Law and Order in the Community: Mexico’s Penal Code of 1871

• In Event: Outside In? Plebeian Exclusion and Participation in Dominant States from the Enlightenment to the Era of Positivism

Abstract

Recent scholarship supports the view that in the late nineteenth century, Mexico’s modernizing state was the body chiefly responsible for disciplining, controlling and scrutinizing the national population with such mechanisms as the discourse of criminology and the construction of new penal and civil codes. Robert Buffington describes the evolution of a new discourse of criminology in this period that sought to control degeneracy and contain vice within the orderly institutions of the Porfirian state. James Alex Garza has explores how Profirian elites and administrators, in an effort to maintain moral superiority created an imagined underworld of crime in Mexico City, erecting an ideological barrier between the educated and popular classes, instructing the middle class on appropriate behaviors for all. Scholars have paid much less attention, however, to how members of the popular classes themselves participated in the construction and enforcement of the late nineteenth-century state’s modernizing objectives. This paper examines the issue of popular perceptions of crime and justice by examining the role of the community in legal trials involving the crimes of infanticide and abortion, both of which experienced a notable rise in denunciation rates in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Looking at a span of trials across the nineteenth century, this paper examines evidence of community perceptions of mothers’ involvement in these crimes to analyze the gaps and continuities between state and popular articulations of crime, female deviancy, and family honour.

Author

• Nora E Jaffary, Concordia University