A widely accepted interpretation of agrarian reform after the Mexico Revolution is that peasants demanded restitution of village lands that had been illegally taken by large landowners. Nonetheless, revolutionary officials preferred to expropriate land that did not necessarily belong to villages previously and redistribute it to villages in perpetual, though conditional, usufruct in the form of “dotaciones.” Instead of restoring land and ownership to villages, dotaciones engendered dependence on a paternal state. Thus, scholars such as Frank Tannenbaum, John Womack, and Arturo Warman concluded that the agrarian reform became a mechanism of clientelism that undergirded Mexico's postrevolutionary authoritarianism.

Helga Baitenmann offers a reappraisal of this view by examining the theory and practice of the agrarian reform programs proposed by the two major revolutionary factions, the Zapatistas and Constitutionalists, particularly as they stumbled through the courts. Baitenmann shows that agrarian reform strengthened the authority of the executive, in particular by encroaching on the judiciary's role in land adjudication. However, this imbalance sprang not from a concerted effort to co-opt peasants’ demands, but rather from complications inherent in a “country where land titles overlapped and where, for centuries, legal and illegal transactions had become intermingled” (190).

Early revolutionary Francisco I. Madero called for the return of village lands unjustly taken by haciendas, but restitution claims soon ran into insurmountable problems in the courts. Few had the necessary colonial-era documentation to substantiate claims, and colonial titles were often faulty and sometimes forged. Staked centuries before, boundaries alluded to shifting streams, trees, and cactus. Even when leaders supported peasants’ claims in principle, the courts upheld constitutional protections of private property and the separation of powers, thereby preventing expedient executive redress (54). Stymied by the judiciary, villagers simply took possession of lands they considered their own. For large landowners and conservative elites, this was pillage, the epitome of the chaos and disregard for due process engendered by the revolution. For revolutionaries, the court's rulings showed that the judiciary could not produce justice. As Luis Cabrera, architect of Maderista and Constitutionalist land reform, said, “There comes a point when historic injustices must be remedied outside the justice system” (75).

A more pressing complication was that most disputes were not between peasants and haciendas, but between neighboring villages, all of which wielded moth-eaten maps that often bore faint resemblance to current holdings. Even in Zapatista-controlled Morelos, where ancient claims to land took on an almost sacred quality, officials acknowledged that adherence to colonial-era maps often would have meant eliminating modern pueblos (94). Revolutionary leaders, therefore, erected a parallel legal structure in which the executive ruled through agencies such as the National Agrarian Commission. The guiding category was no longer restitution—based on colonial deeds and adjudicated by the courts—but rather dotaciones, which defined the subsistence needs of villages as a “social right.”

The inevitable clash over the separation of powers produced what Baitenmann calls “the key to understanding Mexico's revolutionary land reform” (137). In short, a reconstructed Supreme Court skirted the issue by granting the executive broad latitude. Even though it may have skewed the balance of powers, the prevalence of dotaciones did not make peasants any more dependent on the state than restitutions did. Rather “it was only through dotaciones that officials [were] able to grant land to so many population centers” (173).

Next to this central insight, the book's organizing principle, comparing Zapatista and Constitutionalist programs, is significant, though less striking. The main difference regarded scope. The Zapatista program intended to “restructure property relations” nationally, but remained an “unfulfilled utopia” (200). The Constitutionalists hoped to address discrete situations through agrarian reform and only “accidentally” developed policies that redistributed half the national territory. If agrarian reform contributed to authoritarianism, it was not because it rendered peasants clients of the state; rather, the broader process developed to address peasants’ forceful demands compromised (or “transcended,” as revolutionaries preferred) the rule of law in favor of social inequality.