Title Intimate enemies : landowners, power, and violence in Chiapas / Aaron Bobrow-Strain

Published Durham : Duke University Press, 2007

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Description 1 online resource (xv, 271 pages) : illustrations, maps Series e-Duke books scholarly collection. Contents Introduction -- Honest shadows : ethnography and ordinary tyrants -- Landed relations, landowner identities : race, space, power, and political economy -- Children of the magic fruit : the making of a landed elite, 1850-1920 -- Killing Pedro Chulín : landowners, revolution, and reform, 1920-1962 -- The dead at Golonchán : cattle, crisis, and conflict, 1962-1994 -- The invasions of 1994-1998 : estate agriculture unglued -- Import-substitution dreaming : producing landowners' place in the nation -- Geographies of fear, spaces of quiescence -- The agrarian spiral Summary Intimate Enemies is the first book to explore conflicts in Chiapas from the perspective of the landed elites, crucial but almost entirely unexamined actors in the state's violent history. Scholarly discussion of agrarian politics has typically cast landed elites as "bad guys" with predetermined interests and obvious motives. Aaron Bobrow-Strain takes the landowners of Chiapas seriously, asking why coffee planters and cattle ranchers with a long and storied history of violent responses to agrarian conflict reacted to land invasions triggered by the Zapatista Rebellion of 1994 with quiescence and resignation rather than thugs and guns. In the process, he offers a unique ethnographic and historical glimpse into conflicts that have been understood almost exclusively through studies of indigenous people and movements. Weaving together ethnography, archival research, and cultural history, Bobrow-Strain argues that prior to the upheavals of 1994 landowners were already squeezed between increasingly organized indigenous activism and declining political and economic support from the Mexican state. He demonstrates that indigenous mobilizations that began in 1994 challenged not just the economy of estate agriculture but also landowners' understandings of progress, masculinity, ethnicity, and indigenous docility. By scrutinizing the elites' responses to land invasions in relation to the cultural politics of race, class, and gender, Bobrow-Strain provides timely insights into policy debates surrounding the recent global resurgence of peasant land reform movements. At the same time, he rethinks key theoretical frameworks that have long guided the study of agrarian politics by engaging political economy and critical human geography's insights into the production of space. Describing how a carefully defended world of racial privilege, political dominance, and landed monopoly came unglued, Intimate Enemies is a remarkable account of how power works in the countryside Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 247-264) and index Notes Print version record Subject Landowners -- Mexico -- Chiapas -- History Elite (Social sciences) -- Mexico -- Chiapas -- History Land reform -- Mexico -- Chiapas -- History Social conflict -- Mexico -- Chiapas -- History Violence -- Mexico -- Chiapas -- History HISTORY -- Latin America -- Mexico. Elite (Social sciences) Land reform Landowners Social conflict Social conditions Violence Grundeigentümer SUBJECT Chiapas (Mexico) -- Social conditions Subject Mexico -- Chiapas Chiapas -- Aufstand (1994) Genre/Form History Form Electronic book ISBN 9780822389521 0822389525

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