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Land use and land cover change in Mexico's drylands has been highly dynamic in space and time concomitantly coupling and decoupling ecology, culture, economics, and politics between people and land. Most drylands in Central Mexico are communal rangelands, so-called ejidos, where most ejido members have the right to use the land mostly for cattle production. Dryland use is currently mostly dedicated to livestock production at the expense of most staple food, base food crops, native grass species and the provision of ecosystem goods and services associated with multifunctional landscapes. Changes in rural land tenure in ejido land triggered and accelerated by the 1992 reforms of Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution launched a wave of privatization of communal land with direct and indirect short and long term consequences on the multifunctional nature of dryland landscapes. While most ejidos maintain at least to some degree communal land ownership and communal use areas for risk avoidance, some ejidatarios benefit from an additional titling process both, to enter rental markets or to acquire a small-parceled pasture for cattle production. Parceling out and fencing in of small hectare-grazing plots and the establishment of water ponds, in former communal lands, however has been leading to severe fragmentation of rangeland landscapes with consequences on local and regional hydrology, rangeland ecological function, adaptive capacity and system resilience. Newfound interests to strengthen communal efforts should target rangelands as social-ecological systems and thus as providers of multiple ecosystem goods and services, whose demands while potentially greatly fluctuating, will eventually stimulate the generation and maintenance of highly diverse multifunctional landscapes. Also, fostering local knowledge systems will then naturally lead to communal (= collaborative) adaptive (to drought, price shocks, etc.) management and thereby enhance local food security, local livelihood development, and rural sustainability.