True Stories of Crime in Modern Mexico

Abstract

This timely and progressive collection of eight essays centers on criminal cases from the late Porfiriato to the first decades of the Mexican Revolution. Robert Buffington and Pablo Piccato have concentrated on framing causes célèbres as texts that offer insights into changing aspects of Mexican society during the disruptions that accompanied modernity and revolutionary change. This volume gives readers a sense of not only “place” but also how the individual act fits into the larger social discourses of criminality and nation.In presenting their argument that criminal cases offer a way for people to make sense of the world, Buffington and Piccato offer an interesting variety of expertly authored topics, from banditry and murder to political assassinations and infanticide. Some of the cases will be familiar and others are relatively unknown, but all offer the reader, both academic and general, a fascinating look at Mexican criminality. The anthology begins with the 1897 exploits of the Porfirianera prostitute María Villa. Buffington and Piccato explain the nuances behind Villa’s actions, highlighting Porfirian society’s anxieties about modernity and gender. The next two essays, by Elisa Speckman Guerra and Cristina Rivera-Garza, offer fascinating analyses of the roles print media and modern science played in ordering and defining crime. Speckman Guerra’s subject, the notorious El Tigre de Santa Julia, became a symbol of the revolution only because his execution occurred at the same time as Francisco Madero’s revolt. Rivera-Garza’s contention that historians and state institutions are obsessed with narratives finds resonance in the case of an insane asylum inmate. Modernity plays a significant role in her essay, as it does with Pablo Piccato’s discussion of the 1923 murder of Senator Francisco Tejeda, committed by the young daughter of a political rival killed by Tejeda. In this selection, questions concerning family and gender roles emerge and provide insight into how masculinity was both challenged and reinforced through the public arena of the trial, a civic forum that would fall prey to the modernizing impulses of the revolutionary state.The Mexican state’s dominant role in constructing criminality, especially in the wake of its solidification of power in the late 1920s and early 1930s, provides the fuel that drives the rest of the volume. In Christopher R. Boyer’s essay on murder in Zamora, Michoacán, political motives certainly lay behind the 1923 death of the son of a conservative landowner, but while the case was never definitely solved, it did not matter. As Boyer demonstrates, the murder and subsequent events transformed politics in the region, giving conservative and Cristero forces added motivation to embark on their conflict. The violence of the 1920s is examined again by Renato González Mello, who offers a comparison of the careers and violence-related art of José de León Toral and David Alfaro Siquieros. Though ideological opposites, both men were dedicated to the pursuit of violence to fulfill their ideals. In fact, Toral had more success than Siquieros, the latter emerging in the essay as a frustrated and somewhat tragic marksman. González Mello’s focus, the self-body sketches of both men, demonstrates once again, as in Rivera-Garza’s essay, that violence can be read in many different ways. Body politics also provides an important subtext in Víctor M. Macías González’s examination of the case of Miss Mexico 1928, María Teresa de Landa, who murdered her bigamist husband, General Moisés Vidal Corro, and Katherine Elaine Bliss’s look at infanticide and its intersection with revolutionary notions of state and motherhood. In the case of Miss Mexico, Macías González ties together questions about propriety and class. This is one of the stronger essays and, together with Piccato’s tale of family vengeance and Boyer’s analysis of political vendetta, offers the best window into the formative and turbulent 1920s, a decade deserving further study. Where Buffington and Piccato succeed, however, is in offering a new and provocative mechanism to study criminality. By digging deeper into narrative and text, Piccato and Buffington present an alternative visualization of the importance crime has in national and community identity and formation, a topic of extreme relevance in the present moment.