A historical perspective on journalistic representations of crime in Mexico and in Brazil: gender, justice and public sphere

Abstract

The central aims of professor Piccat’s academic visit to UNICAMP includes doing research in order to conclude a book-lenght manuscript on the representations of crime in Mexico during the XIXth Century, to collect documents in the libraries of São Paulo to write an article comparing police journalism in Brazil and in Mexico, and to establish collaboration with Brazilian students and researchers who work with these issues. This project looks at crime in Mexico as a public phenomenon, an interaction with cultural and political consequences - a communicative act that brings together different actors around issues of central importance for everyday life. The project's first product, a book-length manuscript, will assemble a longterm examination of trends, causes, practices and responses to crime during the twentieth century. The historical framework for the narrative will be the development of the public sphere and the role of crime and justice as nodes of public debates and interactions between state and civil society. The goal is to develop a multidisciplinary and socially relevant conceptual framework to understand crime in contemporary Mexico. Through a cross-disciplinary explanation of a complex phenomenon, he will assemble a long-term examination of trends, causes, practices and responses to crime over the century that started with the 1910 revolution and comes to a close under a new cycle of violence .He will also continue the research, still unpublished, that he has been doing on the history of Latin American journalism between the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, considering the a comparative framework. From his research on the police journalism in Mexico he has concluded that the historiography on journalism has almost entirely forgotten the study of publications devoted to crime in everyday life, although these were the most popular and criticism published during much of the twentieth century. Such is the case in Mexico and, as he proposes to investigate during his sojourn at UNICAMP, and probably in Brazil, particularly during periods in which the political control of authoritarian regime established controls over the daily press.In the libraries and archives of São Paulo, he hopes to find publications that will allow him to compare themes, treatments, uses of visual resources and narratives between the Mexican and Brazilian publications. This will be the first step toward a broader comparison that will include Argentina and the United States (countries for which he has already written something). His work will be concentrated at Arquivo Egard Leuenroth at UNICAMP and at the Public Archive of São Paulo for its wealth of newspapers. The academic groups he plans to interact with during his stay in Sao Paulo are part of the Research Line Gender, Subjectivities, Material Culture and Cartography, of the area of Cultural History of Programa de Pós-Graduação em História da IFCH - UNICAMP .The project includes a course on "Crime, gender and justice in modern Latin America" , and a workshop on the themes of his research project, which will be open to professors and students interested in the history of crime, crossed by issues of gender and the contemporary reality of Mexico and Latin America. (AU)