Overview

Over the past two decades, increased criminal and state violence has profoundly transformed everyday life in Mexico. In The Two Faces of Fear, Ana Villarreal draws on two years of qualitative fieldwork conducted during a major turf war in Monterrey, Mexico to trace the far-reaching impact of fear and violence on social ties, daily practices, and everyday spaces. Villarreal brings two seemingly contradictory faces of fear into focus--its ability to both isolate and concentrate people and resources, deepening inequality. While all residents of one of Mexico's largest metropolises confronted new threats, the most privileged leveraged vastly unequal resources to spatially concentrate and defend one municipality more fiercely than the rest. Within this defended city, business, nightlife, and public space thrived at the expense of the greater metropolis. The book puts forth a new approach to the study of emotion and provides tangible evidence of how quickly fear worsens inequality beyond Mexico and the ""war on drugs.""

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9780197688014

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Reviews

Ana Villarreal expertly theorizes how fear and danger transform daily routines, simultaneously isolating and regrouping people, through acutely class-determined strategies. This moving ethnography of Monterrey, a wealthy and unequal city that many thought immune to violence, adds crucial nuance and depth to our understanding of the relations between violence, fear, and inequality. * Angélica Durán-Martínez, University of Massachusetts-Lowell * An outstanding ethnography of how the affluent use their resources to safeguard themselves from extreme violence, contributing to the perpetuation of class, race, and gender privilege. For a comprehensive understanding of fear and its impact on urban life, this is a must-read. * Hugo Cerón-Anaya, author of Privilege at Play * This elegant volume offers a rare insider perspective on elite fear of violence, vividly illustrating how it is fostering new forms of metropolitan isolation, concentration, and exclusion in 21st century Mexico. This is essential reading for anybody wanting to understand contemporary urban dynamics in Latin America and elsewhere. * Dennis Rodgers, Geneva Graduate Institute *

Ana Villarreal expertly theorizes how fear and danger transform daily routines, simultaneously isolating and regrouping people, through acutely class-determined strategies. This moving ethnography of Monterrey, a wealthy and unequal city that many thought immune to violence, adds crucial nuance and depth to our understanding of the relations between violence, fear, and inequality. * Angélica Durán-Martínez, author of The Politics of Drug Violence * An outstanding ethnography of how the affluent use their resources to safeguard themselves from extreme violence, contributing to the perpetuation of class, race, and gender privilege. For a comprehensive understanding of fear and its impact on urban life, this is a must-read. * Hugo Cerón-Anaya, author of Privilege at Play * This elegant volume offers a rare insider perspective on elite fear of violence, vividly illustrating how it is fostering new forms of metropolitan isolation, concentration, and exclusion in 21st century Mexico. This is essential reading for anybody wanting to understand contemporary urban dynamics in Latin America and elsewhere. * Dennis Rodgers, Geneva Graduate Institute *

Author Information

Ana Villarreal is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Boston University. Her main areas of research, writing and teaching are urban inequality, emotions, and violence. Her work has appeared in Sociological Theory, Emotions and Society, City & Community, among other venues.

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