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CHAPTER 1
Moving into the Modern Era
Transporting the Dead in Mexico City
In the winter of 1904, a British visitor to Mexico City recorded her thoughts about how modernization was unfolding before her eyes. To her, there was no other city in Mexico where "modernity and barbarity shoulder one another more closely" than in the capital. On any given night, visitors and residents could lose themselves in the city's rich history, striking architecture, and cacophony of urban sounds. Amid the hum of electric lights, the thunderous clap of arriving trains, and the cries of street vendors selling corncakes, nuts, or charcoal, it was difficult to find a quiet moment. At the same time, however, the newfound highlights of modern urban life met a dark reality, a growing number of unfortunate souls who peddled and begged visitors for money to afford the costs of living in a rapidly urbanizing city.
As a result, many of these individuals died on the street or in poor houses, a fact that was conspicuously missing from the British visitor's description of the capital. In fact, the number of corpses of the urban poor found scattered in city streets was overwhelming. These corpses were everywhere, including near the homes of the well-to-do, which threatened to ruin the progress that many of the city's elite believed President Porfirio Díaz and his state officials were steadily achieving in the capital.
The majority of these dead bodies belonged to lower-class residents, many of whom had moved to the Federal District from other states throughout Mexico. The reason for such growth owed much to the development of the extensive network of railways that exploded during the late nineteenth century. For President Díaz and his cabinet, railroad development was essential for faster transportation of agricultural products and mineral resources, which promised "economic prosperity through export-oriented economic growth," political stability, and a new identity for a united Mexico free from isolated regions ruled by local caudillos. The growth of the railways also introduced ordinary Mexicans to the marvels of modern technology that could transport them through time and space much faster than traditional methods of transportation could. For example, the completion of railroads linking Mexico City with the northern states of Chihuahua and Nuevo Leon in the 1880s contributed to significant population growth in the north, which peaked at 3 percent annually. As historian Teresa Van Hoy has pointed out, the railroad made longer-distance travel take hours rather than days on foot or horseback.
The growth of the railroad system was part of a larger economic development throughout Mexico begun by President Díaz. In addition to railroads, the government also promoted the expansion of public primary education, large-scale public works, and commercial agriculture. Moreover, Porfirian state officials also encouraged foreign investment in mining and manufacturing, all of which led to displacement among rural families who worked as agricultural laborers or artisans. Beginning in the 1890s, Mexico City experienced unprecedented population growth. By 1900 migrants accounted for more than half of the capital's population, outnumbering residents born in the capital by two to one. Between 1877 and 1900 the population in the Federal District grew by two-thirds to more than half a million inhabitants. This trend continued throughout the early twentieth century: the population in 1910 was 720,753 compared to 327,512 in 1877, which represented a 120 percent growth rate in three decades. The majority of new arrivals came to the capital looking for work. These workers earned their living through domestic work, commerce, delivery of services, production of consumer goods, and, after 1900, heavy industry, following the widespread electrification in factories. What made Mexico City's working class unique compared to other Latin American cities was the fact that it included a high percentage of indigenous workers. Many of these workers brought with them traditional customs, especially concerning daily life, of which hygiene and death were two essential components; both hygiene and death were integral to Porfirian state officials' recipe for progress.
Another ingredient essential for progress was new technologies, none more important than the railroad. The growth of Mexican railways in the 1880s made traveling around the country far easier, especially to Mexico City as well as within the capital, as the railways that converged there reshaped the capital's relationship to the countryside. For example, the Mexican Central Railway, the largest of the railways, allowed passengers to travel almost two thousand kilometers from Mexico City to El Paso at rates much faster than previous transportation modes. On the way to El Paso, trains also passed through an additional ten states, including Querétaro, Jalisco, Zacatecas, Durango, and Chihuahua. The route also included two lines to Guadalajara (Northwest) and Tampico (Northeast), which meant if the railway expanded from these points, it would ensure that both goods and people could move freely throughout the country. Ticket prices varied in the Porfirian period, based on distance traveled. However, on average, railroad companies charged passengers between one and a half and three centavos per kilometer, depending on the type of ticket purchased (first, second, or third class). Thus, the train allowed people of both meager and sizable incomes to travel great distances much faster than they could on foot or horseback. The constant influx of people, however, added to the already growing number of poor local residents, whom the government considered dangerous and dirty, impediments to progress.
The tremendous population growth at the end of the nineteenth century created tremendous pressure on the capital's infrastructure, which led to poor residents living in squalor. Rising real estate values in the city center led to distinct residential patterns of class segregation in the capital. As workers constructed elegant mansions along the Paseo de la Reforma, the number of slums in the city ballooned around railroad stations, hospitals, public works facilities, slaughterhouses, and textile factories. In these neighborhoods, the city services provided in wealthy neighborhoods were absent, resulting in poor sanitation and overcrowding, which led to widespread health problems among residents. The growth of this group — collectively known as the urban poor — helped contribute to Mexico City's international reputation as one of the most unsanitary cities in the world, highlighted by the alarming statistic of a mortality rate of 33.6 per 1,000 in 1900. While major epidemics diminished as the nineteenth century progressed, largely due to improvements in sanitations and dedicated public health efforts by government officials, some records show life expectancy to reach as high as 40 years of age, while other data indicates a life expectancy of between 25 and 30 years of age. Regardless, the fact is that the urban poor commonly resided in vecindades, one- or two-story tenement homes, where several families lived in single- or double-room apartments with doors that opened into narrow hallways, which were typically used for hanging clothes or as makeshift kitchens or bathrooms. With such cramped living spaces, as well as lack of understanding related to modern hygienic practices, it was no wonder that disease spread rampantly through these "troglodyte dwellings," creating a high rate of death in these homes. Furthermore, tourist guidebooks pointed out that the lower classes bore the brunt of the poor drainage system, which was "thoroughly and radically bad, incorrect in its engineering, and ineffective in its results." Thus, diseases like typhoid as well as high mortality rates remained prevalent among the poor since many lived on the ground floors of buildings. This was not the picture of modernity that state officials had envisioned.
To address the concern that both state officials and well-to-do residents had concerning public health and disease in the city, the government created a series of health and legal measures that sought to maintain invisible boundaries in the city separating the gente decente (elites and middle classes) from the diseased (the urban poor). Influential officials, writers, lawyers, doctors, and engineers known as cíentificos offered their expertise in order to remedy the situation. Influenced by Comtean positivism, científicos believed that in order to solve national problems, the government needed to apply the scientific method to all situations, especially those related to public health. They argued that all parties involved in presenting potential solutions had to agree that society was a developing organism and not a collection of individuals. Thus, the key to developing a stronger society (and government) was the introduction of scientifically driven laws and policies that would diagnose and solve problems quickly. But for an older generation of state officials, this approach conflicted with classic liberalism, especially as it concerned constitutional law and individual rights. Nevertheless, científicos were successful at introducing policies that created an opportunity for the state to quantify people. Births, deaths, and housing were all integral components of Porfirian officials' method to identify and solve the city's hygienic problems.
As a result, statistical information intertwined with experts' assumptions about the exact causes of death and disease among the urban poor. Accordingly, the poor were the group most likely to become criminals, drunkards, and prostitutes, which exposed them to disease and an early death. State officials, however, failed to realize that as urban growth occurred, the lives of both elite and poor citizens intersected on a daily basis. Elite neighborhoods required labor, labor provided by members of the lower classes. Lower-class women often worked as seamstresses or as domestics in the homes of the elite, while lower-class men worked as unskilled laborers, clearing trees to build roads and hauling materials required for constructing homes, among a variety of other labor-intensive jobs. Thus, workers who spent the majority of their days in these elite neighborhoods brought with them to the job their food, drink, and social customs, which often clashed with those of the city's elite residents.
Furthermore, tension emerged between the urban poor and the upper classes over how lower-class residents should use public space, especially when that space crossed class lines. The government had attempted to create invisible, artificial boundaries throughout the city in an effort to protect upper- and middle-class citizens from the urban poor. However, when it came to the disposal of corpses, the Porfirian state constructed corpse deposits in areas of the city that did not belong exclusively to the urban poor. Rather, deposits existed in parts of the city where class overlapped because corpse removal methods (horse, electric tram) could reach them there more easily and quickly, which reduced exposure to potential public health problems found in decomposing corpses. Immediately, residents filled deposits full of corpses to the point that corpses began to spill into the streets in front of the deposits faster than officials could remove them, which created problems for the modern image of the capital that state officials sought to maintain. Moreover, these scenes also threatened upper- and middle-class values, especially those related to death, hygiene, and health, since these residents often walked by or near deposits in order to get to work or visit friends.
The introduction of deposits coincided with a decades-long push by the modern liberal state to transfer burial responsibility from the Catholic Church to the secular government. Burials were an important part of the modern state's population management techniques. Exerting control over the bodies of citizens (living or dead) became a hallmark of late nineteenth-century biopower around the world as the role of the state changed from "that of a saver of souls to a governor of bodies." This governorship also provided economic opportunities since burial fees had traditionally provided the Catholic Church with significant economic earnings. For example, in the eighteenth century, a burial underneath the church and near the Eucharist cost twenty pesos, a fee only upper- and middle-class parishioners could afford. These burial fees became an important portion of a priest's income, which would soon line the pockets of the modern state.
Rather than individual priests being responsible for burials, thus ensuring economic success for opportunistic individuals, the state homogenized the process, making itself the beneficiary in the process. Burial fees remained high, even when the modern liberal state put itself in charge of the burial process after Mexican independence. The poor could not afford the rising costs associated with burials, and by the late nineteenth century, Porfirian officials seeking to avoid the potential pitfall of endemic disease and showcase benevolence offered free burials to residents who chose to leave their dead at designated deposits in Mexico City. As a result, hundreds of corpses appeared at the deposits, guaranteeing free burials at a rate that had been unimaginable to state officials.
The threat corpses posed to public health forced Mexican state officials to find potential solutions that would help reflect their desired image of the capital. This chapter explores how state officials tried to accomplish such a feat through the adoption of new transportation methods for the dead that moved corpses from city deposits and streets to public cemeteries. In particular, to combat the spread of disease, officials introduced specific rules regarding hygienic corpse transportation on board trains in 1887. This paved the way for additional methods for moving dead bodies safely throughout the capital, which other cities could adopt in turn as well. To state officials, these techniques would protect residents from exposure to potential health risks. At the same time, however, the urban poor reacted to these new methods in ways that challenged the government's idea that their lives and bodies belonged to the state. I argue that the transportation methods (railroad, modern carriage, and electric tram) implemented by Porfirian state officials focused on introducing capitalinos to the benefits of modern living and technology. Moreover, these same officials sought to strip citizens of essential rights, including self-ownership, in order for the state to protect the population as a whole.
The Hygienic Railroad
Integral to the development of modern Mexico, including the capital, was the growth of the railway network in the late nineteenth century across the country. The expansion of the railway was part of the Díaz administration's official discourse that created a new nation that was nothing like the past, "a past characterized by economic stagnation, internal divisions, and constant threats from abroad." The use of the railroad for transporting corpses throughout Mexico became one of several symbols of modernity for President Porfirio Díaz and his administration that demonstrated their commitment to progress. By 1877, President Porfirio Díaz's first year in office, the country only had 640 kilometers of railroad track, but less than a decade later, by Díaz's long second term as president, the country had built almost nine times as much track (5,731 kilometers), creating an extensive railroad network throughout the country with Mexico City at the center. This was just the beginning. At the end of the nineteenth century, Mexico's track measured 12,173 kilometers, and by the time Díaz left the presidential office in May 1911, it had grown to almost 20,000 kilometers. The expansion of the railroad became synonymous with Díaz's presidency, and newspaper writers, both liberal and conservative, praised the president for his effort to develop Mexico. The railroad became a way to unite the country, bringing civilization to both urban and rural Mexico while also providing all with a glimpse of what the future held.
Despite the excitement and celebration surrounding the railroad, problems remained. In addition to the displacement of indigenous groups, especially the Yaquis and Mayas, there was little concern about public health on the railroad. In fact, the railroad industry continued to take few precautions when transporting corpses. Bodies traveled freely between Mexican states and even into the United States, with no specifications governing the types of materials used to secure the body; the only requirement was that a signature appear on a certification of embalmment. Thus, it was possible that passengers could travel in or near the same cars as the dead.
By 1887, however, during Díaz's second term, his administration introduced specific rules that emphasized to railroad employees the importance of hygienic protocol when transporting corpses. The new rules covered issues such as the construction and packing materials that surrounded corpses in coffins as well as the inclusion of demographic information for the deceased. Once the body reached its final destination, the new regulations required that workers follow specific disinfection procedures once they had unloaded corpses from cars.
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Excerpted from "Death Is All Around Us"
by .
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