Paper short abstract:

In a Nicaraguan agrarian reform cooperative, residents have come to treat the concept of derecho—originally referring to rights attendant upon cooperative membership—as connoting, simply, land. But land and derecho resist steady identification, and vital intersections emerge from this redefinition.

Paper long abstract:

In Gualiqueme, a village established as an agrarian-reform cooperative in rural Nicaragua, residents have come to treat the concept of derecho—originally referring to rights attendant upon cooperative membership—as connoting, simply, land. Insisting upon derecho as a straightforward share of the cooperative's territory has been central to a process of spontaneous decollectivisation which has characterised the cooperative's post-revolutionary trajectory. But in addition to standing as a productive simplification, the respective terms of this equivalence—land and derecho—firmly resist steady identification; and the implications of the effort to assert it nonetheless are consequently far from straightforward.

In this presentation I show that derecho, as well as indicating a simple share of land, carries a range of more expansive connotations which play critical roles in the current situation of complex tenure informality among residents. Through everyday assertions of the equivalence of derecho and land, this divergent range of themes come to be woven into livelihood strategies, and to be critically implicated in everyday efforts to establish ownership and undertake land transactions. The integral relation of land to the social life of the campesino household also, crucially, means that this pragmatically-asserted equivalence produces effects in the other direction, and derecho comes to be inflected by its performed identity with land. Derecho becomes something that can be divided up among children, ownership comes to be construed as a product of effortful labour rather than allocative fiat, and the exigencies of kinship reshape the abstract entitlements conferred by institutional membership.