General Systems of Land
In 1910 Francisco I. Madero called for armed revolt in defense of presidential nonreelection. In his Plan de San Luis Potosí Madero included a call for the restitution through legal channels of illegally seized lands. From the first, the Mexican Revolution was the culmination of complex processes in which systems of land tenure helped define social divisions and hierarchies. The Revolutionary process that established the institutional norms for the Mexican state in the Constitution of 1917 also was an agrarian war as differing conceptions regarding the possession and use of land entered the conflict. This explains the central position of Article 27 in the Constitution, which gave the state the authority to implement agrarian reform.

At the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution, five general systems of land tenure helped define the experience and perspective of the Mexican people. The first was the land of campesino (peasant) and indigenous villages, a combination of communal lands and family plots that had been handed down since pre-Hispanic times. During the dictatorship of Porfirio Dfaz ( 1876-1910), however, capitalist haciendas grew at the expense of communal landholdings. It has been estimated that at the beginning of the nineteenth century 40 percent of the arable lands in central and southern Mexico were village communal properties, but by 1910 this fraction had dropped to 5 percent. This process of appropriation and dispossession was fresh in memory of the Revolutionary generation. The expectations of communal villagers went far beyond Madero's call for legal restitution and ended up being formally codified in November 1911 in the Plan de Ayala of Emiliano Zapata's Liberating Army of the South.

The second system of land tenure was organized around the military colonies that had been established in northern Mexico, particularly the state of Chihuahua, during the nineteenth-century wars against nomadic tribes. The owner of the land was the armed campesino who had taken possession of the land and made it productive. Once the so-called Apache Wars were over, however, the former military colonies lost many of their juridical rights and privileges, and capitalist haciendas grew at the expense of individual and family plots. In 1905 Governor Enrique Creel of Chihuahua promulgated a new law that forced the colonists' lands onto the open market. The opposition to these measures by the colonists and other campesinos later found expression in Francisco "Pancho" Villa's Division of the North.

In the northeast, lands also were held by indigenous groups, most notably in the Yaqui and Mayo valleys of Sonora. For the Yaquis and Mayos land and water formed the body of the community in a sacred bond uniting the community and the basis of time as conceived by their ancestors. This relationship of the people with the land was alien to the spirit of capitalist enterprise that in the 1890s inspired Sonoran hacienda owners to appropriate Yaqui and Mayo lands in a prolonged and bloody war.