UC San Diego

Primarily based upon archival resources at the Archivo Histórico del Distrito Federal (AHDF) and the Archivo General de la Nación (AGN) in Mexico City, this thesis is a social and cultural history of the criminalization and punishment of homosexuality during the 1920s and 1930s in Mexico City. The bulk of the primary historical research is based upon two separate spheres of homosexual-related criminal cases, adult and juvenile homosexual 'criminal' cases. The Archivo Histórico houses adult crime cases adjudicated by Mexico City's Tribunal Superior de Justicia del Distrito Federal. The AGN, meanwhile, houses juvenile cases brought to the officials at the Tribunal Administrativo para Menores, a court established in 1927 to adjudicate cases involving troubled youths and delinquents. The criminalization of homosexuality embodied the contradictory and exclusionary nature of modernization in Mexico. More precisely, criminological discourse of turn-of-the-century Mexico, born in the name of modern science, did not aim to extend benefits of progress of the entire population. Rather, it served as an acceptable justification for the exclusion of vast segments of Mexican society from the progress of modernization. Thus, the attempt to criminalize homosexuality in Mexico City was a means for the dominant Mexican culture, itself in a constant process of social and cultural transformation (and re-transformation), to police its own boundaries and solidify notions of 'normal' masculine behavior