The Imagined Underworld: Sex, Crime, and Vice in Porfirian Mexico City

5. Disease, Decay, and the Strange Case of Federico Abrego and Maria Barrera

5 Disease, Decay, and the Strange Case of Federico Abrego and María Barrera Cities, like men, have a system. They have nerves, veins, arteries and an abdomen; and this abdomen is horrible and mysterious. —El Imparcial, July 10, 1908 acting on a tip, on October 5, 1898, Mexico City police began an investigation into the recent death of a young obstetrics nurse, María Barrera. Three days before, Barrera had died in the of- fice of Federico Abrego, a well-known doctor, during a medical procedure intended to stop a massive hemorrhage. The death, Abrego reported at the time, had been unfortunate but natural, the result of uncontrolled bleeding. However, investigators were doubtful. Digging deeper, they not only discovered that Abrego and Barrera had been lovers, but that Barrera appeared to have died at the hands of a medical conspiracy headed by Abrego. What secrets did Barrera take to the grave? Why was she buried hastily? And most importantly , what exactly happened on the night of October 2?1 The “mysterious death of María Barrera,” as the Porfirian press first dubbed this case, offers a privileged look at the role of modern medicine and urban hygiene in late nineteenth-century Mexico City. As we have noted, Mexican elites constructed a narrative that utilized traditional fears of the urban poor to forge an imagined 132 Disease, Decay, and the Strange Case of Federico Abrego and María Barrea criminal underworld. Celebrated cases such as the Francisco Guerrero murders helped the government elaborate this invented threat. However, middle-class criminality and the apparent ease with which criminals penetrated the heart of the city undermined the elite discourse. Enter modern medicine. By the 1890s scientific and medical progress in Mexico and Latin America had led to new ways of thinking about the role of the nation-state in relation to disease and hygiene. Throughout the region national governments and elites implemented vaccination programs, health inspections, and public ordinances in order to control the lives and the bodies of a popular class increasingly seen as a source of physical and social infection. There was resistance against this program. For instance, in 1904 officials in Rio de Janiero, Brazil, contended with an urban riot when they attempted to carry out a vaccination law that targeted that city’s poor. However, the increasing power of the modern state to intervene in the personal lives of its citizens could not be stopped.2 Modern medical science provided another tool for social control, with doctors and health inspectors serving as willing agents. This was especially evident in Porfirian Mexico City, with its large, impoverished population and abundance of sanitation issues. Yet the death of María Barrera posed a dilemma for the Porfirian elite. In the wake of the scandal that followed, public commentary became focused on middle- and upper-class anxieties about the role of modern medicine. While elites agreed that the urban underclass posed a significant threat to public hygiene, the case itself presented a dilemma. As a licensed obstetrician, Barrera allegedly represented the ideal Porfirian woman: intelligent, incorruptible, and pure. The circumstances surrounding her relationship with Abrego would dispel these notions. Abrego’s role posed a similar dilemma. How could a respected doctor, a symbol of medical progress, commit such a crime? As Porfirian society increasingly sought to limit and control the activities of the urban underclass, the case of Federico Abrego and María Barrera threatened not only to undermine official efforts to promote modern medical science, but to link professional medicine with the imagined underworld.3 133 Disease, Decay, and the Strange Case of Federico Abrego and María Barrea The Contaminated Body The Porfirian elite had long considered Mexico City’s impoverished neighborhoods hotbeds of infection. In numerous official documents and newspaper accounts, the poor hygienic conditions reported in working-class neighborhoods contributed to official perceptions that the capital’s underclass was physically degenerate, uncivilized, and infected by filth and decay. Such thinking was not exclusive to the Mexican elite class. Teresa A. Meade’s study of turn-of-the-century Rio de Janeiro demonstrates the way in which positivistic interpretations of health and sanitation found their way into projects aimed at sanitizing cities, in effect “civilizing” them. Porfirian officials, like their Brazilian counterparts, believed that outbreaks of disease in poor colonias contributed to...