"Over the course of Mexican history, patterns of land tenure and cultivation have found expression in Indian villages, missions, great estates, smallholdings, and revolutionary ejidos. These institutions have emerged, evolved, and disappeared in accordance with historical conjunctures--Colony, Reform, Revolution--creating a complex agrarian panorama of interwoven property rights, diverse forms of land and water use, and interactions with the natural world. Mexico in Transition explores this agrarian, political, and ecological history and reevaluates the place of the 1910 revolution within it: more than a simple agrarian 'watershed', 1910 is seen as part of a long term struggle to define, administer, and exploit the Mexican countryside."--Page [4] of cover.