Criminal and Citizen in Modern Mexico - Hardcover

Buffington, Robert M.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0803213026 ISBN 13: 9780803213029

Publisher: University of Nebraska Press, 2000

Synopsis

"Criminal and Citizen in Modern Mexico" explores elite notions of crime and criminality from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. In Mexico these notions represented contested areas of the social terrain, places where generalised ideas about criminality transcended the individual criminal act to intersect with larger issues of class, race, gender, and sexuality. It was at this intersection that modern Mexican society bared its soul. Attitudes toward race amalgamation and 'indios', lower-class lifestyles and 'leperos', women and sexual deviance, all influenced perceptions of criminality and ultimately determined the fundamental issue of citizenship: who belonged and who did not. The liberal discourse of toleration and human rights, the positivist discourse of order and progress, the revolutionary discourse of social justice and integration sought in turn to disguise the exclusions of modern Mexican society behind a veil of criminality - to proscribe as criminal those activities that criminologists, penologists, and anthropologists clearly linked to marginalized social groups. This book attempts to lift that veil and to gaze, like Jose Guadalupe Posada, at the grinning 'calavera' that it shields. Robert M. Buffington is an assistant professor of history at Bowling Green State University.

About this title

Review:

"Buffington's carefully wrought analysis of nineteenth- and twentieth-century works on criminology, penology and anthropology vividly conveys how Mexican elites viewed the habits, morals and capabilities of subordinate groups, especially the urban poor, in relation to the modern nation state they hoped to create." -- TLS, August 11, 2000

"These seven essays address the "dark and often deliberately hidden side" of Mexico's project of modern nation building. . . A well-selected, thought-provoking collection of essays . . . " -- British Bulletin of Publications on Latin America, April 2000

About the Author:

Robert M. Buffington is an assistant professor of history at Bowling Green State University.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0803213026
• ISBN 13: 9780803213029
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 239