Robert M. Buffington

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.

Prohibition in the Borderlands: National Government-Border Community Relations

Borderlands are unique places and, as such, present unique problems for historians. Political boundaries frequently separate distinct economic, political, and cultural systems. When they do, typical community problems like increased demand for public services, ethnic tensions, and environmental pollution become bewilderingly complex. In recent years, borderlands scholars have frequently noted the contentious character of historical relations between border communities and national

La ‘Dancing’ Mexicana: Danzón and the Transformation of Intimacy in Post-Revolutionary Mexico City1

At first glance, the danzon craze that surrounded director Maria Novaros 1991 feature film, Danzon, is hard to explain. To dance aficionados (except perhaps those from Veracruz or Mexico City), da...

Homophobia and the Mexican Working Class, 1900–1910

In his memoirs, My Last Sigh, the Spanish emigre filmmaker Luis Bunuel recalls a newspaper story that he read just after his arrival in Mexico City in 1946: A man walks into number 39 on a certain street and asks for Senor Sanchez. The concierge replies that there is no Sanchez in his building, but that he might inquire at number 41. The man goes to number 41 and asks for Sanchez, but the concierge there replies that Sanchez lives at number 39, and that the first concierge must have been mistaken. The man returns to number 39 and tells the concierge what number 41 said, whereupon the concierge asks him to wait a moment, goes into another room, comes back with a revolver, and shoots the visitor. (207)

Contention and the Dynamics of Inequality in Mexico, 1910–2010Contention and the Dynamics of Inequality in Mexico, 1910–2010, by Brachet-MárquezViviane. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

One of the often unrecognized strengths of Mexican social science, especially sociology and sub-disciplines like criminology, is an eclectic approach to theoretical models that might lack the analytical elegance of grand theory but more than compensates in explanatory power and empirical richness. This is certainly the case with Viviane BrachetMárquez’s Contention and Dynamics of Inequality in Mexico, 1910–2010. Indeed, theoretical eclecticism is at the core of this thoughtful, important book on the intersection of contentious politics and social inequality in Mexico since the 1910 Revolution. The book’s major theoretical contribution, carefully developed in the first and last chapters, is a convincing revision of contention theory, associated primarily with Charles Tilly and developed ‘‘as a generalizable form of social conflict’’ (McAdam et al. 2001:3). While Brachet-Márquez accepts many of the basic precepts of contention theory, including its focus on public collective actions in support of political demands, she takes issue with its claim that contention ‘‘can be expressed in terms of ‘mechanisms’ [brokerage, diffusion, coordinated action, etc.] recurring in different combinations, some of which are identical or very similar, and have the same immediate consequences.’’ The fractal quality of this proposition, which theoretically conflates the central function of mechanisms in smalland largescale contentions, isn’t the problem. Instead, Brachet-Márquez takes issue with classic contention theory’s refusal to sufficiently account for either agency or contingency. ‘‘When we observe a contention process,’’ she argues, ‘‘we are . . . not testing the function of a set of known mechanisms unfolding in predictable ways, but investigating the strategies selected by contendents . . . [a process] inevitably fraught with unintended consequences and inappropriate resolutions induced by poor judgment or structural pressures’’ (pp. 178–179). To address what she sees as the principal weaknesses in contention theory, BrachetMárquez turns to theories of structuration and to her own previous work on the pacts of domination that sustain social inequality in Latin America and elsewhere. Anthony Giddens’s work on the role of agency in social change supports her argument about the importance of ‘‘reflexivity’’ in the responses of actors to their lived experiences. She tempers Giddens’s optimistic account of individual agency with William Sewell Jr.’s work on the ‘‘schemas’’ that enable social life, determine access to resources, and constrain individual and collective agency. Taken together, these theories of agency and structuration allow her to reconceive the concept of mechanism as ‘‘the dynamic principle that impels the turning point in a process of contention and reflects the capacity of conscious and reflexive contending agents to use or invent resources to achieve their ends’’ (p. 34). Her own work on the pact of domination—’’understood less as a formal contract than an implicit agreement, on a daily practical basis, to accept the rules that distribute power and resources unequally’’—adds a macroanalytic level to contention theory. Here, she highlights the centrality of the State—considered just another contendent by Tilly and other analysts—’’as a set of coordinating mechanisms enforcing those terms of the pact that are factually valid at any given historical juncture, generally through its legal authority and coercive power, but also through its infrastructural and ideological powers, and through its capacity to mediate conflict’’ (p. 35). Combining the insights of these three theoretical models, Brachet-Márquez develops a hybrid theory of contention and concludes that: ‘‘contentious politics, the ubiquitous and daily process of social conflict confronting actors with rival distributive claims over positions of power and/or resources, is the historical process of structuration of inequality which shapes, reproduces, modifies, or destroys (from above or Reviews 151

90.00 cloth. ISBN: 9781107063310.

and found. Pilgrims’ narratives collected at the shrine recount both individual miracles and more widely known mythic tales. These stories, repeated over generations, speak to diseases, stresses and injuries related to the pilgrims’ poverty, poor sanitation, and hard manual labor. The stories, the pilgrims’ socially marginal lives, and their frequent recourse to St. Francis of the Wounds, join them together, King suggests, in a shared world, as participants in a collective spiritual community, which she refers to as “the nation of St. Francis.” This phrase denotes their adherence to a form of folk Catholicism that lies outside the institutional Catholic Church and relies on worship in the home and belief in the efficacy of the saints rather than on the formal priesthood and rites of the Church. King claims that this constitutes a form of “silent rebellion” against the Catholic religious hierarchy and against the pilgrims’ conditions of poverty and marginalization.

Searching for Madre Matiana: Prophecy and Popular Culture in Modern Mexico by Edward Wright-Rios (review)

El presente trabajo examina la evolucion del discurso sobre la reforma carcelaria mexicana a partir de mediados del siglo XIX hasta el Congreso Constituyente de 1916-17. Reconoce que se da una fuerte continuidad en el discurso sobre la reforma carcelaria de las elites mexicanas, en particular su preocupacion acerca de la criminalidad de las clases bajas. Al mismo tiempo reconoce los esfuerzos de los revolucionarios por poner un freno al abuso potencial del poder ejecutivo al negar a Carranza un sistema penitenciario controlado desde el centro, descentralizando asi los medios de represion.