Robachicos: Historia del secuestro infantil en México (1900–1960)

Abstract

This heartfelt and disturbing book investigates the heinous crime of child abduction from 1900 through 1960 in Mexico City. Drawing on compelling analyses of newspapers, legislation, films, comic books, and juvenile court records in Mexico City, Susana Sosenski reveals the emotional and economic connotations of abducted children as cultural symbols and how the fears about child abduction shaped the parental experience and public perception of kidnapping. Child kidnappers, or robachicos, engaged in different (if occasionally overlapping) types of abduction or kidnapping (for example, ransom kidnapping and extortion, kidnapping by women due to a “desire to be mothers,” parental kidnapping by men who inflicted gender violence on former partners, and the abduction of children for labor and sexual exploitation). Sosenski brilliantly argues that media and citizen fears in response to the abduction of children from well-to-do families resulted in prescribed harsh punishment for perpetrators of child abduction. However, such particular moments of heightened fear in moral panics paved the way for the exclusion of children from public spaces and sustained the impunity and negligence of the Mexican authorities in relation to child abduction.Sosenski has organized her primary sources in a sophisticated argument structured in five chapters that allow her to develop the thesis on how the fear of child abduction, propagated in the print media's massive coverage, increasingly expanded to new technologies of radio, movie newsreels, and comic books and exacerbated class, racial, spatial, and gender disparities in Mexican children's lives. Chapter 1 introduces the moral panics over child kidnappers in Porfirian Mexico City; Sosenski notes how anti-Blackness shaped heightened fear in reports about the abduction of poor children for work in Oaxaca and Yucatán. Chapter 2 unveils the economic and emotional value of children in working-class and middle-class households and the strangers who seized or kidnapped children for labor and sexual exploitation. Sosenski persuasively investigates how common understandings of girls' sexuality fed into family-based concepts of honor and chastity; she shows how the practices and narratives of girls' bodies have perpetuated rape culture in Mexico. Chapter 3 shows how, in the autumn of 1945, the sensational coverage of the kidnapping of Fernando Bohigas, a light-skinned two-year-old from a middle-class family, shaped the response of well-to-do Mexicans to child abduction and resulted in the formation of civic associations and support for the return of the death penalty (which had been eliminated in 1929). The middle-class 29-year-old María Elena Rivera Quiroga, the boy's kidnapper, became a cause célèbre in the public sphere by making a case that she had abducted Bohigas because of her “desire to be a mother” (p. 131). Newspapers, including La Prensa, Novedades, El Nacional, and Magazine de Policía, also encouraged readers to participate in identifying potential child kidnappers in Mexico City.In chapter 4, Sosenski highlights that, pressured by readers in the aftermath of six-year-old Norma Granat's ransom kidnapping, lawmakers increased punishment for kidnappers from five to forty years and equated the crime of child abduction with the most serious form of homicide (p. 166). The 1955 reform of the 1931 penal code after Granat's kidnapping redefined the crime of child abduction as the “unlawful removal of a child under the age of 12 by those who do not exercise full parental authority” (p. 166). In chapter 5, Sosenski highlights how the gendered perspectives of boyhood and girlhood shaped depictions of child kidnapping in press, film, radio, and comic books while promoting the enclosure of children in homes under parents' strict supervision and the surveillance of children by police in public spaces.Sosenki's main contribution to Mexican cultural history and to the burgeoning field of the history of emotions is her employment of emotions as an analytical category, which allows her to examine how new narratives and images of child abduction were disseminated in mass media and consumed avidly by urban audiences. Sosenski convincingly engages multiple historiographies and scholarship across fields in sociology, children's studies, geography, and media studies. This book is an indispensable reference for understanding the emergence of new forms of criminal behavior and police practices that revolve around child abduction and the increasingly rapacious journalistic exploitation of violence against children in Mexico City. Although the book's focus is Mexico City, it will certainly become a reference for students and scholars interested in furthering their research on the extent to which the linkages of fear and childhood in mass media and radical journalism shaped the mechanisms by which the Partido Revolucionario Institucional ruled provincial cities since the Cold War. Future studies might elucidate how the conceptions of order and fear articulated by tabloids, crime sheets, and magazines reached far beyond the middle class and shaped the experiences of youth and policing in the growing informal neighborhoods that housed the vast majority of Latin America's urban poor.