Reconceptualizing Urban Violence

from the Global South

Ana Villarreal*
Boston University

Although urban violence is most often theorized in relation to marginality, violence

affects wealthy and poor in Latin America, albeit in different ways. Drawing on qual-
itative fieldwork and media coverage of a gruesome turf war in Monterrey, Mexico,
this paper illustrates how an increase in violence lead the upper class to “disembed”
the municipality of San Pedro from the Monterrey Metropolitan Area, revamp the
police, and attempt to create not only a “defended neighborhood,” but an entire
“defended city.” Contemporary San Pedro reveals that violence and related fear can
prompt not only the fragmentation of urban space into numerous gated communi-
ties, but also the simultaneous concentration of urban wealth and public security at
a city level. Latin American metropoles call for a reconceptualization of urban vio-
lence beyond the margins and a closer examination of the invisible walls enclosing
the urban wealthy around the world.

RECONCEPTUALIZING URBAN VIOLENCE FROM THE GLOBAL

SOUTH

As violent crime declined in the United States, Latin America became the most violent re-
gion in the world. In 2016, 43 of the 50 cities with the highest homicide rates were located
in El Salvador, Mexico, Honduras, Brazil, Guatemala, and Colombia (Muggah and Aguirre
Tobon 2018). As both the most violent and urbanized region in the world—with approxi-
mately 80 percent of its population now living in cities—Latin American metropoles con-
stitute prime sites to examine and reconceptualize urban violence (UN-HABITAT 2012).
Although urban violence is most often theorized in relation to marginality, violence affects
wealthy and poor in Latin America, albeit in different ways. In this paper, I examine the
impact of violence on the increased seclusion of the urban wealthy in the Global South.
The urban poor in Latin America, like the urban poor in the United States experience
disproportionate levels of violence (Auyero 2011; Auyero et al. 2015), yet the most privi-
leged in Latin America are more likely to get kidnapped, killed, and caught in crossfire
than the most privileged in the Global North. The underexamined responses of the ur-
ban wealthy to violence have a powerful impact on the spatial organization of a city. In
the first part of this paper, I briefly examine scholarship on urban violence developed in
the margins of American cities, as well as how core concepts in the literature have been

∗ Correspondence should be addressed to Ana Villarreal, Department of Sociology, 100 Cummington Mall # 260,
Boston, MA 02215; [email protected].

City & Community 0:0 xxx 2020

doi: 10.1111/cico.12506
© 2020 American Sociological Association, 1430 K Street NW, Washington, DC 20005

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 CITY & COMMUNITY

revised in the margins of Latin American cities. I then link these findings to research on
the spatial consequences of increased violence in Latin America taken from global urban
studies. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork and media coverage of a gruesome turf war in
Monterrey, Mexico, one of the wealthiest cities in Latin America, I illustrate how violence
lead the upper class to “disembed” (Rodgers 2004) the municipality of San Pedro from
the Monterrey Metropolitan Area, revamp the police and attempt to create not only a “de-
fended neighborhood” (Suttles 1972), but an entire “defended city.” Contemporary San
Pedro reveals that increased violence and fear can prompt not only the fragmentation of
urban space into numerous gated communities (Caldeira 2000; Dinzey-Flores 2013; Gar-
rido 2019; Low 2004, 2006), but also the simultaneous concentration of wealth and public
security at a city level. Latin American metropoles call for a reconceptualization of urban
violence beyond the margins and a closer examination of the invisible walls enclosing and
concentrating the urban wealthy at the top of the social structure.

VIOLENCE AT THE MARGINS OF AMERICAN CITIES

Following the crack epidemic of the late 1980s and early 1990s, homicide rates steadily
declined in American cities, though violence continues to be an important feature of
inner-city life. Inner-city ethnographers stress the importance of mastering a “code of the
street” (Anderson 1999, 1990) to survive in a violent “inner-city street culture” (Bour-
gois 2003) where having a reputation as a fighter capable of inflicting violence is a prime
means of warding off aggressors for men and women (Contreras 2013; Jones 2004, 2009).
For those living in marginalized, impoverished, and heavily policed neighborhoods (Wac-
quant 2008, 2009), becoming “streetwise” (Anderson 1990) is insufficient. Residents, and
particularly Black and Latino youth (Rios 2011, 2017; Vargas 2016), must additionally be-
come “copwise” to avoid police violence (Stuart 2016). From a quantitative perspective,
scholars examine the significance of collective efficacy and street efficacy in controlling
or avoiding urban violence among the urban poor, as well as the ways in which crime
and neighborhoods are closely connected (Papachristos and Bastomski 2018; Sampson,
Raudenbush, and Earls 1997; Sharkey 2006). Although this scholarship can explain some
dynamics of urban violence in Latin American cities, particularly at the neighborhood
level, it is also limited in scope given the scale of violence affecting the whole class spec-
trum and the deep distrust in state institutions that characterize life in Latin American
cities.
Key concepts in this literature such as neighborhood effects and collective efficacy
(Sampson 2008, 2012; Sampson and Groves 1989; Sampson et al. 1997) have been revised
drawing on different experiences of urban violence in Latin America. In strong contrast
with Chicago, sociologists find in Belo Horizonte that social ties can also be correlated
with higher levels of crime; in Bogotá, that increased police presence may also be cor-
related with increased levels of violence (Escobar 2012; Villarreal and da Silva 2006). In
a comparative study of neighborhoods in Bogotá, Lima, and Santiago, scholars find that
rapid migration from rural areas, including those displaced by violent conflict, and the
failed efficacy of policing, often taken for granted in the United States, play “a key role
in our understanding not just of why violence occurs, but also of the specific types of vio-
lence, and of the ways these are reinforced through political and social practices” (Arias
and Tocornal Montt 2018:122). Scholarship developed in the margins of American cities

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 RECONCEPTUALIZING URBAN VIOLENCE FROM THE GLOBAL SOUTH

and revised in the margins of Latin American cities tends to miss how other social strata,
and the wealthy in particular, respond to violence in an urban context where they are
more likely to be victimized than in the United States. In other words, more attention has
been given to the collective efficacy of the poor (Sampson et al. 1997) than the collective
action of the wealthy, the resources at their disposal to respond to increased violence in a
city, and the social and spatial consequences of their responses.
In The Social Construction of Communities, Gerald Suttles (1972) formulates the concept
“defended neighborhood” to examine mechanisms of territorial defense emerging out
of the failure of the police and courts to protect property and lives. Several scholars have
made arguments on gangs establishing localized orders in the United States and Central
America (Moore 1991; Padilla 1992; Rodgers 2006; Sánchez-Jankowski 1991; Venkatesh
1997; Vigil 1988). In this paper, I suggest rescaling this concept from a neighborhood to a
city level. In an attempt to demarcate a space where they feel secure, the upper class can
leverage private and public resources to establish a localized order as well, a “defended
city” within a metropolitan area.

VIOLENCE AT THE CORE OF LATIN AMERICAN CITIES

Over the course of the 20th century, global capital violently forced masses of Latin Amer-
ican peasants to migrate to cities where modernist urban planning contributed to lay the
foundation for further social exclusion and violence (Angotti 2013; Davis 2016). Since the
early 2000s, several edited volumes and special issues examine Latin American metropoles
as “fractured cities” inhabited by “citizens of fear” (Imbusch, Misse, and Carrión 2011;
Koonings and Krujit 2007; Rotker 2002) where urban space is increasingly reorganized
in response to violence and “the lack of confidence in the state’s capacity to provide ef-
fective police security” (Moser 2004:10). Numerous ethnographies of favelas and barrios
marginados depict scenes of everyday terror, horrifying police brutality, and unresponsive
bureaucracies among the urban poor, and particularly among the urban youth (Alvarado
Mendoza 2013; Auyero and Berti 2015; Machado da Silva 2008; Zubillaga, Llorens, and
Souto 2019). Scholars argue that violence and not only poverty define the very notion of
urban margins in the Global South and beyond (Auyero 2011; Auyero et al. 2015).
As the poor are relegated to the urban margins, the wealthy retreat to private “forti-
fied enclaves” as conceptualized by Teresa Caldeira in her native São Paolo that became
a “city of walls”—a metropolis fragmented by privatized spaces of residence, consump-
tion, leisure, and work and “a population obsessed by security and social discrimination”
(2000:231–32). Gated communities proliferate in Latin America, as in “fortress” America
(Low 2004), yet these do not capture the totality of spatial strategies used by the wealthy
to increasingly seclude themselves (Wacquant 2010). After five years of absence, Den-
nis Rodgers returned to Managua, Nicaragua and noticed that in response to increased
crime: “rather than fragmenting into an archipelago of self-sustaining and isolated is-
lands of wealth within a sea of poverty, urban space has undergone a process whereby
a whole layer of the metropolis has been disconnected from the general fabric of the
city” (2004:114). This disconnection or “disembedding” as Rodgers calls it, drawing on
Anthony Giddens (1990), was achieved, among others, through increased private secu-
rity, multiple “beautifying” public works and especially through the elaboration of a new
transportation network including: the replacement of traffic lights with roundabouts (to

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 CITY & COMMUNITY

prevent carjacking); a bypass road to avoid a high-crime area; and overall road improve-
ment in areas connecting upper class spaces at the expense of roads elsewhere.
Although the literature on gated communities highlights the connection between fear,
crime, and the fragmentation of urban space (Caldeira 2000; Dinzey-Flores 2013; Gar-
rido 2019; Low 2004, 2006), Rodgers provides an example of how increased violent crime
can also prompt the wealthy to concentrate private and public resources in one area of
the city. Building on Rodgers and Suttles (1972), in what follows I trace a similar though
more extreme case of “disembedding” of the urban wealthy from a metropolitan area. In
response to a wave of gruesome violence, the Monterrey Metropolitan Area underwent
a simultaneous process of fragmentation and concentration of the urban fabric. On the
one hand, an increase in violence coincided with the construction of the first gated com-
munities in the metropolis. On the other, the most luxurious ones were all located within
the municipality of San Pedro politically marketed as an “armored” municipality by the
mayor at the time (Altuna, Rossini, and Osorno 2012). Moreover, I observed not only an
increase in the use of private security, but also in the private use of the state to create a
“defended city” where all aspects of upper-class life could be reorganized.

TAKING SUTTLES SOUTH: VIOLENCE AND THE

“DEFENDED CITY” IN MEXICO
In the mid-2000s, the Zetas, a criminal organization of U.S. trained Mexican army desert-
ers, split from the Gulf Cartel, their former employer (Correa-Cabrera 2017). Homicide
rates exploded in northeastern Mexico. Bodies were hung from overpasses and dismem-
bered corpses were abandoned in trash bags or dissolved in acid. The violence unleashed
by organized crime like the Zetas on trafficking rivals, state officials, and civilians in north-
eastern Mexico is proportional only to the profits at stake in controlling one of the world’s
most lucrative drug, human, and gas trafficking routes into the United States.
Beginning in 2009, this tidal wave of gruesome violence hit Monterrey, a metropolis of
4.5 million inhabitants and the industrial and commercial core of the region. Figure 1
depicts a sudden and stunning nine-fold increase and decrease in homicide rates for the
state of Nuevo Leon where Monterrey is located, concentrating almost 90 percent of the
state population. For decades, homicide rates in Nuevo Leon were below the national
average, oscillating around 5 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants. Between 2009 and 2011,
homicide rates increased to 45 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants and nearly doubled the
national average. By 2015, homicide rates had significantly declined oscillating between
10 and 12 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants, though remained twice as high as homicides
prior to this wave of violence. To provide a point of reference, homicide rates in the United
States at the height of the crack epidemic peaked at 9.8 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants
in 1991 and have since declined below 5 (US Department of Justice 2011).
As mentioned above, widespread violence in Latin American metropoles is exacerbated
by heightened distrust in state institutions. In 2012, a survey revealed that fewer than 1 out
of 5 Monterrey residents trust the local police (18 percent), the state or local government
(19 percent), judges (18 percent), congress (16 percent), public functionaries (13 per-
cent), or politicians (12 percent). Although half of Monterrey residents claimed to trust
the military in 2010, trust levels dropped to 38 percent in 2012 (Corpovisionarios 2012).
This drop is likely due to increased awareness of military abuses, including extrajudicial

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 RECONCEPTUALIZING URBAN VIOLENCE FROM THE GLOBAL SOUTH

FIG 1. Homicide rates for Mexico and Nuevo Leon, 1997–2017.

Source: Estadísticas de mortalidad, defunciones por homicidio (Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía 2018);
Indicadores demográficos 1950–2050—población a mitad de año (Consejo Nacional de Población 2018).

killings, torture and forced disappearances documented by Amnesty International, Hu-

man Rights Watch and other human rights organizations (Amnesty International 2013;
Daly, Heinle, and Shirk 2012).
As the first bodies were hung from footbridges in Monterrey, The Wall Street Journal and
other foreign media reported that increased violence, and the “exodus” of wealthy Mexi-
cans, Americans, and other foreigners that followed, delivered “a blow to a city, which for
some time was proud to be one of the wealthiest and safest in Latin America” (Luhnow
2010). In 2011, as homicides peaked in the state, local business tycoon Lorenzo Zambrano
captured the disbelief of the upper class facing increased violence in Mexico’s “business
jewel” in an interview with the Spanish newspaper El País: “If we lose Monterrey, everything
will be lost” (Ordaz 2011). Home to prestigious universities, as well as thriving industries
and multinational corporations, Monterrey had seemed exempt from the gruesome vio-
lence tearing apart other parts of the country since President Felipe Calderón escalated
Mexico’s “war on drugs” in 2006 (Durán-Martínez 2018; Enciso 2009; Lessing 2017).
“We thought it would be temporary, that it was related to minor arrangements between
mafias,” Zambrano continued. “We heard there were drug traffickers living here, but at
the time we did not request that they leave the city. I’ll be honest, in Monterrey, we be-
came a bit arrogant.” Speaking for one of the strongest business groups in the country,
he called for measures to “save the city” such as remaking the police and building a sense
of citizenship among the population to increase its demands on the state. Above all, he
called for a fight when other businessmen were leaving. “I was enraged to see them drop in
the towel,” he said, “that they did not stay to defend what their parents and grandparents
had built.”
Increased violence and fear not only splintered the Monterrey Metropolitan Area with
numerous gated streets and parks, as well as the first “fortified enclaves” (Caldeira 2000) in

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 CITY & COMMUNITY

the metropolis, but also concentrated massive private and public resources in the wealth-
iest of its nine municipalities: San Pedro (see Figure 2). San Pedro huddles in a valley,
cradled between the mountains that gave Monterrey—the King of Mountains—its name.
Entire neighborhoods of homes perched on the steep rocks and through the dense for-
est of the monumental Sierra Madre Oriental were gated. Access to San Pedro, which
is limited to eight points including a couple of bridges and a tunnel, were irregularly
guarded with military checkpoints at the time of my fieldwork. As violence escalated, real
estate plummeted in Monterrey, but not in San Pedro where gated communities and office
buildings thrived on residents’ fear of leaving the “armored” municipality.
Raised in San Pedro, I had access to examine the responses of the upper class at this
time. Over two years of ethnographic (re)immersion between 2011 and 2013, I witnessed
the rapid concentration of all aspects of upper class living within this municipality in re-
sponse to increased violence, fear, and victimization. The two most feared crimes among
the wealthy at the time of my fieldwork—kidnapping and extortion—are underreported
given distrust in state institutions and fear of retaliation. The extent of victimization is
nonetheless palpable in everyday language, for people began to assess themselves as kid-
nappable or not (Villarreal 2013). State officials admit how unreliable kidnapping statistics
are. In 2012, I attended a “security talk” by a military officer at a private sports club in San
Pedro where a woman asked him to report on the number of kidnappings that took place
in the metropolis per day.
“I can speak of reported cases because those are the ones I have knowledge of,” replied the
officer. “Umm, last month there were only twelve reports but that would be like covering the
sun with a finger if we think there were only twelve. Most people do not report. When we find
out and approach them, they say, ‘thank you but stay out of this, I want him back alive and if
they see you they will kill him.’ So, my hands are tied.”
“Is it true?” said the woman in the audience.
“What is?” replied the officer.
“If they see you come near, will they kill?”
“Well, you’ll immediately get a phone call of someone saying, I saw you told the soldiers; I’m
turning him in dead,” he replied in a low, sketchy voice.
“Yes or no? (…) Generally speaking, will they…?”

“Generally speaking, yes.”

“Well in that case, it’s best not to report.”

“Well no, it’s best to report. It’s best to report!”

Prior to this wave of violence, kidnapping and extortion were rare in Monterrey and
mostly affected the wealthy. Both became widespread as Zetas and other groups of orga-
nized crime turned to systematic kidnapping and extortion, locally referred to as cobro
de piso, of both wealthy and poor, in exchange for “security.” The core spatial response
of the upper class to widespread violence, including kidnapping and extortion, was to
concentrate.
The upper class of Monterrey relocated from downtown Monterrey to the valley of San
Pedro in the mid-20th century to late 20th century. Violence exacerbated this ongoing
process of seclusion (Wacquant 2010). Wealthy families living near golf courses in the

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RECONCEPTUALIZING URBAN VIOLENCE FROM THE GLOBAL SOUTH

FIG 2. San Pedro and the Monterrey Metropolitan Area.

Source: Map drawn by Sahoko Yui. [Color figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]
[Color figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]
 CITY & COMMUNITY

countryside moved to San Pedro or left the country. Some San Pedro residents rarely left
its borders. “I don’t leave San Pedro,” said Carolina in an interview in 2013. “The farthest I
go is Costco [located at the municipal border], beyond that I’m like… oh, oh, I’m leaving
San Pedro.” Others enforced curfews on family members required to be within munici-
pal boundaries after dark. Even the U.S. Consulate for Monterrey ordered its personnel
residing in San Pedro not to “travel outside the San Pedro Garza Garcia municipal bound-
aries between midnight and 6 a.m.” (U.S. Department of State Bureau of Consular Affairs
2012).
Although understudied, the private sector plays an important role in the regulation of
urban violence in Latin America (Moncada 2016). One of the lines of action pursued
by the organized business class in response to increased violence was to revamp the state
police (Ley and Guzmán 2019). On September 14, 2011, the first generation of Fuerza Civil
police graduated from the newly formed University of Security Sciences. Self-defined as “a
new generation of heroes, made up of braver, smarter men and women better trained to
protect what matters the most,” the new police force relied heavily on marketing strategies
to rebrand a state institution as a civic institution made up of hero citizens. Television
ads, like action movie trailers, featured heavily armed police officers descending from
helicopters, ready for battle. Marketing strategies emphasized the “newness” of the police
and aimed to recruit men and women who had not been police officers before.
In 2013, The Economist covered the creation of this new police force in the piece “The
new face of Mexican policing: A public–private effort to reduce violence in Mexico’s
wealthiest city.” Business-style psychometric tests, military training, twice the salary of other
police, separate housing were meant to “make it difficult for drug mafias to hobble” these
new recruits, though it was too early “to declare victory” (The Economist 2013). The jour-
nalist noted that “in the once-cool Barrio Antiguo in the city center, many bars that suf-
fered frequent shootouts remain boarded up, but in San Pedro nightlife was once again
buzzing.” This observation is important, hinting at the differential benefits of this local
police reform and the deepening divide between the wealthy municipality of San Pedro
where club nightlife thrived as it shut down in downtown Monterrey.
Within this context of explosive violence, San Pedro became increasingly “disembed-
ded” from the broader metropolitan area with four times more police officers than the
metropolitan average. Inside its mountainous walls, perceptions of security and trust in
the new and more numerous police force varied greatly. Some San Pedro residents like
Carolina found comfort in increased police presence. “In a second, you’ll get 20 police
trucks, granaderas. I just saw that on Saturday or Sunday here on Vasconcelos, at the gas
station, I was getting gas and I saw cops interrogating some kids, unos chavitos… one was
put against the wall to inspect him and in a second, a patrol car arrived, then another, and
one on Vasconcelos, and another with a gun in the middle, so…” When her kids asked
what was going on, Carolina replied, “they are protecting the city.” “From whom?” they
asked (smart kids). “’They’re protecting the city,” she repeated, “so smile at them and say
thank you.” Other San Pedro residents like Tanya feared Fuerza Civil. “I hate seeing them
everywhere, they’re everywhere. I hate seeing their trucks and their rifles and they’re at a
traffic light and they’re not paying attention and they’re pointing a machine gun at you
and your son’s there, a four-year old, what do you do? It’s the most aggressive thing I’ve felt
in my life. And you’re driving in your car and you just want to cry from the impotence,
you get me? How can I tell that guy to turn away his…” Tanya’s eyes reddened as she
struggled to finish her sentence.

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 RECONCEPTUALIZING URBAN VIOLENCE FROM THE GLOBAL SOUTH

Upper class responses to crime often include rising walls, gated communities, surveil-
lance cameras, armored cars, private security guards. San Pedro has them all, yet these
were also insufficient to deal with the violence and fear posed by organized crime like
the Zetas. The urban wealthy in the Monterrey Metropolitan Area not only locked them-
selves up in privately secured gated communities and neighborhoods; the local business
class also entered in new partnerships with the local state to revamp the local police,
among other measures. By 2017, the divide between San Pedro and the greater Monterrey
Metropolitan Area became obvious to foreign journalists. The New York Times reported in
the piece “’The Social Contract is Broken’: Inequality Becomes Deadly in Mexico” that
while Monterrey appears as “one city stretching between the mountains that surround it”
from above, closer up, “it becomes visible that invisible walls enclose Monterrey’s wealthy
core” (Fisher and Taub 2017). Government is more responsive and crime is lower for
those living in the “defended city” of San Pedro.

VIOLENCE BEYOND THE MARGINS

In this paper, I have argued that the underexamined responses of the wealthy to vio-
lence are central to the spatial organization of metropolitan areas in the Global South. In
Monterrey, Mexico, as in Managua, Nicaragua, the wealthy have “disembedded” (Rodgers
2004) from the broader metropolitan area following an increase in violent crime. More-
over, in San Pedro, the wealthy relied not only on private security but on the private use
of the state to create a “defended city” where all aspects of upper-class life could be reor-
ganized. Both cases demonstrate that in Latin America, violence can prompt not only the
fragmentation of urban space but also the increased concentration of urban wealth.
There are more cases of violence exacerbating the seclusion of the wealthy to the point
of “disembedding” entire municipalities to be examined in greater detail. Following the
Caracazo of 1989, the municipality of Chacao in Caracas, Venezuela became a “tiny munic-
ipal nation-within-a-nation” (Ciccariello-Maher 2007:60). Core business activities moved
away from the traditional center of Libertador to Chacao, which became a “pole” for
corporate agglomeration (Nagoda, 2005:8). In the mid-2000s, large road signs featuring
Chacao’s municipal logo welcomed incoming drivers with the words: “You are now in Safe
Territory’” (Nagoda, 2005:9). Like the “armoring” of San Pedro, the public authorities de-
clared Chacao a “safe territory” within the Caracas Metropolitan District. More recently,
Chacao continues to thrive in the midst of soaring violent crime. In “An Unlikely Winner
in Venezuelan Crisis: High-End Real Estate,” Reuters reports that “cranes clutter the skyline
of the Caracas municipality of Chacao, home to the capital’s financial district and most of
its embassies, despite a backdrop of huge supermarket lines that have become a symbol of
the country’s economic decay” (Ellsworth 2016). Beyond using private security and walls,
how is the upper class using the state to escalate its mechanisms of spatial seclusion in
Latin America and beyond?
The convergence of increased violence and the “disembedding” of the urban wealthy
may be specific to the Global South but the more general trend of spatial concentration
of wealth is not. After two decades researching the haute bourgeoisie in Paris, Monique
Pinçon-Charlot and Michel Charlot conclude that the search for “people like us” results
in spatial “class clustering that is often narrower and more intense than the conspicuous
concentration of poverty observed in some working-class districts” (Pinçon-Charlot and

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 CITY & COMMUNITY

Pinçon 2018:116). As global inequality continues to rise, San Pedro, Nueva Managua, and
Chacao push us to examine not only the visible walls fragmenting metropolitan areas,
but also the invisible walls enclosing the wealthy at the top of the social structure in ever
tighter urban spaces around the world.

Acknowledgments
I thank Marco Garrido, Xuefei Ren, and Liza Weinstein for the invitation to participate in
this special issue and their critical feedback. I also thank Sneha Annavarapu, Javier Auyero,
Benjamin Bradlow, Japonica Brown-Saracino, Teresa Caldeira, Laura Enriquez, Julian
Go, Ieva Jusonyte, Mara Loveman, Ashley Mears, Delphine Mercier, Miguel Quintana-
Navarrete, Victoria Reyes, Loïc Wacquant, and our reviewers. This research was assisted
by a grant from the Drugs, Security and Democracy Fellowship Program administered by
the Social Science Research Council and the Universidad de los Andes in cooperation
with funds provided by the Open Society Foundation and the International Development
Research Centre, Ottawa, Canada; a University of California Institute for Mexico and the
U.S. Dissertation Research Grant; a Harry Frank Guggenheim Dissertation Fellowship; a
Boston University Initiative on Cities Early Stage Urban Research Award; a Frederick S.
Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future Faculty Research Fellowship;
and a Boston University Center for the Humanities Junior Faculty Fellowship.

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