Economic Crime: Bounced Checks and Financialization in Mexico, 1930s–80s

This paper presents a history of uncovered cheques in post-Revolutionary Mexico. Writing a bad cheque was defined as fraud between 1932 and 1984. The 1930s banking legislation was passed during the consolidation of the one-party state, when political elites were keen to promote the consumer economy and financial modernization. The government’s finance policy officials forged close ties with bankers, and banking laws set high penalties for uncovered cheques (which were costly for banks). The broader goal of the criminalization was to stimulate the consumption that was key to the mid-century import substitution developmental model. Cheques were part of the growing consumer economy, used by small business owners and their customers to facilitate exchange, and one aim of the legislation was to instill societal confidence in these financial instruments. Writing an uncovered cheque was decriminalized in 1984, part of an emerging political economy of neo-liberal financialization.

The paper examines what happened to people who wrote bad cheques. Research is based on 115 files of people jailed in Lecumberri prison for writing uncovered cheques between 1941 and 1975. The paper uses humanities and social science methods to study the problem of bounced cheques. It combines statistical analysis of demographic, microeconomic and legal variables abstracted from the prison files with close readings of uncovered cheques in the public sphere, especially newspapers, and in popular culture like blockbuster films. Ultimately, the paper shows how everyday financial habits and customs were criminalized to promote consumption and advance financial modernization.

The paper also considers the limitations and possibilities of the prison files, an archival collection that offers new perspective on state-society relations in mid-century decades. These files, which are relative unused by historians, add to the scholarship based on declassified intelligence archives, offering a fresh entry into the coercive apparatus of the state.