The Enlightened Patrolman

"Clearly written and deeply researched, The Enlightened Patrolman offers readers several things: a nuanced history of urban policing, a social history of nocturnal Mexico City in the decades before independence, and a case study of a failed Bourbon reform. It will appeal to both specialists and undergraduate students in upper-level colonial Mexican and Latin American courses."-Christopher Albi, Hispanic American Historical Review “Veritable intellectual dynamite-bursting with insights into colonial Mexico’s class and caste structures; exploding with new interpretations on criminality, law, poverty, and social order; and igniting new conversations on the linkages between surveillance, urban control, race, justice, and the Enlightenment. A masterwork of historical scholarship, The Enlightened Patrolman finely represents social history at its best.”-Ben Vinson III, author of Before Mestizaje: The Frontiers of Race and Caste in Colonial Mexico “A richly textured reconstruction of the lowliest agents of late colonial order. . . . Combining small stories and a broad perspective, Germeten offers the first chapter of Mexico’s long history of resistance and negotiation of police power.”-Pablo Piccato, author of A History of Infamy: Crime, Truth, and Justice in Mexico “An outstanding book that will help to reshape our understanding of early modernity in the Spanish New World as well as the social and cultural history of race and gender in one of the great urban centers of the time.”-William B. Taylor, author of Magistrates of the Sacred: Priests and Parishioners in Eighteenth-Century Mexico “A groundbreaking examination of the roles of policing in its incipient forms in late colonial Mexico City.”-Sharon Bailey Glasco, author of Constructing Mexico City: Colonial Conflicts over Culture, Space, and Authority