Spying at the Drycleaners: Anonymous Gossip in 1973 Mexico City

Walker, Louise E.

doi:10.1080/13260219.2013.805720

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Far from idle chatter, rumors refuse a respectable performance of consent with what we might otherwise consider to be a totalizing narrative that only spectacular moments of resistance can rupture. As historian Louise E. Walker ( 2013a , b ) explains in her studies of intelligence archives, rumors pose a methodological challenge and opportunity through which one can “flip the gaze” to reconstruct history from the perspective of those left out of the extant historical record. As a critical part of everyday political culture, rumors not only express discontent with the public transcript, but they also perform dissent.…”

Section: Rumors As Counter-discoursementioning

confidence: 99%

“Wild tongues can’t be tamed”: Rumor, racialized sexuality, and the 1917 Bath Riots in the US-Mexico borderlands

Khanmalek

2021

Lat Stud

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On 28 January 1917, a group of women led by seventeen-year-old Carmelita Torres defied quarantine orders at the US-Mexico border, where Mexican-heritage people were required to undergo delousing. According to local and national coverage of the protest, rumors that United States Public Health Service officials had photographed women in the nude ignited what would come to be known as the Bath Riots. This paper engages archival materials with Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands La Frontera: The New Mestiza to show how these rumors disrupt the existing historical record. Specifically, I analyze newspaper reports to highlight the racialized and sexualized construction of Mexican women as disease carriers in need of regulation and public health photographs of the El Paso disinfection plant. By employing Anzaldúan concepts of “wild tongues” and la facultad as methodological tools for reading state archives, I reveal a counter-discourse to biopolitical subjection in the transmission of rumors among working-class Mexican women.

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Section: Rumors As Counter-discoursementioning

confidence: 99%

“Wild tongues can’t be tamed”: Rumor, racialized sexuality, and the 1917 Bath Riots in the US-Mexico borderlands

Khanmalek

2021

Lat Stud

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“Wild Tongues Can’t Be Tamed”: Rumor, Racialized Sexuality, and the 1917 Bath Riots in the US-Mexico Borderlands

Khanmalek

2024

Latino Studies: A 20th Anniversary Reader

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‘It's Not Gossip, It's True’: Denunciation and Social Control during the Guatemalan Armed Conflict (1970–85)

Janssens

2020

J. Lat. Am. Stud.

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Practices of denunciation are at once ubiquitous and marginalised in literature on the Guatemalan armed conflict. Meanwhile, ordinary Guatemalans who spontaneously denounced neighbours, former friends and fellow villagers have largely escaped scrutiny in scholarly work on low-level perpetrators. Departing from untapped confidential documents in the Historical Archive of the National Police, this article provides the first archival study of denunciatory behaviour during the Guatemalan Civil War, specifically at the height of the conflict (1970–85). This contribution reveals both the strategic considerations that spurred state intelligence apparatuses to elicit civilian information as well as the broad range of personal, opportunistic and strategic motives that drove civilians to denounce. The case study questions scholarly consensus on the spontaneous and voluntary character of denunciation by arguing that besides providing novel pathways for opportunistic action, denunciations also opened up new strategies for survival in the face of a civil war that structured available choices.

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Spying at the Drycleaners: Anonymous Gossip in 1973 Mexico City

Cited by 3 publications

References 1 publication

“Wild tongues can’t be tamed”: Rumor, racialized sexuality, and the 1917 Bath Riots in the US-Mexico borderlands

“Wild tongues can’t be tamed”: Rumor, racialized sexuality, and the 1917 Bath Riots in the US-Mexico borderlands

“Wild Tongues Can’t Be Tamed”: Rumor, Racialized Sexuality, and the 1917 Bath Riots in the US-Mexico Borderlands

‘It's Not Gossip, It's True’: Denunciation and Social Control during the Guatemalan Armed Conflict (1970–85)

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