Property in layers: land and subsoil rights in rural Mexico

Keywords: land, oil, property, Mexico
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 2/25/2022 05:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/25/2022 06:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 16

Abstract

Land ownership has generally been considered horizontally—with fences and boundaries dividing plots side by side. But what happens when there are different rights and claims to vertical layers of the land? Mexico’s Constitution (Article 27) separates ownership of the subsoil from surface land, and the country’s 2013 Energy Reform allows the Mexican state to lease layers of the subsoil to private corporations, in some cases resulting in one plot having different “owners” at different depths. In other words, someone might own the surface land, while a private oil company has a claim to the Mesozoic shale layer at 4000 meters below ground, and Pemex (the state-owned oil company) owns the shallow conventional oil reservoir at 1000 m below ground. What are the issues that result when land rights are layered vertically? What happens when what is underground comes to the surface through erosion, excavations, or leaks, blurring the boundary between layers? In this presentation I draw upon fieldwork in the community of Zapata, Veracruz where Pemex, private oil companies, and farmers must deal with overlapping (vertical) property claims to a 600-hectare plot. Each has rights to different layers of the land, but in practice the boundaries are often breached, leading to a series of conflicts. Through this ethnographic example, I hope to challenge the idea of land rights as existing solely on a horizontal plane, and encourage us to also think about the consequences of them being stacked up vertically and volumetrically beneath our feet.