Dutra's World: Wealth and Family in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro (review)
Throughout this book, the author writes with a marked sensitivity for Lima's prison population. He concludes with a discussion of a unique series of colored drawings done by an inmate at El Fronton in 1932. The drawings show the abuse, arbitrariness, and suffering in places of incarceration, as well as what the author calls "the customary order." The latter, he argues, distinguished Lima's prisons and helped inmates overcome some oppressive elements, and revealed the "porosity and ambiguities of state-imposed mechanisms of social control" (pp. 215-16). The drawings often "invite the viewer to laugh," but readers of The Criminals of Lima and their Worlds will do so with a much greater understanding of and empathy for Lima's prison populations gained from Aguirre's research.