Monuments of Progress: Modernization and Public Health in Mexico City, 1876-1910 (review)

Until now there has been no adequate English-language study of the fascinating history of Mexican public health before the 1910 Revolution. This was the period ruled by the authoritarian regime of Porfirio Diaz and his technocrat group of advisors known as the "científicos," who promoted a series of urban sanitation efforts and created new medical institutions inspired by European models. This book, with its excellent title and subtitle, describes the aim to transform—truly, to modernize—Mexico City into a "hygienic city." The volume's main novelty is Claudia Agostoni's remarkable description of the work of the local sanitary inspectors who worked for the Superior Sanitation Council. These officers tried to change the environment and family hygiene practices, developing a discourse that implemented at the local level the Profirian-positivist dictum of "order and progress." The result appears to have been similar to that in other Western cities—the emphasis on hygiene, morality, and orderliness became a tool for social control. To explain filth and disease, the Mexican authorities partly resorted to blaming the victims—their individual uncleanliness and the Indian culture, rather than poverty, inequality, and deficiencies in the health infrastructure.

The book's scope is wider than its title suggests, exploring the development of various ideas on progress and social order in addition to those concerning public health, since the late colonial period. For example, the first chapter deals with the modernization of Mexico City in the late eighteenth century, emphasizing the relationship between the Spanish Bourbon reforms and urban renewal.

In subsequent chapters, the author makes a valuable effort—with few precedents in Latin American historiography—to link environmental, urban, and public health histories. According to Agostoni, the attempt to modernize Mexico City "from above" was part of a quest to validate Diaz's rule (this effort the author terms "symbolic legitimization"); the quest encompassed the creation of new public health institutions, the launching of engineering projects, and the construction of historical monuments and allegorical parks. Much of one chapter of the book deals with the construction and meaning of civic monuments; according to the author, parks and statues used motifs from the pre-Columbian and Independence-era past to encourage an obedient form of patriotism and reinforce the notion of an idealized and superior elite.

It is important to remember that Mexico City was created on an insular marshland within a large lake system. By the mid-nineteenth century the recurring floods, the inadequate sewers, and the proximity of Lake Texoco presented a menace to the inhabitants of the city. Major drainage and sewerage projects carried out at the turn of the twentieth century resulted from these concerns. An intriguing part of the story is the relationship between filth, water, and religion: it would have been interesting to learn more about the author's brief allusions to the association, starting in the colonial period, of the entire lake system of the city with the devil.

Finally, the book suffers from an important omission: Ana Maria Carrillo, a Mexican historian of medicine with several sound publications in Spanish on public health during the Diaz regime, is not cited and does not appear in the bibliography. This book, which is based on a doctoral dissertation, leaves the impression that polishing of the text might have improved the consistency and depth of its argument.