Death in Old Mexico

by Nicole von Germeten

In a Mexico City mansion on October 23, 1789, Don Joaquín Dongo and ten of his employees were brutally murdered by three killers armed with machetes. Investigators worked tirelessly to find the perpetrators, who were publicly executed two weeks later. Labelled the 'crime of the century,' these events and their aftermath have intrigued writers of fiction and nonfiction for over two centuries. Using a vast range of sources, Nicole von Germeten recreates a paper trail of Enlightenment-era greed and savagery, and highlights how the violence of the Mexican judiciary echoed the acts of the murderers. The Spanish government conducted dozens of executions in Mexico City's central square in this era, revealing how European imperialism in the Americas influenced perceptions of violence and how it was tolerated, encouraged, or suppressed. An evocative history, Death in Old Mexico provides a compelling new perspective on late colonial Mexico City.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Crime, True Crime

286 pages, Paperback

First published March 9, 2023

About the author

Nicole von Germeten has a lifelong passion for history and writing. She received her PhD in history from the University of California at Berkeley. She also has degrees from Boston University and the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Her research has taken her to over thirty historic archives in Colombia, Spain, and Mexico. She held a post doctoral fellowship at Princeton University, was a visiting scholar at Stanford University, and currently teaches on the History faculty of Oregon State University in Corvallis.

Reviews

[Cristhian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Muy buen relato a fondo de la serie de 11 asesinatos en la casa de Dongo durante el virreinato. La verdad no sabía nada de este caso y está muy interesante.

Ojalá lo escuche alguna vez en leyendas legendarias.

[Maven_Reads · Rating 4 out of 5]

Death in Old Mexico: The 1789 Dongo Murders and How They Shaped the History of a Nation by Nicole von Germeten – Review

Death in Old Mexico: The 1789 Dongo Murders and How They Shaped the History of a Nation by Nicole von Germeten is a meticulously researched historical non‑fiction that reconstructs one of late colonial Mexico City’s most brutal crimes, when Don Joaquín Dongo and ten of his employees were slaughtered by machete‑wielding assailants in October 1789, a crime quickly labelled the “crime of the century.” Von Germeten draws on legal records, city archives, and period texts to piece together both the event itself and the wider social, judicial, and racial context of Enlightenment‑era New Spain, showing how this massacre and its aftermath reflect evolving ideas about law, violence and imperial authority in a multiracial colonial capital.

What drew me in as a reader was how this book treated historical violence not as distant spectacle but as something lived by real people, whose lives and deaths ripple through the surrounding society and its institutions.

Von Germeten’s writing brings Mexico City’s colonial streets, public executions, and tangled court proceedings into sharper relief, and made me think deeply about how justice was administered and perceived long ago and in places I know only through history.

Although some sections weighed heavily on legal and administrative detail, the care she took to restore ordinary figures to historical view kept me emotionally invested in the world she was excavating.

Rating: 4 out of 5 because it blends serious scholarship with compelling storytelling that made me look at colonial Latin America with fresh eyes.

[Sandra Rivera · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'd heard of the Dongo case when I was young, but there wasn't any really good book on it until now. This was a great read! The author really did her research. She also brings it a lot of Mexican history to help make sense of what happened next. I couldn't put it down once the story got going. If you like true crime and history (especially Mexican history), I couldn't recommend this higher.