This article examines the teaching experience in the elective course “Agrarian Question in Brazil’s Dictatorships” offered in the History major at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG), Brazil in the first semester of 2019. Developed by two graduate students in History who were fulfilling their student teaching requirement, the classes consisted of discussions about Brazil’s agrarian issues during the Estado Novo dictatorship (1937-1945) and the Military dictatorship (1964-1985). Based on the examination of course content, the reception of novel historiographical approaches in Brazil, and discussions about theory and different types of evaluation, the article concludes that this was a positive practice given the experience gained in teaching, research, and extension.

Historians have debated the so-called “social justice” and effects of the laws introduced by the governments arising from the Mexican Revolution of 1910, as well as what the obtaining of land through endowment and restitution involved for rural inhabitants. This article aims to chart how, with the endowment of land, the pueblos (villages) experienced a new territorial expansion, redefined their identities and sought to settle border disputes with other pueblos. It also examines the arguments of those who were affected by land redistribution.

This article analyzes the conflicts between miners and farmers in Northeastern Antioquia between 1930 and 1950 to understand the problematic coexistence of ideas of public and private ownership of land and gold and the role of the state in regulating them. In the agrarian literature about Colombia, scholars argue that fake mining claims became a mechanism to hoard large extensions of land. To test this hypothesis, we study Colombian mining and land legislation alongside conflicts between farmers and miners that rest in the Archivo Histórico de Antioquia. Rather than a problem of land grabbing, the conflicts between mining and agriculture reveal that the antioqueño mining tradition of mazamorreros and the promotion of frontier colonization through colonos were in stark contradiction with the new agricultural and mining uses of natural resources and the model of regional development after the great depression. Since the laws protected both, mazamorreros and colonos, and mining and farming entrepreneurs, the access to natural resources became a source of conflict in places were mining and agriculture coexisted.

The article shows that the consolidation of the business agriculture in the Mexican Bajío rested on new technologies: irrigation and machinery, which impacted on productivity levels, the expansion of the agricultural frontier, and the diversification of crop patterns. In this process, both national economic policy and the state’s role in fostering mechanization were crucial factors. At the same time, the Bajío’s natural resources, geographic location and environment (soil, climate, rainfall) also made possible the adoption of a successful business model, which was sustained in the initiative of small and medium owners.

Among many conflicts that arose during the implementation of the Agrarian Reform in Peru, the confrontation between the workers’ union and the owners of the Hacienda Huando stood out. After months of struggle, Juan Velasco Alvarado’s military government (1968-1975) yielded to the workers’ demands and expropriated the entire estate - widely seen as an emblem of modern agricultural enterprise - paving the way for the creation of a cooperative. Using a variety of sources, such as the hacienda archives, newspaper articles, presidential speeches, interviews and the draft minutes of the Council of Ministers’ meetings, this article analyzes how the Velasco Alvarado government used the case of Huando as an anti-oligarchic symbol, and how this conflict in turn marked a key rupture in relations between the military regime and the large landowners.

Costa Rica is not an exceptional case to the rest of Central America in terms of its agrarian history and redistributive reforms. The creation of ITCO in 1960 and its project of land colonization with peasant settlements—the least threatening of all styles of agrarian reform—fails as an agrarian reform because of its limited redistributive scope, and because of the lack of interest in changing the power structures and concentration of the land in the countryside. This article examines the Costa Rican agrarian policy on peasant settlements through the history of the Bagatzí and Falconiana settlements in Guanacaste, Costa Rica, with a critical approach to agrarian reforms. As one more example of the class character of Costa Rican agrarian policy, the tension between the proposals of Israeli cooperation and the objectives of the Costa Rican State is evident in the rejection of a cooperative model for the settlements.