The Constitution of Mexico (1917)
The revolutionary constitution that pioneered enforceable social and labor rights
📖 Go to the source
For the complete official Spanish text, see the Mexican Congress’s own archive: Constitución Política de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos, Cámara de Diputados.
Promulgated in Querétaro on February 5, 1917 — still celebrated in Mexico as Constitution Day — the Constitución Política de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos was drafted in the final years of the Mexican Revolution, under President Venustiano Carranza. It remains in force today, though heavily amended over the past century.
A pioneer of social constitutionalism
What set the 1917 Constitution apart from its era’s other charters was its inclusion of enforceable social and economic rights, years before similar provisions appeared in Weimar Germany’s 1919 constitution — making it one of the first constitutions in the world to enshrine social rights as constitutional guarantees rather than mere legislative policy.
Article 27 — Land and natural resources
Declared that ownership of land and water within Mexico’s boundaries originally belongs to the nation, which has the right to transmit title to private persons and to regulate the use of natural resources for the public interest — the constitutional basis for the post-revolutionary land reform (ejido) system and, later, for the 1938 nationalization of Mexico’s oil industry.
Article 123 — Labor rights
One of the world’s earliest constitutional labor codes: an eight-hour workday, a weekly day of rest, a minimum wage, equal pay for equal work, the right to organize unions and to strike, and employer liability for workplace accidents — rights won directly from the Revolution’s labor movements and written into the constitution itself rather than left to ordinary statute.
Structure of government
The Constitution establishes Mexico as a federal, democratic republic composed of free and sovereign states, with a separation of powers among an executive (a President elected for a single six-year term, or sexenio, with no re-election), a bicameral Congress (Senate and Chamber of Deputies), and a judiciary headed by the Supreme Court of Justice.
Primary source: Constitución Política de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos, Cámara de Diputados (Mexican Congress).
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