Susana Sosenski’s book deftly examines the varied uses, meanings, and motivations behind child abduction in twentieth-century Mexico using the analytical framework of emotions. She traces how a mythical figure such as the robachico (child kidnapper) morphed from a tale parents used to enforce obedience into a real and imagined threat that changed everyday behavior and limited children’s autonomy. The author considers how and why children were abducted, largely in the capital city, but she also makes connections to other regions, such as the Yucatán and Oaxaca, where children were forced to work on henequen and tobacco haciendas. Early twentieth-century accounts highlight organized exploitation whereby “police officers, judges, journalists, traffickers, and hacendados” participated in a highly lucrative endeavor to gain children’s labor without fear of punishment (p. 41). Nevertheless, most child abductors were far less organized, though they similarly aimed to exploit children for their labor, their bodies, or to fulfill notions of maternal love. Jilted lovers kidnapped children as acts of revenge, and greedy opportunists sought to extract hefty sums from wealthy parents.

Sensationalist media reports exacerbated parents’ and children’s fears of robachicos, and in some cases, encouraged readers to participate in investigations—largely a byproduct of public mistrust in the police force—or take matters into their own hands through extrajudicial violence. Sosenski convincingly demonstrates how this moral panic altered children’s mobility and presence in public spaces in Mexico City. While children roamed the capital relatively freely in the century’s first decades, their autonomy was severely restricted by the 1950s. Media accounts stoked racist and xenophobic fears as the reportage “constantly joined in the creation of narratives focused on stoking fear of the Black population” (p. 53). Chinese, Indigenous, Roma, and U.S. populations were also labeled as suspect.

Sosenski’s book describes with sensitivity the emotional turmoil felt by parents and children while also providing a glimpse into the everyday lives of ordinary Mexicans. The police and judicial system failed to adequately protect children, especially darker-skinned and poor children. Two entire chapters are devoted to high-profile cases. The 1945 Bohigas case marked a watershed moment. After a two-year-old, middle-class, “fair-skinned” boy from Colonia Juárez was abducted, the press constantly covered it. Cultural productions appeared demonstrating how it permeated the national psyche. Civil associations were created to protect children, and some even called for the death penalty to be reinstated. Initially vilified by the press, the childless, female kidnapper of the boy eventually garnered a certain level of sympathy as narratives stressed that she had committed her crime out of maternal desperation after failing to conceive and being denied adoption. The case, as Sosenksi so convincingly argues, “was used to reinforce the values that associated femininity with motherhood and maternity with the most crucial of women’s duties” (p. 84).

Similarly, the 1950 Granat case sent shockwaves through the city when the six-year-old “millionaire girl” was taken from the elite Lomas de Chapultepec; Mexicans saw that even extreme wealth and privilege could not shield the film industry tycoon family from such crimes. While most suspected a high-level ransom as the motive, police corruption and torture were believed to have extracted confessions from several lower-class men. Other accounts point to perpetrators exacting revenge on the mogul for refusing to sell his chain of movie theaters to a competitor. During Mexico’s so-called economic miracle, “the notoriously corrupt, violent, and ineffective Mexican police needed to reassure the middle and upper classes and build trust in their capability to pursue criminals and solves cases” (p. 130). The case was thus swiftly, although dubiously, “solved.” After these high-profile cases, modifications to the penal code in 1946, 1951, and 1955 increased prison sentences and fines for kidnapping, though all efforts to protect children and punish offenders had little effect on reducing kidnapping. The book’s fascinating last chapter examines fictionalized child kidnapping stories in mass entertainment media from 1945 until the mid-1960s. Sosenski convincingly argues that these similar narratives “cemented the idea of a hierarchal relationship between adults and children” and “made value judgements about gender (especially maternity), poverty (criminalizing it), and childhood” (p. 161).

Sosenski’s book beautifully balances theoretical complexity with narratives of human suffering, moral panic, and the power of mass media. It will be widely read by scholars and students interested in the history of emotions, childhood and youth, the media, and Mexico.