In 2019, residents of the rural district of San Rafael Comac in the municipality of San Andrés Cholula, Mexico, challenged the implementation of the 2018 Municipal Program for Sustainable Urban Development of San Andrés Cholula (MPSUD), a rapacious urban-planning policy that was negatively affecting ancestral communities—pueblos originarios—and their lands and traditions. In 2020, a legal instrument called the writ of amparo was proven effective in ordering the repeal of the MPSUD and demanding an Indigenous consultation, based on the argument of self-recognition of local and Indigenous identity. Such identity would grant them the specific land rights contained in the Mexican Constitution and in international treaties. To explain their Indigenous identity in the writ of amparo, they referred to an established ancient socio-spatial system of organization that functioned beyond administrative boundaries: the Mesoamerican altepetl system. The altepetl, consisting of the union between land and people, is appointed in the writ of amparo as the foundation of their current form of socio-spatial organization. This paper is a land-policy review of the MPSUD and the writ of amparo, with a case-study approach for San Rafael Comac, based on a literature review. The research concludes that Indigenous consultation is a key tool and action for empowerment towards responsible land-management in a context where private urban-development impinges on traditional land uses and customs, and could be beneficial for traditional communities in Mexico and other Latin American countries.
Autores y editores
Schumacher, MelissaGuizar Villalvazo, MaríaKurjenoja, Anne K.Durán-Díaz, Pamela
Land (ISSN 2073-445X) is an international, scholarly, open access journal of land use and land management published quarterly online by MDPI.
MDPI AG, a publisher of open-access scientific journals, was spun off from the Molecular Diversity Preservation International organization. It was formally registered by Shu-Kun Lin and Dietrich Rordorf in May 2010 in Basel, Switzerland, and maintains editorial offices in China, Spain and Serbia. MDPI relies primarily on article processing charges to cover the costs of editorial quality control and production of articles. Over 280 universities and institutes have joined the MDPI Institutional Open Access Program; authors from these organizations pay reduced article processing charges.
Proveedor de datos
MDPI AG, a publisher of open-access scientific journals, was spun off from the Molecular Diversity Preservation International organization. It was formally registered by Shu-Kun Lin and Dietrich Rordorf in May 2010 in Basel, Switzerland, and maintains editorial offices in China, Spain and Serbia. MDPI relies primarily on article processing charges to cover the costs of editorial quality control and production of articles. Over 280 universities and institutes have joined the MDPI Institutional Open Access Program; authors from these organizations pay reduced article processing charges.