Communities and Crime in Mexico City

In Mexico’s capital, understanding the city means understanding crime, and vice versa. More specifically, it means taking some distance from prevailing policy-oriented criminological perspectives and reintegrating the problem of crime into urban history. Asking question to crime from a historical perspective requires a critical use of views of Mexico City as a chaotic, dangerous, dirty city. More useful is asking how is it that people continue to come and stay and build communities in the largest city of the hemisphere in spite of great obstacles. The answer involves a complex picture, where the small detail is as important as the broader landscape