Harvard University, PhD '96

BIOGRAPHY

Emilio Kourí's main scholarly interest is in the history of rural Mexico since Independence, including society, economy, politics, culture, and the law. He is the author of A Pueblo Divided: Business, Property, and Community in Papantla, Mexico. It tells the story of the strife-ridden transformation of rural social relations in the Totonac region of Papantla during the course of the nineteenth century, paying particular attention to how the progressive development of a campesino-based international vanilla economy changed and ultimately undermined local forms of communal landholding. A Pueblo Divided received the 2005 Bolton-Johnson Prize from the Conference on Latin American History (CLAH) and the 2005 Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin Prize (Honorable Mention) from the American Society for Ethnohistory. He is also the editor of En busca de Molina Enríquez: cien años de Los Grandes Problemas Nacionales and co-editor of Revolución y exilio en la historia de México: Homenaje a Friedrich Katz.

He is at work on a three-volume history of communal landholding in Mexico. Volume One examines the evolving meaning and practice of communal land tenure in Mexican villages during the 18th and 19th centuries, focusing on changes brought about by agricultural commerce and commodification, population growth and mobility, socio-economic differentiation within and beyond villages, and the haphazard implementation of a multiplicity of liberal disentailment laws. Volume Two focuses on the Zapatista movement of the Mexican Revolution, offering a revisionist interpretation of its agrarian and political goals and practices and of its place in the land reform that would follow its demise. Volume Three explains the legal, political, and ideological origins of the collective land-grant community (ejido) created by the Mexican Revolution between 1915 and 1934. By 1992, when a constitutional amendment ended the redistribution program, more than two thirds of Mexico’s arable lands and forests were at least nominally in the hands of these land-grant communities—the most extensive state-managed land tenure transformation in the history of modern Latin America. Historians have long regarded the communal character given to ejido property as a return to forms of social organization rooted in Mexico’s indigenous past, and have considered it to be the fulfillment, at least in principle, of what villagers like Emiliano Zapata had long demanded and fought for. Against prevailing interpretations, Volume Three argues that the new ejido of the Revolution was not what country people (and especially the Zapatistas) had battled for. Rather, it was the piecemeal product of idealized notions of indigenous communal organization and historical practice hastily contrived by the "progressive" elites who won the Revolution and who were then compelled in fits and starts to make expedient agrarian reforms in order to build sorely needed popular political allegiances.

He teaches classes and seminars on land reforms, rural ecologies and social movements, indigenous societies, and the history of agrarian thought, as well as general courses on Latin American and Latino/a history, and is director of the Katz Center for Mexican Studies.

Recent Course Offerings

• Tropical Commodities in Latin America

• Latin American History Seminar

• Zapatista Social Movements, Old and New

• Agrarian Reform in Twentieth-Century Mexico

• The History of Mexico, 1876 to the Present

• Pre-Columbian and Early Colonial Latin America

• US Latinos: Origins and Histories

• Latin American Civilizations