Definition
A possessory action under Mexican law brought to recover immovable property from which the plaintiff has been wrongfully dispossessed. The term describes both the act of dispossession and the legal remedy arising from it. The dispossession qualifying as despojar must have been accomplished through violence or clandestine means — ordinary contractual or legal displacement does not trigger the remedy. The object of recovery is immovable property (real property), not personal property or other interests.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): In Spanish, despojar means to strip, divest, or deprive someone of something, often by force; used broadly across contexts including property, rights, and possessions.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not independently listed; the English cognate "despoil" appears, meaning to strip of possessions, to plunder or rob, carrying overtones of force or pillage.
The legal term is narrower than the common Spanish usage. While despojar in ordinary language can describe any deprivation, the legal action is limited to immovable property and requires that the dispossession occurred through violence or stealth — a threshold condition that filters out many ordinary property disputes.
Core Elements
The action of despojar rests on three requirements:
1. Immovable property. The subject matter must be real property. The remedy does not extend to personal property or intangible interests.
2. Actual prior possession. The plaintiff must have held possession — not merely a title or right to possess, but actual possession — before the dispossession occurred.
3. Wrongful means of dispossession. The deprivation must have been accomplished through violence or clandestine means. Dispossession by legal process or open contractual act falls outside the remedy.
Why It Matters in Research
Despojar appears in American legal sources almost exclusively in the context of California land title disputes arising from Mexican land grants. When California was admitted to the Union in 1850, large portions of its territory were subject to property claims governed by Mexican civil law. Courts and practitioners in early California statehood cases were required to interpret and apply Mexican possessory law, and despojar appears in that litigation record.
Researchers working in California land grant materials, mission property disputes, or early California Supreme Court decisions should treat despojar as a term of art with a specific procedural and substantive meaning rather than a generic descriptor of dispossession. The single case reference in Black's (1 Cal. 268) points directly to that early California decisional context.
The term also signals the broader category of Mexican possessory actions, which included related remedies with overlapping but distinct elements. A researcher encountering despojar in a historical document should consider whether the related action of amparo (protection of possession) or other Mexican possessory remedies are also implicated.
Because this is a term drawn from a civil-law tradition and transplanted into American common-law courts, historical sources may apply it inconsistently. Early California decisions were working out the relationship between Mexican civil law and the incoming American common-law framework in real time, and the reasoning is not always stable across cases.
Historical Dictionary Support
Both Black's editions are in close agreement on the core definition. The first edition adds the analytically important qualification — that the dispossession must involve violence or clandestine means — which the supplemental second edition omits, likely a condensation artifact rather than a substantive difference. Researchers should treat the violence-or-clandestinity requirement as part of the term's established meaning; the first edition's formulation is the fuller and more useful one.
Neither edition discusses the procedural mechanics of the action in detail, nor do they situate it within the broader architecture of Mexican possessory remedies. For fuller treatment, contemporary Mexican civil law sources and the early California Reports are more reliable than the dictionary entries alone.
Jurisdictional Note
Despojar as an active legal remedy is historically specific to jurisdictions that operated under Mexican civil law prior to American acquisition — principally California, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. Outside of historical land grant litigation in those states, the term has no operative legal meaning in American law.