Pablo Piccato argues convincingly that masculine honor and violence helped create a public sphere in nineteenth-century Mexico. Violence and reputation may seem antithetical to a notion of a public sphere as theorized by Jürgen Habermas, Hannah Arendt, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and others, but Piccato asks his reader to consider a public sphere in Mexico as something uniquely Mexican. Violence, shame, and the not-always-so-free exchange of ideas and opinion characterized Mexico’s public sphere during the second half of the nineteenth century. A grammar of violence, in the duel, offered public men a legitimate method to defend honor, influence public opinion, and sometimes provide a bloody afterword to rational-critical debate. What the Mexican public sphere had in common with Europe was its steady exclusion of women and the poor, as liberalism and republicanism triumphed in the century of Juárez and Díaz.

The era of the Restored Republic (1867 – 76) ushered in heady...

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