Political rhetoric often portrays Mexico as an inherently violent nation. Pablo Piccato’s essential work, now available in English for the first time, cuts through the noise to contextualize violence as a historical phenomenon. Piccato shows us that violence is not unique to Mexico but, just as anywhere else, has erupted there in many forms. Attending to multiple histories of violence, Piccato reveals how violence emerges as a resource that people mobilize to various ends—not an uncontroll...

The Others reconstructs the history of migration and naturalization of foreigners in Mexico during the first half of the twentieth century.Despite never receiving large influxes of foreigners, paradoxically Mexico has applied particularly tight controls on migration and naturalization. Why did it choose to limit the arrival of foreigners when their numbers were so low as a proportion of the total population? In a nation riven by ethnic prejudices and with post-revolutionar...