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In
The Two Faces of Fear, Ana Villareal provides an in-depth study of how people live in a high-violence environment, drawing on two years of qualitative fieldwork conducted during a violent turf war in her hometown of Monterrey, Mexico. More broadly, Villareal puts forth a new approach to the study of fear and provides tangible evidence of how quickly fear worsens class, gender, race, and urban inequality beyond Mexico and the "war on drugs."
List of contents
- Chapter 1: Fear as an Everyday Problem
- Chapter 2: Ubiquitous Violence
- Chapter 3: The Logistics of Fear
- Chapter 4: Defending San Pedro
- Chapter 5: Restructuring Nightlife
- Chapter 6: An Oasis from War
- Chapter 7: Fear and Inequality at the Onset of Crises
- Appendix: Gaining Distance
- Acknowledgments
- References
- Index
About the author
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.
Summary
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."
Additional text
Ana Villarreal offers a powerful, perceptive, and conceptually persuasive account on the impact of fear in people's everyday lives in contexts of chronic insecurity and violence.
