This book is a landmark in Mexican rural history. Activists and professional historians have long argued that the nineteenth-century privatization of indigenous communal lands was the original sin that laid the ground for the agrarian strife of the twentieth century. Many also claimed that this privatization drove the political mobilizations of indigenous peasants even before the Revolution. Nevertheless, very few historians have actually studied the process through which indigenous lands were privatized, and their findings have been published mostly as tantalizing but sketchy articles. In this book we finally have the first intensive study of how the lands of a particular locality became private property.