Criminal and Citizen in Modern Mexico (review)

The construction of modern Mexico and the repeated failures to forge a truly inclusive nation can be fully understood, according to Robert Buffington, only by taking into account the enduring criminological and penological discourses of Mexican intellectuals and policymakers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this richly-documented book, Buffington argues that with the demise of legally-prescribed racial segregation after independence, the Mexican criminal justice and penal systems became the primary mechanisms to denigrate the heterogeneous lower classes and ultimately legitimize their exclusion from full involvement in national life. While exclusions based on race, gender, and class are commonplace in modern nation-state construction in the developing world, elite notions of categorized criminality became the principal, though veiled, means to define and enforce those exclusions in Mexico. Such classist, racist, and sexist criminological beliefs "represented the opaque core of the nation-building project," a core that, in supplying "a seal of legitimacy to injustice, inequality, and exploitation," assured the disenfranchisement of lower classes (p. 166).

This bold argument is articulated through seven largely freestanding chapters that illustrate various facets of Mexican elite visions of criminality from the late colonial period to the 1930s. The opening chapters, which afford an excellent discussion of the development of the diverse Mexican criminological viewpoints from the late eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries, provide a context to subsequently explore a number of topics, such as efforts to modernize criminal laws and procedures, shifting notions of judicial discretion, the connection between the criminal justice system and political legitimacy, Porfirian and revolutionary prison reform, upper- and middle class attitudes toward prostitution and homosexuality, and the convergence of anthropological and criminological discourses in the decades after the Revolution.

This sweeping examination of elite notions of criminality describes not only the changes that occurred in the shifts from liberal to positivist to revolutionary notions of lower-class crime, but also the discursive continuities that, in spite of Enlightenment and revolutionary ideals, continued to malign and marginalize people of color, women, and the poor. Mexico's elites never overcame their fears of what they perceived as the generally lawless popular groups, and the resulting anxieties shaped the exclusionary rhetoric of intellectuals and policymakers, whether Bourbon, Porfirian, or Sonoran. One notable example of this enduring construction of lower-class criminality is how positivist penal theory continued to fashion criminal codes and notions of punishment for decades after the Revolution. Buffington demonstrates that the 1929 Penal Code was based explicitly on the premises of científico criminologists and penologists, and that even the less ideological and more pragmatic code that replaced it two years later nonetheless was not shed of all its positivist trappings.

This book is largely about elite ideas, and with the exception of a chapter on divergent visions of homosexuality, the author does not examine how these beliefs were received, contested, and even possibly transformed by members of popular groups or by agents of the Mexican state. Nonetheless, this book is an important contribution to the growing literature on law, crime, and punishment in Mexico and Latin America. It offers a valuable framework both to assess the attitudes of the Mexican state in matters of criminology over an extended period and to understand elite ideological parameters that would shape subsequent interaction with popular groups. By placing notions of criminality in the mix of hegemonic discourses and linking the study of crime to larger issues and processes, Buffington has presented a compelling and heretofore little understood case for the role that criminologists and penologists played in the elite construction of identity and nation-building.