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Preface Ostensibly concerned with banditry and culture in Mexico, this study is, above all else, a narrative about the struggles of oppressed people for justice, dignity, and redemption. For more than a hundred years, Mexican and foreign elites waged war in Mexico to secure their access to power, privilege, and wealth. They glossed their behavior with stirring rhetoric, appeals to patriotism and destiny, and the assertion of moral principles. At the end of the day, however, their conduct resembled little more than banditry organized on a massive scale. Yet they are not remembered as such, for among the perquisites of victory is the right of the winners to demonize their opponents and to decide who among them is or is not a bandit. Most often, the Mexican and foreign elites pinned the label of “bandit” on lower-class outlaws and rebels who resisted exploitation and oppression—not merely because most bandits emerged from among the poor, but also because these elites generally assumed that plebeian Mexicans were prone to criminal activity. It is small wonder, therefore, that lower-class Mexicans, when confronting systematic social injustice, often identified with bandits in popular culture as heroes who opposed the excesses committed by social superiors. This is not to assert that all bandits, or even most of them, were in fact popular champions; it is to recognize and understand the class-based character of banditry and the narratives that foreigners and Mexicans created about it in the decades that spanned the achievement of Mexican independence and the outbreak of the revolution. Today in contemporary Mexico, many of these bandit-heroes live on in popular memory, and some are now lauded as national heroes by a state eager to maintain legitimacy in the eyes of the people. This is not a uniquely Mexican phenomenon. Perhaps like most other children in the English-speaking world, I first encountered the figure of the bandit in the form of the Robin Hood myth. I knew the name even before I understood what it represented, for in Canada the imagined Anglo-Saxon profile of this legendary outlaw was, and still is, emblazoned on the packages of every product sold by Robin Hood Multifoods Inc.1 There is a curious juxtaposition between, on the one hand, the mythical reputation of an outlaw who robbed from the rich and gave to the poor, and on the other, the marketing strategies of a corporation devoted to acquiring profit by exploiting labor and accumulating capital. But this illustrates well how the elites can maintain hegemony by appropriating and co-opting elements of oppositional popular culture. Most readers will probably be able to identify similar examples from their own experience, for this dynamic—the production of bandit-heroes in popular culture and their appropriation by the dominant culture—operates in almost every society. At the same time, this strategy can have the unintended consequence of helping to preserve in popular memory a narrative that—at historical moments when social tensions are sharp and conflictive—authorizes banditry as a form of rebellion. This, for example, is what lent such resonance to ballads such as Woody Guthrie’s “Pretty Boy Floyd,” which, in the midst of the Great Depression of the 1930s, celebrated the exploits of an outlaw who provided “Christmas dinner / For the families on relief.”2 This logic continues to operate to this day. The corporate-run television and cinematic industries in North America profit from dramas that feature outlaws and antiheroes; but these coexist and compete with more-critical narratives that continue to circulate. Even as I was researching this book, Billy Bragg and Wilco released a critically acclaimed compact disc that featured another Woody Guthrie bandit ballad, “The Unwelcome Guest,” while author Peter Carey won the Booker Prize for his novel about the legendary nineteenth-century Australian bandit Ned Kelly.3 None of this would exist or have any particular appeal if, at some level, people did not feel the need for a Robin Hood. Preface viii ...

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