Criminal and Citizen in Modern Mexico

Abstract

Positivist criminology is drawing renewed scholarly attention. Yet the new historians of the science of crime do not come from legal backgrounds. This heavily ideological, discourse-based discipline is an irresistible temptation for scholars who (under the influence of Foucault) see a link between ideas of punishment and the symbolic legitimacy of social systems, and who (thanks to the linguistic turn) have become sensitive to the multiple implications of text and discourse in the analysis of power systems. To a great extent, the new studies about criminology are enterprises of “unveiling.” Furthermore, the study of criminology is exceptionally relevant for Latin America, where this science was genetically bound to the emergence of several nation-states, and contributed to shaping the discourse and perceptions of many reform-minded elites.In this carefully crafted book, Robert Buffington analyzes how the eclectic collection of photographs, and medical, penal, journalistic and anthropological texts that constituted (or were intertwined with) the corpus of criminology delineated definitions of citizenship in modern Mexico. Much like their Argentine counterparts, Mexican criminologists refused to commit to any European school of criminology, choosing instead to combine Lombrosian and anti-Lombrosian theory, and limiting their contribution to the gathering of new data about the Mexican case. Buffington shows convincingly how the lax argumentative disposition of criminology (built on the analysis of individual cases) allowed for a combination of common prejudice and modern theory, objective data, and moral judgment that tended to validate old class and race prejudice with the prestige of science. Rather than emphasizing the change introduced by science in prison reform, penal reform, or modern anthropology, Buffington points to the less obvious “perceptual continuity” underlying all reforms despite the most violent social and institutional changes.Carlos Roumagnac, the police inspector, criminologist, and journalist, whose versatility and narrative skills made him the chief popularizer of criminology, has a prominent place in this story. One of the highlights of the book is an essay about his sensationalist yet “scientific” popular criminology, whose hidden (and not so hidden) ideological underpinnings Buffington exposes with great skill. Yet, the leap between the textual analysis of Roumagnac’s fascinating prose and the conclusions about its actual ideological role is less clear. More information about the reception of the “Roumagnac effect”—circuits of discussion, size and nature of his readership—would have strengthened the case about the persuasive power of popular criminology.Ideas about crime are not just dissected but also followed as they were adopted for key institutional reform. What Buffington finds is remarkable continuity. In the prison system, he traces an unbroken line connecting Porfirian and postrevolutionary penitentiary principles—a continuity based on the survival of the positivist concept of social defense, and a shared confidence in the powers of a state whose right to rehabilitate inmates was never questioned. He also finds continuity—colonial continuity this time—in penal law, an area where positivist criminologists were met with strong resistance from the legal establishment, leading to a much-negotiated reform. The resulting 1931 penal code allowed for the coexistence of a wide variety of penal philosophies, while granting great discretionary power to the judge. In this theoretical flexibility, mixed with paternalism, Buffington identifies a clue to the remarkable continuity of the Mexican institutional system. This observation seems more than reasonable, yet it is one that he feels compelled to present cautiously given his limited collection of documental evidence of court practices. So, while the study may not be conclusive, it is richly suggestive, delineating an agenda for future case-study-based analyses of legal practices.These conclusions, however, are only deceptively timid. By studying the role played by boundary-delimiting science in the construction of modern Mexican society, this skillful “exercise in unveiling” provides material for fundamental questions concerning the well-established historiographical subjects of nationalism, education, and ideology, and the less-traveled roads of modernity, punishment, and science. Overall, it brings many valuable insights to one of the greatest enigmas of modern Mexico in particular, and Latin America, in general: the success with which the modern nation-state has imposed a system of domination and exclusion upon so many.