Ejidos, Urbanization, and the Production of Inequality in Formerly Agricultural Lands, Guadalajara, Mexico, 1975–2020

The ejido is an institution of communal land tenure and governance administered by the Mexican government. This paper assesses the current visual appearance of landscapes and implicit land use in ejidal lands on the periphery of Guadalajara, Mexico, using Google Street View (GSV) images tagged for signs of urban distress. Distressed landscapes are associated with the temporal process of urban expansion—newer settlements tend to be more visibly impoverished. Concentrations of vulnerable housing are correlated with encroached-upon ejidal lands in a process that was underway by the 1970s, well before Mexico’s neoliberal turn. Ejidos on the urban periphery, created to support agricultural communities during Mexico’s radical period of agrarian reform, are now sites of urban sprawl and impoverishment. Nevertheless, these communities remain legally salient as federal entities with respect to the disposition of land. Their presence complicates the historical evolution of land use in the urban periphery in ways that do not fit into classical central place models. We conclude that the presence of ejidos is associated with rapid and chaotic urbanization by migrants and the loss of agricultural capacity in Guadalajara’s periphery.

Urban distress and political narrative: Life stories of local leaders in a poor, underprivileged suburb and the reconstruction of urban order

This study discusses the relations between life stories, political narratives and attitudes towards social problems taken by local leaders living in a poor, underprivileged suburb. Using the ‘biographical-narrative’ method, it addresses the questions—How do local conditions (in terms of: housing, social class, municipal policy, social networks, NGO settings, local conflicts, organizational narratives, etc.) affect local leaders’ narratives, biographies, attitudes and strategies and, vice versa—How do their narratives affect the urban order? In order to attain these answers, this paper presents two contradicting narratives, taken from two different local activists, both acting on behalf of the weak Arab population in an Israeli suburb at the turn of 21st century. The findings show that these divergent narratives and resultant attitudes were both deeply rooted in each narrator’s life story and close social milieu. Furthermore, such life stories, charged by certain biographical resources, generated and maintained particular strategies that, in turn, affected the reconstruction of their immediate urban socio-political order. Applying the ‘biographical-narrative’ method to the urban political realm has created a unique configuration of social analysis with some policy implications, especially in regard to community social work.