Interpretations of Sexuality

in Mexico City Prisons

A CRITICAL VERSION OF ROUMAGNAC

Pablo Piccato

Para que el cielo de la heterosexualidad exista, se requiere ftjar, con

sana minuciosa, el infterno de los homosexuales.
-carlos Monsivtiis,
Salvador Novo: Lo marginal en el centro

Between 1906 and 1912, Carlos Roumagnac published three books

about Mexican criminals based on interviews with inmates of the
prisons of Belem and San Lazaro, in Mexico City (Los criminates en
Mexico; Crimenes sexuales y pasionales; Matadores de mujeres). The
books attracted an audience that went beyond the narrow circles of
social scientists and, in recent years, have become important docu-
ments for our knowledge of everyday life in late Porfirian Mexico.
These detailed accounts of inmates' words and deeds exercise a
strong attraction because of the rich information they contain and
because of their author's ability to condense the ambivalent gaze of
criminology toward the everyday life of the urban poor. Roumagnac
and other criminologists explored urban life looking for "the crimi-
nal"-that creature imagined by the Italian positivist master Cesare
Lombroso as the product of immorality and racial backwardness. In
Mexico City, amateurs and professionals of criminology, such as Fed-
erico Gamboa, Miguel Macedo, and Julio Guerrero, described and
speculated about the dark corners of a city that was growing out of
the control of Porfirian urban planners and policemen. Criminology
provided a scientific vocabulary to document the fascinated wander-
ings of modern flaneurs and customary patrons of the city's seedy
night life (Piccato, "Construcci6n").

R. M. Irwin et al. (eds.), The Famous 41

© Robert McKee Irwin, Michelle Rocío Nasser, Edward J. McCaughan 2003
252 • PABLO PICCATO

The darkest corner of the city was Belem prison. The prevalent
view was best portrayed by the verses of one Enrique Valay in El Di-
ablito Rojo:

La humanidad prostituida
que en tus recintos se alberga,
adquiere vicios infames
tras de tus muros de piedra;

En amores asquerosos
Ofende a Naturaleza,
y con vii marihuana
disipa (?) todas tus penas.

Carcel que guardas al crimen

entre muros y entre rejas,
eres del vicio la madre,
eres infame y abjecta!

[Prostituted humanity / which dwells in your rooms, / acquiring ne-

farious vices / behind your walls of stone. / / In disgusting loves / of-
fends Nature/ and with vile marijuana/ dissipates(?) your pains.//
Jail which keeps crime/ between walls and behind bars, I you are the
mother of vice,/ you are infamous and abject]. (3, I owe this refer-
ence to Robert Buffington)

In a modified version of this perspective, criminologists saw the

place as their own laboratory, where the criminal population congre-
gated and immorality ruled (Martinez Baca 5). Over the cranial mea-
surements of the prison population practiced by Lombroso and other
Mexican colleagues, however, Carlos Roumagnac, a former journal-
ist, emphasized the direct questioning of inmates. In interviews that
followed a common pattern, he asked criminals about their offenses
and their past, their inheritance and their beliefs, and registered ad-
ditional evidence he considered of interest. That was the shortest
way, he believed, to get at the heart of"los mundos del delito" [the
worlds of crime ]-as read the book series title. As an appendix to the
first volume, he reproduced pictures of "dos casos de her-
mafroditismo" [two cases ofhermaphroditism]-unrelated to the in-
terviews but sharing the morbid association of deviant sexuality and
crime sung by Valay.
Roumagnac, therefore, would have never expected his books to
become, 90 years later, primary sources for the history of sexuality.