Description:

The talk will discuss the ways in which different actors tried to establish the truth about crime in twentieth century Mexico. Detectives, scientists, journalists, fiction writers, newspaper readers and even criminals competed and collaborated to describe and understand crimes in a context where police and judicial institutions did not provide a broadly accepted version of the truth.

Pablo Piccato is Professor of History at Columbia University, specializing in Mexican history. He has worked on the political and cultural history of Mexico, and on the history of crime. His book, A History of Infamy (University of California Press, 2017) explores the broken nexus between crime, justice, and truth in mid-twentieth-century Mexico.

A light lunch will be served.

Co-Presenters: Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Nicholas D. Chabraja Center for Historical Studies, and Kaplan Humanities Institute.

The 2017-18 TRUTH Dialogues are a year-long conversation about knowledge crises and politics from humanistic perspectives, co-presented by the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities in partnership with multiple Northwestern departments and programs.