Treating Indigeneity: Medicine and Racial Privilege in Rosario Castellanos's "La rueda del hambriento" and "El don rechazado"

This article discusses the tension between local (Chiapanecan) and federal approaches to medicine in Rosario Castellanos's short stories "La rueda del hambriento" and "El don rechazado." Federal and local authorities generally agreed that Amerindians occupied a lower position in the social hierarchy than did their mixed-race and European counterparts. That said, federal workers buoyed paradigms of official mestizaje, which held that the state could assimilate Amerindians to the mestizo state by initiating them into twentieth-century society through hygiene and education. This approach aligned their biopolitics with Roberto Esposito's "immunization paradigm": the state attempted to redeem indigenous individuals from their supposedly undesirable communities by modernizing their bodies and initiating them into the mestizo order through modern medicine. Local elites upheld notions of ladinaje that interpellated indigenous individuals into de facto serfdom. The elites of Castellanos's fiction thus jealously keep medicine to themselves in order to institutionalize what Giorgio Agamben calls indigenous "bare life" and "zoê." Because Chiapanecan landowners depended on strict racial divisions to perpetuate an economic system that benefitted them, they opposed federal attempts to engage and modernize local Mayan communities. As such, both stories show local elites who coopt federal indigenista programs to further institutionalize their own hegemony.