Criminal and Citizen in Modern Mexico (review)

The title of this book is somewhat misleading, for it is less about criminals and citizenship than about how elites viewed crime and punishment. Robert Buffington analyzes over a dozen texts published from the 1780s to the 1940s. These include works by writers he labels "classic criminologists," like Manuel de Lardizabal, Hipólito Villarroel, José María Luis Mora, Mariano Otero, and Antonio María de Castro, as well as by "scientific criminologists" like Rafael de Zayas Enríquez, Fernando Martínez Baca, Miguel Vergara, Miguel Macedo, Julio Guerrero, and Carlos Roumagnac. A final chapter shows how Manuel Gamio and other early twentieth-century anthropologists who studied rural Indians shared many assumptions and research methods with criminologists who studied the urban poor.

The book provides a valuable intellectual history of Mexican criminology. It charts the rise of criminology as a professional field. It analyzes how writers from different periods viewed the causes of criminal behavior and the nature of effective punishment. It explores their discussions of changes in the 1871 and 1931 Penal Codes and their proposals for prison reform. Two fascinating chapters, largely based on Roumagnac's case studies, portray female offenders and homosexuals whose "deviant" sexuality supposedly led them to a life of crime.

The long time period covered by the book is a source of strength. Buffington notes some gradual shifts in the discourse about criminality. The older view of criminal behavior as irrational was increasingly supplanted by a belief in the social and environmental causes of crime. The emphasis on rehabilitation grew. So did the discretion theoretically permitted judges in assigning penalties. Yet the author's most significant finding is how little changed from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries. Buffington shows that, although rhetorical styles differed in different periods, the elite disdain for the urban poor persisted. The new scientific terminology only thinly disguised traditional prejudices of class, race, and gender. Judicial criteria consistently favored the "honor" of "good" families. And the earliest writer, Lardizabal, already displayed an environmental view of crime and called for prison reform to rehabilitate prisoners.

The comparisons with European criminology are also valuable. Instead of blindly copying foreign ideas, the Mexican writers selected bits and pieces from competing continental theories. For example, if many accepted links between criminality and physical deformities, few Mexicans assumed that all non-whites were inherently prone to crime, an admission that would have meant giving up on the majority of their countrymen. Instead they focused on those who were ignorant, alcoholic, lazy, unemployed (the beggars and vagrants), and "depraved" (such as oversexed women and homosexual men).

This book fails, however, when it attempts to explain "the delimitation of the boundaries of national citizenship" (p. 8). Although most criminals may have been excluded from full citizenship, it is difficult to sustain Buffington's view that "the opposition of criminal and citizen . . . became the fundamental dichotomy within modern Mexican society" (p. 4). Many other groups, such as children, women, and, at various times, illiterates, servants, and vagrants were also denied full civic rights. Their exclusion was not always cloaked "behind a veil of criminality" (p. 8), as Buffington claims. Indeed, it is unclear what he means by the term "citizen." He ignores suffrage laws that might have some bearing on the definition of citizenship. He asserts that by constructing the Indian as "the Other," anthropologists helped keep Indians from actively participating in the nation--even though the anthropologists he studies wrote precisely around the time when Indians gained new civic rights, as the Revolutionary state awarded suffrage to all men and incorporated peasants into the body politic through the corporate party of the PRM.

In short, the history of Mexican citizenship still remains to be written. So does the legal history of crime, for Buffington does not systematically analyze the penal codes or indicate how they differed...