Crime and Punishment in Late Colonial Mexico City, 1692-1810 (review)

Crime and Punishment in Late Colonial Mexico City, 1692–1810. By Gabriel Haslip-Viera. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999. xii + 193 pp., introduction, maps, tables, bibliography, index. $49.95 cloth.)

Gabriel Haslip-Viera states two objectives for this study of crime and punishment in Mexico City. First, he seeks to “determine the nature of urban criminality by focusing on the social and economic factors that contributed to the emergence of a criminal class”; second, he wants “to explore . . . the manner in which urban colonial society reacted to the reality of crime” (2). For the first objective his “factors” are poverty, dislocation, low status, and insecurity, but it is not clear how these necessarily explain the “the nature of urban criminality.” Some of his cases, for example, show fairly comfortable plebes seeking to achieve what he calls upward mobility. The second objective, to explore reactions to crime, is concerned with “elitist attitudes toward crime,” attempts to control crime, and “the development of mechanisms and institutions designed to maintain public order . . .” To data gathered from Mexico City archives Haslip-Viera says he will “apply some of the concepts advanced in the current sociological literature” (3).

Crime and Punishment divides into five chapters that deal with “society and the urban environment,” the system of criminal justice, “crime and social disorder,” the processing of criminals through the stages of “arrest, incarceration, trial, and sentencing,” and “punishments and corrections.” A brief conclusion compares Mexico City with London, Madrid, and Paris and, with reference to some works on social deviance, asks “if crime played an important functional role” in Mexico City.

The author, having mined archives in Mexico City “from the late 1970s to the early 1990s,” repeatedly invokes his sources as authorities as if they stood outside his selection, organization, and assignment of meaning to them. He uses such stock phrases as “the documentary evidence for this period clearly suggests,” “there is considerable evidence to believe that,” “the documentary evidence indicates,” all of which can be found on one page (99). The positivistic style, possibly imported from the discipline of sociology, marks the book as an artifact of the late 1970s when it was completed as a doctoral dissertation.

And so does Haslip-Viera’s use of secondary sources. True, a selection of published work from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s is included in the bibliography. R. Douglas Cope, for example, along with Susan Deans-Smith, Louisa Schell Hoberman, Teresa Lozano Armendares, and Silvia M. Arrom are there. And so are Arlette Farge and Mary Elizabeth Perry and Anne J. Cruz, but not Juan Pedro Viqueira Albán, Cheryl Martín, or Eric Van Young, and not a single dissertation in the list postdates the author’s own. Haslip-Viera occasionally cites recent scholarship for its data but seems unaffected by the turn toward the so-called new cultural history that such works represent.

Returning to the author’s first objective cited above, Haslip-Viera assumes that “social and economic factors,” or more bluntly, poverty and misery, “contributed to the emergence of a criminal class.” But the connection is implicit. He uses categories such as “poor” or “criminal” but fails to explore the range of meanings for such terms or the degree to which they might have been contested. In the end we are left still wanting to know the exact connection between poverty and crime. We want to see how petty criminals or the poor more generally differentiate themselves from one another. We wonder if they developed a code of honor and a modus operandi? Did they protect each other with a secret argot? How did they react when stigmatized by epithets and gestures implying racial inferiority or character defects? Did they accept a standard European distinction between the “deserving” poor—children, widows, the elderly, and the infirm—and the “undeserving” or able-bodied poor?

Haslip-Viera seems uninterested in such insider views of the...