Introduction
Intimate Enemies: Landowners, Power, and Violence in Chiapas is an academic ethnography (272 pages), written by Aaron Bobrow-Strain and published in 2007 by Duke University Press. His work closely examines the conflict between landowning elites and the Ejercito Zapatista de Liberacion Nacional (EZLN), a rebellious rural movement that led a successful agricultural land reclamation campaign on behalf of the lower class indigenous people in the southeastern Mexican state of Chiapas (see figure 1.0 below). Bobrow-Strain’s ethnographic research was focused on the real-life accounts and perspectives of the elite landowners in this conflict. This report will provide a brief summary of Bobrow-Strain’s main points and thesis for examination within the ethnography, and an evaluation of how effectively they are born out and aesthetically delivered to the audience within the text.
Background Analysis
Beginning in 1994, The EZLN, along with the aid of other affiliated and unaffiliated rural movements, launched a series of reclamation invasions of agricultural land against ladino landowners. These elite landowners, many of which had owned their large fertile tracts of land for generations, suddenly were embroiled in a sociopolitical uprising that threatened their previously unchallenged land ownership. Bobrow-Strain states, these landowning elites were being painted as a violent and powerful class of modern “latifundistas”, a historical reference to privileged landowners of Spanish dissent which owned extensive estates of land, cultivated on the backs of Latin American indigenous slave labour.
Contrary to this wholly violent representation, many elite landowners met the resistance of these rebel invaders with resignation, rather than violence. Despite the outcry from landowners to the Mexican government, only a small percentage of these invaders were evicted. As public pressure mounted from outraged landowners, the government response was the adoption of the Agrarian Accords in 1996. This historic accord involved the government purchasing massive quantities of the agricultural land and redistributing it to the poor indigenous communities through state-subsidized programs. Ultimately, the indigenous people of the region were relatively victorious in this contentious, and sometimes violent, struggle, ending generations of land monopolization and forcing the migration of many of these elite landowners out of Chiapas, Mexico.
Thesis Analysis
Bobrow-Strain’s ethnography does not follow the romantic struggle of the down-trodden indigenous people of Chiapas as one might expect. Rather, it takes up the unique, and perhaps politically incorrect, position of empathizing with the elite landowners in an attempt to tell the story of this struggle for territory and rights from their perspective. This approach was taken by the author in order to critically explore the overly simplified notion that this conflict was a strict dichotomy of the repressed good (peasants) versus an evil oppressor (landowners). Bobrow-Strain was not without his own reservations in spotlighting the views of the elite at the expense of the indigenous perspective. He addressed this internal conflict as he writes, “I feared that my work might unintentionally undermine efforts to transform relations of domination and repression in the Chiapan countryside”. His unique perspective does much to further our holistic understanding of the conflict in Chiapas, simply through his willingness to offer a platform to the privileged, and perhaps previously unsympathetic, voice of the elite landowners. Todd Hartch concurred in a 2008 review for the American Historical Review in which he wrote, “This is an important book that explains how landowners responded to the various pressures and tensions of their position as local elites”.
While many may see the struggle for land reclamation by previously subjugated indigenous communities as a wholly righteous enterprise, there are many moral and practical considerations which complicate the issue with ambiguous shades of grey, which are explored within Bobrow-Strain’s ethnographic research. In an Oxfam review in 2008, Debroah Eade summed up the challenge Bobrow-Strain’s ethnographic thesis presents when she observed, “Borrow-Strain sets himself the difficult task of challenging the dualism of ‘good’ indigenous peasants with ‘bad’ ladino landowners”. Bobrow-Strain conducted extensive research by interviewing fifty landowners from four generations of the elite class. His findings through his ethnographic research brought much to light that would challenge this dualism of good and bad, even amongst many proponents of the indigenous perspective.
Perhaps the strongest of these practical considerations is the lack of experience maintaining and developing agricultural lands amongst indigenous populations of Mexico, contrasted against the inherent generational knowledge and experience of now transplanted former elite landowners. Experts in land cultivation for commercial profit, lands that were once rich in agriculture under the old regime of elite landowners, are often now planted only with corn or neglected altogether. Don Roberto, one of the former elite landowners Bobrow-Strain interviewed, reflected on the transformation of his land and that of his friends, post-indigenous land reclamation. Bobrow-Strain writes, “… the conversion of pasture to vast stretches of ‘unproductive’ wild land … symbolize the waste and devastation wrought by the transfer of land to indigenous communities after the 1994 invasions”.
Form a purely moral perspective; while many of these elite landowners had the still fresh blood of subjugation, violence and racism on their hands from their past dealings with the indigenous factions that were now rising up against them, they are still human beings with basic rights. Forcibly invading the land of these ladinos, many of which have owned these plots in their families for generations, by way of a type of Machiavellian means of violence is inherently wrong. While there may be ample justification in the motives of the EZLN, and other like minded rural activists, to regain their land and thereby dignity, achieving these aims by way of such brutal tactics in turn stains their hands with the same blood. Bobrow-Strain eloquently sums up this moral balance between the two sides when he writes, “… to replace landowners’ unmediated tale of innocence lost with a reiterated discourse of sweeping condemnation would substitute caricature for caricature …. I seek to replace the sharp dualisms of evil and good, landowner and peasant, with honest shadows."
Analysis and Evaluation
Unquestionably Bobrow-Strain’s ethnography succeeded in the main point of his thesis, showing that neither the landowners nor the peasants had the right to claim wholly righteous providence in this conflict. While he did not paint the elite landowners as sympathetic figures to be shown undue pity for their plight, Bobrow-Strain aptly demonstrated that the caricature of the evil landowner was just that. This critical view of the landowners as innocent victims of the conflict is illustrated in the passage, “I could never accept landowners’ decline as wholly unfortunate …” Through the ethnographic style of his research and documentation of his experiences with the real people embroiled in this historical conflict, Bobrow-Strain was able to lend personification to his writing detailing the landowners issues and perspective. Ultimately, he succeeded in walking the fine-line between empathy and sympathy, while remaining impartial and academically detached from the subjects of his research.
This academic detachment Aaron Bobrow-Strain was able to maintain, both during and in the eventual written accounts of his ethnographic research, is a product of his outsider’s perspective. While the author was eminently qualified to provide analysis of his subject material, having a PHD in Latin American Studies attained at the University of California, Berkeley and currently working as a professor of Political Studies at Whitman College (Aaron Bobrow-Strain, Whitman College), not being a native of Mexico with any ties or affiliations to either party in the conflict enabled this academic detachment.
From a personal perspective, I felt conflicted with my own internal cerebral and emotional reactions to this real-life conflict of the historically oppressed indigenous people of Chiapas as I read the book. Serving further proof that the author’s intent, to stimulate discourse and critical review of the events from both sides, was served. While one cannot help feeling sympathy and thereby justification for the actions of the rural activists to reclaim their ancestral lands, the accounts of the impacts and consequences of their actions on these very human landowners with families was cause for personal pause and reflection. One such passage that reflects the human reality behind the actions perpetrated against these vilified landowners reads, “The man had opened up his rich memory … his wife recounted in painful detail the violent events surrounding the invasion of their property.”
To say this ethnography was merely a socially and historically enlightening academic experience is to do the book a disservice. It was a riveting read that both engages and entertains while it educates on these important matters. The author’s first person dialogue as he navigates you through his experiences in dealing with both peasants and landowners, transports the reader to their time and place, while allowing you to feel their very real and human struggles and emotions. The author wrote the book with plain and simple language, without hiding behind academic prose, to allow the audience to feel the raw and very real lived experiences that were described within.
Conclusion
The desire to internalize simple binaries when viewing conflicts, such as good versus evil, is inherently human. As is the case with the land reclamation by the repressed poor of Chiapas pitted against the historically oppressive elite landowners of the region. However, as is invariably the case, these simple black and white binaries rarely provide a wholly accurate depiction of the events and contextual issues behind such conflicts. Aaron Bobrow-Strain’s important ethnographic research, which details the conflict from the perspective of the elite or ‘evil’ landowners, does much to restore a balanced perspective to this polarizing conflict. While certainly his documented research and analysis was not biased towards the landowners, it provided them with a voice to better understand the conflict in a more holistic way than had been predominantly presented within the public sphere previously.
References
Eade, Deborah (2008). A Review of Intimate Enemies: Landowners, Power, and Violence in Chiapas and Subcommander Marcos: The Man and the Mask. Oxfam GB, 18(3), 453-456.
Hartch, Todd (2008). A Review of Intimate Enemies: Landowners, Power, and Violence in Chiapas. The American Historical Review, 113(3), 882-883.
“Aaron Bobrow-Strain”, Whitman College, accessed June 20, 2012, http://www.whitman.edu/content/politics/faculty/aaron-bobrow-strain
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