ABSTRACT
This chapter reconstructs and analyzes the relationship between conviviality and violence in a colonial Mexican city. I argue that violence, far from being an anomaly, was an integral part of the fabric of everyday life, an encoded way of expressing and preserving social hierarchies. On the other hand, I demonstrate that personal violence had explicit and implicit regulations that maintained it in the private sphere, limited the so-called “excesses,” and prevented discontent and tensions from becoming collective issues.
