Most people in Chiapas will tell you that the struggle has always been for land. Although the Zapatista National Liberation Army demanded democracy, housing, schools, hospitals, roads, and an end to NAFTA, at the center of the movement was the demand for land. This is a book about the bad guys in that struggle, about the people who had the land, and about how they lost it in the four years following the 1994 uprising.

The book is lyrically written, theoretically rich, and very interesting. It tells a story that has not been told before, and it challenges some deeply held conceptions of the history of land in Chiapas. For those who study Chiapas, it will immediately become an indispensable text. For those who study land, peasants, and agriculture—anywhere—this book makes clear that the other side of the story is part of the story itself. How the struggle for land shapes the landowners, and constitutes them as subjects, is as central to the study of rural political economy as the study of peasants.

Mostly it is a sad book. The question Aaron Bobrow-Strain asks is why, in the years following the Zapatista uprising, despite threats and bluster to the contrary, did many Chiapas landowners give up their land without a fight, passive and resigned to their fate? The answer, he says, is complicated, bound up with the history of peasant–landowner relations and with the way landowner identities were constituted through interactions with the state that was supposed to protect them, and with the peasants who were their intimate enemies.

The story he tells is a fascinating account of landowner struggles in Chiapas, pieced together from archives and other primary sources that seem not to have been used before to this end. It will come as a surprise to many that the Mexican government has not always been responsive to landowner demands, and that even the Chiapas government does not always form a monolithic front with Chiapas landowners. There are splits within the familia chiapaneca, as the landowner-government nexus that is purported to control money and political power in Chiapas has long been called. Or maybe the familia chiapaneca is itself vulnerable. Either of these interpretations challenges common conceptions of politics in Mexico's southernmost state.

Bobrow-Strain starts the story in Mexico's Liberal era. In 1850, the Mexican state had two goals for Chiapas: modernization and governance. Both goals involved agricultural production and close ties with the landowners who often did the work of governing: counting people and extracting taxes. The first wave of landed elites was drawn by sugar cane and coffee, in tight connection. The sugar cane produced sugar, but it was also turned into alcohol, and the alcohol was used to secure a labor force for the coffee plantations. Peasants were tied to land, and to landowners, through debt peonage. Landowners promoted alcoholism as a way of increasing debts that would keep a peasant and his family indentured for generations.

By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the Chiapas state government would start to challenge the system that kept workers hostage on highland estates instead of freeing them for wage labor on lowland coffee plantations. Highland landowners resisted such challenges and were mainly able to subvert the intentions of the state, maintaining systems of debt servitude well into the 1940s and 1950s and in some cases even into the 1980s. Nevertheless, the never-ending struggle to keep a labor force is central to understanding how landowners are simultaneously constituted by the state, by the market, by labor, and by labor resistance.

Bobrow-Strain focuses next on the Mexican Revolution, arguing forcefully that the established consensus—that the revolution, and revolutionary land reform, never reached Chiapas—is wrong. He argues instead that landowners appropriated the revolution in order to maintain and extend their control over land and labor. But by appropriating the discourse of agrarian reform and social justice, they “increasingly found themselves forced to shore up their crumbling authority with substantial concessions to a peasantry also empowered by state practices” (p. 81). The revolution played an important role in defining the limits of land ownership, even in Chiapas.

As the twentieth century progressed, liberation theology, Maoist sympathizers, urban activists, ejido unions, opposition parties, and even the ruling party itself would add further to the burdens afflicting the landed elite. Starting in the 1960s and 1970s, landowners in Chiapas have been rocked by peasant opposition, insubordination, and violent revolt. The paternalistic ties that bound peasants and landowners have been shattered.

For much of that time, it looked as though the landowners were winning. They had vigilante armies, soldiers and policemen, and allies in government. They perpetrated massacres, they assassinated individual peasant leaders, and they intimidated resistors. They also had the means to buy off some peasant groups, sowing confusion and undercutting peasant solidarity.

In fact, as Bobrow-Strain shows, they were losing. Individual victories added up to cumulative defeats. Even as landowners successfully defended particular pieces of property against land-invading peasants, they were met by a government eager to secure quiescence and support in the countryside. Trying to shore up support on all sides, government bureaucracies would give away the same piece of land over and over again, ignore landowner certificates of exemption from land redistribution in order to placate peasant demands, and overlook peasant claims to a particular piece of land in order to issue certificates of exemption they knew would not stand (p. 137). Peasants were pummeled but so, in a way, were landowners.

Which brings us to the crux of why this is a sad book. There are no winners here. After 1994, the landowners gave up the land without much resistance because they had lost the support of the government, and because coffee and cattle ranching can no longer support their families. Agricultural production has ceased to be an important and productive part of the Mexican economy, shattering the moral framework that sustained landowners' identities as productive Mexican citizens.

The defeat of the landowners does not signal a victory for the peasants, however. For a government that has signed on to the neoliberal policy prescriptions of NAFTA, agricultural production on small family-owned farms is an economic anachronism. The future of Mexico is tied to liberalization, immigration, and international trade. The government is therefore willing to redistribute land, to buy peasant support, and to mollify indigenous activists, because the land is worth nothing. The peasants can have the land.