The Enlightened Patrolman

The Enlightenment was more than the metaphoric opening of minds to rational ideas in order to dispel backward thinking: it also meant, literally, the lighting up of city streets to civilize their unruly inhabitants. In The Enlightened Patrolman, Nicole von Germeten tells this important story for late colonial Mexico City. In the early 1790s the viceregal government installed streetlights and created a new corps of night watchmen to maintain them. Through painstaking research, she brings these humble agents of the colonial state to life, revealing the difficulties they faced, in particular their contentious relationship with the city's Indigenous and mixed-race poor. She deftly contextualizes the Mexican experience into the larger history of early policing in Europe and North America.The book is organized largely thematically, though it begins with the pre-1790 debates over who should pay for street illumination. The brutal murder in the darkness of night of the merchant Joaquín Dongo and his household in 1789 (the subject of another recent book by Germeten) spurred the government of the viceroy at the time, the conde de Revillagigedo, into action. A new tax on flour entering the city would pay for the installation of lamps along the city streets and for the salaries of the guarda faroleros. These men, mainly young, illiterate plebeians who claimed Spanish origin, were also expected to announce the time and weather, exterminate stray dogs, escort midwives and priests to attend to births and deaths, and round up drunks stumbling out of the city's pulquerias. In her entertaining fourth chapter, Germeten maps out the city's main nightlife districts and analyzes its drinking culture. Arrest statistics indicate that the main task of the guards was to remove drunk indios from the streets, which Bourbon colonial officials hoped would make Mexico City appear more European. Not surprisingly, plebeians of all races resented the lighting reform. They shattered the lamps and insulted the guards. Germeten argues that many of the city's poor targeted the guards as representatives, however low, of an increasingly oppressive Spanish colonial state. For their part, the poorly paid guards routinely shirked their responsibilities. They slept and drank on the job and engaged in petty crimes. In one notorious case, a guard raped a woman but escaped serious punishment because of her reputation as a prostitute. With the beginning of the independence movement in 1810, their job became even more challenging. The city filled with soldiers, who, protected by the military fuero, got drunk, fought in the streets, and ignored the tenuous authority of the guards with impunity. At the end, as Germeten admits, this particular Bourbon reform failed: the streetlights, fueled by turnip oil, hardly dispelled the nocturnal gloom, and the guards themselves became more figures of ridicule than respected agents of law enforcement.Germeten has meticulously mined sources at the Archivo General de la Nación in Mexico City, in particular the Libros de Reos, which record the city's criminal cases from the 1780s to independence. She has seemingly sorted and analyzed every incident involving the night watchmen, attuned especially to how they reflected race and gender issues in colonial society. This fine-grain approach at times becomes a bit much; for instance, she breaks down the sixteen or so official accusations against the guards for theft and bribery into six separate categories. Some tangential details, however, must have been simply too good to leave out, such as the medical debate over the efficacy of administering cold-water enemas to revive jailed drunks.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

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