http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=Propiedad/dotaciones comuna...

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Note added at 13 mins (2009-01-02 18:01:39 GMT)
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dotaciones appear = land grants

The National Agrarian Institute provides land grants ("dotaciones," from the
Spanish verb "dotar" which literally means to give or hand over) subject to certain
conditions. It does not give out fee simple titles ("títulos plenos"). What it does
provide is akin to a use right or usufruct. The beneficiary has the right to use the
land so long as the beneficiary works the land. If the land is abandoned it can
revert to state control and ownership. The beneficiary cannot place a mortgage
on the land, since the beneficiary is not the fee owner.
90
Interestingly, however,
the Institute may allow the land to be sold, provided that the buyer meets certain
qualifications and the Institute grants its authorization. The land can also be
passed to heirs in wills or through intestacy, assuming subsequent holders


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Note added at 14 mins (2009-01-02 18:02:37 GMT)
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Here is a quote specific to Mexico:

Also see: Mexican Revolution and Mexican History 1810-1940

Land reform before Cárdenas

The post-revolutionary governments of the period 1911-1934 did undertake some land reform, but it was premised on the idea that capitalism would remain dominant in the countryside: what was to be abolished was a supposedly parasitic, "traditional" landlordism. The vision of Mexico's rural future envisaged by the reformers was one of large scale modern agroindustries and prosperous medium-scale private capitalist farms. Land grants to peasants were seen as a transitional measure, part of the process of dismantling the great estates, the haciendas. In the longer term, private property would replace the state property associated with land reform: the ejido. The term ejido, which now means a land reform community, is a colonial one, denoting public land (what in England we call commons) attached to a settlement. Post-revolutionary land reform beneficiaries may receive a plot of land individually, or ejidos can be collective, based on collective work on land held in common. Ejidatarios, the beneficiaries of land reform, only received rights to use the land in legal theory, and could not alienate it as if it were private property: if an ejidatario could no longer farm his or her land, and had no successors in the family able to do so, the plot should revert to the community for redistribution to some other potential beneficiary. In practice, however, land titles have been bought and sold in ejidos, and ejidal land might be rented to capitalist entrepreneurs from outside the agrarian community for long periods. But these were informal and illegal practices up to December 1991, when the neoliberal administration of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari (elected in July 1988 amid widespread accusations of electoral fraud) amended constitutional Article 27 in ways which will in practice make legal sales of ejido land possible for the first time and allow peasants to put up their land as collateral for a loan.