Intimate Enemies

by Bobrow-strain, Aaron

• ISBN13: 9780822339878
• ISBN10: 0822339870
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-06-30
• Publisher: Duke Univ Pr

Summary

Intimate Enemiesis the first book to explore conflicts in Chiapas from the perspective of the landed elites, crucial but almost entirely unexamined actors in the staters"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 landownersrs" understandings of progress, masculinity, ethnicity, and indigenous docility. By scrutinizing the elitesrs" 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 geographyrs"s insights into the production of space. Describing how a carefully defended world of racial privilege, political dominance, and landed monopoly came unglued,Intimate Enemiesis a remarkable account of how power works in the countryside.

Author Biography

Aaron Bobrow-Strain is Assistant Professor of Politics at Whitman College

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	p. vii
Acknowledgments	p. ix
Abbreviations and Acronyms	p. xiii
Rethinking Thuggery
Introduction	p. 3
Honest Shadows: Ethnography and Ordinary Tyrants	p. 16
Landed Relations, Landowner Identities: Race, Space, Power, and Political Economy	p. 32
Estate Formations
Children of the Magic Fruit: The Making of a Landed Elite, 1850-1920	p. 49
Killing Pedro Chulin: Landowners, Revolution, and Reform, 1920-1962	p. 80
The Dead at Golonchan: Cattle, Crisis, and Conflict, 1962-1994	p. 105
Contours of Quiescence
The Invasions of 1994-1998: Estate Agriculture Unglued	p. 133
Import-Substitution Dreaming: Producing Landowners' Place in the Nation	p. 158
Geographies of Fear, Spaces of Quiescence	p. 184
The Agrarian Spiral	p. 208
Notes	p. 221
Glossary	p. 245
Bibliography	p. 247
Index	p. 265
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