| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Caribbean and Latin America

Pablo Piccato. City of Suspects: Crime in Mexico City, 1900–1931. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. 2001. Pp. x, 365. Cloth $64.95, paper $21.95.

This book surveys crime in Mexico City from 1900 to 1931, with heaviest emphasis on the Porfirian period at the turn of the century. Felicitously, statistical tables are kept to a minimum. Instead, Pablo Piccato focuses on the perceptions and attitudes of segments of society toward what official codes labeled as "crime." The result, he claims, was (is) a city of suspects: authorities and elites suspect lower groups of criminal tendencies, and ordinary people suspect upper echelons of corruption and injustice. As his sympathies lie with the masses, Piccato sees the elite stance as indefensible profiling and that of the commoners as largely justifiable. While there is nothing startling in these conclusions, the book plumbs their meaning and complexities through a variety of historical sources and develops themes that both support and contradict the generalities. 1

Commendably, Piccato leaves a great deal of elasticity and interplay between social elements. He finds that it is the nature of the burgeoning city itself that stirs the mix. Planners designed a city that would separate the better off from the hoi polloi, but the realities of everyday life doomed the scheme. Lower-class people provided the goods and services that elites needed, and a vastly improved inner-city transport system blurred and in some cases erased neighborhood lines. Moreover, a steady stream of rural immigrants further disrupted city planning, insuring that a new, unstable, disoriented, and at times desperate population flowed into the metropolis. Many of these newcomers formed new colonies in the spreading outskirts of the city, but a good number settled forlornly into seething, live-as-best-you-can pockets of destitution right in the center of town. . . .

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