Intimate Enemies

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.

“Aaron Bobrow-Strain has made an invaluable, important contribution to our understanding of political conflict in Chiapas. This is the first book-length analysis in English that closely documents the landowners’ perspectives on the Zapatista uprising and the struggle for land since 1994. This is a very timely analysis that sheds light on the complex and shifting relationships between landowners, government officials, and agrarian organizations.”—Neil Harvey, author of The Chiapas Rebellion: The Struggle for Land and Democracy, “Whether we knew it or not, Intimate Enemies is the book that we have been waiting for since at least 1994: the book about the other side of Chiapas’s rural society, its ladino landowners. Gracefully written, evocative, and wise, it is just superb.”—Jan Rus, coeditor of Mayan Lives, Mayan Utopias: The Indigenous Peoples of Chiapas and the Zapatista Rebellion, “Intimate Enemies is a fascinating interdisciplinary book that will be valuable to social scientists interested in questions of land reform, landed production, state-society relations, and indigenous politics. . . . Bobrow-Strain has written a nuanced thick description deeply informed by the literature on landed production and hegemony. I recommend this book highly.”, “Intimate Enemies is one of the few ethnographies that focus instead on the elite and ask how do events (some global, others local) affect and perhaps marginalize this population as well. The strength of Bobrow-Strain’s work comes in his ability to effectively capture the ambivalent world of the landowners.”, “A a fascinating ethnography and cultural history of the landed elites of Chilón in the northern zone of Mexico’s southernmost state of Chiapas. . . . The lesson of Bobrow-Strain’s excellent book is that not only peasants but also landowners respond to shifting circumstances in ways not predetermined by a generic class label.”

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