City of Suspects: Crime in Mexico City, 1900-1931 (review)

Many recent cultural histories of Latin America have focused on the contentious and negotiated character of everyday social realities. They emphasize that the poor and marginalized majority in society have resisted and effectively limited elite initiatives and thereby played significant roles in the process of defining the meanings of key cultural and political institutions. In this historiographical vein, Pablo Piccato studies crime and punishment to understand how views and values of the authorities and lower classes conflicted and to create a rich, detailed cultural history of early twentieth-century Mexico City. City of Suspects is analytically innovative, magnificently researched, and full of fascinating cases that bring the reader inside the homes, minds, and hearts of the urban poor.

Pablo Piccato vividly creates a tale of two cities at the turn of the century: the minority, Porfirian elites, attempted to build a modern and ordered ideal city, while the majority, the urban poor, struggled to maintain the ways of their "everyday city." Because modern transportation brought rural migrants and urban poor to all parts of the city and because the wealthy were unable to tolerate the presence and practices of the dirty and undisciplined poor (practices such as public drinking, begging, elimination, and sexual intimacy), authorities enlisted the police and positivist science to try to keep the elites separate from these people who refused to conform. Mexican criminologists developed a science to connect race and poverty to cultural backwardness and deviance and to justify exclusion, segregation, and inequality, but their efforts largely failed as the majority poor continued to contest and limit elite programs. In considering crime and criminals, for instance, Piccato argues that the lower classes founded their communities on their own code of honor and justice, one that was often at odds with official laws. Elites denounced violence among the poor as crude and barbaric, but, as police records and court testimonies show, nonelites generally fought one another for purposes of defending integrity and respectability, and followed specific rules of behavior in their confrontations, much as elites did in their duels. The expectation for men to uphold their honor and to keep women submissive, however, also encouraged and excused male violence against women. Close-knit communities distrusted police and the judicial system and preferred to resolve these and other crimes themselves, without outside intervention.

Before and after the revolution, Piccato asserts, authorities used class and racial characteristics to create a profile of the modern criminal thief, the ratero, for the purposes of rounding up suspects and sending them to lives of hard labor on penal colonies, far away from the "modern" city. But well-connected criminals, especially those in organized gangs, were able to purchase protection and privileges from poorly paid authorities. Profiling and corruption only created greater popular suspicion of police and government officials. Piccato also argues that prisoners became politically active in the postrevolutionary period, organizing unions and demanding (and sometimes effecting) improvements in prison conditions. The revolution, according to the author, had a much more direct impact on practices and perceptions of punishment than it did on crime itself.

Piccato has combed through a staggering quantity of evidence, much of it previously unexplored, in his efforts to understand a vast array of social and political perspectives. His sources include police and court records, criminal and victim testimonies, scientific and criminological literature, government policy debates, penal codes, official newspapers, popular press accounts, as well as novels, plays, and poetry. Piccato does not sensationalize crime nor glorify violence, but narrates countless colorful and fascinating cases that glue readers' eyes to the pages and offer deep insights into the cultural and social meanings of crime and violence for those most directly involved—the offenders, victims, and neighbors. On occasion, the author's conclusions overstep the available evidence. For example, long...