This heartfelt and disturbing book investigates the heinous crime of child abduction from 1900 through 1960 in Mexico City. Drawing on compelling analyses of newspapers, legislation, films, comic books, and juvenile court records in Mexico City, Susana Sosenski reveals the emotional and economic connotations of abducted children as cultural symbols and how the fears about child abduction shaped the parental experience and public perception of kidnapping. Child kidnappers, or robachicos, engaged in different (if occasionally overlapping) types of abduction or kidnapping (for example, ransom kidnapping and extortion, kidnapping by women due to a “desire to be mothers,” parental kidnapping by men who inflicted gender violence on former partners, and the abduction of children for labor and sexual exploitation). Sosenski brilliantly argues that media and citizen fears in response to the abduction of children from well-to-do families resulted in prescribed harsh punishment for perpetrators of child abduction. However, such particular...
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Book Review|
November 01 2022
Robachicos: Historia del secuestro infantil en México (1900–1960)
Robachicos: Historia del secuestro infantil en México (1900–1960)
. By Susana Sosenski. Mexico City
: Grano de Sal
, 2021
. Photographs. Figures. Table. Notes. Bibliography
. 277
pp. Paper, Mex$330.00.Hispanic American Historical Review (2022) 102 (4): 769–771.
Citation
Carlos Zúñiga Nieto; Robachicos: Historia del secuestro infantil en México (1900–1960). Hispanic American Historical Review 1 November 2022; 102 (4): 769–771. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00182168-10025944
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