Violence in Mexico, Then, There, and Now: A Review Essay

• DOI: 10.1177/0094582X20951824
• Date: 01 November 2020
• Author: Dolores Trevizo
• Published date: 01 November 2020
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

136 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

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Violence in Mexico, Then, There, and Now

A Review Essay

by

Dolores Trevizo

Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera Los Zetas Inc.: Criminal Corporations, Energy, and Civil War

in Mexico. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017.

John Gibler I Couldn’t Even Imagine That They Would Kill Us: An Oral History of the

Attacks against the Students of Ayotzinapa. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2017.

Carlos Illades Conflict, Domination, and Violence: Episodes in Mexican Social History. New

York: Berghahn Books, 2017.

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X20951824

The three books reviewed here document various types of extreme violence in

Mexico over time, across space, and in specific places. While ordinary people engage in

violence and while cartels specialize in it, all three indict the Mexican state—from the

officials at or near the heart of state power to the local police forces forming the capil-

laries of its coercive apparatus.

The historian Carlos Illades’s book, Conflict, Domination, and Violence, examines pro-

test movements and armed rebellions since the nineteenth century, among them the

labor movement and the early agrarian rebellions, ethnic violence against Spanish

shopkeepers and hacendados during the Mexican Revolution, and some protests since

the mid-twentieth century. In documenting the making of the Mexican working class,

Illades explains that while the authorities limited labor’s role in politics, workers’ pro-

test still proved consequential. The early labor movement contributed to the seculariza-

tion of public space and the expansion of civil society even though the state eventually

Dolores Trevizo is a professor of sociology and chair of the Department of Latino/a and Latin

American Studies at Occidental College and the coauthor, with Mary Lopez, of Neighborhood

Poverty and Segregation in the (Re-)Production of Disadvantage (2018).