“A Savage and Refined Cruelty”: Sexual Vagabondage, Domestic Violence, and Colonial Race Thinking in the Masculine Public Sphere of Late Nineteenth-Century Mexico City

During the late Porfiriato, authorities in Mexico City, acting in concert with elites, fashioned an underworld of crime and disease.  This phenomenon, they argued, existed along the capital’s social and physical periphery and threatened to undermine the ordered spaces of the middle and upper classes.  To populate this world, elites appropriated the urban poor and labeled them as criminals and sexual vagabonds.  In this paper, I discuss this process by focusing on several important cases recorded by authorities and reported by the popular press from 1890 to 1910.  Specifically, I will examine how authorities viewed and labeled poor men who inhabited urban slums along the city’s periphery.  Many of these men were recent arrivals from the countryside and were popularly depicted as violent drunks and thieves. In particular, I offer the example of “Los Fandangos,” Petronillo and Antonio Guerrero, who haunted the colonias and taverns of Mexico City’s imagined underworld. 
The Guerrero brothers’ actions were reflected in numerous other cases, such as the misadventures of Gerardo Ortega and Cipriano Ronquillo, who murdered María Ramirez, a known prostitute in 1903, and Francisco Guerrero, a notorious serial killer who raped and murdered several prostitutes during the 1880s and whose trial in 1890 marked the beginning of the official project labeling the capital’s urban slums as crime-ridden wards.  Men such as the Guerrero brothers were of particular interest to Porfirian elites, who agonized over the sexual dangers posed by such characters.
While these cases illustrate criminality in Latin America, they also offer important examples of the colonial race thinking that permeated the elite ranks of Porfirian Mexico City.  By criminalizing the masculinity of poor urban males, Porfirian elites acted as colonial masters, echoing their contemporary peers in French Algeria, the Dutch East Indies, and British East Africa.