Books
The Enlightened Patrolman: Early Law Enforcement in Mexico City
The Enlightened Patrolman: Early Law Enforcement in Mexico City tells the story of the night watchmen who walked their beats on the streets of eighteenth-century Mexico City. Their key duties were maintaining the new street lighting, and arresting men and women for public drunkenness. These plebeian patrolmen functioned as street level enforcers of late colonial racial policies, while at the same time facing frequent violent resistance from the populace.
Death in Old Mexico: The 1789 Dongo Murders and How They Shaped the History of a Nation
Click here to order: Death in Old Mexico: The 1789 Dongo Murders and How They Shaped the History of a Nation. This book recreates a paper trail of Enlightenment-era greed and savagery which began with a brutal massacre of eleven men and women by three killers armed with machetes on the night of October 23, 1789. Investigators immediately rushed to the scene and worked night and day to find the perpetrators, who were publicly garrotted two weeks after committing their crimes. This book highlights how the violence of the Mexican judiciary echoes the acts of the murderers. The Spanish government carried out dozens of executions in Mexico City’s central plaza in this era, but rejected the Tenochtitlán legacy of human sacrifice when it literally rose up from the mud underneath their own gallows in the early 1790s. The history of violent law enforcement continues to affect Mexico’s present. We can still learn from this “crime of the century.”
A MEXICAN TRUE CRIME FOR THE FIRST TIME AVAILABLE IN ENGLISH: A Fictionalized Account of the Dongo Murders
One night in 1789, three men used machetes to slaughter 11 innocent people in their home. The killers then stole a fortune in silver. This book translates a fictionalization of what the classic nineteenth-century novelist José de Cuéllar viewed as The Sin of the Century
Trained as a historian of Spain and its global empire at the University of California, Berkeley, Nicole von Germeten’s research has taken her to dozens of archives and libraries on three continents. Her first two books investigated African populations and their social and religious organizations. More recently, she has written five books about the history of crime and policing in Colombia and Mexico.
