ABSTRACT
Taking as its point of departure debates on Latin American multiple modernities and nineteenth-century popular republicanism, the introductory chapter explores the analytical challenges of studying the ways of doing modernisation during the Porfiriato and Conservative republic from the perspective of one of its most erratic agents: the police of the capitals. The first section reviews classical theories and more recent approaches to the police as agents of state power, national order, and culture. It concludes by proposing a heuristic definition of the police as a subjectivity in transit between the state and modern society, which better recalls the process of police formation and the conceptualisations elaborated in the Latin American context. The second section outlines the development of writing as cultural technic and tool of power in Latin America to provide an analytical and historical framework for the study of the functions and dysfunctions of police writing practices. It then explains the pragmalinguistic approach and presents the sources used to analyse the acts of writing of the Policía de la Capital and the Gendarmería Municipal. The introduction concludes with a summary of the chapters of the book.
