University of Michigan needs your feedback to better understand how readers are using openly available ebooks. You can help by taking a short, privacy-friendly survey.
Embodied Archive: Disability in Post-Revolutionary Mexican Cultural Production
Embodied Archive focuses on perceptions of disability and racial difference in Mexico's early post-revolutionary period, from the 1920s to the 1940s. In this period, Mexican state-sponsored institutions charged with the education and health of the population sought to strengthen and improve the future of the nation, and to forge a more racially homogeneous sense of collective identity and history. Influenced by regional and global movements in eugenics and hygiene, Mexican educators, writers, physicians, and statesmen argued for the widespread physical and cognitive testing and categorization of schoolchildren, so as to produce an accurate and complete picture of "the Mexican child," and to carefully monitor and control forms of unwanted difference, including disability and racialized characteristics. Differences were not generally marked for eradication—as would be the case in eugenics movements in the US, Canada, and parts of Europe—but instead represented possible influences from a historically distant or immediate reproductive past, or served as warnings of potential danger haunting individual or collective futures.
Weaving between the historical context of Mexico's post-revolutionary period and our present-day world, Embodied Archive approaches literary and archival documents that include anti-alcohol and hygiene campaigns; projects in school architecture and psychopedagogy; biotypological studies of urban schoolchildren and indigenous populations; and literary approaches to futuristic utopias or violent pasts. It focuses in particular on the way disability is represented indirectly through factors that may have caused it in the past or may cause it in the future, or through perceptions and measurements that cannot fully capture it. In engaging with these narratives, the book proposes an archival encounter, a witnessing of past injustices and their implications for the disability of our present and future.
Fig. 3. Another of Urzaiz’s drawings in Eugenia depicts a pregnant man, part of a eugenic, state-controlled system of reproduction in the fictional society of Villautopía. Eduardo Urzaiz. Eugenia. (Esbozo novelesco de costumbres futuras). Mérida, Yucatán: Talleres Gráficos A. Manzanilla, 1919, p. 66.
Fig. 17. Emblem from the Mexican Eugenics Society for the Improvement of the Race, published in each edition of the Society’s Bulletin. The text on the right reads as follows: “El emblema representa dos brazos de los sexos masculine y femenino, empuñando la antorcha del saber, cuyas flamas se confunden en el ideal que inspira la enseñanza eugénica; todo esto emergiendo del mar agitado por la ignorancia y las pasiones. Al fondo, se destaca la ponderosa rueda del progreso.” [The emblem represents two arms of the masculine and feminine sexes, holding up the torch of knowledge, whose flames merge into the ideal that eugenic teaching inspires; all this emerges from the sea, agitated by ignorance and passions. In the background, the powerful wheel of progress stands out.] Sociedad Eugénica Mexicana para el mejoramiento de la raza, Boletín num 8, 6 de oct. de 1932, p. 2. Caja 35505, “educación sexual,” Archivo General de la Nación, folio 225 vuelta.
x
This site requires cookies to function correctly.