Pablo Piccato

City of Suspects: Crime in Mexico City, 1900–1931

In City of Suspects Pablo Piccato explores the multiple dimensions of crime in early-twentieth-century Mexico City. Basing his research on previously untapped judicial sources, prisoners’ letters, criminological studies, quantitative data, newspapers, and political archives, Piccato examines the paradoxes of repressive policies toward crime, the impact of social rebellion on patterns of common crime, and the role of urban communities in dealing with transgression on the margins of the judical system. By investigating postrevolutionary examples of corruption and organized crime, Piccato shines light on the historical foundations of a social problem that remains the main concern of Mexico City today. Emphasizing the social construction of crime and the way it was interpreted within the moral economy of the urban poor, he describes the capital city during the early twentieth century as a contested territory in which a growing population of urban poor had to negotiate the use of public spaces with more powerful citizens and the police. Probing official discourse on deviance, Piccato reveals how the nineteenth-century rise of positivist criminology—which asserted that criminals could be readily distinguished from the normal population based on psychological and physical traits—was used to lend scientific legitimacy to class stratifications and to criminalize working-class culture. Furthermore, he argues, the authorities’ emphasis on punishment, isolation, and stigmatization effectively created cadres of professional criminals, reshaping crime into a more dangerous problem for all inhabitants of the capital. This unique investigation into crime in Mexico City will interest Latin Americanists, sociologists, and historians of twentieth-century Mexican history.

The tyranny of opinion : honor in the construction of the Mexican public sphere

In the mid-to-late nineteenth century, as Mexico emerged out of decades of civil war and foreign invasion, a modern notion of honor—of one’s reputation and self-worth—became the keystone in the construction of public culture. Mexicans gave great symbolic, social, and material value to honor. Only honorable men could speak in the name of the public. Honor earned these men, and a few women, support and credit, and gave civilian politicians a claim to authority after an era dominated by military heroism. Tracing how notions of honor changed in nineteenth-century Mexico, Pablo Piccato examines legislation, journalism, parliamentary debates, criminal defamation cases, personal stories, urban protests, and the rise and decline of dueling in the 1890s. He highlights the centrality of notions of honor to debates over the nature of Mexican liberalism, describing how honor helped to define the boundaries between public and private life; balance competing claims of free speech, public opinion, and the protection of individual reputations; and motivate politicians, writers, and other men to enter public life. As Piccato explains, under the authoritarian rule of Porfirio Diaz, the state became more active in the protection of individual reputations. It implemented new restrictions on the press. This did not prevent people from all walks of life from defending their honor and reputations, whether in court or through violence. The Tyranny of Opinion is a major contribution to a new understanding of Mexican political history and the evolution of Mexican civil society.

Public sphere in Latin America: a map of the historiography

Abstract “Public sphre” is often used by historians of modern Latin America without much concern about its theoretical and methodological implications. Some historians have used it as a model to fit evidence about public debates and politics during the modern period, yet few have engaged it as a theory with deeper methodological and conceptual implications. This article will review the historical literature that has applied Habermass ideas to Latin American history. Focusing on a few particularly important books, the article will examine potential avenues for research and comparisons. Rather than becoming a new orthodoxy for the study of the region, the theory of the public sphere is establishing a dialogue among historians interested in intellectual phenomena and political discourse (most of them centered on the history of liberalism after independence) and those historians whose interest in social formations have framed their study in terms of hegemony and class domination. The article will argue that a critical use of Habermass ideas (one that is more systematic about the gender and class exclusions built into the bourgeois public sphere, and that problematizes the connections between the specific development of capitalism in peripheral regions and their embrace of European political traditions) could yield useful results in terms of new research and an inclusive synthesis of recent literature interested in politics, culture and hegemony in Latin America.

A Historical Perspective on Crime in Twentieth-Century Mexico City

This paper is an overview of perceptions of crime in Mexico City during the twentieth century. After a brief review of quantitative evidence and the main sources on crime, the paper surveys police and judicial corruption as the common denominator of public perceptions of crime, punishment, and the judiciary. The paper then discusses gender violence and juvenile delinquency as two criminal practices that have characterized the impact of crime in everyday life. Based on a review of evidence about areas of the city commonly associated with crime, the paper concludes with a discussion of the reactions of urban communities and civil society against crime.

Tales of two women: the narrative construal of porfirian reality.

It was the perfect murder, really. Illicit passions: two beautiful women-of-the-night feuding over a dashing young rake, a masked ball, casual taunts, thwarted assaults, escalating threats. Heinous crime: the lovers borrowed gun, midnight bordello visit, fighting words, a gun shot, a maids scream, a young womans tragic death. Cruel punishment: suicidal remorse (by some accounts), humiliating public trial, twenty lost years (the maximum sentence for a woman) in Mexico Citys squalid Belem jail. The Tarasquillo Street murder had it all! And so it happened that, in an era enamored of all things French, Mexico City had its very own cause celebre . A scant twelve years earlier, professional francophile and amateur criminologist Rafael Zayas de Enriquez had devoted an entire volume of his Fisiologia del crimen to notorious foreign criminals like Alfonse Dupont, the hunchbacked wife-killer, and Charles Guiteau, the deranged assassin of President Garfield. Now, Mexico too could claim a prominent place in the international annals of infamous crime.

Comments: How to Build a Perspective on the Recent Past

The contemporary historiography on Mexico has developed in the last decade beyond journalism, political fiction and testimonio. Fourteen years ago Stephen Niblo noted the ‘barren historiographical landscape’ on Mexico after 1940. Today that is clearly not the case. New studies are emerging that make systematic use of archives, combine local, national and international frameworks and drastically revise the interpretations inherited from social sciences on the political changes that led to the defeat of the PRI in the elections of 2000. A large part of the impulse for this innovation comes from the determination, among historians and other users of those archives, to find the truth about the abuses of an authoritarian regime that tried to resist opposition with extralegal means. Perhaps because of that imperative, and the inevitable proximity of events and people from that recent past, the historiographical landscape still lacks a paradigmatic interpretive framework—which might not be such a bad thing, after all. Before turning to the documents and interpretations presented in this issue, these comments will point to some historiographical themes and works relevant for the interpretations they propose but also as examples of the difficulties involved in writing the history of the pasado inmediato and uncovering some painful aspects of that past. As Alfonso Reyes wrote, a few years after the end of the Revolution, ‘Recent history is always the least appreciated’. In part, he thought, because it was difficult, if not impossible, to establish a single acceptable perspective: ‘A certain amount of ingratitude always accompanies progress’. This was inevitable for him given the cost of the revolution for his family and the success it brought him. Several schools of interpretation about the regime that emerged out of the 1910 Revolution provide the basic framework to understand the changes since 1940. The traditional approach centres on the institutional and social structure consolidated under President Lázaro Cárdenas from the blueprint of the 1917 Constitution. The last years of that system are explained in terms of the arch from authoritarian corporatism to the partial transition to democracy under a weakened presidentialist regime. These accounts, many of them written by political scientists, are based on newspapers, official publications and interviews with important actors. Although many of them were conceived and published before 2000, they still provide a good framework to enclose the sixty years after 1940 in which the familia revolucionaria, the close-knit political elite, took a turn to the right but maintained the structures of political control that secured stability and capitalist development. A variation of this interpretation would place the arrival of neoliberalism, particularly with the government of Miguel de la Madrid (1982–1988) as the true end of the system, rather than the electoral victories of the PAN. Studies of state formation published after the 1990s focused on the process of state building, and presented alternatives in terms of interpretation and method up to the

Conversación con los difuntos: una perspectiva mexicana ante el debate sobre la historia cultural

This article discusses the debate around the cultural history of Mexico that took place in several academic forums in the United States and in The Hispanic American Historical Review in 1999. In order to understand the reasons why that debate has not had similar repercussions in Mexico, the article looks at the cultural history practiced by Edmundo O’Gorman during the second half of the twentieth century. From the influence of historicism in Mexico there is an emergence of several specific notions about the meaning of culture and identity, which need to be reviewed with the goal of establishing a common vocabulary and a productive dialogue between the historiographies produced in both countries.

Interpretations of Sexuality in Mexico City Prisons

Between 1906 and 1912, Carlos Roumagnac published three books about Mexican criminals based on interviews with inmates of the prisons of Belem and San Lazaro, in Mexico City (Los criminates en-Mexico; Crimenes sexuales y pasionales; Matadores de mujeres ). The books attracted an audience that went beyond the narrow circles of social scientists and, in recent years, have become important documents for our knowledge of everyday life in late Porfirian Mexico. These detailed accounts of inmates’ words and deeds exercise a strong attraction because of the rich information they contain and because of their author’s ability to condense the ambivalent gaze of criminology toward the everyday life of the urban poor. Roumagnac and other criminologists explored urban life looking for “the criminal”—that creature imagined by the Italian positivist master Cesare Lombroso as the product of immorality and racial backwardness. In Mexico City, amateurs and professionals of criminology, such as Federico Gamboa, Miguel Macedo, and Julio Guerrero, described and speculated about the dark corners of a city that was growing out of the control of Porfirian urban planners and policemen. Criminology provided a scientific vocabulary to document the fascinated wanderings of modern flaneurs and customary patrons of the city’s seedy night life (Piccato, “Construccion”).

Crime, Truth, and Justice in Modern Mexico: Notes for a National History

With this lecture by Pablo Piccato, The Americas continues its collaboration with the New School for Social Research to publish its annual Lecture in Latin American History. The series features lectures by senior historians in the field of Latin American history across an array of topics. This is the fifth in the series.

Laws of Chance: Brazil's Clandestine Lottery and the Making of Urban Public Life

coalition. Consequently, González Videla tends to stand alone at the heart of the narrative as responsible for events in 1947, and the timing and personal reasons for his anti-communist turn take on a disproportionate importance. This is a contradiction that stems from the way in which the book’s analysis of domestic political history takes place almost exclusively from the sources and perspectives of left and working-class political actors. Consequently, the opinions and visions of elites and the middle class – including white-collar workers and centre and right-wing politicians – are little examined. Yet, as the author acknowledges, they constituted an integral part of the Popular Front coalition. Similarly, the book puts forward a rather romantic conception of labour and leftist political organizing, which tends to downplay the more violent and unsavoury side of union politics and leave insufficiently explored the struggles for power and control among coalition members, notably the great animosity between the Communist and Socialist parties and the unions affiliated to them. Bringing these elements nearer the centre of the analysis would most probably reinforce the author’s arguments rather than undermine them, and such a move would certainly throw more light on the domestic roots of the anti-communist policies of 1947. Despite these weaknesses, the book gains momentum over time, moving away from very detailed narrative towards a far more focused analysis that engages with the historiography of modern Chile, and Latin America more widely. It would perhaps have been interesting to have had an even broader comparative context – one thinks of the role of coal mining unions in the rise of the British Labour party and its victory following the end of the Second World War. Nevertheless, Mining for the Nation is a well-researched and innovative study of Chile’s coal mining region and of the role played by labour organizations and leftist parties in the struggles for democratic and social reform in the 1930s and 1940s; a comprehensive account of the Popular Front years; and an important contribution to the twentieth-century history of Chile.