In the Vortex of Violence examines the practice of lynching—defined as an extralegal, public, and asymmetrical form of collective violence—in central Mexico from the 1930s to the 1950s. The book situates lynching as part of a broader history of violence and legitimacy. Instead of attributing lynching to state absence or weakness, Gema Kloppe-Santamaría shows how state authorities and society negotiated the prevalence of lynching as part of an informal idea of justice: from looking the other way to triggering them directly with their presence, thus refusing to inscribe lynching into top-down or bottom-up narratives. It is neither a means for oppression nor a weapon of the weak, she argues, but rather a tool of social control, informed by local motives, rumors, and fears, which may take on different meanings and interpretation—as resistance, corrective justice, scapegoating, or el mal menor. Most lynch mobs targeted people considered at the margins of society: a way to police Otherness and reinforce community values and fears.Kloppe-Santamaría departs from recent literature on lynching in contemporary Latin America and argues that they are not recent anomalies or isolated events. Nor are lynchings a consequence of the rise of neoliberalism, current civil conflicts, corrupt states, or the crumbling of the Pax Priista (see, e.g., Fuentes 2006; Goldstein 2004; Snodgrass Godoy 2006). Lynchings, she contends, are recognizable sociological phenomena with distinct motivations, organization, and political significance—and they have a history. Drawing mainly from newspaper reports of lynchings, the book examines 366 cases and organizes the analysis thematically around the different sources of legitimation that made lynching an acceptable practice. Chapter 1 explores the types of lynching that occurred during Mexico’s process of state formation (lynching as resistance, corrective justice, and state-sanctioned lynchings). Chapter 2 delves into the influence of religion and how Catholicism and the Church shaped their organization and legitimacy during the state-sponsored anticlerical campaigns of the 1930s. Chapter 3 assesses public understandings of crime, justice, and punishment—the ideas that made lynchings possible, even reasonable. Chapter 4 analyzes the role of mythical beliefs—bloodsuckers, fat stealers, and witches—in the collectivization of violence as a defense mechanism against otherworldly powers and dangers. A conclusion wraps up the argument and connects it to contemporary forms of violence.The book’s historical approach successfully overcomes the tropes and narratives that inform most analyses of Mexican violence: a weak state, poor economic performance, backwardness, corruption, and an almost natural inclination toward death, blood, and violence. The recent security crises in Mexico, specifically, have made violence almost too easy to explain and the solutions crystal clear—redistribution, growth, legalization of narcotics, and, of course, getting rid of the bad guys. Yet the exoticism and essentialism of Mexican violence diminishes when approached historically and anthropologically. As In the Vortex of Violence shows, violence is never just a physical act, but the enactment and embodiment of beliefs: it is never just business or revenge. Enactments of violence, furthermore, are themselves representations of violence. When meanings and social orders are at stake, lynchings appear not only as rightful and legitimate acts but also as necessary practices to ensure the survival of communities.The book is an outstanding contribution to the literature exploring the many faces of violence in Mexico and Latin America—which shows that the University of California Press is setting a high standard. Nonetheless, when it comes to assessing the broad relevance of the book, some inclusions and exclusions become perplexing. While the book was careful to underscore the contingent, situated character of the violence it explores, the conclusion inscribes it as part of the larger topic of Latin American violence; the vortex to which the title alludes is in fact a Latin American one, not Mexican. While it may be true that lynchings happened—and keep happening—across the continent, blurring the geographical and temporal borders unweaves the central arguments of the book. The refusal to look at the United States directly leaves out what promises to be an illuminating, even necessary analysis. Explicit racial motivations were absent from the cases in Kloppe-Santamaría’s book, but the implicit comparison begs for deeper analysis. If, as the book claims, the logics of power and social control drive the occurrence of lynchings, the United States might be a better fit to compare localized violence in the 1930s with Mexico than the whole subcontinent—which is at odds with claiming that lynchings reflect, in part, the state’s incapacity to uphold the rule of law. Kloppe-Santamaría argues, however, that although lynchings are situated, nonstatic forms of collective violence, they still happen today—indeed it is the current stream of violence that drives her work (4). But if the motives changed, if the context of modernization and state building changed, and only the collective violence remains, can we be sure that there is such a thing as “lynchings in postrevolutionary Mexico”? Or is it just another instance of collective, ritualized violence that occurs anywhere in the world? Why Mexico? Why are the cases from the 1930s to the 1950s more revealing than others—is the Mexican state in Iztapalapa today as “weak,” intrusive, or foreign as it was in 1936 Veracruz?At the core, Kloppe-Santamaría’s book entails a quest for the elusive ideas of power and authority in postrevolutionary Mexico: a search for legitimacy. To explain why some forms of violence are tolerated or encouraged while others are not lies at the center of any state-building project. As her book convincingly portrays, no reasonable politician or public official attempted to effectively monopolize the use of legitimate violence in a context of state formation, modernization, and contingent politics. It is the selective use of violence, the law, and beliefs that allows the state-building project to flourish. The politics and the making of authority exploit the contingency and complexity of local instances of violence—and that is why historical and anthropological approaches, instead of legal or rigid structural frameworks, become so adequate to illuminate these processes. Students of Mexican history—the continuities and ruptures of its repertoire of violence in the twentieth century—and of serious sociological explanations of collective violence may profit immensely from reading In the Vortex of Violence. The book illuminates authority at work, not how it should work, which makes it an excellent window to understand Mexico today. As Clifford Geertz (2004) wrote, less Hobbes, more Machiavelli.