Joining an Ejido to Plant Our Agave Farm
If you’ve been browsing our site, you may have come across another project we’ve been working on. That is, our Agave Farm. As is most things in life, nothing comes easily so we wanted to share how we came about purchasing the parcel of land for our farm. Before we get into the details of the purchase, here’s a little history lesson on what an ejido is.
We came across available land that sits adjacent to my parents-in-law’s property. The land is part of what is known as an ejido, the loose translation being “common land” since there is no direct translation. Ejido land is community land that is primarily used for agriculture. Members of the community are assigned parcels of land and the community collectively maintains the communal holdings. The practice of ejido land can be traced all the way back to the Aztecs. When the Spaniards came to Mexico in the 1500’s the practice was abandoned.
When Mexico adopted the Constitution of 1917 the ejido was officially brought back into the country. However, there was a disproportionate amount of wealthy landowners who took advantage of their laborers. In 1934, then President Lázaro Cárdenas began removing large amounts of land from the wealthy landowners and redistributed the land to individual peasants who were leasing the land so they could have an opportunity to make a living from their work.
Once a member of an ejido, the individuals are known as ejidatarios(as). Each ejidatario could live on the land, farm it, lease parts of it, and pass it onto a single offspring. The only thing they couldn’t do was individually own the land or sell it, in pieces or whole. For almost 60 years, the only way to acquire ejido land was to have it willed to an heir.
In 1992 when legislation was passed to modify Article 27 of the constitution which pertained to the ejido, the community members as a unit, where granted the power to make the executive decision of privatizing the individual parcels of land to legally sell off.
Fast forward to 2019, Sophia and I started researching the agave plant and trying to learn about the ins and outs of growing an Agave Farm. We lucked out on an available parcel of land that we wanted that was part of an ejido. So we had to brush up on what all this was about while managing and learning the process of buying a house to flip in Centro Histórico in Mazatlán.
When we started the process of negotiating and agreeing to the purchase of the parcel of land with the former owner, we quickly learned that there’s an old fashion way of handling a deal like this in Mexican countryside. Check out our checklist below to see how the process curiously went down:
“Gentleman's handshake” to agree to buy the land ✓
Confirm we were Mexican citizens ✓
Attend an ejido meeting to introduce ourselves to the community and attest who we were, why we were buying the land and affirm our commitment to the ejido ✓
Obtain at least 51% approval signatures of the ejidatarios and ejidatarias for the purchase of the parcel of land ✓
Get a notario who specializes in ejido contracts to draft the sale/purchase agreement ✓
Submit signed sale/purchase agreement to the government to obtain our deed ✓
And while this list may make it look straightforward it was anything but that! Yet, we are happy to say we are proud to have an Agave Farm and officially be members of the ejido community.