From Ejido to Ciudad Universitaria: Expropriation and Citizenship in Postrevolutionary Mexico

Abstract In 1946, the Mexican federal government expropriated four ejidos—plots of land that the postrevolutionary state had recently redistributed to agrarian communities—to build a Ciudad Universitaria for the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México near the southern periphery of Mexico City. This article reconstructs the expropriation, the displacement of ejidatarios, and their struggle for legal compensation by analyzing their own written appeals to the president alongside documentation from state, university, and agrarian archives. It argues that this expropriation brought about not only a physical displacement but also a political one that removed the ejidatarios’ recently expanded citizenship in the state's developing corporatist system. Nonetheless, as the midcentury state shifted to the right and prioritized the urbanization and modernization of Mexico City above agrarian concerns, these ejidatarios on the rural-urban periphery continued to claim their postrevolutionary citizenship and rights by articulating an ideological and discursive allegiance to the agrarian ideals of the revolution.