Silvia Marina Arrom provides a well-researched and thorough picture of the ultimately failed efforts of the state, the church, and private philanthropists to aid Mexico City’s legitimately needy, while forcing undeserving vagrants to either work or face internment. Arrom traces the changes of the Poor House experiment’s goals from the late eighteenth to late nineteenth century and how both its administration and residents influenced its function and the populace it served. Arrom’s study denies the conventional periodization of Mexican history and instead bridges the colonial and national periods. Furthermore, Arrom argues that the differentiation between heroes and villains in Mexican political histories proves overly simplistic.
Arrom pieces her study together using archival sources from Seville, Mexico City, and Salt Lake City, as well as various newspapers and secondary materials. Michel Foucault and the social control school influenced her analysis, which was initially meant to serve as a “Latin American example...
