Prometheus Re-bound: Disability, Contingency and the Aesthetics of Hygiene in Post-Revolutionary Mexico

In the early 1930s, the Boletín Semanal of the Mexican Departamento de Salubridad Pública printed a series of messages to the public, usually in large block letters on the back of the publication, where they might easily catch the eye of even the most casual reader. As we read in one instance: “Niños imbéciles, escrofulosos y epilépticos, o de instintos depravados, son con frecuencia hijos de alcohólicos” (Boletín 1.17). A second issue of the same bulletin contained a slightly more graphic warning on the dangers of alcohol: “El alcohol es un buitre que arrancará lentamente las entrañas del bebedor. El bebedor está siempre atado en la roca del infortunio” (Boletín 1.19).

The context for these dramatic messages is a massive public hygiene campaign, rooted in a discourse of eugenics that would dominate state-sponsored policies and rhetoric across a number of institutions in the first decades of twentieth-century Mexico. This discourse of hygiene, broadly articulated, would link areas such as education, medicine, urban planning and cultural aesthetics. My approach to the history of hygiene through cultural manifestations such as the above-cited texts is focused towards an analysis of the roles of human differences, especially the conjunctions of corporeal diversity, disability and race, in configuring the contours of discursive national character in the post-revolutionary period. In this essay, focused on the public health texts, and on the work of José Vasconcelos of the same period, I consider how the processes of inclusion and exclusion at work in such texts allow us to think about disability in its relationships to populations and collective histories. More specifically, I pay attention to the temporal frameworks through which disability emerges in the text. In the citations above, for example, ideas about disability are mediated through warnings and predictions about the future, or speculation about the past. If disability and difference—as I will argue—are historically and temporally contingent, or in other words uncertainly remembered, anticipated, postponed, or bracketed by a shifted temporal perspective, what kinds of risks or promises for a disability politics might such a contingency allow?

My use of the term, “disability” here should be understood in the context of disability studies in the humanities, a field which has been heavily influenced in its development since the 1970s by the “social model” of disability (Shakespeare and Watson 9-10). Michael Oliver’s frequently cited explanation of the distinction between “impairment,” or the physical fact of a lacking or defective limb, body part or bodily function, and “disability,” or the social context that makes impairment into a disadvantage, is important here (11).¹ However, more recent work in the field questions the rigidity of the division between physical body and constructed social context (Meekosha and Shuttleworth 50). Reading the history of eugenics in a variety of national settings helps to illuminate the ways in which particular contexts construct disability. At the same time, eugenic practices create a combination of material and discursive effects, as I will discuss further, thus transcending strict oppositions between body and context. Eugenics, as Lennard Davis has written, sought to improve the population or “race,” by “diminishing problematic peoples and their problematic behaviors” (14). As he continues:

these people were clearly delineated under the rubric of feeble-mindedness and degeneration as women, people of color, homosexuals, the working classes, and so on. All these were considered to be categories of disability, although we do not think of them as connected in this way today.

(14)

Davis’s reading of eugenics here is useful in that it gives historical specificity to conflations between racial difference and various categories of disability. Racial difference, in this reading, operates as a mode of disability because of policies and practices designed to simultaneously eradicate particular racial characteristics and disabilities, and because of beliefs regarding their inseparability.² In addition, Davis’s discussion of eugenics here, like much contemporary work in disability studies, operates as part of a broader critique of reductive categorizations of people, and of the idea that disability...