Articulations of rule: landowners, revolution, and territory in Chiapas, Mexico 1920–1962

This article examines struggles over the spaces of landed property in north-central Chiapas. Engaging the work of Mexico's ‘new cultural history’ and geographic theorizing of the entanglements of space, hegemony, and territoriality, it argues against widespread representations of Chiapan landowners maintaining autonomous domains of domination ‘untouched’ by the Mexican Revolution. Rather, the contours of landed property were made and remade through the complex articulation of landowner, state, and indigenous territorialities. Based on this analysis, it concludes that territoriality—as the diverse constellation of social–spatial practices through which space is bounded and these boundings sedimented with meanings—is both a central arena through which hegemony operates and a constant outcome of those struggles.