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The Americas 58.1 (2001) 7-38



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Conspicuous Benevolence:
Liberalism, Public Welfare, and Private Charity in Porfirian Mexico City, 1877-1910 *

Ann S. Blum

Introduction

"If the charity that one practices for adults honors and gratifies, that which one engages in for children redeems and glorifies," wrote Juan de Dios Peza, poet and playwright, in his journalistic chronicle of public welfare under the government of Porfirio Díaz. Peza elaborated: "If charity is beautiful when exercised in favor of adults, it is a divine reflection, a smile of God, when given to children." 1 Peza's imagery evoked religious charity of the colonial era, when giving alms and pious bequests earned the salvation of the donor. But Peza wrote in 1881 to celebrate the achievements of General Porfirio Díaz's first presidential term in the realm of public welfare, principally bringing welfare administration under federal jurisdiction.

With the 1877 transfer of the administration of the welfare establishments of the capital from city oversight to that of a Junta Directiva de Beneficencia Pública under the Secretaría de Gobernación, Díaz claimed the honor of realizing the cherished liberal goal of federalizing welfare. 2 Having assumed the presidency by force of arms, Díaz had a strong interest in establishing his political legitimacy. He inherited from his defeated predecessors an institutional system of welfare with colonial roots but freighted with special significance in the canon of Mexican liberalism. Wresting charity--along with the milestones of the life cycle and education--from the influence of the Catholic Church had been a cornerstone of the political program laid out in [End Page 7] the foundational documents of Mexican secular liberalism, the body of law known as the Reform. 3

Bringing welfare administration under definitive federal jurisdiction, however, did not elevate assistance to the nation's poor on the list of Porfirian state priorities. Taking a position squarely within the bounds of laissez-faire liberalism, spokesmen for the Díaz regime asserted repeatedly that the state bore limited responsibility for the poor. Nevertheless, under Díaz the Mexican federal government not only assumed direct administrative responsibility for public welfare, but also substantially increased appropriations for operating the establishments. Moreover, the Díaz administration expanded the institutional system in an ambitious building campaign that moved Mexico City's largest orphanage, prison, reform schools, and hospitals out of their crumbling colonial-era structures into modern quarters. This paper focuses on the programs and rationales for public welfare for children under the government of Porfirio Díaz, 1876-1910, to explore how officials resolved to their own satisfaction the tensions inherent in pious rationales for public welfare and the bureaucratic expansion of a low policy priority.

Díaz brought under federal administration a chain of welfare and correctional institutions established on the principles of enclosing the poor, adults and children, and reforming them through labor. Although regulations defined distinct missions for asylums for sheltering the poor and for penal institutions, the boundary between assistance and punishment had long been blurred. The Mexico City poor house, the Hospicio de Pobres, opened its doors in 1774 to admit paupers arrested for begging. A century later, the Hospicio sheltered an inmate population consisting of a few adult beggars, hundreds of children of both sexes, and a substantial number of young women. Hospicio administrators had inaugurated a corrections department in 1806, the same year that a school designed to remove children from the corrupting influence of older beggars opened in the compound. The trade school, popularly known as the Tecpan de Santiago for its location in the old palace of justice of the historically Indian barrio of Santiago Tlatelolco, absorbed the Hospicio's corrections department in 1850. Since then, the trade school had taken overflow from the Hospicio and referrals of incorrigible boys and was generally considered a branch of the adult prison. Through the decades, inspections of the two institutions usually found workshop [End Page 8] and classroom instruction largely unenforced, hygiene deficient, discipline lax, and the inmates lacking the most basic...

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