Medical law and national politics, Indigenous cosmovisions, representation and bi-national musical authenticity

Welcome to Volume 35 of Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos. This journal continues to provide a unique and essential forum for the dissemination of cutting-edge research relating to Mexico, broadly defined. Engaging a range of disciplinary frameworks, fields, and approaches, the many articles lined up for publication in the three issues of this volume contribute to understanding and knowledge of contemporary and historical issues. Volume 35 encompasses both a Special Issue titled “On the History of Sexualities in Modern Mexico City / Sobre la historia de las sexualidades y los procesos de modernización en la Ciudad de México” and a Thematic Section titled “Vínculos controvertidos: flujos, tráficos e intercambios en la relación México-Estados Unidos (1824–1940).” Other forthcoming articles include research on missionaries in Alta California; women’s choirs in convents in New Spain; maternity and feminist visual arts in Mexico City in the 1980s; and twenty-first-century migration policies.

Turning to this issue (35.1) the four articles offer stimulating and in-depth research essays on matters of health and the criminalization of venereal diseases; electoral politics and Indigenous cosmovisions; representations of Indigenousness in the Porfiriato; and bi-cultural and bi-national musical practices of norteño. In article one, “El enfermo venéreo ¿víctima o criminal? El delito de contagio venéreo en México en la primera mitad del siglo xx,” author María del Carmen Zavala Ramírez (El Colegio de México) examines the criminalization of venereal diseases in the first half of the twentieth century. Her work discusses medical, moral and legal debates around social norms of masculinity and femininity, opening up complex questions of corporeal privacy and sickness. The second article focuses on contemporary matters of Indigenous autonomy in relation to electoral processes. In “Elecciones municipales y democracia en territorio totonaco: Mecatlán,” Antonino Santiago Isidro (Universidad Veracruzana Intercultural) and Naayeli E. Ramírez-Espinosa, a practicing lawyer and academic, specifically focus on seventeen communities that make up one municipality in Veracruz, examining continued conflicts of Indigenous cosmovisions with imposed state values, offering insights into matters of pluricultural communities of peoples on micro to macro scales, particularly in terms of financial versus social resources. Within their article Santiago Isidro and Ramírez-Espinosa include a brief overview of a shared Totonac cosmovision of the Mecatlán region, which encompasses foundational ideas that are essential, and which bear repeating here:

These foundations are reflected in two dimensions: the individual dimension, which connects to aspects or values that are shown through independence when belonging to a collective, such as responsibility, honesty, worthiness, generosity, empathy; and the collective dimension, which brings together values of respect, leadership, commitment, loyalty, unity, solidarity and love. . . . The core that connects these two dimensions . . . [involving] living and coexistence, brings a life of harmony and equilibrium with others, with the community and with the natural world.

Article three also focuses on matters of Indigenousness, specifically as represented by Próspero Cahuantzi, governor of Tlaxcala from 1885–1911 during Porfirio Díaz’s dictatorship. In her article “The Indigenous Governor of Tlaxcala and Acceptable Indigenousness in the Porfirian Regime,” author Jaclyn Ann Sumner (Presbyterian College) traces how Cahuantzi asserted his Indigenousness as he contributed to the Porfirian administration’s nation-building campaigns. His actions included collecting, disseminating, and protecting Indigenous artifacts and giving speeches in Nahuatl at the Eleventh International Congress of Americanists (Mexico City, 1895). In the final article, “Hacer sonar la tradición a través de las fronteras: la popularidad transnacional de Ramón Ayala, ícono de la autenticidad fronteriza en la música norteña,” Cathy Ragland (University of North Texas) focuses on the career of accordionist and bandleader Ramón Ayala. She discusses processes in which he transformed a regional folk tradition into a transnational popular music phenomenon, particularly shaped by issues of bi-cultural and bi-national border citizenship and Texas–Mexico border identity.

• Derecho médico y políticas nacionales, cosmovisiones indígenas, representación y autenticidad musical...