“Hacer ejido” and a Sense of Community. Transformations in to Collective Action, the State and Ecological Conservation in Mexico

Abstract

Studies on common goods tend to focus primarily on so-called community institutions. In this article, however, I analyze the transformations of collective action and the expansion of ecological conservation policies in Mexico in order to understand the management of common property resources. Thus, from a diachronic and ethnographic perspective, I analyse two complementary processes: the local construction of the idea of ‘community’, and the reconfiguration of the idea of ‘State’. Both processes are analyzed in the light of the experiences of two groups that colonized the southeast of the Lacandon Jungle in Mexico, around 1970. In studying the relationship between the government apparatus and the colonizers, I question the tendency to refer to the ‘state’ and the ‘community’ as if they were finished entities in complete opposition. Furthermore, in approaching local organizational practices, I explore the dynamics, tensions and contradictions experienced by the settlers in the first time in regard to the imperative to form ejidos and in the second time to knowing themselves to be inhabitants of an ecological buffer zone. Considering these constraints, the final section describes the recent orientation of the sense of community toward environmental concerns, but also the acquired learning to take a political position in the face of state power.