James Alex Garza has written a thoughtful social history of sex, crime, and vice in late nineteenth-century Mexico. He uses judicial archives, newspaper accounts, secondary literature, and correspondence to examine six sensational criminal trials in Mexico City during the Porfiriato. Garza pays special attention to a serial killer, a young woman who died at the hand of a former lover, burglars and murderers of store owners, a woman who died from a botched abortion, and the would-be assassin of Porfirio Díaz. Building on the works and ideas of eminent scholars such as William H. Beezley and Benedict Ander-son, Garza analyzes “the ways in which urban elites . . . imagined, forged, and populated this underworld of crime and vice” (p. 3). “In an effort to maintain moral superiority, erect an ideological barrier between the educated and popular classes, and instruct the middle class in what they believed were appropriate behaviors and customs,” he continues, “elites invented a criminal underworld and populated it with imaginary, stock Mexicans: degenerate, foul, drunk, deviant, and murderous” (pp. 3 – 4). The author convincingly demonstrates that the government sought “to validate the ideal city by labeling impoverished neighborhoods and their residents as disease and crime ridden” (p. 17).Like any provocative work, Garza’s inquiry forces the reader to contend with complicated issues. This reviewer found some of Garza’s conclusions less satisfying than others. While the author focuses on the “imagined underworld,” his painstaking and at times overly detailed depictions of specific events suggest that científicos did not need to exaggerate the level of crime in order to promote their agenda of order and progress. Garza correctly criticizes the state for ignoring the economic basis of poverty and depicts the Porfirian elite as manipulative. But not every project of the state (sewer projects, campaigns to eradicate typhus, vaccination programs, etc.) was meant “to control the lives and the bodies” of the popular class (p. 132). The tragic case of María Barrera, who died from a massive hemorrhage, serves as an example of a forced conclusion. The author contends that this incident “threatened not only to undermine official efforts to promote modern medical science, but to link professional medicine with the imagined underworld” (p. 132). Later, Barrera is said to have “fallen victim to modernity’s grasp, for the abortion she died from clearly had a modern aspect [and she . . . ] became entangled in the bowels of the underworld” (p. 153). A simpler explanation would have been that this ashamed and frightened unmarried woman (with or without the help of her boyfriend) became mortally ill after a botched abortion, and detectives and medical examiners sought to determine the cause of death. In his introduction, Garza stated that his study (especially the characters in chapter four) reveals “how average Mexicans coped with the intrusive powers of the state” (p. 9). But these protagonists were thieves and murderers, not average people. Their sophisticated arsenal may have included “careful planning, rendezvous sites, and street tactics,” but these individuals made life difficult for average Mexicans (p. 110).Garza’s final section, “The Porfiriato Revisited,” reveals an interesting perspective on class dynamics. He comments on a massive protest march in 2004 in which “Mexicans, mostly from the middle and upper classes, marched . . . [while] millions of other Mexicans reported to work as usual . . . . [For these latter citizens] crime was not an issue to protest but part of everyday life . . . not an abstract issue but a horrifying reality. However, for the press and the government, crime is a social phenomenon that often takes on imagined aspects . . . . like its late nineteenth-century incarnation, the imagined underworld of the present is judged by those in power to be a threat to the nation” (pp. 181 – 82). I participated in that march and remember it differently. People from all backgrounds protested that Sunday afternoon against the drug-related violence, organized crime, carjackings, taxi-jackings, and kidnappings that gripped (and continue to grip) the country. My hunch is that both those who marched and those who did not, regardless of social class, view the underworld as a true threat to the nation. Perhaps Garza’s focus on and sympathy for members of the underclass — during the Porfiriato and in 2004 — prevented him from seeing those occasions when criminals are, in fact, part of the problem and those other occasions when public officials (detectives, medical examiners, and even some policy makers) have sincere, if misguided, motives.These concerns should not detract from appreciating Garza’s effective research and narrative of Porfirian society. Chapters from this valuable work would perfectly complement university courses on Mexican history and the Porfiriato and Mexican Revolution.
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Open Access
Dec 1, 2013
Emily R Gill 
