The Nuevo León Penitentiary as a political prison during the 1903 Anti-Reyista protest and the Mexican Revolution of 1910

Abstract

The political legitimacy crises faced by Bernardo Reyes in 1903 and Porfirio Díaz in 1910 share a common point: the Nuevo León Penitentiary was politically instrumentalized in both junctures as a state strategy to perpetuate the regime—first against a local protest and later against a national mobilization. Political dissidents such as Felipe Naranjo, Francisco Madero, and Roque Estrada were apprehended in Monterrey during the development of this phenomenon. Accordingly, this research articulates the analysis of political imprisonments with the concepts of heterotopia, state of exception, and domination association, proposed by Foucault, Agamben, and Weber, respectively.

      The relevance of the research lies in its revelation of the tactics used by the regime to perpetuate itself through a regional control apparatus. Furthermore, this study complicates the political dimension of the Nuevo León Penitentiary by linking it to the 1903 Anti-Reyista protest and the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Through the analysis of primary sources located in archives such as the Centro de Estudios de Historia de México, the Archivo Histórico de Monterrey, and the Global Press Archive, the official discourse of the penitentiary is examined. This discourse established the foundational purpose as the criminal's regeneration, but contrasts sharply with what is observed in the documentation gathered: the existence of a political prison that frequently violated the norms established by the judicial apparatus to perpetuate the Porfirista-Reyista regime. In this context, political prisoners exercised discursive resistance by denouncing in writing the injustices of the Mexican penitentiary system.