Intimate Enemies: Landowners, Power, and Violence in Chiapas (review)

Aaron Bobrow-Strain has a smart question about the present that animates his investigation into the past: Why did ladino landowners in Chiapas acquiesce so easily when, in the wake of the 1994 Zapatista revolt, large numbers of indigenous peasants invaded estates that ladinos had owned for generations? Why did they not respond instead as they always had, with "thugs and guns"? The answer involves extensive interviews of landowners, trips to several archives, and a sensitive observation of what the author calls "the social-spatial practices that produce the bounded spaces of estate production" (p. 7). Bobrow-Strain tunes into the intimacies of ladino hegemony in the north-central Chiapas countryside to produce a very good history that adds depth and nuance to what we know about agrarian reform in this well studied state. Along the way he makes a strong case that Chiapas is a place where agrarian reform made a profound difference not only in indigenous peasant lives but also, and necessarily, in ladino lives, too.

The short answer to the question above is that the central state's increasing presence as a mediator between peasants and landowners through the twentieth century, combined with the implementation of a neoliberal economic policy in the 1980s, had displaced ladino rural power by the 1990s. This is not surprising. But the full answer is more complicated because it is the close spaces of intimate social relations that are the object of the book's analysis. Bobrow-Strain collects rich documentary data from personal, municipal, and national archives dating back to the 1850s to tell a story about the rise of a ladino elite dependent materially and psychically on the subjugation of the indigenous majority. Much more than a material relation of owner and worker, the ladino-Indian relationship developed its own cultural idiom that was expressed in language, social expectations, and in geography; ladino hegemony was well established by the late nineteenth century. When the Mexican revolution came to Chiapas, however, the threads that held this hegemony together began to unravel and it is this part of the story that Bobrow-Strain tells with gusto, well aware of the common understanding that the revolution never came to Chiapas.

Agrarian reform energized and empowered indigenous peasants to engage in struggles with ladinos over the control of land. Not only did the state (its inspectors, teachers, prosecutors) now come between owners and workers as never before, but it opened up spaces, literally, for a new Indian leadership organized in ejidos and agrarian communities. Indigenous empowerment was further encouraged in the 1970s by liberation theologians and a leftist political party that turned out to be a wing of the ruling PRI. Indigenous communities invaded ladino estates and landowners responded predictably with violence that police often aided and abetted. But the genie of indigenous mobilization had been let out of the bottle and there was no turning back: the countryside had become a very conflicted and insecure place for ladinos, who could no longer count on the state to defend their land. With effective references to his interviews with landowners, Bobrow-Strain emphasizes ladino subjective understandings of this conflict as a world turned upside down, in which the state favored Indians over ladinos and the boundaries between ladino and Indian were no longer respected. When a renewed cycle of land invasions followed the Zapatista uprising and state agents made it clear they would not intervene to defend ladino estates, ladino elites retreated fearfully into the remaining spaces they still held onto. We understand clearly by the end that there was nothing else left for them to do and their acquiescence made perfect sense.

By the end we also understand better how this book is an examination of the settler worldview. (Michael Taussig's important work on "the colonial imagination," Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing [1986]) is cited prominently.) In...