A Review of The Two Faces of Fear: Violence and Inequality in the Mexican Metropolis

The Two Faces of Fear: Violence and Inequality in the Mexican Metropolis by Ana Villarreal (New York: Oxford University Press, 2024)

On March 19, 2010, two graduate students at the Tec de Monterrey, Jorge Antonio Mercado Alonso and Javier Francisco Arredondo Verdugo, were killed by members of the Mexican Army inside the university campus. To cover up the murder, the Army and Mexican authorities initially claimed the victims were armed sicarios—hitmen— with organized crime connections. An investigation later revealed that Jorge and Javier were engineering students who did not belong to any criminal group and were unarmed when the perpetrators shot them. 

On August 25, 2011, 52 people died after the Zetas, a criminal group notorious for its predatory and violent tactics, set fire to a casino in Monterrey. Two of the victims were pregnant. According to newspaper reports, the attack against the building and the resulting massacre were organized in retaliation for the casino owner’s refusal to pay protection money to the Zetas.  

I evoke these two tragic events to offer a window into the complex context of violence and insecurity that characterizes Monterrey, the vibrant and busy capital of the northeastern state of Nuevo León and the setting of sociologist Ana Villarreal’s groundbreaking book The Two Faces of Fear. While these two incidents took place under the government of President Felipe Calderón (2006-2012) and are unequivocally connected to the series of militarized and repressive security policies promoted under his administration, we can hardly consider these levels of spectacular violence a thing of the past.  

While homicide rates started to decline around 2014, they have been on the rise since 2018. In 2022, Nuevo León had a homicide rate of 23 murders per 100,000 inhabitants, equivalent to 1,410 homicides yearly. In the first eight months of 2024, there were a total of 1,231 homicides, most of them concentrated in the metropolitan area of Monterrey. Beyond these statistics, the forms of violence displayed today make it clear that overt forms of violence continue to punctuate the daily life of regiomontanos—Monterrey area people. 

In Two Faces of Fear, 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. While spectacular and high-impact forms of violence—from mutilated bodies to hangings, extortions and kidnappings—profoundly shaped social relations during Villarreal’s meticulous fieldwork in the city of Monterrey (from 2011 to 2014), her book breaks away from sensationalist accounts that pepper mainstream media both in the United States and Mexico. Villarreal’s book also differs from a scholarship within the social sciences that has centered for the most part in the actions and interactions between armed actors, be they organized criminal groups, state actors or violent entrepreneurs that operate in a grey zone between legality and illegality. Instead, Two Faces of Fear provides an original and much-needed examination of how ordinary citizens—from public school teachers to taxi drivers, businessmen, artists and mothers—navigate fear and the feelings of insecurity and vulnerability they experience as a result of ubiquitous violence.  

As Villarreal argues, scholars have traditionally conceptualized fear as a paradox: an emotion that reflects a disjuncture between objective levels of crime and violence and their subjective dimension, manifested in feelings of insecurity and fear. However, as she effectively demonstrates, in the context she studies, fear is not paradoxical but a logical reaction to high levels of violence. Equally important, fear is an emotion that engenders different responses and strategies and that pushes people to make decisions about how to move in the city, how to get to work, how to go about their leisure activities and how and when to meet in public or in social gatherings. Some people isolate or relocate, others reschedule or reorganize their routines, while still others decide to regroup or concentrate to collectively face fear. This range of responses and practices constitute what the author calls the “logistics of fear”: the strategies people adopt and adapt to confront fear.  

The title of the book, Two Faces of Fear, refers to one of the main contributions of the book. As the author states in the introduction, the book “brings two seemingly contradictory faces of fear into focus: its ability to simultaneously isolate and to concentrate people and resources, deepening existing inequalities in places of severe societal disruption.” Indeed, the responses and strategies people develop to deal with fear are not homogeneous and the differences between them reflect problems of inequality, marginalization and differential access to material, social, symbolic and political capital. As the author aptly shows, inequality in Mexico, as in many other contexts, has not only a class but also a racial and gender component. The book thus traces how the “successful” responses of some people to fear (mainly middle- and upper-class people with lighter skin) translated into the further exclusion and vulnerability of others.  

For instance, people from Monterrey’s privileged classes were able to create what she calls an “oasis from war” through the formation of a “public” space that allowed them to regroup and expand their sense of sociability and conviviality among conocidos (people that knew each other well) within a highly scrutinized, surveilled and controlled area that excluded “others.”  However, for those in the margins of society (dark-skinned youth who were criminalized or perceived as potentially dangerous), regrouping or concentrating was not a viable option as their grouping was seen as a further confirmation of their criminality or gang membership. As a result, as Villarreal argues, some of the groups most vulnerable to violence (marginalized young men) were not able to rely on these strategies to face fear or insecurity. The aggregate effect of these differential responses to fear was the deepening of urban inequality and the further exposure to violence of those at the margins of society. 

In The Two Faces of Fear, scholars and general readers interested in violence, crime and the sociology of emotions will find a carefully crafted narrative that is both ethnographically rich and theoretically astute. The fact that Villarreal focuses on Monterrey, a city that has long been considered a city of progress and home to a thriving business sector with strong connections to the United States, positions her book as a central reflection and critique of what had until recently been the dominant narrative of violence in Mexico. Before the spike on levels of homicide in the city, and particularly before the sort of overt violence the city experienced, Monterrey was considered outside the reach of the social and criminal violence(s) traditionally associated with either rural or historically convulsed areas such as Veracruz, Guerrero, Michoacán, Oaxaca and Chiapas. Simply put, Monterrey was considered a modern, northern and prosperous city where the sort of spectacular and “primitive” forms of violence that began to surface around the 2010s were unthinkable. 

Villarreal’s book also sheds light on another aspect of violence that might seem unlikely: the fact that criminal violence, particularly kidnapping, impacted not only those at the margins of society but also those in the middle- or upper-classes who, due to their display of social status, had become “kidnappable” (secuestrable). Most scholarly literature on urban crime, fear and inequality has tended to focus on the dispossessed and on the impact of violence on those that are at the margins of society. Villarreal, however, turns our attention to the privileged classes—her field notes include working-class individuals but are mostly from people in the middle- and upper-classes—a sector that was and continues to be understudied. In this sense, another contribution of the book is to trace the different strategies put forward by the privileged classes to deal with fear and insecurity, and to highlight how their use of political and economic resources allows them to reorder their lives but also to reorder life in the city, at the expense of marginalized groups. By highlighting the impact of economic inequality on crime as well as the impact of insecurity and fear in reproducing inequality, Villarreal helps us understand how it is that Monterrey’s so-called prosperity could not shield the city from descending into violence.  

Two Faces of Fear is a beautifully written book, even if it deals with a painful and at times horrific reality. Ana Villarreal’s ability to position herself within the study in a way that always feels right, ethical and necessary greatly enriches her sociological analysis. This is a deeply well-crafted ethnographic work, where the author does not shy away from reflecting on her own positionality and her affective ties with the place and with some of the subjects she interviews and studies. The following quote from page 17 captures Villarreal’s unique voice as a scholar deeply committed to understanding this topic: “La inseguridad (the insecurity) was all people talked about. At that point any other topic seemed off-topic. If sociology could not help me understand why this was happening, what people were doing, and what can be done, then what was I training for?”  

 While I was reading Two Faces of Fear, I traveled to Monterrey and encountered a city scarred by many of the violent episodes Ana Villarreal recounts in her book, including the killing of the two graduate students of Tec de Monterrey. As a scholar who works on violence and is therefore attentive to dynamics of crime, I found myself resorting to some of the “logistics of fear” Villarreal discusses and feeling many of the emotions she so sensibly examines. Two Faces of Fear is a formidable book that shifts the needle from prevailing stories of so-called narcos and criminal wars and introduces us to the realm of the affective, the everyday and the all-too-human impacts of violence and fear. 

Gema Kloppe-Santamaría is a Nicaraguan-born sociologist and historian. She is the author of In the Vortex of Violence: Lynching, Extralegal Justice, and the State in Post-Revolutionary Mexico (University of California Press, 2020). She is a permanent Lecturer of Sociology at the University College Cork and an Associate Research Professor of Latin American History at the George Washington University.