Political rhetoric often portrays Mexico as an inherently violent nation. Pablo Piccato’s essential work, now available in English for the first time, cuts through the noise to contextualize violence as a historical phenomenon. Piccato shows us that violence is not unique to Mexico but, just as anywhere else, has erupted there in many forms. Attending to multiple histories of violence, Piccato reveals how violence emerges as a resource that people mobilize to various ends—not an uncontroll...

La violencia en el México del último siglo ha tenido múltiples manifestaciones. Este libro recorre su historia, empezando por la violencia revolucionaria, y explora la agraria, la religiosa, la pistoleril, la de guerrilleros y represores y la del crimen organizado, para finalizar con la de género. Cada una de estas violencias tiene sus propias reglas y justificaciones, aunque las unen varios factores, como el acceso a las armas, la incapacidad del Estado para garantizar la justicia y la fa...

A History of Infamy explores the broken nexus between crime, justice, and truth in mid-twentieth-century Mexico. Faced with the violence and impunity that defined politics, policing, and the judicial system in post-revolutionary times, Mexicans sought truth and justice outside state institutions. During this period, criminal news and crime fiction flourished. Civil society’s search for truth and justice led, paradoxically, to the normalization of extrajudicial violence and neglect...

In the mid-to-late nineteenth century, as Mexico emerged out of decades of civil war and foreign invasion, a modern notion of honor—of one’s reputation and self-worth—became the keystone in the construction of public culture. Mexicans gave great symbolic, social, and material value to honor. Only honorable men could speak in the name of the public. Honor earned these men, and a few women, support and credit, and gave civilian politicians a claim to authority after an era dominated by milit...

In City of Suspects Pablo Piccato explores the multiple dimensions of crime in early-twentieth-century Mexico City. Basing his research on previously untapped judicial sources, prisoners’ letters, criminological studies, quantitative data, newspapers, and political archives, Piccato examines the paradoxes of repressive policies toward crime, the impact of social rebellion on patterns of common crime, and the role of urban communities in dealing with transgression on the margins of...

Éste es un libro sobre la infamia en México y, a la vez, sobre la infamia de México: al explorar diversas expresiones criminales en el país durante buena parte del siglo XX Pablo Piccato da cuenta de la forma en que se procesaban los delitos en los tribunales, en la opinión pública y en la literatura, pero además explica cómo se gestó la fama de nuestra violenta nación. Si el vínculo entre crimen, verdad y justicia es una premisa de la sociedad moderna, estas páginas muestran cómo se rompi...

Featuring the original primary research of a number of leading scholars, this innovative volume integrates gender and sexuality into the main currents of historical interpretation concerning Latin America. The book argues that gender and sexuality-rather than simply supplementing existing explanations of political, social, cultural, and economic phenomena-are central to understanding these processes. Focusing on subjects as varied as murder, motherhood and the death penalty in early Republ...