HEROIC, PUBLIC SUICIDE HAS A long history, beginning in ancient times. Cato, Lucretius, Socrates, and Brutus were just some of the famous deaths remembered as heroic suicides. Louis Pérez Jr. has also shown that Cubans had a cultural affinity for heroic and martyr suicide, an attraction that is especially evident in the historical memory of great Cubans who killed themselves for la patria (homeland).1 Eddie Chibás is just one example. Chibás shot himself in 1951 during his live radio broadcast to protest fraudulent politics during the reign of Fulgencio Batista (1940–44, 1952–59). Mexico’s heroic suicides include the six young cadets who defended Chapultepec Castle against the Yankee invaders in 1847. Rather than surrender to the occupying force, the national myth has it that cadet Juan Escutia leapt from the castle wrapped in a Mexican flag and died moments later, his body crushed on the pavement below. Every September 13, just days before the independence celebration, Mexicans commemorate these fallen boy heroes.2
Suicides planned with a sense of purpose and forethought when they selected prominent public buildings or cultural landmarks as the setting of their death. Public suicides garnered notice from bystanders and the press, and it seemed the suicides understood this. Reporters flocked to these scenes to gather details and communicate the most grisly details in the next day’s paper. Passersby also stopped, gawked, and discussed the latest tragic deaths in the city. In particular, young women who committed public suicides made self-conscious decisions to script their deaths with careful planning and costuming. In the letters they left behind they asserted tropes of honorable death.3
The idea that those individuals who chose to commit suicide in public took careful measures to dramatize their deaths in certain spaces of the city contradicts the idea held by medical experts that suicides had lost reason and individual will. Theorists argued that suicides could not be held responsible for their deaths because they suffered from temporary insanity. Mexico City was undergoing rapid modernization and secularization at the turn of the twentieth century, and public spaces took on new meaning at the same time that intellectuals grappled with the perceived rise in suicide. This chapter focuses on the two most prominent suicide spaces of the era, Chapultepec Park and the cathedral, but also discusses other sites, such as cantinas and the streets. While suicides were quick and fleeting acts, they served as touchstones for various actors to debate and discuss the trajectory of Mexican society at a point when Mexico was on the cusp of a new century and a social revolution.
Mexico underwent intensive modernization efforts during the Porfiriato. A public building spree transformed the country’s built environment into a hodgepodge of architectural styles. Architects designed new spaces, widened streets to form tree-lined boulevards, and erected monuments and statues to visually narrate Mexico’s history. Some citizens benefited from development; others suffered and were forced to leave their ancestral villages to seek menial work in the capital. Mexico City teemed with rural migrants who plied goods and offered their services. Many residents felt that these workers represented the underbelly of modernization. Porfirian Mexico City certainly projected a facade of modernity. However, the evolution of the city was not simply a linear progression forward but also a suturing of past and present, which were in constant tension. This suturing could be seen or read as the hub of the modern city shifted away from the historic pre-Columbian and colonial center to newly developed parts of the city to the west and southwest.4 The Zócalo, the central plaza of Mexico City, had been the heart and soul of Mexican civilization since the Mexica (Aztecs) ruled the valley, from 1428 to 1521. The Spanish built their city literally atop the ruins of the Mexica capital, Tenochtitlán, after their conquest of the Aztec Empire in 1521. For the next three hundred years, the Zócalo confirmed the prominence of the twin pillars of power in Mexican society: church and state. The government palace occupied the full east side of the plaza, and the cathedral rose up from the north side. The cathedral’s tower, completed in 1791, provided the best panoramic view of the city and the nearby twin volcanoes, Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl. By the late nineteenth century, the west side of the central plaza was occupied by a long commercial arcade that contained offices, merchant houses, and retail shops.5
During the first years of the reign of Porfirio Díaz, the Zócalo embodied the tense intermingling going on in the country of the traditional and the modern, the old and the new, the poor and the rich. Mexicans of all classes and ethnicities packed the central square on national holidays or knelt for mass in the imposing cathedral. Businessmen traversed the plaza, making deals in government offices and then returning to their places of commerce on the western side. Rich and poor citizens stood side by side in the Zócalo watching performances of puppeteers and street musicians.6 Standing in the center of the Zócalo and scanning its perimeters, one is struck by the architectural symbols of hegemony, or what Henri Lefebvre calls abstract space.7 Lefebvre argued that abstract spaces like the cathedral, the governmental palace, and the commercial buildings that flanked the plaza represent state power and possess the motive to exclude as well as to dominate. Each of these spaces held particular meanings that came to be commonly acknowledged. Worship was carried out in the cathedral, political activities took place in the government offices, and capitalist exchanges occurred in the commercial houses. A “tacit agreement . . . imposes reciprocity and a communality of use,” and this provides an unwritten guide on how to behave in such spaces.8
Over time, the elite abandoned their palatial homes in the northern and eastern sections of the city to take up residence in the modern western side. They could leave their homes dressed in the latest Parisian fashions and ride in carriages or hired private cars through the fashionable shopping street of Plateros (now Madero), past the Alameda Park, and along the Paseo de la Reforma, a modern avenue modeled on Paris’s Champs-Élysées, to socialize and be seen among the smart set. New middle-class neighborhoods lined Reforma, further shifting attention away from the historic center. The modern city rose up along Reforma, “and this area served the purpose of giving the upper middle classes a place in which to assert their cultural and economic identity apart from the people at large.”9 The stylish streets of Plateros and Corpus Christi sported electric streetlamps by 1880, while other streets in the center still relied on gas and hydrogen carbonate for illumination.10 Electric trains brought those who could afford the fares from outlying villages to shop and work in the city. Simply put, these sites west of the historical central plaza “represented urbane, civilized, and modern Mexico: in a word, Europe.”11
The refashioned districts to the west of the Zócalo contrasted sharply with those to the east, which had housed many elite families since early Spanish colonization. When these families moved out, landlords subdivided the mansions they left behind and created tenements, first for poor workers and later for the throng of rural migrants that had come to the city after being displaced from their lands in neighboring states. These spaces took on new meaning as they transformed from elite centers of life and power to crowded, disease-ridden abodes that sheltered the working poor. Social scientists viewed the tenements as their laboratories. In the 1890s, criminologist Julio Guerrero classified residents of Mexico City according to how close they lived to the street. Tenements housed, on average, five occupants in each one-room apartment, and the expansive courtyards of the former mansions served as communal patios where laundry, cooking, and bodily elimination occurred. The lack of privacy in the tenements led to sexual promiscuity and criminal impulses, according to Guerrero.12 The only connection between the western and eastern halves of the capital was that poor residents living in the working-class barrios of Tepito and La Bolsa provided menial services in elite residences and businesses. They cleaned homes, swept shop floors, shined shoes, nursed babies, and hawked newspapers. A visitor to Mexico City who only toured the colonial buildings of the plaza and stayed and dined in the neighborhoods to the west along Reforma had a distorted view of the capital as eminently modern. Not many blocks away, dirt roadways, with nicknames such as Rat’s Alley, Dog’s Lane, and Pulque Place, crisscrossed the eastern barrios. In the reaches north of the Zócalo, small factories operated, adding to the malodorous and unhygienic environment of the barrios filled with the working poor. Mexico City suffered an epidemic of typhus in 1884 and an outbreak of cholera a year later.13 After noting that more than half of all working-class homes in El Centro had cases of typhus in the 1890s and the first decade of the 1900s, the health department routinely sent physicians to these impoverished enclaves to forcibly vaccinate tenement dwellers.14 Stray dogs were yet another nefarious feature of urban life. Vectors of rabies, murderous when traveling in packs, and spoilers of city sidewalks, “dogs ruled the streets.”15
Suicides committed in dramatic, public fashion grabbed attention. Most suicides were carefully premeditated, but this was especially true when individuals chose a meaningful site for death and made meticulous preparations to carry out their plans. The city spaces in which a person lived, worked, and loved held special significance for them. They courted in certain places, experienced camaraderie and had drinks with friends in others, and worshipped and celebrated spiritual milestones in the various churches that marked the landscape. In other words, specific places and objects held special meaning, and a person who planned to kill him- or herself took these connotations into account when they chose the place to commit suicide.
Chapultepec Park, like the Zócalo, the Alameda, and other prominent public places, was imbued with social meaning. Some public spaces were open to people of all social classes, yet some sites clearly remained the realm of the privileged classes. In fact, urbanization and public works initiatives acted to reproduce social relations and divide cities between zones of inclusion and exclusion. The poor were not barred from Mexico City’s green spaces, but it was clear that the chief function of parks was to provide services to the rich, who could afford leisure activities there. Historian Susie Porter found in her research on female market vendors and the public sphere that public works initiatives like building modern markets or bringing electricity to neighborhoods served the wishes of the elite first and workers second.16 Creating hygienic and orderly markets improved the shopping experience of honorable housewives. Similarly, elite urban planners hoped that building separate parks for workers would separate them from their social betters.17 In other words, workers should be invisible. Chapultepec Park certainly held symbolic and political importance to the Porfirian urban planners who carried out an impressive renovation of its historic castle and gardens in 1882. President Díaz made it his summer residence, just as presidents before him had done and presidents after him would do. A tramline connected parts of the city to the park in the 1880s, facilitating access for the elite and middle classes, who picnicked under the grand cypress trees.18 After the revolution, the state attempted to open up Chapultepec to all Mexicans by holding festivals like Noche Mexicana in the park to attract the popular classes.19 Young sweethearts kissed on park benches and in the privacy of its gardens.20
The young men and women who committed suicide in the green spaces of the city must have chosen these locations in part for the privacy they provided but surely also for the meanings the youths attached to them. How their deaths were interpreted depended upon their age, class, and gender. Even though late nineteenth-century mores tolerated women in public spaces, gender ideology mediated their entrances into those spaces and how they behaved in them.21 Breakups and heartaches propelled some to end their lives in the romantic parks of the city. One day during the winter of 1900, Margarita Vivanco had a fight with her boyfriend and felt despondent that he had not returned to make up. She sent him a note asking him to meet her in Chapultepec Park. She hoped to reconcile; she did not know his intentions. The two met in the Jardín de San Fernando, the appointed and sentimental spot, and Margarita’s lover terminated their relationship for good. Margarita, according to newspaper reports, had vowed to take her life if she could not convince her boyfriend to take her back. At his refusal, she marched straight into a nearby botica, bought strychnine, a readily available rat poison, went home and ingested the toxic substance in her bedroom. A maid heard her cries of pain and called a doctor.22 Margarita made the decision to go home to take the poison, but her plan had been sealed in the modern park.
Many couples initiated their romantic relationships in Chapultepec, and courting lovers could be seen flirting in small boats on the lake, picnicking, or stealing kisses on secluded paths. In 1905, five years after Margarita’s death, twenty-year-old Federico Biesler, said to be from a good family and to not possess any vices, killed himself in Chapultepec Park. The night before, he attended a dance at the Cotillion Club, socialized with friends, and seemed to be in a pleasant mood, according to all who saw him. Federico stayed until the party ended in the early hours of the morning and then strolled the historic streets of the city. After sunrise, he took one of the first morning trolleys to the park. Witnesses saw him board a boat, cross the lake, and debark to sit on a bridge. Nothing seemed amiss, as many visitors to the park relaxed on benches and bridges, enjoying the verdant scenery or whispering sweet nothings in the ears of their beloveds. Sometime later, Federico’s corpse was found resting on the very same bridge. A letter lay nearby, addressed to a Matilde: “In these brief sentences, a passion not reciprocated.”23 Federico appeared to be another young victim of unrequited love who had been vulnerable to the modern plague of suicide.
Ana María Schlonwbits tried but failed to kill herself in the Alameda, several blocks from Mexico City’s central plaza in the western, fashionable side of El Centro in 1909. A worker found her slumped over on a park bench near the central kiosk. A twenty-five-year-old native of Germany, Ana had moved to Mexico with her boyfriend, who subsequently abandoned her and left her impoverished. Her ex-boyfriend testified that she had seen him with another woman, and even though they had already broken up by that point, she felt despondent enough to attempt suicide. Ana survived her overdose of morphine, a medicine she apparently ingested from time to time for her “nerves.”24
At 3:30 am on May 25, 1897, French businessman Armand Mahuizier, who lived on the fashionable shopping street of San Francisco (also known as Plateros), shot himself in the Alameda. A policeman heard the shot and investigated, but he found nothing amiss and thought little more of it until a bicyclist discovered Armand’s lifeless body on the ground at 5:00 am. Reporters usually commented on the interior clothing of women only, but El Imparcial’s article about the death noted Armand’s “fine silk undergarments and silk hat,” which attested to his prosperous status. The reporter also surmised that a thief had gotten to the man’s corpse first, as the only things in his pockets were letters, cigarettes, and a cigar. His wallet, watch, and the gun he had used to carry out the deed were missing.25
The double suicide of two adolescent girls was the most sensational public suicide to occur in Chapultepec Park during the Porfiriato. On November 5, 1909, two best friends, eighteen-year-old María Fuentes and sixteen-year-old Guadalupe Ortiz, crossed the Zócalo, boarded a trolley, and headed for Chapultepec. Each girl was wearing her best dress, cloak, and hat and thus appeared destined for a party or an afternoon with suitors. Three young men, who would later provide testimonies to police, spotted the girls on the trolley and flirted with them on the way to their destination. The five disembarked at Chapultepec, and the three would-be paramours followed the girls at a safe distance until María and Guadalupe shooed them away and turned down a wooded path. The men took an alternate route but circled back to continue their flirtations with the pretty girls. On their return, they discovered a truly horrific sight. Tucked into the verdant greenery just off a footpath in Chapultepec’s famous forest, María and Guadalupe tightly clutched each other in death’s embrace. A small glass bottle and a bundle of letters and photographs rested several feet from their bodies. The alarmed boys contacted authorities, and the corpses were taken to the Hospital Juárez for autopsies. Reporters flocked to the scene to search for clues and craft a bird’s eye reimagination of the double suicide for the next day’s papers.26 The tragic event also drew curious voyeurs to the scene, who likely wanted to visualize the deaths or mourn the calamity of youth suicide, which seemed all too common those days in the capital.27 The subsequent investigation concluded that María and Guadalupe had died almost instantly after ingesting potassium cyanide, a poison that causes death within fifteen minutes. Physicians found suicide notes tucked neatly under their dresses. One note, addressed to the prefect of police, read: “The motive for taking our own lives is very simple: we do not wish to live this sad life, with its bitterness and torment, even though we are very young. And to not take a wrong turn and live a life to which we cannot aspire, it’s death.”28 Only one reporter pondered, “Where did these young girls, who were not of the best education, learn that cyanide of potassium is the most deadly and the quickest acting poison known?”29
The fact that María and Guadalupe had wrapped their letters and photographs with ribbon and deposited them at the scene linked them to a long pattern of romantic suicides. Women in particular killed themselves for love, and society sometimes accepted this motive as unfortunate but honorable. Death scenes often were littered with romantic mementos such as love notes and portraits. The two best friends followed this script to a T. Reporting on the double suicide at Chapultepec Park, a writer for El Imparcial emphasized the romantic aspect of their deaths. The subheading of the article pointed out that the “the suicides hid to kill themselves on one of the most poetic paths.”30 The reporter also speculated that the girls loved the same man, Elias Rojas, who came to the hospital and identified their bodies just after midnight.31 A rival paper, El Diario, reported on the “two romantics [María and Guadalupe] who sought the solitude of nature, the poetry of the forest, and drank a cup of poison. Tomorrow their white bodies will be in horrible contrast to the black coldness of the Hospital of Blood.”32 The English-language newspaper the Mexican Herald continued the theme, noting the careful premeditation of the double suicide and adding a new detail: each girl had worn a locket around her neck with a photo of a soldier in it. The assumption was that love and deception drove the girls to suicide.33 Indeed, articles noted that women were more likely than men to kill themselves for love.34 The tone of the reporting suggested that it was honorable, even saintly, to die for love, particularly passionate love. In other words, María and Guadalupe were no different from the romantic heroes of literature (i.e., Goethe’s young Werther) who died for the noblest of passions—sublime love. The girls’ mental state was never questioned in the early reporting. There was absolutely no speculation of brain lesions or dubious social environments. On the surface, the double suicide at Chapultepec Park conformed to societal values and expectations—two beautiful, prosperous girls, consumed by love and disappointment, sought an exalted and romantic end. Even the girls’ morning grooming ritual and the letters penned to authorities followed the expected scheme. They endeavored to leave behind exquisite corpses.
Their construction as honorable and virtuous young women, however, failed within days. María and Guadalupe, who had been cast as two honorable and elegant young women in the flower of life, fell squarely off their pedestal once reporters started being nosy. What the press had initially judged as a tragic but honorable suicide devolved into a dishonorable pact committed by two girls who could not fulfill their lust for the good life. As more details came to light, El Diario reversed its course of extolling the girls’ virtues and strove to correct the details perpetuated by rival dailies. One reporter interviewed family members and neighbors of María and Guadalupe and detailed the girls’ personal histories, which involved single mothers, stepfathers, multiple moves between Puebla and the capital, and increasing deprivation. He noted that the tenement they lived in had only two patios, one surrounded by ten apartments and the other by thirty-one. The implication was that the girls lived in crowded and very public conditions and were therefore prone to immoral and criminal impulses—an allusion to Julio Guerrero’s conjecture, mentioned above. The reporter stated that María had had several boyfriends and that the girls did not die for love but because they realized that they could not achieve their desires for wealth and luxury.35 The underlying tone was that María’s salary from her job in the ticket booth of a movie theater could not fund the lifestyle she wanted. Moreover, her presence in public selling film tickets diminished her potential for honor. There was speculation that modern films playing at her cinema had fueled her impossible fantasies. Afflicted with unfulfilled and unreasonable desires for wealth, the best friends chose death. Reporters took their crusade a step further, attending the funeral procession and making special note that the girls had to be buried in the same clothes in which they died, that the family departed for the cemetery in second-class transportation, and that gravediggers interred the girls’ bodies in the fifth-class (the cheapest) section of the cemetery.36 Even El Imparcial’s reporter, who gained access to their corpses in the morgue, described them no longer as “white” but as “naked” and with “dark flesh” (carnes morenas).37 How quickly the narrative changed when reporters learned that María and Guadalupe, although they had looked privileged due to their clothing and modern hairstyles, were in reality working-class girls who lacked honor and had unreasonable desires.
An article in the Boletín de Policía impugned the girls’ honor even further. María and Guadalupe were transformed from victims of envy into a vengeful older friend and a weak, younger acolyte. The writer referenced Italian intellectual Scipio Sighele, who argued that double suicides usually had an architect and a disciple.38 The writer noted that María’s boyfriend had allegedly spurned her for Guadalupe, and he theorized that María had sought revenge by convincing Guadalupe to agree to a suicide pact. Guadalupe succumbed because she was young, had a weak character, and lacked a father. The reporter argued: “This suicide, like many, is nothing more than revenge, for María deprived her unfaithful lover of Guadalupe, and racked him with misery.”39 The victim was no longer the suicide but the man robbed of his beloved.
The girls may have chosen Chapultepec Park because it provided them the privacy they needed to complete the deed, but it is fruitful to suggest that they made a calculated decision to choose a public and honorable space for their suicide pact.40 The tree-lined lanes of the park were spaces that Mexico City’s youth claimed for courting, socializing, and, in this case, dying. On the way to the park, María and Guadalupe opted to pay the fare for and board the archetypal representation of modern urban life and progress: the electric trolley.41 Trolleys moved residents from place to place in the city, but they also caused gender disorder, as women traveling alone could attract untoward male attention or exploit the confines of the cars to flirt with strange men. María and Guadalupe boarded a trolley, eschewed the advances of flirtatious men, and traveled from the historic center to the modern city in the west to author their deaths. Although María worked in the ticket booth of a movie theater in the fashionable Juárez neighborhood, she lived with her cousin in Tepito, a working-class neighborhood north of the Zócalo and east of the Paseo. Instead of carrying out their suicide pact at home, in the public baths, or at some site in the historical city center, María and Guadalupe took a trolley excursion to the park and sought a quiet spot off a footpath in the forest. Trolley fares were not cheap. It cost five centavos in 1910 to travel around the city, and an unskilled laborer earned just fifty centavos per day.42 The girls left notes and personal effects behind to define their motives and selves and the conclusions they hoped the public would draw from their suicides. They also asked that their bodies not be subjected to autopsies, in hopes of controlling the destiny of their cadavers. It was known that autopsies were part and parcel of suicide investigations, and the girls had likely hoped to prevent their bodies from being violated by scientific instruments.
In 1920, more than a decade after the deaths of the two girls, José Amieva planned his suicide in Chapultepec Park with exacting and confounding details. In fact, a journalist for El Demócrata questioned his numerous friends over and over again but could not determine a reason for why José shot himself on the Calzada de los Filósofos (Path of the Philosophers) in the famous park. He had not been spurned in love. He had plenty of money and friends. What could have been the cause? José was an orphaned son of Spanish parents and had held a good job working for the city. He had no vices except for dating a series of waitresses who worked in the capital’s cabarets. One Sunday, he decided to organize a gran paseo (grand excursion) of automobiles with various friends. They spent the day first at the Café Colón and then at the Cafe Inglés, where José picked up one of the waitresses, Isabel González. He told her that he was planning a “long trip into the unknown.” Other friends testified after his death that he had talked about suicide but said they had not taken him seriously because of his young age. On Monday morning, he called a tailor to the hotel room where he lodged and ordered a black suit. He arranged to have a car pick up Isabel later that afternoon for a rendezvous in the park. When she arrived, she was surprised to see a large group surrounding a cadaver, that of the young José. The reporter noted that José had not loved just one woman and so was unlikely to have been deceived by a specific love interest and also remarked that he had no debts and that he loved baseball, concluding that whatever drove the young man to death was truly an enigma.43
A year after the death of José, a young man chose to end his life on the Paseo de la Reforma in a hired car. Guillermo Barrios Oropeza hired a driver at the intersection of Las Flores and Santa María de la Ribera, located in one of the middle-class neighborhoods of the capital. The driver thought nothing of an elegantly dressed young man who wanted to pay him for the drive to Chapultepec Park. The client appeared to be middle class and seemed to have ample leisure time to frequent the park. Customer and driver arrived at Chapultepec and drove down some of the shady and sunny streets of the park. After riding for half an hour, Guillermo asked the driver to stop at the lake and wait. He got out and sat on one of the benches circling the lake, and the driver observed from a distance that he took out a letter, read it, ran his fingers through his hair, looked perturbed, and tossed the letter to the ground. The driver saw him pick up the letter and light it with a match. The young man then returned to the car, seemingly calm, and told the driver, “Let’s go downtown.” The chauffeur later told a journalist for El Demócrata that he had mused about “these young men of today, given over to romanticisms.” Merging onto the Paseo, the driver started to head downtown, but when the car arrived at the intersection with Insurgentes, in the upscale Juárez neighborhood, a loud detonation upset the tranquil journey. The driver glanced back to see his customer with a ghastly wound in his right temple and a gun clutched in his fist. He then panicked, thinking that the police might think that he had robbed and killed his passenger, but a traffic cop had witnessed Guillermo raise the gun to his head and fire. The two men agreed that the chauffeur should drive the victim to the police station right away. After a search of Guillermo’s pockets, police officers found his address and informed his shocked family. El Demócrata’s article about the death was accompanied by a graphic depiction of the young man, nattily dressed, shooting himself in the back of the hired car. The reporter also prefaced the story with a warning about the suicide epidemic that was infecting society’s lovelorn youth.44 The theme of youthful lovesickness had its antecedents in the nineteenth century, but the tone of reporting had changed from Porfirian times, and by the 1920s, reporters did not exalt suicide for love as they had then.
A few years earlier, in 1916, park-goers steering their boat around Chapultepec Park’s lake saw what looked like a dead body near the Calzada de Violetas. On further investigation, they found the corpse of Guadalupe Ponce. She was dressed elegantly in a black suit, her feet were shod in patent leather shoes, and silk stockings showed from under her dress. A velvet hat embellished with feathers covered her head. El Demócrata’s article began with a familiar rant:
Another victim of romanticism! A woman of nineteen years who put an end to her life in a picturesque place! A passage of another timeless and trite tale that would be tragic if it were not disgusting . . . . The morbid propensity for suicide of many victims already wakes in another case, as much as we want to know the details, it is always the same. A young woman swallows a strong dose of poison, her body falling into the dry leaves of the shady millennial forest. The story is vulgar, the crime repugnant, the sensation it wakes is momentary and only leaves a family mourning, a discordant note in the harmony of life, and the murmur of reprobation in the neighborhood.45
Like journalistic voyeurs had done ten years earlier, the paper detailed the personal effects found at the scene, which included a small purse bearing the initials “G.P.” and a bottle of perfume labeled “Sweet Pea.” Coincidently, a page of El Demócrata lay nearby, and wrapped inside it was a white powder, presumably the poison ingested by Guadalupe. Reporters undertook their own forensic investigation by taking traces of the powder in question to a local pharmacy, where a poison a pharmacist subsequently identified it as cyanide.46 How reporters covered Guadalupe’s suicide in comparison to the double suicide in 1909 was revealing. María Fuentes and Guadalupe Ortiz received adulating coverage when reporters thought they hailed from the prosperous class. The girls may have been young and smitten with the same man, but reporters narrated their demise in romantic and even forgiving tones. In 1916, a year when Mexico was still in the throes of revolution, with different factions controlling sections of the nation, reporters and presumably many members of society had less patience and understanding for what they saw as trite deaths.
A reporter for El Universal mocked a 1930 suicide attempt by Valeriano Gutiérrez Sáinz, a Spaniard who had escaped the Beneficiencia Española (Spanish Sanitorium) in Mexico City after being diagnosed with partial paralysis. Comparing the events to a comic film, the article narrated Valeriano’s haphazard attempt to end his life on the shores of Chapultepec Lake. Despondent, the distressed Spaniard had taken out a Gillette razor, nicked his neck with it, and then jumped into lake. The reporter commented that the cold water must have made him forget his “desires to kill himself” because he quickly struggled up onto the grass and asked a passing woman for help. The article also ridiculed the man for thinking that jumping into the shallow end of the lake would make him drown. The Spaniard suffered nothing more than an “insignificant” wound on his neck, and he returned to the care of doctors at the sanatorium.47 Humorously, the title of the front-page article read, “A Cut and a Bath in Chapultepec Pond.”
A good part of daily life took place in the street. Many men and women walked or rode to their places of employment, shopped in the stores and markets of the city, and, importantly, found places to court and socialize in restaurants, cafes, and parks. Others literally worked in the streets, plying goods as itinerant peddlers, hawking newspapers, or setting up kiosks to sell products to capital residents. Trolleys, cars, and horse-drawn carriages also traversed urban streets and provided the methods and places for public suicides. In 1898, train operator Alfredo Díaz leapt off a train headed for Tizapán when it reached its highest speed. Passengers said that they had noticed him as they crossed at Piedad but that he had then vanished. Officers found him unconscious on the tracks, and he later died at the hospital. All surmised from the circumstances that is was suicide.48 Concepción González also chose a train as her place and method of suicide, but more was known about her motives, as she did not succeed in killing herself and so the police were able to collect her deposition. Twenty years old and hailing from the middle class, Concepción lived with her husband, Sergeant Enrique Vásquez. She grew suspicious of infidelity, as he had been recently promoted and was presumably more able to spend money on a mistress. She went to the barracks where he worked and demanded that he come out and speak with her. He refused, and she became despondent enough to lie down on the rail lines in the path of a trolley traveling to Atzcapotzalco, hoping to be crushed and relieved of her suffering. Just in time, a police officer and the conductor of the trolley were able to stop the train and save her.49
In 1902, Eleanor Bailey, a young American woman who was living in Mexico City with a Mrs. Detwiler on the fashionable Paseo de la Reforma, hoped to join her beloved Luis Garcia Rivero in death. Luis, a Spaniard from Asturias who had lived in Mexico for four or five years, had committed suicide in August that year at the age of twenty-three. A chemist by trade, Luis had lived and worked with his brothers at their liquor manufacturing plant. His brothers were shocked that he had picked up a gun one late afternoon and shot himself. The judicial inquest noted that one of his brothers had found him comatose on his bed at the factory. He told investigators that he suspected that Luis killed himself because of a letter he had received from a woman. Police officers found two letters from Eleanor Bailey on his desk. One read: “Luis of my soul. Just arrived. I have to tell you without fail tonight, when you like. Please answer with the carrier. Your Leonora.”50 The next day, a short notice of his suicide appeared on page four of El Imparcial.51 Police also recovered a .38-caliber Smith and Wesson at the scene. They began taking depositions from those close to him. His colleagues had not noticed anything amiss in his temperament. He had declined to go out to eat with them that day, but he seemed normal. He paid the daily wages to the help and retired to his bedroom. A shot rang out moments later. One friend testified that he was in love with a young woman and kept her portrait tucked in his clothes.52
Eleanor pined for her beloved Luis and, according to her guardian, Mrs. Detwiler, had become more and more inconsolable each day since his suicide. One morning, Eleanor announced that she wanted to visit Luis’s grave in the Spanish cemetery. Mrs. Detwiler offered to join her, but Eleanor stated that she needed solitude to grieve her lover’s death. At the cemetery, Eleanor pulled out her guardian’s gun and attempted to end her own life on her lover’s grave. She failed to kill herself and was taken to the hospital. Although El Imparcial’s article on the attempt did not mention the analogy, young Werther’s beloved, Charlotte, pines for him on his grave after his suicide. Eleanor agreed to an interview with the paper, and she informed the reporter that Luis had been “tall, strong, and handsome. I love him more than my life, and he, me.” She claimed that Luis killed himself because one of his brothers had opposed their match due to her inferior social position. The brother, when interviewed by the press, denied this accusation and stated that he had not even known of their relationship. Mrs. Detwiler testified that her gun was missing and presumed that her young charge had taken it. Eleanor surprised the reporter with her frankness, and he wrote that she was unrepentant of her actions and that, since she could not have Luis, she did not want to live. This sentiment also surfaced in a letter she left for a friend named Alicia: “My dearest friend, Oh Alicia! Pardon me if I die and appear ungrateful, but I have a desperate heart and it would be cruel that you or anyone else try to stop me from finding peace and quiet in the cemetery.”53 Ending one’s life in a cemetery was common in Cuba as well.54 And perhaps nothing seems more romantic than ending your life on the gravesite of your departed lover.
Imbibing a few drinks often preceded the decision to commit suicide. Some men even decided to kill themselves in the taverns and cafés where they socialized with friends and coworkers. Other suicides occurred in the streets outside cantinas or popular hangouts. Musician Gastón Moreno shot himself in the Cantina Veracruzano while drinking with fellow musicians in 1929. The proprietor of the cantina testified that, on the night of the event, he had been about to close the establishment but let Gastón and his buddies in for a few drinks. Drinking partners Gustavo Vargas and Salvador Parga testified that, after a few cups, Gastón pulled out a pistol, proclaimed, “This is for me!” and shot himself.55 He neither left a note nor uttered a reason for his drastic action. Some years earlier, in 1921, chauffeur Efrén Muñoz, twenty-six years old, procured a couple of grams of mercury cyanide and, because he felt “bored with life,” went drinking with some friends. After his friends bid their goodbyes, he swallowed the poisonous power with tequila. Thirty minutes later, he felt intense pain and went home and told his girlfriend what he had done. She called a doctor, and he survived his suicide attempt.56
In 1911, eighteen-year-old José Díaz stumbled into the tendajón (small grocery store) El Porvenir (the future) and fell to the floor trembling. The owner notified a street cop, and José admitted that he had swallowed strychnine. In his testimony, José stated that he was a single pharmacist by training and that he had worked for the cantina La Pura Caña until about a month ago, when he had fallen ill. A few days earlier, he had gone to the cantina to have a drink. The owner, José Rios, had asked him how he intended to pay, calling him a “shameless ratero.”57 José Díaz could not support such dishonorable, public insults and opted to kill himself with rat poison. He had procured the poison sometime earlier from his former place of employment, a botica in Mixcoac, south of the city center. The offended young man also penned a letter to Francisco Vega, who was both the owner of El Porvenir and José Díaz’s landlord, that read: “Sr. Francisco Vega Licea, I find myself offended by Don José R. Rios, you know how he has treated me, I thought to end my life because I do not have sufficient means to get revenge and proceed against Rios. My honor is finished and so is my life. Goodbye forever, goodbye.”58
The lovesick, young Salvador Magallón poisoned himself under the balcony of his sweetheart in 1897. Twenty years old and hailing from the middle class, Salvador had courted his girlfriend for almost a year. Every night, he had gone to her house and conversed with her, she standing on her balcony and he in the street, for two or three hours. He had begun talking about marriage, but they had also started fighting. On the fateful night, he stood under her balcony and she came out, asking why he had not visited her the night before. Salvador seemed sad and pensive, and he asked the young woman for a glass of water. She handed it to him, and he took out a blue box from his pocket, poured its contents into his mouth, and swallowed a large gulp of water. A few moments passed, he turned red and grabbed his stomach. He called out for another glass of water, and when his sweetheart returned with it, he convulsed violently and hit the street with a thud. He died soon afterward of arsenic poisoning.59
Jumping off the top of buildings or throwing oneself in the path of trolleys or cars were two common methods of committing dramatic, public suicide. Those persons intent on killing themselves by jumping from heights chose sites of three and four stories or more to ensure a likely death. Some suicides chose to leap from buildings that held special individual or societal significance. Others simply jumped out of windows or off roofs of their own homes and workplaces, like Mónica Santillán, who worked as a domestic in a house on the historic Calle de Tacuba in the city center. A reporter and a photographer for El Independiente happened to be passing by when they noticed something fall off a roof. As they moved closer, they discovered the body of someone who appeared to be dressed as a servant. The young Mónica had killed herself because her boyfriend had deceived her. A letter from the boyfriend was found on her body. It read, “Mónica, don’t blame me, but it is destiny. I cannot continue loving you, because I am promised to Desideria, so don’t bother yourself with me any longer.” Mónica died instantly, and her body was unceremoniously transferred to the Hospital Juárez for an autopsy.60 María Guadalupe Servín also tried to leap to her death because she had lost in love, but she survived the ordeal. A reporter for El Universal was walking down Calle Soto and Avenida Hombres Ilustres when Guadalupe jumped from a third-floor balcony. She had been courted and deceived by a young man named Escalante. She had attended dances with him, and he had promised to take her to the altar when his financial situation improved. The implication was that he had had sex with her but then reneged on his promise to marry her and therefore repair her honor. She lived with her mother and a young sister of six or seven years. She survived the fall and later told the judge that, even though everyone suspected that he had violated her, he had not. The judge accepted her testimony, and the court did not bring in the suitor for his testimony.61
The El Demócrata reporter who wrote about the suicide of Matilde Chazaro in 1924 flexed his literary chops in the article. A drawing accompanied the article showing a young, modern woman falling head first off the top of her mansion. The long title of the article began: “A Morbid Effluvia Populates the City, and the Evil of Suicide Sickens Young People’s Spirits.” Referencing Lady MacBeth and Nietzsche, the reporter warned, “All kinds of suicides registered in the police annals have captured the daily press headlines with painful regularity. It seems this bad act is highly contagious. Who knows what macabre shadow moves though the city, for not a day goes by when some sick spirit does not make an attempt against their life.” What especially upset this writer was that Matilde counted herself among the metropolitan aristocracy; she was a woman of “exquisite upbringing.” Her maids said that she had normally been full of joy, but shortly before her death they had noticed a change in her personality. She started to shut herself in her quarters and played “intoxicating ballads” on the piano for hours on end. Her parents tried to seek various therapies for her, but Matilde insisted it was just the heat that was bothering her. On the fateful day, she awakened early, donned black clothing and a veil, and attended mass. When she returned home, she played her “maddening ballads” again. Moments later, at 11:30 am, she opened a window and jumped over the balcony. She died three hours later at the hospital.62
Luis Ortega, a twenty-eight-year-old civil servant, was walking across the street at Nuevo México and López around 5:00 pm one day in 1923 when he stopped suddenly after hearing the blast of a gun close by. He moved toward the sound and saw Manuel Castellanos lying injured on the sidewalk. When interrogated, Manuel, a twenty-four-year-old Spaniard, told authorities that he was tired of living and that no one had compelled him to try and take his life. He had planned his suicide with some forethought and penned three notes. One reiterated what he had confessed to police, “I killed myself because I am tired of life.” A second note read, “Goodbye, dear brother, goodbye.” A third, addressed to authorities, stated, “I advise you that I have a brother in the Carolina Fabric Factory, his name is Santiago Castellanos.” Officials transferred the Spanish victim to the Sanitorio de Beneficiencia Española (Sanatorium of Spanish Welfare). Perhaps in hopes of saving face, Manuel later recanted and claimed that he accidently shot himself while cleaning his gun.63 It is unclear why he would have chosen the street to clean his gun. The fact that he shot himself in the street, whether intentionally or by accident, ensured that he would be discovered by passersby.
Two friends and fellow police officers, Alfonso Domínguez and Alberto Brusco, met each other by chance at the intersection of Calle República de Ecuador and Avenida Santa María La Redonda one day in the summer of 1928. They chatted for some minutes, and then Alfonso turned to leave his friend to go pick up his paycheck. Immediately, Alberto pulled out a 9 mm Browning pistol and shot himself in the chest in the middle of sidewalk. Alfonso ran to him and tried to grab the gun as Alberto lifted it to take another shot. The injured man fell to the street and was carried off for medical attention soon afterwards. Thirty-eight-year-old Alberto hailed from Chiapas and worked as a carpenter and police officer. He stated that he had not tried to kill himself but had accidently shot himself while trying to teach Alfonso a trick with the gun. Alfonso testified to the contrary, stating that Alberto had tried to kill himself and that he had done so over a woman. Apparently, Alberto had taken a young woman named Alicia from her home, moved around the country with her, and finally settled with her in the capital. They fought, and Alicia moved out and took employment in different cabarets around the city. She had asked for a reconciliation because of her dire economic situation, according to Alfonso, but Alberto refused to take her back. She claimed that someone was going to kill her and that he would suffer because he did nothing to protect her. Alfonso claimed that this row had provoked his friend’s suicide attempt. Alberto offered nothing more but later asked for police to return his property, which included a watch, five pesos, and a hairpiece (peluca).64
In fin-de-siècle Mexico, the tower of the Metropolitan Cathedral became known as the Tower of the Suicides. José Guadalupe Posada illustrated an early twentieth-century broadside that showed a tiny body falling from the top of the majestic church. Some bent on suicide chose religious spaces to commit the deed. Women chose to leap to their death from the church more often than men.65 In 1899, a journalist for the largest circulating newspaper in Mexico City, El Imparcial, recounted the suicide of Sofía Ahumada, a young woman who jumped to her death from the tower of the cathedral. He mocked the twenty to thirty “unemployed” people who loitered around the “stain of blood” left at the site of her tragic plunge.66 He referred to the spot where she landed: the location of an Aztec sacrificial sunstone altar that was excavated in 1790 during repairs on the church.67 Whether the reporter was equating suicide to sacrifice or barbarity, his narrative lamented the rise of suicide in the city and warned against the potential for imitation.
One of the most talked about suicides at the tower occurred at the cusp of the 1900s, when capital residents were feeling trepidation for the coming century. When Sofía decided to jump off the cathedral in 1899, she joined an assembly of victims who had succumbed to the infectious mania of self-murder. El Imparcial’s article about her death was prefaced with the warning: “Suicide spreads, and the number of victims of this imitative mania is already alarming. They employ all forms of destruction known, the knife, the pistol, the rope, the poison; she chose the wrong way to throw herself off when a full trolley passed. This last suicide has produced a terror in society. The method employed is certainly not new.”68
The article continued with a familiar narrative. Sofía, of middle-class background, had moved to the capital with her three sisters when their parents died. The reporter noted, “She was at the height of her youth, brimming with life; she was, if not beautiful, graceful.” The four sisters supported themselves with respectable work. One by one, Sofía’s sisters moved out of their shared home for employment outside of the city. Only one sister remained in the capital, but she lived separately with her husband. Sofía eventually moved in with her married sister on Calle Concepción. She met a young man, Bonifacio Martínez, who soon passed by her balcony to initiate a courtship. Bonifacio had learned the watchmaking and clock trade from his father. According to the reporter for El Imparcial, he had been in love with Sofía until she unleashed her hysteria and exhibited violent fits of neurotic behavior. The older sister, Tomasa, recounted that Sofía had always been lively and possessed of easy conversational skills but also excessively nervous, known to clench her fists tightly when upset. Two months before Sofía leaped to her death, Tomasa noticed a drastic change in her younger sister. She slept fitfully, rose earlier than usual, ate her meals begrudgingly, and spent long hours lost in her thoughts. Apparently, Bonifacio had broken off their relationship. Sofía told him, “I cannot live without seeing you,” and he agreed to meet. They went to the cathedral, where he was working on the clock. They bickered, and as he tinkered with the clock mechanism, she jumped over the balustrade and fell to her death on the pavement below. The reporter noted that the “neurotic” landed with her head to the south, the direction of the plaque that marks the place where the Aztec sunstone was found.69 Bonifacio peered down in horror and then ran down the steps to the street below, only to run back up the tower because he feared that people would think he had pushed her. Authorities found a letter in her skirt that read, “I was born to suffer! For some time I have thought of suicide as the only remedy for my pain . . . . I do not want the man I have loved to be thought the cause. No. I killed myself because I felt like it. No one is responsible for my death.”70 Her letter went on to inform authorities that no one would claim her body and she would be buried in a pauper’s grave.
Police detained potential perpetrators or accomplices in most investigations, and they followed protocol in this case, taking Bonifacio into custody. Since Bonifacio had been atop the tower with Sofía, it was possible he had pushed her or egged her into killing herself. The fact that her shawl was found in the tower and not on her body raised suspicions. Generally, a shawl signified modesty and honorable women did not go into the street without it.71 The idea that Sofía would have discarded her shawl before jumping seemed unthinkable. Authorities also found an inscribed portrait of Sofía in their search of Bonifacio’s home and confiscated it to see if the handwriting matched the letter found in her skirt, as they felt the note looked suspiciously like it had been written in a masculine hand.72 The next day, the young victim’s body continued to rest on the slab at the morgue, just as she had predicted; her family did not claim her body or arrange the burial. Three girlfriends identified her body and told a reporter that they knew she would choose the most extravagant way to kill herself. Coworkers stated that she had procured dynamite in weeks past but said they had managed to get it away from her and discard it in the toilet where they worked.73
A common tactic of articles editorializing youth and suicide was to look to the influence of novels. An unsigned editorial published in 1899 in El Imparcial agreed with the Italian doctor Luigi Midena, who claimed that novels were the cause of many moral calamities. In fact, it was thought that reading such novels caused liver congestion, which would in turn lead to moral dissipation. The editorial took the Sofía Ahumada case and spun a familiar narrative borrowed from Victor Hugo:
He was a watchmaker. He knew her from the street. He followed her. Came to love her. There was jealousy . . . . They arranged to meet at the Cathedral . . . . This boy was not Quasimodo, but his girlfriend had one of those bizarre temperaments, decadent, novelistic; she took bromide and jumped to her death. While he managed the clock weights, she fixed her eyes on the horizon. While he fine-tuned the needles, she pondered sad things. While he worked his tool, she felt a pessimism that seemed so foreign and deep as to be rare in our country, this bitterness of character . . . . She decided to kill herself . . . . [She] made preparations . . . . [Wearing] new clothes, colorful stockings, letter in her showy interior clothing, she jumped from the tower to eternity.74
The reporter continued in this tone of mockery, noting the ten, twenty, or thirty unemployed who contemplated the “tombstone commemorating the calendar of idolatry . . . and the stain of blood” of Sofía’s broken body.75 This reporter had less sympathy for Sofía than the reporter who covered the double suicide of María Fuentes and Guadalupe Ortiz in Chapultepec Park ten years later had had for his subjects. What Sofía Ahumada lacked that the two other girls appeared to have, at least initially, was honor. That she would torture her stolid artisan beau with her hysterics and trifles placed her in the category of young girls corrupted by decadent literature, making her a victim of suicide who lacked virtue. Religious newspapers in particular highlighted the negative influence of popular novels and dramatic plays on a person’s will to live. An 1895 editorial signed “The Messenger of the Priesthood” warned readers of the ill effects of novels that only served to “delight the flesh.” She continued, “Think about what impact this reading will have on a maiden, a half-open bud, who inhales the poisoned perfume of the passions that drags us back to the corrupt nature of original sin.”76 The message was not yet that madness caused suicide but that popular culture debased those with young impressionable minds who might be “bored with life” or who might be slaves to the latest fashions. A reporter for El Chisme expressed shock that Sofía would jump off the tower in full view of passengers enjoying a trolley ride and related that she had worn stockings to the knees so that, when her skirts flew up during the fall, onlookers would not see her nudity.77
In 1912, just over a decade after Sofía jumped to her death, a drawing of three figures—two large and one small—falling from the Tower of Suicides appeared on the front page of El Imparcial. The victims were two young women and a toddler of almost two years old. The article accompanying the picture introduced one of the victims as Juana López, “of fine presence and a manner of dress that denotes her as a woman of middle-class circumstance from the interior.” The reporter was equally impressed with her clothes and, like most reporters covering female suicide, noted her silk blouse and undergarments. Yet, while the El Chisme reporter wrote mockingly that Sofía had purchased new undergarments to costume her suicide drama, implying that she could not afford the fine silk, El Imparcial stressed the luxurious and expensive silk garments as evidence of Juana’s prosperity and good education. Her partner in death, a younger woman named Margarita Pereda, was dressed equally respectably in clothing of silk. The trio had arrived at the cathedral for noon mass, and witnesses had seen them kneeling in prayer at the altar. Witnesses recounted that they asked the doorman for access to the tower to take in the view. According to the reporter, the women removed letters from their pockets, and then Juana threw her son off the tower and jumped immediately afterward. Margarita soon followed. Juana’s letter obeyed the formula, stating that no one was responsible for her death. She simply asked to be buried with her son. Margarita diverged from the pattern in her letter, blaming her father for her suffering and her death. In a display of literary license, the reporter speculated erroneously that Juan López, a man who had jumped off the tower six months earlier, was Juana’s son and Margarita’s beloved. The rift between Margarita and her father, the reporter surmised, was that he had prohibited her marriage to Juan.78 The mere possibility that star-crossed lovers were involved urged the reporter to paint the suicide in romantic terms, and he scarcely mentioned the murder of the toddler. It was as if a cultural logic existed that made female suicide understandable, and perhaps even condonable, if committed for love. The condition was that a lovelorn woman had to be honorable.
The case of the double suicide and murder took on new twists as it was investigated further. Margarita had not been in love with Juan López. Instead, reporters revealed that an evil suicide pact had been formed between the more domineering Juana and the impressionable Margarita. A lover had abandoned Juana, and a father had abandoned Margarita. A shared sense of desertion fueled their mutual desire to end their suffering once and for all, and the older friend convinced the younger to succumb to her wicked scheme. The sordid story began with Margarita’s mother, Joaquina, and her father, who was not named in the reporting. A love grew between them, and Margarita was born, but the father rose in social status, met a young lady with means, and forsook Joaquina. Nonetheless, he registered as the infant Margarita’s father in the civil registry and committed twenty pesos monthly to her education. Joaquina befriended a Frenchman by the name of Bulmé and his wife, who offered to adopt Margarita and raise her as their own. Margarita’s benefactor enrolled her in the prestigious high school El Buen Tono, and she excelled academically, learning French in three months. However, her French adoptive father became seriously ill, and he and his wife moved back to France, leaving Margarita in the care of a good friend. At the same time, her biological father stopped paying for her schooling. Margarita encountered him in the street one day, and he ran from her, telling her that she was not his daughter and that he did not know her. Since that day, according to her temporary guardian, Mrs. Prince, Margarita had been despondent and inconsolable. Mrs. Prince recounted that her restaurateur husband had brought home Juana López when he found out she had been abandoned by the father of her child. The problem for Margarita was that her new housemate talked incessantly of suicide and had already attempted to kill herself a couple times. Once, she had jumped in the path of a trolley; another time, she drank alcohol with matches dissolved in it, but friends intervened and saved her. The Princes alleged that the abandoned single mother had a strong influence on Margarita. Much to the young girl’s glee, her adoptive father returned from France and took her shopping for a new dress in an attempt to cheer her up. They shopped happily, but in retrospect he pondered the fateful meaning of her odd question as she glanced up at the cathedral tower: “If you jumped from the first floor, would it kill you?”
On the unfortunate day of the deaths, Mrs. Prince left Margarita and Juana in charge of her young children while she ran errands. She returned hours later to find her children at the neighbors and Margarita, Juana, and Juana’s toddler son gone. A note addressed to Bulmé read, “Cher papa Bulmé, I kill myself because I suffer so much. I don’t want to suffer anymore. Your daughter, who loves you very much. Margarita Bulmé. All my portraits are for you. Goodbye.” The older child of Mrs. Prince told reporters that the young women drank some cups of absinthe before they departed. Reporters concluded that the thirty-two-year-old Juana convinced Margarita to join her in a suicide pact.79 This was the same dynamic that was used to explain the double suicide at Chapultepec Park. It seemed unfathomable that a young woman would kill herself if she had not been brainwashed by an older accomplice. In this case, the young adopted girl of a French businessman maintained her virtue in death, while the older architect of the suicide, the working-class single mother, won no esteem for her actions.
Angelina Ruiz made sensational news by leaping to her death from the same tower less than a decade later, though her suffering was caused not by loss of love of a father but by shame caused by an unknown lover. El Demócrata reported on July 23, 1920, that the young woman, who was of refined education and worked as a ticket seller at the Salón Rojo, had jumped from the tower to her death the day before. The subtitle asked whether it was love, desperation, or insanity that drove her to do it. The article recounted her biography, noting that she had lived with her widowed mother and younger siblings.80 She had worked at the cinema to help the family make ends meet. Her workday began at 3:00 pm. She sold tickets and “gave away smiles” until 10:00 pm, when her mother would meet her each night to escort her home. The reporter wrote that on the walk home, the two would peer in the windows of the cafés and gaze at the elite customers in their fine clothes. He implied that Angelina’s mother had saved her from dishonor by accompanying her in the street, even though they both gazed enviably at the rich patrons. He wrote that Angelina had lived the life of most modern youth, one of relative monotony, noting that she had been affected by a “morbid misanthropy” from her experiences working in the ticket booth. One day, she visited the cathedral and asked to take the stairs to the tower. The guard forbade her from ascending because rules dictated that a woman needed a male escort to enjoy the city views from the turret. Undeterred, Angelina boarded a trolley the following day, ran into an acquaintance from work, and asked him to escort her up the tower. He accepted, and they both debarked the trolley at the majestic church. They paid the guard fifty centavos and ascended the stairs. Angelina asked her friend to inscribe their names and the date on the wall: “Angelina Ruiz and Onésimo García . . . 7–22–[1]920.” He complied, took out a pencil, and began writing. Moments later, he realized that the young woman he knew just slightly from work had jumped off the tower. The newspaper gave a detailed description of the injuries she sustained from falling so heavily on the stone pavement below, noting her torn clothes, broken leg, and crushed face.81
The next day, the focus on Angelina’s young, broken body continued, but it was accompanied by a warning to other girls who might be tempted to follow her example. Clearly, the empathy for youths who killed themselves for love had begun to wane by the 1920s. Mexico had just emerged from a decade of revolution. With more than one million dead, lovelorn suicides were no doubt considered frivolous. A reporter for El Demócrata wrote, “Read, silly señorita, you think to kill yourself because your boyfriend, an insubstantial youngster, has quarreled with you . . . . On the cold marble slab, . . . completely naked, Angelina’s body was already in a state of decomposition.”82 He went on to detail how surgeons approached Angelina’s body with the detachment of science, tearing open her flesh and examining her entrails not to look for something spiritual but to seek evidence of lesions that might explain her actions. Another report on a female suicide in 1920 also took a cold view, ridiculing young women who forget that their naked corpses will rest on the cold slabs of the morgue and serve as “fodder for science and men, who justly laugh at them, those who commit that sad madness.”83
As was the case with most suicide inquests, the judge determined that no crime had been committed and released Onésimo from custody. However, four months later, Angelina’s mother appealed the decision after finding various forms of evidence in her daughter’s personal effects, in particular a letter that blamed a said Jacobo for her disgrace. Coincidently or not, the owner of the theater where Angelina had worked was named Jacobo Granat. He was a prominent businessmen and proprietor of some of the most modern and toniest hotspots in the city, including the Cine Olimpia and the Salón Rojo.84 The mother wanted the case reopened because someone stole the watch, rings, and money that Angelina had on her person the day of her suicide.85 She also alleged that Angelina might have been deflowered by the Jacobo mentioned in the letter and chosen death to end her shameful suffering. Clearly, the mother wanted to understand the reasons behind her daughter’s act, and killing oneself to cover up shame was a more or less accepted motive for suicide. Jacobo Granat’s lawyer responded to the appeal by noting that his client had had no more relationship to Angelina than that of employer to employee and that there were many men named Jacobo. As for the charge of estupro (deflowering), the lawyer contended that the medical experts had not documented a recent loss of virginity during the autopsy and reminded the judge that estupro applied only to girls fourteen years of age and younger. Angelina Ruiz had been in her early twenties when she jumped off the tower. The mother insisted that she had found a letter from her daughter under a hatbox that said Angelina had had sex with Jacobo and that he had abandoned her. She also revealed to the judge what she considered to be damning evidence of Granat’s guilt. According to her, Granat had come to her house after the suicide and offered to pay the funeral and burial expenses. In her mind, these seemingly charitable actions originated in his guilty conscience. The grieving mother failed to have Granat prosecuted, and she did not recover her daughter’s personal effects. However, she succeeded in getting the sordid story published in the newspaper, which certainly tarnished Granat’s honor and reputation. Although it is impossible to assess, the mother’s appeal may have restored some of her daughter’s honor in certain readers’ minds, at least those who believed that death was preferable to public shame.
Honor was a slippery slope that both journalists and suicide victims attempted to navigate. What was most important was honor’s public component—that is, how one was viewed by others. Newspapers purported to offer the most accurate versions of events and victim biographies; yet in reality, they fictionalized crime stories to make them more interesting to readers. The large dailies had investigative reporters who interviewed the family, friends, witnesses, and coworkers of suicides. The victims hoped that their deaths by suicide would be considered rational and honorable. Of course, as the case of María Fuentes and Guadalupe Ortiz shows, reporters had the upper hand when it came to how suicides would be remembered. Although the two young girls attempted to portray themselves as honorable, the newspapers ended up dragging their reputations through the mud, and some went as far as to suggest that the girls had made a diabolical suicide pact. Although reporters by and large no longer signed their names to stories at the turn of the century, the history of rivalries and duels between newspapermen were legendary.86 Reporters routinely called out rival papers for the errors they printed when covering the same stories. In El Chisme’s report on Sofía Ahumada’s suicide, the reporter told his readers that the paper was the only one that could correct the erroneous information disseminated about the case by the rest of the dailies in the capital, noting that it had a team of investigative reporters who hunted down the facts.87 The reporter for the Catholic newspaper El País ignored Sofía’s relationship with Bonifacio Martínez. He used the spectacle of her suicide to blame the government-sponsored, positivist-liberal newspapers like El Imparcial for the increased immorality in society, claiming that such newspapers did not teach capitalinos to read or cultivate themselves but instead induced them to kill themselves by publishing lewd and salacious coverage of crime and immoral acts.88
Journalists reported the details of suicides, but enlaced in the litany of biographical details were lessons on honor, proper education, the roots of insanity, and gender ideology. Journalists initially placed María Fuentes and Guadalupe Ortiz on pedestals, extolling their comely and arrogant visages and encouraging readers to sympathize with their suicides, but once they discovered that the girls had lived in a tenement in the working-class barrio Tepito, they condemned their acts. The press disparaged Sofía Ahumada from the outset, although they also employed romantic language to describe the tragedy. Her neurosis stood front and center in the reporting of her death. What seemed most troubling to her chroniclers was the fact that her suicide was too public in its pornographic spectacle at the Zócalo. Unlike the best friends María and Guadalupe, who drank poison down a private path, Sofía jumped off the cathedral tower as a trolley arrived, and her fall disheveled her clothes and exposed her body to onlookers. Her friends told reporters that she had desired an extravagant exit, but the press did not play along and romanticize her life and demise. Sofía may have lacked honor in the eyes of the judgmental newspapers, but mourners felt differently, leaving behind flowers as they contemplated the stain of blood and perhaps the fate of youth in modern times.
Few residents of Mexico City committed suicide in the public spaces of the city. Private spaces like the home or a rented hotel room were preferred settings. The most sensational suicides (those covered extensively by newspapers) occurred in the monumental or abstract spaces of the city, including the cathedral, the Alameda, and Chapultepec Park. These spaces were monuments to progress and piety and also represented the dominant spaces of power. When reporters referred to Chapultepec Park as a popular destination for both lovers and suicidal youth, the park transformed from a homogenous abstract space to a counter-space with multiple meanings created by the suicidal bodies that darkened traditional leisure destinations. Ultimately, the young men and women who made self-conscious decisions to realize their suicides in public spaces chose places that were imbued with historical and cultural meaning. In the case of the double suicide at Chapultepec Park, María Fuentes and Guadalupe Ortiz departed their working-class tenement, groomed and dressed at the public baths, and proceeded to the historic center of the city, where they caught a trolley from the central plaza. The girls traveled from the historic center, down the Paseo, and into the modern city to author their deaths. They left notes and personal effects behind to define their motives and selves in hopes of shaping the discourse that would surround their suicides. They drank poison under the cover of the forest and died in a final embrace. A cultural logic pardoned suicides committed by honorable women motivated by love or deception. The manner of their deaths linked them to a long line of romantic deaths. However, María and Guadalupe hailed from the working-class barrio of Tepito. They desired more in life than their social status provided them. The fact that they desired a social mobility that they could not achieve made society condemn their deaths as capricious and unintelligible.
When Sofía Ahumada and the other women leapt off the tower of the cathedral, their bodies hurtling through the air and landing on the paving stones below, they shattered the ideal meaning of the cathedral, especially as newspapers and broadsides began representing the monolithic structure as the Tower of Suicides. When the young women jumped from the tower, their bodies broke on historic ground. The cathedral sat atop the ruins of an Aztec temple, in which sacrifices had been symbolic and commonplace. The female victims of the Tower of Suicides opted for very public and sensational suicides. Reporters maligned the working-class Sofía Ahumada and Juana López, saving their more romantic intonations and empathy for middle-class Angelina Ruiz and Margarita Pereda. All of the young women chronicled in this chapter carefully planned their suicides to construct their selves in their deaths in the meaningful public spaces of the city. They also endeavored to project their honor. A reporter noticed that Sofía wore socks to just below the knees to cover as much flesh as possible. María and Guadalupe followed the most romantic suicide script by carefully wrapping letters and portraits in fine ribbon to leave at the scene of their deaths. Knowing that their bodies would suffer the forensic probing of male eyes and surgical instruments, the women dressed in their finest clothes and coifed their hair. The public narratives that followed public suicides competed for authority, yet in many ways the stains of blood left behind had the most permanence as certain spaces of death, such as the Tower of Suicides and Chapultepec Park, became linked to modern suicide for years to come.89
The tone of reporting on suicides from 1900 to 1930 connoted both continuity and change. Surely, the catastrophic loss of life and the violence of the revolutionary years must have dissuaded commentators from romanticizing suicides. Reporters had less patience for impetuous youth in general during and after the revolution, even though they sometimes lamented the suicides of young women who seemed to be on the cusp of a full life yet chose to end it. Reporters on the whole had less empathy for what they considered to be foolish suicides and attempts, like the failed suicide of the Spaniard Valeriano Gutiérrez Sáinz, who nicked himself with a razor blade and jumped into the shallow end of Chapultepec Lake, or the suicide of Angelina Ruiz, who jumped from the cathedral in 1920. There were other suicides that they did not mock, and in those cases they coldly reported the details with little editorializing. When a police officer discovered domestic servant Matilde Cejudo clutching a letter and visibly pained in the Alameda in 1930, for example, the next day’s article in El Universal simply reported that she drank potassium permanganate because she had been deceived in love. No suppositions followed.90 Later that year, the same newspaper showed a little more amazement at the suicide of a well-dressed man who rented a room at the Hotel San Pedro. Determined to succeed in his death wish, the man dissolved mercury cyanide in a glass, drank it, and then walked up to a third-floor balcony, swung his legs over the rails, and shot himself in the head. The fatal trinity of poison, a bullet, and a three-story fall ensured that the man perished. The reporter expressed being chilled at the cold-bloodedness of the suicide’s actions.91 Make no mistake about it, the way reporters narrated and understood suicide may have changed from the Porfirian to revolutionary times, going from over-romanticizing to reporting only cold, hard facts, but suicide remained both a vehicle to communicate grief and sorrow and a social problem to be analyzed and curbed. By the 1930s, Excélsior pledged to stop reporting la nota roja (blood crimes), stating that this type of news only served to stimulate the basest passions and perpetuate immorality in Mexican society. Women and children in particular suffered from the reporting of suicides and violent crimes. Archbishops, leading politicians, and Emilio Rabasa, a writer and the cofounder of the newspaper El Universal, praised the paper’s decision, claiming that it would further the uplift of the working classes.92 Most expected that removing the sensational and gruesome details of suicides from the front pages would decrease the occurrence of suicide in society.