Author Description

This book explores a much-neglected field in the contemporary history of Chiapas. Land reform is generally believed to have played only a minor role in this state and in debates on the Zapatista uprising of 1994, the lack of land reform typically features as one of the root causes. This book tells a different story. Drawing on detailed archival work and ethnography for one of Chiapas' least studied indigenous regions, it shows that land redistribution has been considerable in scale and had profound consequences. By promoting the formation of ejido-communities at the expense of private estates from the 1930s onwards, land reform dramatically reduced the amount of land in non-indigenous hands. Land invasions in the wake of the Zapatista uprising completed this process. Gaining Ground also traces one of the principal routes of state formation in eastern Chiapas. It argues that land reform drew the indigenous population closer to the state, but also laid the foundations for their resistance to state control and the assertion of local autonomy.