Criminal and Citizen in Modern Mexico - Softcover

Buffington, Robert M.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0803261594 ISBN 13: 9780803261594

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 generalized 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 léperos, 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 José Guadalupe Posada, at the grinning calavera that it shields.

About this title

About the Author:

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

Review:

"What Buffington has given us is an interesting view of intellectuals' ideas about crime and Mexican society. It gives us an important critical lens to examine elites's visions of their society."-Joel Horowitz, Latin American Research Review -- Joel Horowitz Latin American Research Review

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0803261594
• ISBN 13: 9780803261594
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 239