SUICIDE OPENS A WINDOW INTO the vivid social imaginaries of Porfirian and revolutionary Mexico City. The capital underwent significant modernization during these years. A massive drainage system alleviated seasonal flooding issues. Eclectic housing developments sprung up in western sections of the city. Trolley lines crisscrossed large expanses of the city and connected the rural with the urban. More homes boasted electricity and modern appliances. Programs of public hygiene improved the quality of life of the city’s inhabitants and curbed epidemic diseases. Mexico City was modern on the cusp of the twentieth century, but this modernity was a hybrid that knitted the new with the old.1 Markers of modernity were parks replete with fountains, avenues lined with trees, department stores stocked with imported goods, and paradoxically, suicide. A universal human act like suicide was a modern disease to be contemplated, lamented, and by all means studied. To scholars a century later, the act itself matters less than how and why social groups imbued it with meaning. When journalists reported on a young woman who jumped head first off the cathedral or a man who shot himself because he was bored with life, they communicated universal anxieties that hounded their social worlds. When physicians peered into the craniums of cadavers to seek the causes of mental illness, they did so with an arsenal of preconceptions about human behavior. Prevailing gender, class, and racial norms shaped their judgments. It is exactly these notable peculiarities that situate suicide in its historical context. These were universal themes and trepidations that plagued modern societies.
Continuity over the eras rather than difference characterized popular and official attitudes toward suicide in Mexico City. Porfirian- and revolutionary-era scientists yearned to understand the circumstances that led some to self-destruct. Society reacted with various responses, and printed discourse supported and shaped those collective emotions. In fact, newspapers cultivated modern communities of affect and feeling. The suicides sometimes asserted a narrative that countered public discussion. In their final act, they attempted to contour how others would reflect on their deaths. Young people killed themselves at greater rates than people from other age groups, a phenomenon that troubled society because the belief was that the youth of the nation ought to be full of promise and optimism as they looked forward to enjoying the fruits of twentieth-century modernity. They were Mexico’s future workers and leaders. After all, Mexico had survived a protracted revolution, and national leaders ushered in an era of peace and stability as they rebuilt the nation. These were invigorating times. Mexico emerged from revolution with a renewed purpose and identity. Youth and female suicide seemed unfathomable.
The Mexican Revolution continues to be a touchstone when discussing the nation’s progress or criticizing current politics. New leaders swept in with a bevy of promises that elevated the hopes of a people who had fought the hemisphere’s first social revolution against political and economic tyranny. Tragic deaths and disease devastated families; citizens pined for relief. Auspicious times lay ahead to build an independent and revitalized society. It is no wonder that a cadre of postrevolutionary scholars, socialized in that heady milieu, came to shape an idea of mexicanidad or lo mexicano (Mexicaness). They hungered for a unique Mexican character, a national identity that was based on Mexico’s cultural strengths and potential. Porfirians had looked to Europe; revolutionary intellectuals looked inward. Porfirians had denied their indigenous past; revolutionaries embraced it. Thinkers like José Vasconcelos, Samuel Ramos, Leopoldo Zea, and Octavio Paz insisted that Mexico possessed a singular essence that set it apart from its European and Anglo peers. Vasconcelos theorized a “cosmic race” and the rejection of Darwinist ideologies that stratified race in 1929. He argued that Latin Americans epitomized the cosmic race in that their miscegenation gave them the best attributes of all races.2 Ramos, however, wrote the seminal work on Mexicaness in his essay El perfil del hombre y la cultura en México (Profile of Man and Culture in Mexico) in 1938. Employing the inferiority complex theory of Alfred Adler,3 Ramos postulated that Mexicans were failing because they were attempting to imitate or strive for artificial goals that could never be attained. Frustrated, they blamed the object of their failed imitations rather than themselves. As a result, he claimed that Mexicans lacked confidence, acted defensively and belligerently, mistrusted others, needed victims to feel superior to, and felt indifferent to those around him.4 Octavio Paz echoed these sentiments a decade later, when he penned El laberinto de la soledad (The Labyrinth of Solitude) in 1949.5 Paz almost singlehandedly propagated the notion that the birth of the nation out of the violence of conquest formed the cavalier and indifferent Mexican archetype. Ramos wrote of Mexican indifference to others, yet Paz took it two steps further. He contended that Mexicans do not fear death because both life and death lack meaning to them.6 These theorists have been criticized for essentializing Mexicans and arguing that the entire society suffers a collective case of post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of the Spanish conquest and the rape of the first mother, La Malinche, by a European conqueror. Paz likens the Mexican experience to being ensnared in a labyrinth of solitude. He suggests that the founding of the mestizo nation by violent conquest nurtured a national morbid melancholy. Roger Bartra prefers the metaphor of a cage of melancholy rather than a labyrinth of solitude. Bartra further states that devoting intellectual energies to delineating a Mexican essence is an intellectual exercise connected decidedly with modernity.7
Mexican physicians tackled diseases and perceived maladies related to social problems with a vengeance. Many embraced the theories of French specialists like Esquirol and Durkheim, but they also argued about the most efficacious approaches to understanding mental and physical disturbances in the body that could lead to criminality, insanity, and suicide. Although some late Porfirian medical specialists prescribed cold-water baths, purgatives, and physical restraint to cure mental disorders, others advocated for what they called moral treatments. These specialists believed that writing down life histories and having patients reflect on their own odysseys into psychological despair could yield valuable information to effect a cure. Although revolutionary intellectuals blamed Porfirians for imitating trends in Europe, physicians and medical students did not accept the latest theories and medical approaches from across the Atlantic without scrutiny. Brilliant minds populated the medical schools, asylums, and hospitals. These experts read medical studies, labored over determining the appropriate medical curriculum, collaborated with scientists from Europe and the United States, and dabbled in new sciences like sociology and psychology to understand the mental and physical well-being of society. They viewed society as a superorganism and strove to cure its sick parts. The impetus to understand suicide in Mexico began early.
Death imagery in the public sphere was never a uniquely Mexican phenomenon. Many nations, including the United States, attempted to sanitize public spaces and relegate reminders of death to the fringes of urban life; still, the morbid persisted in all aspects of life. Funeral processions, war, and bodies left breathless by vehicle accidents, violent crimes, and lynchings reminded urban residents of their own mortality. The same conditions confronted individuals in Mexico. Mexicans suffered and mourned death no less profoundly than their contemporaries in England and France. Claudio Lomnitz-Adler argues that death as metaphor in Mexican political discourse arises from the fact that “political control over dying, the dead, and the representation of the dead and the afterlife has been key to the formation of the modern state, images of popular culture, and a properly national modernity.”8 Could this not be argued for any modern state? Most secular states, the very ones Ramos criticized Mexico for emulating, underwent similar programs of controlling public spaces and rituals of death and dying. Rural cemetery movements pushed death outside the city. Anthony Giddens theorizes that modern nation-states have a monopoly on violence.9 I would argue that nation-states have a monopoly on death as well. Lomnitz-Adler is most persuasive in showing how the Mexican state co-opted and expanded Day of the Dead celebrations for political and economic reasons, but this festivity does not equate to a unique death cult, as Paz and others have boldly asserted. Likewise, the engraver Posada may have papered Mexico City with images and verse foretelling the end of days and showcasing the latest murder or suicide, but have scholars given as much weight to penny dreadfuls in Victorian England and concluded that death defined that society?10 This study of suicide on the cusp of the twentieth century suggests that Mexicans approached death like any world citizens, with an immense sense of concern, humanity, and sensitivity.