Crime and Punishment in Late Colonial Mexico City, 1692-1810

Abstract

This book offers a pithy summary of crime and law as social practice in late colonial Mexico City. Excellent studies exist for rural crime, Indian responses to legal administration, and urban elite society in colonial Latin America in general, but studies of urban crime are scant; in fact, social history of crime has been understudied for colonial Mexico, with most scholarship focusing on jurisprudence or the Inquisition. Gabriel Haslip-Viera focuses on the milieu of everyday or “street” crime, and has two goals: first, to evince the nature of urban criminality with an eye to the “emergence of a criminal class” (p. 2); and second, to examine social reactions to crime. Accordingly, he contributes a much needed overview of the nature of such crime as well as a synthesis of law enforcement practice.The study begins with a general overview of the urban environment of late colonial Mexico City. Haslip-Viera renders a lively sketch of streets, ethnic divisions, and population. The narrative has an easy flow, with engaging details about the baratillo or thieves market, merchant mansions, and sewers that enhance this descriptive approach. Chapter two discusses the law as a system, fashioned and altered by jurists and ancillary officials. For example, he indicates that the Recopilación de las leyes de Indias was not necessarily used as a final arbiter for everyday legal dilemmas when legal forms and protocol were open to interpretation. This fluidity is described as “discretionary” law, meaning that the same crime was often dealt with in widely varying ways. To this end, Haslip-Viera is attentive to the ways that class, ethnicity, and sex affected both individual cases and the overall face of jurisprudence.Chapters three, four, and five deal broadly with arrest, prosecution, and punishment, providing summary information on social conditions associated with urban poverty, criminal groups, and the function of law enforcement. For example, the reader encounters definitions of terms such as sala del crimen and alcalde del crimen, as well as explanations of how law cases wound their way through the colonial administrative system. Many fine (if rather brief) sections outline themes such as community policing, conditions in prisons, and the social pressures of poverty, which, according to Haslip-Viera, led to urban crime. Other sections deal with the application of the law, showing how jurists relied on forced labor for punishment. For female offenders this took the form of being placed en depósito with a “reputable” family for reform, meaning mostly that such women became domestic servants.This book is a useful guide to some of the rudimentary facets of crime and law in the late colony, and will be helpful for anyone seeking a portrait of everyday life in colonial Mexico City. It is well researched and represents a synthesis of judicial archival material, contemporary observations or belles lettres, and secondary scholarship. On the other hand, the book sometimes lacks interpretive panache. Indeed, the study’s most interesting idea is that crime was not a form of resistance to order, but precisely the opposite—an affirmation of the status quo. Haslip-Viera argues that interpersonal violence siphoned off discontent among the poor and that property crime was a form of social climbing for the middle-class. These suggestions are powerful fodder for a revision of supposed “everyday forms of resistance,” but they are not well integrated into the text. Overall, this book is an important addition to our understanding of the social history of crime and offers some interesting provocations that ought to add to the debate on the nature of deviance and everyday life.