Monstrous Births and Creole Patriotism in Late Colonial Mexico

On February 8, 1785, the Gazeta de México, one of New Spain's first news periodicals, published an announcement from the city of Guanajuato celebrating the recent birth of a pair of conjoined twins:

Doña Rafaela Cortés . . . has delivered two children from one birth, joined together at the back of their heads by the skull. They received the holy waters of baptism and were christened Joseph Nepomuceno Guadalupe and Joseph Ignacio Guadalupe. . . . Many people, admiring these rare effects of nature, have visited them, and there has been no record in these twins of any deformity or defect in their separate and agile bodies. . . . The few doctors and surgeons residing in the city have considered separating them, but have not found it advisable because of the manner in which they are united, and every day more news circulates about their existence and longevity, causing ever more admiration for them given that the first one was born foot-first, and in delivering him, the midwife discovered the knot that joined the two heads. ¹

Between 1784 and 1803, the Gazeta de México publicized 50 such notifications of unusual childbirths. The notices, originating in both large cities and rural communities, drew attention to women's production of multiple offspring, including 20 cases of triplets and six of quadruplets, and to their birthing of progeny the Gazeta often classified as "monstrous." The latter included two-headed and four-buttocked infants, those with missing limbs or unusual facial features, and, in one celebrated case, a child born with her heart on the exterior of her body.

These largely unexamined announcements yield insight into attitudes toward unusual births fostered in the intellectual climate of New Spain. ² Most strikingly, they reveal that elite and literate inhabitants of the viceroyalty, whose attitudes feature most prominently in the Gazeta's pages, did not greet the advent of such offspring with the revulsion or pity we might have expected of them. Both contemporary sources and modern scholars have reported that monsters and monstrous births in colonial Latin America evoked loathing or freak-show curiosity. But the Gazeta notices, as in the birth of Rafaela Cortés's conjoined offspring (both called Joseph Guadalupe, perhaps not coincidentally the names of Mexico's two patron saints), depict New Spaniards rejoicing in their advent. Both the Gazeta's notifications and its description of communities' reception of these unusual babies conveyed attitudes of wonder, affection, and pride. The Gazeta's authors, readers, and the urban and rural communities depicted in its pages celebrated the births as evidence of New Spain's prodigious fertility, a perspective that reflected both the particularized manner in which the Enlightenment developed in Mexico and Mexico's late-colonial development of "creole patriotism."

In the era of the Enlightenment, Mexican intellectuals and bureaucrats championed empiricism, rationalism, and modernist efficiency. Simultaneously, however, these groups, along with the populations they attempted to direct, preserved key aspects of the baroque religious culture upon which colonial society was institutionally and intellectually constructed. Earlier scholars have established the powerful evocations of creole patriotism in historical and scientific productions of late eighteenth-century Mexico. ³ The novelty of the findings discussed here lies in the expression of this sentiment in contemporary portrayals of childbirth, particularly in the births of exceptional or monstrous children in the viceroyalty of New Spain. Anxiety over childbirth—and deviations from its normal, healthy occurrence—were issues of heightened preoccupation in the last decades of the colonial era, when Europeans and creoles alike scrutinized the Americas, monitoring and analyzing the new peoples, identities, and nations these territories were in the midst of producing. ⁴

Gazeta de México: Civic Loyalty and Popular Edification

Manuel Antonio Valdés's Gazeta de México, the third of New Spain's eighteenth-century periodicals to take this name, was an emblematic product of the Mexican Enlightenment. A native of Mexico City, Valdés was a professional printer educated in bellas letras and the techniques of printing at Mexico City's Colegio de San Ildefonso. ⁵ After completing his education, Valdés...