not uncommon, it is important to note that
the cases in which opposition was registered by landholders were excep-
tions. In most cases, property holders presented evidence of ownership
that was accepted by the companies, which duly respected their proper-
ties according to the judicial record. The record also indicates that while
conflicts occurred over land set aside as ejido orfimdo legal (land that was
the legal property of a town), the companies were at least as likely to re-
spect such claims as they were to dispute them. When Jesus Valenzuela's
company surveyed Canton Guerrero in Chihuahua in 1884, for example,
the surveyor noted that although the pueblos of Ariziochi, Tomochi, and
Pichachic "no tienen titulos documentaries, es innegable que cada uno de
ellos tiene derecho a un sitio de ganado mayor" or about 1,755 hectares.32
Rafael Garcia Martinez's firm, surveying the baldios in the Mezquital dis-
trict of the state of Durango, set aside as ejidos 7,024 hectares for each of
eight Indian pueblos in the district.33 In the same way, Jose M. Becerra's
30. Only for post-19go Sinaloa was an effort made to compare total surveys to surveys
in which opposition was expressed. Table V indicates that 49 out of 149 surveys, or 1 out of
every 3, were opposed by at least one person.
31. Among the many scores of such incidents, see ATN, TAB 1.322/2, pp. 130-133,
177; ATN, DUR 9053, cuad. 1, "Informe del apeo de la zona de Durango"; ATN, DUR
1.322/17, M. Romero Rubio to Fomento, May ii, 1883 and June 11, 1884; ATN, CHIAP
1.71/9, Velasco to Fomento, Mar. 9, 1891; Fomento to judge, June 26, 1891; Velasco to
Fomento, July 7, 1891; ATN, CHIAP 1.71/1, pp. 223-225; and CPD, 14/7/3158.
32. ATN, CHIH 75669, court file.
33. ATN, DUR 113058, court file.

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company, as it surveyed land around the pueblo of Abuya in th
of Culiacan, Sinaloa, in i888, allotted 2,500 hectares to the residents of
the town (in addition to the required ioi hectares infutndo legal) on the
ground that even without a formal title they had possessed it for at least
ten years.34
Piratical behavior was in fact mostly unnecessary. Genuinely vacant
public land was abundant, and the companies were free to demand (with
the backing of the federal judiciary) some evidence of ownership or at
least continuous possession from any property holder whose land they de-
sired-a rather powerful weapon in a country where customary use and
dubious documentation were so common. What is surprising is the fre-
quency with which rural inhabitants were able to produce such evidence.
In any case, survey concession holders complained often enough of
abuse in the countryside to suggest that they lacked unconditional au-
thority. Moreover, as profit-making concerns they had a natural incentive
to avoid a fight in order to hold down costs. When, for example, the
Mexican Land Colonization Co. found landowners moving their boundary
markers up to the limits of already surveyed public land, it chose to over-
look the theft because "era inconveniente suscitar estas cuestiones que
hubieran producido algunos peligros. La Cia. creyo prudente desenten-
derse de ellas y adopt las indicaciones de los propietarios." A surveyor
for the same company (which received nearly one million hectares in
compensation) told Fomento that the company tried to avoid provoking
landholders precisely in order to save itself money: "El trabajo era mias
bien de character comercial que cientifico."35
The following three tables represent an attempt to analyze the protests
that did arise over land usurpation in terms of the federal government's
response to them.36 Except in the case of the post-1900 surveys by Luis
Martinez de Castro and his successor, the Sinaloa Land Co. (Table V),
the parties lodging the complaints are identified as either "entrepre-
neurs" (Table VI) or "communities" (Table VII)-terms that are merely a
shorthand for two distinctive types of rural producers. "Entrepreneurs"
included hacendados, miners, ranchers, and others whose activities, as
described in the archival sources, qualified them as capitalists. "Commu-
nities" appeared to share collective and traditional ties to the land, their
34. ATN, SIN 1.71/21, Martinez de Castro to Fomento, Feb. 2o, i888. The right to
land on the basis of continuous possession-known as the doctrine of prescriptibility-was
established in Art. 27 of the public land law of July 20, 1863, mentioned above.
35. ATN, CHIAP 1.71/24, pp. 156-163; ATN, CHIAP 1.322/8, Juan Navarro to Fo-
mento, Oct. 23, 1891.
36. The data on protests tabulated here are exhaustive, that is, every reference to oppo-
sition found in the relevant files of the ATN is included in the tabulation. The citations for
each protest may be found in chap. 4 of Holden, "The Mexican State."

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TABLE V: Opposition to Surveys by Two Major Contractors in Sinaloa

(after 1900)
Martinez de Castro Sinaloa Land Co.
Total lots surveyed 48 101

Surveys rejected 11 28
Proportion of rejections to total lots surveyed 23% 28%
Surveys opposed 14 35
Proportion of surveys opposed to total 29% 34%
Total rejected surveys that were also opposed 5 20
Proportion of opposed surveys rejected 35% 57%
Of all opposed in court, total withdrawn or abandoned 4 5
Proportion of court oppositions withdrawn 28% 14%
TABLE VI: Opposition to Surveys in Six States by "Entrepreneurs"
Resolution
Total For For

State protests protester company Negotiated Dropped Referred Unknown
CHIH 32 13 1 15 0 0 3
SINa 7 3 0 0 0 0 4
DUR 4 0 1 3 0 0 0
SON 4 0 2 0 1 1 0
CHIAP 3 0 0 0 0 0 3
TAB 3 2 0 1 0 0 0
Totals 53 18 19 19 1 1 10

Note: Neither this table nor Table VII includes three cases-one in Chihuahua and two
in Sinaloa-in which the protesters could not be identified as either "entrepreneur" or
"community." See text for definitions.
a. Excludes Sinaloa Land Co., Martinez de Castro, and Sandoval-Pacheco. Data on the first
two are in Table V; the last-named company's surveys were nearly all composiciones, and
are excluded for that reason.
petitions being commonly signed by numerous vecinos of a pueblo, or

by groups of indigenas. Because of the great volume of surveys in Sina-
loa after Lgoo, the response to these surveys (summarized in Table V) is
analyzed differently from the data on earlier survey work in Sinaloa and
surveys in other states. The difference is two-fold. First, no effort is made
to distinguish "entrepreneurs" from "communities," both because the dis-
tinction was more elusive in rapidly modernizing Sinaloa late in the Por-
firiato, when the two firms mentioned were active, and because the great
number of their surveys in Sinaloa (149) made it less practical to collect

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TABLE VII: Opposition to Surveys in Six States by "Communities"
Resolution
Total For For

State protests protester company Negotiated Dropped Referred Unknown
CHIH 9 3 0 0 0 3 3
SIN 5 2 0 0 0 0 3
DUR 3 2 0 0 0 0 1
SON 0
CHIAP 9 4 0 0 0 0 5
TAB 2 la 0 1 0 0 0
Totals 28 12 0 1 0 3 12

a. In this case, the surveyors were driven away violently by the protesters.
such data. Second, instead of classifying Fomento's response to a particu-

lar complaint as either for the company or for the protestor, the outcome
of Fomento's ruling on the survey itself (i.e., whether it was approved or
rejected) is recorded, in part because the records of the post-9goo Sinaloa
surveys are less ambiguous in this respect than any other records. Since
these two companies' surveys took place at least ten years after nearly all
the others were done, separating them does less violence to the overall
analysis than would otherwise be the case.
With these distinctions between post-9goo Sinaloa and the rest of the
study area in mind, let us review the data presented in the tables. A total
of 8i protests of some kind are reported in Tables VI and VII. About two
out of three (65 percent) were submitted by "entrepreneurs" and nearly
all the others by "communities." (Two protesters could not be adequately
identified.) Of those submitted by "communities," Fomento resolved about
two out of five (43 percent) on behalf of the protester. Only one (4 per-
cent) was negotiated independently by the company, three (11 percent)
were referred by Fomento to another authority (usually the court). The
resolution of the remainder (43 percent) could not be determined. Among
"entrepreneurs," about one-third of the protests (34 percent) were re-
solved in favor of the protester. Fomento favored the company in four
others (8 percent), direct negotiations solved the conflict in nineteen (36
percent), and the resolution of about one in every five (19 percent) could
not be determined. Of the 49 surveys opposed by landholders in Sinaloa
after 9goo, Fomento rejected about half (51 percent) of them, often on the
ground that the holder of property adjoining what the company identified
as baldio failed to approve the boundaries proposed by the company.
It is thus clear that Fomento was reluctant to side with the survey

132.248.9.41 on Tue, 27 Octon Thu, 01 Jan 1976 12:34:56 UTC
companies in conflicts with property holders. When the ministry did so

before Lgoo, if the result can be determined at all, it was invariably in
a case involving an "entrepreneur" rather than a "community." However,
it is important to note that Fomento was also less likely to flatly resolve
a conflict on behalf of a "community" protester than an "entrepreneur."
In cases involving communities, the proportion whose resolution was in-
determinate was more than double that for entrepreneurs. In other words,
the record is more often silent when communities are involved. In Sinaloa
after 1900, as can be seen from Table V, the government seemed more
inclined to rule on behalf of the protesters.
When the federal government sided with the protesters against the
companies, it sometimes punished the latter by suspending surveys and
revoking titles, or forcing them to respect occupied land even when it
was not properly titled.37 Local authorities such as judges and prosecutors
also acted on behalf of property holders whose land was threatened by
the companies.38 Well-to-do landowners were obviously the most likely to
receive such treatment, but poor farmers and peasant communities were
accorded protection, too. Sometimes the authorities in Mexico City or in
a local jurisdiction were able to protect landholders indirectly for years by
simply not acting on a survey or refusing to issue a title to the company
pending the outcome of a protest, to the intense irritation of the surveyors.
It took Durango surveyor Col. Rafael Garcia Martinez, a member of the
president's general staff, nearly 20 years to collect the titles he claimed
for surveys; their issuance had been successfully delayed in part by the
opposition of the residents of Villa Ocampo, who apparently succeeded
in protecting their ejido and fundo legal from Garcia Martinez's company
until 1g1o and 1911, when the titles were issued.39
The record of resistance to a survey by the pueblo of Navolato in Sina-
loa illustrates both the tenacity of the opposition and the capacity of the
federal bureaucracy to reverse a decision that had benefited one of the
state's most powerful agroindustrialists, to the detriment of the towns-
people. In 1889, the survey contractor Jose Maria Becerra turned up 3,432
hectares of land that he claimed were unaccounted for in the two docu-
ments that the townspeople presented as the titles for the property they
worked. Their legal challenge to the survey was dropped after the pro-
37. See, e.g., ATN, CHIH 78534, pp. 45-58; ATN, SIN 1.71/29, Fonlento to Gavou
aod Juez de Distrito, Aug. 29, 1889 and ATN, SIN 84792, pp. 72-74; ATN, SIN 1.71/63,
pp. 38-39 and ATN, SIN 1.71/181, pp. 2-6, 116-LLg; and ATN, DUR 113058, passim.
38. Examples can be found at ATN, DUR 9053, cuad. 1, passim; ATN, CHIAP 1.71/
24, pp. 14-16, 53. Surveyors complained constantly to Fomento about the federal judges
who supervised the surveys, saying they favored local landholders.
39. ATN, DUR 1.71/20, 1.71/24, 113070, 113062, passim.

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6oo I HAHR I NOVEMBER I ROBERT H. HOLDEN
spective buyer, Jesus Almada, agreed to respect the residents' land. This
settlement cleared the way for Fomento to issue title in 1891 to all 3,432
hectares to Almada, who bought the surveyor's one-third share as well as
the government's. However, according to the complaint made by a vecino
of Navolato, Pomposo Medina, to President Diaz, no sooner had the title
been issued than the surveyor located Almada's land "precisamente en el
lugar en que mds afecta a nuestros pequefios intereses," taking "un gran
numero" of our "cercas, casas y labores." The president swiftly suspended
Almada's right to acquire the land. The case dragged on for years. By
1898, the Almada family had built a two million dollar sugar refinery and
distillery in Navolato, employing more than nine hundred workers, yet
the family was still blocked from taking possession of the allegedly bal-
dio land because of the townspeople's opposition and Fomento's refusal to
yield to pressure from the Almadas. Finally, in 1907, with the Almadas
now doing business as the Almada Sugar Refineries Company, S.A., the
family's lawyer conceded that the vecinos of Navolato had been right all
along. Fomento gave Almada back the money he had paid for the gov-
ernment's share of the land, Almada reserved the right to sue Becerra for
damages, and Fomento nullified Almada's title to the disputed land. It
was a complete victory for the vecinos, whose persistence was bolstered
by the federal bureaucracy.40
What stands out above all in Fomento records is the slight proportion
of complaints to the total volume of land surveyed and the number of indi-
viduals whose property bordered surveyed land. Unfortunately, it was not
practical to quantify all the property holders involved in all the surveys.
Nor was it possible to add up the amount of land disputed by property
holders, because only rarely did a complainant indicate the precise extent
of the area in question. (To do so would have required a survey, which
was exactly what many property holders wanted to avoid.) In any event,
in proportion to the overall scale of public land surveys, few landholders
protested.
Sinaloa was the one state where the proportion of complaints was rela-
tively high one out of three surveys was opposed after Lgoo, as Table V
indicates. Because in Sinaloa most of the baldios were surveyed late in
the Porfirian period, well after the Northwest had begun its prodigious
economic expansion, land values had risen sharply and the possession of
land was more likely to be contested.4' Moreover, Sinaloa's population
40. ATN, SIN 1.71/26, passim; ATN, SIN 1.71/63. For a description of the sugar refin-
ery, see John R. Southworth, El estado de Sinaloa, Mhxico: (San Francisco, 1898), 43-47.
41. The price of public land subject to claim in Sinaloa leaped 233 percent from 1905
to 1907; since these prices were set by the federal government, they undoubtedly lagged
behind market prices. For public land prices, see Villamar, Las eyes, 227-240.

132.248.9.41 on Tue, 27 Oct 2020 05:16:14 UTC UTC
PUBLIC LAND SURVEY IN MEXICO 6o 1
density greatly exceeded that of the other northern states in this study,
and increased 25 percent in the last 15 years of the Porfiriato.42 This, too,
enhanced the likelihood of legal contests.
In cases of abuse and negligent behavior not involving land usurpa-
tion, the Diaz and Gonzalez administrations often responded in ways that
were contrary to the interests of the surveyors. When a company errone-
ously included titled land in a survey and did not discover it had done so
until after it had already received title to the same land (as its one-third in
compensation), it usually asked Fomento for compensation elsewhere as
a replacement. But the government habitually rejected such requests, on
the ground that the company's job was to find vacant land an inaccurate
survey did not deserve compensation. Many examples could be cited; a
typical response to such a request was that of Gen. Carlos Pacheco, the
secretario of Fomento, to G6mez del Campo in 1887: "cesa el compro-
miso del Gbo. desde el momento en que los deslindes hechos por Vds.
mismos, que se tomaron por buenos como base de distintas operaciones,
han resultado con errores de consideraci6n."43
Fomento also routinely withheld its approval of surveys for which the
documentation was incomplete, delaying action until it received such data
as the required physical description of the surveyed zone, or the sur-
veyor's classification of the land as first-, second-, or third-class.44 Scores of
surveys were sent back for revision when the Fomento staff found defects,
omissions, or contradictions in documentation. For example, Jesus Valen-
zuela's survey of the municipalidad of Moris in Cant6n Ray6n, Chihuahua,
was returned in 1885 with this sarcastic observation: ". . . no estdn arre-
gladas a la ley en varias parties, notdndose tantas faltas en las diligencias y
en el plano, que bien puede decirse que no estdn deslindados."45 Another
survey was returned, unapproved, to the federal court in Durango when
Rafael Garcia Martinez inadvertently gave the pueblo of Bocas four square
leagues for its fundo legal instead of the one it was entitled to.46
William T. Robertson's representative, Manuel Martinez del Rio, asked
Fomento for compensation for a composici6n (a division of public and pri-
vate properties that surveyors were often empowered to negotiate with
landholders, who secured clear titles as a result) that he had worked out
42. Sec. de Fomento, Colonizaci6n e Industria, Direcci6n General de Estadistica, Bole-

tin, 1 (1912), 75.
43. ATN, CHIH 1.71/112, Pacheco to G6mez del Campo, Nov. 17, 1887. Also see ATN,
DUR 113060, Fomento to Rodolfo Reyes, Mar. 1, 1905, which informed Garcia Martinez's
representative that if the company invaded titled land, "es evidente que no tiene derecho a
ninguna compensaci6n....
44. ATN, CHIH 54653, cuad. 1, Fomento to Jose Valenzuela, Jan. 5, 1885.
45. ATN, CHIH 97514, Fomento to Valenzuela, Aug. 24, 1885.
46. ATN, DUR 113060, memo., Jan. 30, 1895.

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602 I HAHR I NOVEMBER I ROBERT H. HOLDEN
in 1892. In reply, the ministry pointed out that some of the property
line descriptions had not been signed by the adjoining property owners,
other adjoining owners were not summoned, the titles seemed to cover
only about half the land their owners claimed, and the survey report itself
was too vague. There is no evidence that Martinez del Rio ever replied.
In another survey involving Robertson, Fomento requested a copy of the
surveyor's field notes when his report indicated that he had measured 39
kilometers in one day a total which sounded suspiciously high.47
These few examples could be multiplied dozens of times throughout
the period. Yet, surveys in Sinaloa and Sonora seemed to be particularly
vulnerable to close scrutiny in Mexico City. Surveys in these two states,
but especially Sinaloa, tended to involve smaller lots and to be much more
numerous than surveys elsewhere, so there were simply more opportuni-
ties for the government to catch errors. Then, too, most of the Sinaloan
surveys took place late in the Porfirian period, when there were many
more regulations to contend with. Finally, the supply of unsurveyed pub-
lic land was diminishing rapidly, so the government's return on the survey
company business i.e., the two-thirds it got to sell declined absolutely
after the mid-189os, giving Fomento less incentive to overlook defects.48
Those surveys conducted after Lgoo by Luis Martinez de Castro and
the Sinaloa Land Co. were the most closely studied of all; Fomento re-
turned surveys to the federal court to rectify the slightest oversights. In
some such cases, Fomento rejected surveys because angles were drawn
too sharply, or because the surveyor failed to specify the values of the
angles, or because of the quality of paper used for a map objections that
had never before been raised.49 Many, perhaps most, of Fomento's objec-
tions to the two companies' work in Sinaloa, however, questioned whether
a particular adjoining property holder had approved the placement of the
baldio surveyed.
One common form of discipline against the companies was to nullify
survey contracts or authorizations if the contractors failed to begin within
the time required by the contract. When Fomento learned that Rafael
Garcia Martinez had still not begun work in Sinaloa under two authoriza-
tions granted in 1883 and 1884, it finally took action in 1890, informing
47. ATN, SIN 1.71/55, memo., Oct. 28, 1892 and Fomento to Martinez del Rio,
Nov. io, 1892; ATN, SIN 1.71/51, memo., Aug. 15, 1892.
48. That the key variable was not the location of the survey is suggested by evidence
that Fomento was similarly critical of surveys conducted in other states after 1900. A survey
of part of the department of Chil6n in Chiapas by Martinez de Castro was returned three
times in 1902 before it was finally approved; it had omitted evidence of legal procedures to
protect property holders. See ATN, CHIAP 78628, passim.
49. See, e.g., ATN, SIN 1.71/134, p. 31 and 1.71/148, p. 60; 78405, memo., Oct. 24,
1900.

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him of the president's declaration that each of these was "caduca e insub-
sistente."50 The failure of Telksforo Garcia and Jesus Meraz to present the
"documentos y pianos que justificaron sus trabajos" prompted Fomento to
nullify their contract in March L887.5'
The picture presented so far does not, of course, coincide with the
interpretation of survey company activities that dominates the historiog-
raphy of the period. As noted previously, the companies' behavior has
been the subject of sweeping denunciations by historians and journalists
ever since the twilight of the Diaz era. What might be called the "black
legend" of the survey companies has acquired such authority that it is rare
to find works that even bother to cite evidence of company wrongdoing.52
The purpose here has not been to create a contrary "white legend," but to
submit the question to the obvious source the repository of data gener-
ated by the surveys themselves and to attempt a balanced interpretation
of the evidence. Therefore, some obvious, and not so obvious, caveats to
the general picture presented here need to be stated.
First, like all sources, the records of the Secretaria de Fomento are in-
complete and frequently misleading; the absence of evidence of a protest,
an illegal land seizure, or a government decision impinging on landholders'
rights is not proof that such an event did not occur. Local judicial authori-
ties were probably no less tempted to submit to a mnordida offered by a
real estate operator than judges in, say, Chicago in the 1980s. Surveyors
surely seized land that was being worked, with legal title or without, by
rural producers; the high proportion of indeterminate cases among those
in which some opposition was expressed has already been noted. Others
who lost land may never have submitted a complaint, out of ignorance or
50. ATN, DUR 9053, cuad. 1, p. 56.

51. ATN, DUR 1.322/19, mnemo., Sept. 19, 1923.
52. "Surveying companies were notorious for usurping village common lands," reports
Mark Wasserman, Capitalists, Caciques and Revolution: The Native Elite and Foreign Enter-
prise in Chihuiahlua, Mexico, 1854-1911 (Chapel Hill, 1984), 50. Two cases are mentioned
to support the assertion. The first (p. 50), based on a newspaper report, is that a survey comn-
panty "caused widespread agitation among the region's Tarahuinara Indians." The second, in
which survey-company activities were said to be partly to blame for the revolt of the village
of Tomochi in 1892 (p. 108), is not even backed up by the source that the author cites, nor
by the author himself elsewhere in his book (p. 40). See also Jane Dale-Lloyd, El p-oceso
de modernizaci6n capitalist en el noroeste de Chih-uahua (1880-i9io) (Mexico City, 1987),
72. She writes that surveys by three companies in Chihuahua "fueron muy irregulares; en un
sinnliimero de casos afectaron las tierras de los antiguos ejidos de los pueblos del direa, v en
no pocas ocasiones a pequeflos propietarios." While no cases of smallholder expropriations
are actually cited by the author, she quotes a newspaper report that three villages which
together claimed 112,359 hectares of ejido on the basis of an eighteenth-century grant were
left with only 28,o80 following the surveys in 885 (p. 74). Apart from the limitations of the
source and the failure to develop the nature of the supposed irregularity committed by the
survey, Dale-Lloyd fails to consider the vagueness and unreliability of colonial-era titles.

132.248.9.41 on Tue, 27 Oct 2020 05:16:14 UTC
poverty. Documents alleging misconduct by the surveyors may have been
lost or destroyed, perhaps intentionally.
Second, the existence of formidable natural hazards in a relatively
impoverished and technologically backward country undoubtedly under-
mined the accuracy of even the most scrupulous survey. Jose Covarrubias,
the head of a Fomento section in charge of the terrenos baldios and a per-
sistent critic of the companies' performance, estimated it would take 30
years for one team to produce a truly accurate survey of Chiapas, pointing
out that the dense jungle and the eight to nine months of rainfall would
make even that a difficult feat. A government surveyor in Tabasco reported
that even during the dry season his men could not walk more than 50
meters from the banks of the rivers without sinking to their waists in mud.
Timber had to be cut so trails could be blazed, and it often took as long as
eight days just to travel from one rancho to another.53
Moreover, the legislation authorizing the government to contract with
survey companies was repealed in 1902, in part because abuses did occur.
The inaccuracy of many of the surveys, and the erroneous identification
of privately held land as baldio, were among the factors that led to the
repeal according to Covarrubias, who helped to draft the 1902 decree.54
In 9gog, Diaz went further, suspending the sale of all surveyed public
land until it was remapped by official survey teams, a measure required by
the "vaguedad e inexactitud" of the government's knowledge of the public
domain, according to Fomento chief Olegario Molina.55
Finally, it bears repeating that the companies hired to survey the
public land which are the focus of this research were not the only
entrepreneurs seeking to acquire public land. Thousands of others were
potential sources of disruption in the countryside. More than seven thou-
sand titles covering about 17 million hectares in public land were issued
between 1878 and 1908 to companies and individuals who filed claims
under the 1863 public land law, and who were usually required to sub-
mit their own surveys of their claims. Another 5.2 million hectares were
sold outright by the government after they were surveyed. And cases of
usurpation occurred that had nothing whatever to do with the disposition
of the public lands. In any case, that the confiscation of smallholders' land
was a prominent grievance before and during the Mexican Revolution has
not been disputed here. The methods by which land could be stolen dur-
53. ATN, CHIAP 1.71/1, Covarrubias to Sr. Ministro, Jan. 12, 1895 and ATN, TAB
1.71/6, R. Mendoza Cuesta to Ing. Mdximo Alcald, May 7, 1912.
54. Jose Covarrubias, Varios informes sobre tierras y colonizaci6n (Mexico City, 1912),
29-32.
55. Sec. de Fomento, Memoria, 1909-10, v.

132.248.9.41 on Tue, 27 Oct 2020 05:16:14 UTC
ing the Porfiriato were many and varied, and the deeply rooted agrarian
sources of the great conflict cannot be ignored.56
Conclusions
The sources of Mexico's massive drive to survey its public lands are un-
mistakable. The Gonzalez and Diaz governments, which presided over the
most explosive period of economic growth in the nation's history, regarded
the survey of Mexico's vast public lands as an indispensable component
of the country's rural development in the i88os and 'gos. Investment in
the exploitation of Mexico's natural resources required a modern system
of property rights and titles. The chaotic system of property relations that
prevailed in the countryside, where land titles often provided only crude
approximations to property lines, and where public land when it could
be identified at all-was routinely exploited without government consent,
had to be changed.
What does the archival evidence of state-company relations tell us
about the character of the state? While the surveys stood to benefit
the modernizing capitalist sector of the economy (which included small
farmers and businessmen as well as real estate operators and big-time de-
velopers), the state was well aware that other interests could be damaged
by them-including those of entrepreneurial as well as traditional land-
holders. Not only did the state often mediate conflict between different
elements of the bourgeoisie (i.e., the surveyors and landholding entre-
preneurs), but it even sided with nonbourgeois groups such as traditional
communities. The need to attract investors (particularly foreign capital)
made political stability the keystone of the Porfirian state's development
strategy,57 and the threat to stability posed by attacks on the rights of non-
titled occupants as well as legitimate landowners induced the Secretaria
56. Agrarian grievances did fuel the Revolution of 191o, although today we know that
the longest and bloodiest revolution in twentieth-century Latin America was far more than
a peasant uprising. The "populist tradition" of revolutionary historiography originated in the
works of Orozco and Molina Enriquez, and was subsequently expounded by the influential
anglophone historians of Diaz-era public land policy, McBride, Tannenbaum, and Phipps,
all cited in n. 1. See the critiques of this tradition ed. by D. A. Brading in Cauldillo and
Peasant in the Mexican Revolution (Cambridge, 1980), intro., and by Jean-A. Meyer, "Le
Mexique a la veille de la Revolution de 191o: Credibilite des statistiques agraires," Reile
Historique, 562 (Apr.-June 1987). John Tutino, From. Insurrectioni to Revolution in Mexico:
Social Bases of Agrarian Violence 1750-1940 (Princeton, 1986), partially attributes revolu-
tionary grievances in the northern frontier zone to land usurpation by entrepreneurs and
state governments (pp. 299-300), and in the central highlands to the privatization of villagers'
community land by the Diaz regime (p. 318). Demographic change, economic downturns,
and changes in the structure of agricultural production and in social relations of production
also contributed to revolutionary action, Tutino points out.
57. Hansen, Politics, 15.

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6o6 I HAHR I NOVEMBER I ROBERT H. HOLDEN
de Fomento and President Diaz personally to act to protect those rights at

times. The record indicates that Fomento generally enforced the contracts
and required the companies to adhere to the legal and technical require-
ments it set and disciplined surveyors for violations by nullifying titles,
abrogating or suspending authorizations, and imposing fines.
In fact, the decision to hire private contractors to survey the land was
a deliberate attempt to maintain flexibility. The government was able to
insulate itself from the potentially hazardous consequences which could
be financial as well as political of questioning landholders' rights to the
property they worked. Thus, when two Mexico City newspapers reported
that property owners in Chihuahua, including the latifundista Luis Terra-
zas, were alarmed because surveyors were identifying their land as baldio,
President Diaz ordered Fomento to inform all the companies that any
indemnification for damages caused by them would be their own respon-
sibility, and not the federal government's.58 When the governor of Morelos
sounded out President Diaz in 1890 about a state law that would make the
state government responsible for surveys, an incredulous Diaz replied that
not only did the idea conflict with the federal government's own privileged
jurisdiction over public lands, but all the "malevolencia y maldici6n" of the
pueblos that now were putting up with the survey companies would be
directed against the state. Diaz then spelled out the political advantages
of letting private companies open the tiger's cage: "Que esa maldici6n la
eleven las compafifas deslindadoras nada importa porque llegando a una
situaci6n imposible, el Gobierno las desautoriza, las obliga a devolver y
hasta las castiga si es necesario para tranquilizer a los pueblos, cosa que no
puede ni debe hacer con el Gobierno de un Estado ni menos cuando este
es amigo." Diaz added that the proposed state law might be modified to
make it more practical, but he urged the governor to bear in mind that the
state government "corre todos los riesgos consiguientes a su desplante por-
que va a hacer por si mismo y bajo su responsabilidad social, lo que puede
hacerse mediante las Compafifas Deslindadoras: esto es, tendria que sacar
con su propia mano la castafia que puede sacar con la del gato."59
The archival record of the survey companies' activities also shows that
the contractors, responding to their own self-interest as well as to the
dictates of the state, often respected the claims of individual and commu-
nity landholders. How does one account for the fact that, during a period
of mounting rural discontent which came to a head during the Mexican
Revolution itself, the survey companies did not simply become the blunt
instruments of a land-expropriating elite?
58. De la Maza, C6digo, 992-993.

59. CPD, 15/4/1770 and 41/7.16/477-478, emphasis added.

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The state's capacity to intervene against land-expropriating hacenda-

dos was considerably narrower than its capacity to intervene against the
survey companies, which after all were the agents of the state. In conflicts
between large landowners and the rural poor, Diaz may have preferred to
provide more protection to the latter than he actually succeeded in doing,
as John Tutino has speculated. But it was politically unfeasible to side with
the poor in such conflicts, since Diaz's survival in the presidency required
him to allow rural elites to enrich themselves at the expense of the peas-
antry, if necessary.60 At the same time, it was politically acceptable even
necessary, as noted above to exercise comparatively rigid control over
the activities of the survey contractors, agents of a state that was paying
them generously for their services.
The reason for this behavior is not difficult to identify, and it can be
attributed to the dilemma that the state confronted when it adopted the
survey policy. On the one hand, the survey of the public lands was a step
toward building a modern capitalist economy and was needed to attract
new investment in Mexico's natural resources. On the other hand, hardly
any rural producer of whatever class who was peacefully exploiting land to
which he was not legally entitled, or whose titles were vague or of ques-
tionable legitimacy, had any reason to welcome a survey. A survey was
an act of aggression no matter how fairly or accurately it was carried out.
The Porfirian state, therefore, adopted a strategy that allowed it to ab-
sorb both demands simultaneously. The companies, as agents of the state,
would survey the land; but they would also be held accountable for the
inevitable opposition that developed in the countryside.
The survey strategy thus provided a means to balance the diversity of
interests at stake in the transition to capitalism, a diversity that required
a certain measure of state autonomy from both the modernizing sector
and the landed elite.6' After most of the public lands were surveyed, Diaz
abolished the contract system and replaced it with surveys run directly by
the government, few of which were ever undertaken. The companies had
served their purpose.
Historians of the period have not sufficiently appreciated the com-
6o. Tutino, From Insurrection to Revolution, 282.

61. Friedrich Katz, "Mexico: Restored Republic and Porfiriato, 1867-1910," in The
Cambridge History of Latin America, Leslie Bethell, ed. (Cambridge, 1984-), V, 68-70,
and Tutino, From Insurrection to Revolution, 332, have noted that by 1goo the state was
forced to yield some of the autonomy it had earned earlier to factions of the ruling class. For
more evidence of the regime's flexibility in dealing with labor and peasant grievances, see
Donald Fithian Stevens, "Agrarian Policy and Instability in Porfirian Mexico," The Ameri-
cas, 39:2 (Oct. 1982), 153-166, and David Walker, "Porfirian Labor Politics: Working-Class
Organizations in Mexico City and Porfirio Diaz, 1876-1902," The Americas, 37:3 (Jan. 1981),
257-290.

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6o8 I HAHR I NOVEMBER I ROBERT H. HOLDEN
plex character of the Porfirian state, particularly its capacity for autonomy.
President Diaz may have been reluctant to restrain the arbitrary and ex-
pansionist behavior of the hacendados, though the evidence on this point
is not yet conclusive. But, in the case of the survey companies, the regime
managed to establish a crude system of regulation and oversight as it
sought to strike a rough balance (necessarily incomplete and inconsistent)
among conflicting interests while serving goals considered beneficial to
Mexico's long-term economic development, such as accurate surveys of
rural properties and the prevention of class violence in the countryside.
The increasingly sclerotic and autocratic administration of Porfirio Diaz
ultimately failed to deliver on both counts. But the archival record not
only undermines the traditional linking of the two failures, it also points
to a complex and dynamic interplay of state and private interests that has
much less to do with the regime's demise than with its early resilience and
remarkable longevity.

132.248.9.41 on Tue, 27 Oct 2020 05:16:14 UTC

Priorities of the State in the Survey of the Public Land in Mexico, 1876-1911

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Priorities of the State in the Survey of the Public Land in Mexico, 1876-1911

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