En su libro La escritura errante: ilegibilidad y políticas del estilo en Latinoamérica (2016), Julio Prieto no incluye ningún texto mexicano, lo cual suscita la interrogante de si esta ausencia refleja una marginalización mayor de la llamada “mala escritura” latinoamericana en unas literaturas nacionales que en otras. En este ensayo doy un primer paso para abordar esta pregunta, argumentando que México cuenta con una digna representación de dicho tipo de escritura en Cartucho (1931). En este texto, Nellie Campobello elabora su escritura errante gracias a una serie de procedimientos estilísticos que señalan las carencias del cuerpo social y que apuntan a una variada red de textos y tradiciones que podrían haber influido en ella. El análisis que propongo desemboca en algunas reflexiones acerca de la relación entre la escritura errante, la narrativa del norte de México y las normas impuestas desde el centro geográfico y cultural del país para tratar de forjar un canon literario nacional.

Humberto Mariles, medallista olímpico, general brigadier y destacado miembro de la élite política, cometió un homicidio en México y fue acusado de narcotráfico en Francia. Debido al impacto social que tuvieron, el análisis de estos incidentes y sus consecuencias en el declive público de Mariles, permiten asomarse a varios temas y ser abordados desde diversos enfoques. En este artículo estudio las investigaciones policiales, el juicio y la opinión pública. En mi análisis tomo en cuenta diversos aspectos como el perfil de Mariles, sus nexos con gobernantes y otros militares, facciones al interior del ejército, tensiones entre autoridades civiles y castrenses, y el sistema penal y críticas a la justicia. Asimismo, considero la importancia de ideas y valores, entre ellos el honor, que emergieron en los tribunales y en la prensa y que impactaron en el desenlace de estos incidentes.

Using original survey data, we analyze the factors contributing to participation and preferences in the 2018 Mexican election among the Mexican diaspora in the United States. Our empirical analysis of public-opinion data reveals that exposure to Mexican mass media is a significant predictor of voting from abroad among immigrants and US-born Mexicans. Diaspora voters’ feelings of efficacy, their assessments of Mexican democracy, and structural factors yield mixed effects on the vote from abroad and candidate preferences. The study’s design also allows for comparison of the transnational electoral preferences of Mexican emigrants and US-born dual nationals.

Estudios previos en México argumentan que la percepción de corrupción y la percepción de eficacia predicen la insatisfacción y la falta de confianza en la policía. Este artículo extiende estos estudios previos al examinar si la percepción de corrupción policial impacta el miedo al crimen entre la población adulta. Argumentamos que –más allá de los correlativos tradicionales del miedo al crimen y controlando por la intensidad de la guerra contra el crimen organizado– la evaluación de la reputación de la policía impacta la calidad de vida en la sociedad tal como lo indica el miedo al crimen. Los resultados de los modelos multinivel, basados en datos de la Encuesta Nacional de Victimización y Percepción sobre Seguridad Pública (ENVIPE, 2012–2017), confirman nuestro argumento. También hallamos que la experiencia de victimización y las incivilidades en la colonia son los principales predictores del miedo al crimen, mientras que la guerra contra el crimen organizado no mostró tener un efecto consistente.

This article looks at civil society in 1950s Mexico. To do so, it examines the popular responses to the murder of a local taxi driver, Juan Cereceres. It argues that both newspapers and civil-society organizations took the murder seriously, interrogated government findings, attempted to discover the real culprits, and sought a degree of justice. In all, the story asks historians to reassess both the extent and the force of civil society under the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI).

This essay analyzes citizenship in Latin America, providing both comparative context and a schema for the phenomenon in Mexico. It identifies a region-wide “century of citizenship” that ran from the rise of liberal regimes in the 1850s to the eclipse of populist government in the 1960s, using concepts from historical sociology to discuss the common outlines of citizenship and the extent to which they apply or fail to apply to Mexican history. Key among those outlines are the prevalence of the ideas and practices of citizenship, both inside and outside of the state’s formal structures, and the spaces and places where those ideas and practices are developed and perpetuated. It concludes with the exploratory typology of the “four B s,” the processes through which historical actors build, form boundaries, bicker over, and break citizenship.

This article examines debates about the bodies and souls of women prostitutes in Mexico City that confronted the revolutionary Mexican government with the Catholic Church in the 1920s. We analyze the philanthropic activities of women’s organizations such as the Damas Católicas through the Ejército de Defensa de la Mujer and the ways in which they engaged in political roles at a time of fierce political struggle between the Catholic Church and the Mexican government. For both the government and Catholic women, it was deemed necessary to isolate and seclude the prostitutes’ bodies to cure them of venereal diseases and rehabilite them morally. While the government interned them at Hospital Morelos, Catholic women established a private assistance network, as well as so-called casas de regeneración , where former prostitutes had to work to sustain themselves while repenting for their sins and receiving the sacraments. By exploring the tension-filled interaction about women prostitutes between the Mexican government and the Catholic Church, we seek to contribute to the understanding of sexuality and prostitution in Mexico City in the 1920s.

La Glorieta de Insurgentes –una importante plaza y estación de metro de la ciudad de México– es punto de sociabilidad para diferentes sujetos marginados, entre ellos grupos de personas LGBT+. En este ensayo analizo la relación entre la producción social de este lugar, las sociabilidades que ahí surgieron y el proceso de gentrificación actual en la zona que buscan expulsar a estas poblaciones. La discusión se centra en las formas en que la aparición pública –quién puede y quién no puede ser visto en el espacio público– se conducen como un proceso de place making , entendido como un proceso abierto, participativo y de disputa en la producción y mantenimiento de espacios públicos. El artículo analiza algunas de las disputas alrededor de esta glorieta, mostrando cómo las trasgresiones al orden de género, clase e identidad sexual pueden ser marginadas, negociadas o segregadas a ciertos espacios donde se toleran o incluso se aprovechan comercialmente.

Alongside all the other functions of movie theaters over the past century, in Mexico City men have used them as sexual spaces. A few cinemas like the Cine Teresa became notorious as sites in which men could find male sex partners. Yet even there, behaviors of and narratives by men who had sex with men mirrored those by men who had sex with women. This article focuses on the history of masculine sexuality in Mexico City movie houses from 1920 to 2010. The presence of women in these houses, either as workers, on the screen, or in men’s memories, along with the presence of men who went there to watch heterosexual sex on the movie screen, suggests that moviegoing in Mexico City can be analyzed through the lens of gender history as much as through that of the history of sexuality. Despite major social, cultural and technological changes over the twentieth century, examining movie audiences in terms of the histories of sexuality and gender reveals a startling amount of continuity in movie theaters as spaces of male sexuality.

This article examines how some Catholic women, through their participation in an Acción Católica campaign, protested what they believed was the immoral nature of an expanding consumer culture: the movies, magazines, fashions, and comic books that inundated Mexico—particularly Mexico City—in the 1950s. Through this campaign, these women sought to construct an ideal form of Catholic womanhood that was both modern and moral—one that embraced modesty and sexual purity as a way for Mexico to modernize and progress. While the campaign had its roots in papal directives and was part of transnational discourses about morality, the Mexican women who participated saw their actions, nevertheless, in nationalistic terms. A modern Mexico, they argued, needed to have a strong moral base in order to be economically and politically successful; thus the morality they espoused centered on constraining women’s sexual expression.

Este ensayo analiza las experiencias de exilio de Adolfo Salazar y Miguel de Molina, dos hombres homosexuales que se vieron forzados a abandonar España para escapar de la violencia de la Guerra Civil (1936–39) y de la intolerancia del franquismo y buscar refugio en la ciudad de México con el fin de rehacer sus vidas y carreras profesionales, cada uno tomando caminos diferentes. El objetivo de este artículo es brindar un primer acercamiento a una dimensión de la vida de algunos refugiados españoles que hasta ahora ha sido escasamente estudiada, a saber: su identidad sexual. El artículo muestra que, como exiliados, la identidad sexual fue un elemento central a la hora de construir o reconstruir redes de sociabilidad en la sociedad receptora, un factor determinante para el éxito o fracaso de sus experiencias profesionales individuales.

In October 1931, Governor Bartolomé García Correa and Socialist Party activists violently closed Carlos R. Menéndez’s Diario de Yucatán for being reactionary. Defenders of the Diario denounced the governor for illegally silencing the voice of what today we would understand to be civil society. After a seventeen-month struggle in the courts, the national press, and in Mexico City’s bureaucracy, Menéndez prevailed. This article closely examines the conflict, using regional and national archives and abundant contemporary press coverage, paying careful attention to discursive expression of socioethnic inequalities. It reveals significant limits on the regional independent press and the concept of civil society during the formative period in postrevolutionary Mexico known as the Maximato (the 1928–35 era dominated by Plutarco Elías Calles as hyperexecutive or Jefe Máximo). During the Maximato, the postrevolutionary state employed authoritarian measures to centralize power. The Maximato state, however, could not govern without acknowledging both the Constitution of 1917’s classical liberal civil rights, such as freedom of the press and guarantees of associational life, and the revolutionary political legacy of popular action against “reaction.” In the Yucatecan case, the muzzling of the regional independent press was not simply top-down illiberalism. Yucatecan socialists believed it would help create a more egalitarian and inclusive socio-political order to supplant civil society. The Diario ’s exclusivist definition of civil society and the national press’s personal attacks on García Correa reflected widespread beliefs that people of indigenous and African descent were incapable of taking part in civic life. While Menéndez eventually prevailed in the courts, it was due more to his economic and cultural capital and prominent Mexico City allies than to legal protections for press freedom or civil-society resistance. The case helps us to understand how the latter two varied so significantly over place and time in postrevolutionary Mexico, and why Tocquevillian notions of civil society require careful qualification when applied to poor, overwhelmingly indigenous regions of Mexico.

Los esfuerzos bélicos en Norteamérica en la costa del Pacífico durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial reavivaron el flujo turístico hacia la ciudad de Tijuana. Pero el protagonismo que habían mantenido los negocios turísticos, desde la llamada “era de las prohibiciones”, respecto a la organización del espacio se vio mermado ante las demandas de la creciente población mexicana entre las décadas de 1940 y 1950. El propósito de este artículo es describir cómo en esta nueva concentración urbana las facultades ciudadanas empezaron a manifestarse mediante la participación colectiva en acciones y discursos que pugnaron siempre por mantener la cohesión social a través del mejoramiento social, material y moral de la ciudad.

This article examines the political activism of conservative civil society in postrevolutionary Mexico through the lens of American service clubs. It focuses on the case of the Rotary Club of Monterrey, which gathered the city's industrial elites and some of the most vocal opponents of the Mexican state, particularly the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–40). Monterrey is significant because of its economic and political clout; by the 1930s, it was the powerhouse of heavy industry and in the 1940s a key center of support for the Partido Acción Nacional. After Monterrey Rotarians dissolved their club in 1936, following a disagreement with Rotary International's policy against political involvement, they regrouped and established throughout Mexico the only service club that blended pro-business goals with right-wing hispanidad ideology: the Club Sembradores de Amistad. This story illustrates how conservative civil society in Mexico adopted seemingly contradictory transnational influences (Catholic Hispanist thought and American service clubs) to challenge the postrevolutionary state in a less confrontational way.