Introduction

This study moves between examining power—how the state and its representatives thought about and approached suicide—and subjectivity—how and why suicides committed a self-constructive performance in their act of self-destruction.1 Observers, worrying about the fate of the nation on the cusp of the twentieth century, placed women and youth at the crux of the public dialogue confronting suicide. Competing voices in the conversation jockeyed for authority. Suicide had an internal logic, but it also presented multiple implications that changed with variables like age, class, gender, and the march of time. How the deaths of young Mexican men and women came to be viewed depended on these factors and the historical context. For example, prerevolutionary reporters romanticized many suicides, even going so far as to suggest that it was a noble sacrifice to save one’s honor or to die for unrequited love. Although post-1920 commentators constructed the narrative of the suicide in poetic expressions, they were less sympathetic to youngsters who killed themselves for seemingly frivolous reasons. Committing self-murder out of tedium or because of juvenile love jeopardized the social order of the revolutionary state, an entity endeavoring to remake its citizenry in mind and body.

Analyzing suicide across the eras of the Porfiriato (1876–1911, the reign of President Porfirio Díaz) and the Mexican Revolution (1910–20) bears ample fruit. Modernization as a state goal triumphed in the hearts and minds of the revolutionary elite just as it did in the rational ethos of científicos (scientific technocrats) and President Díaz. Díaz focused on constructing markers of modernization like buildings, parks, railroads, and port facilities. Revolutionary politicians improved the built environment as well, but they also rehabilitated Mexico’s citizenry to effect new ways of thinking and living. The transformation of the relationship of the individual to society and state figured prominently through both eras, but modernity as a concept remained a moving target as economic and social development as well as the function of capitalism proceeded unevenly, in fits and starts.² Indicators of modernization’s successes included new buildings and public works, scientific advances like techniques to prevent epidemic diseases, and improve the health and order of families, meaning primarily women and children. Decades before President Plutarco Calles claimed children to be members of the “revolutionary collectivity” in 1934, his political forbearers assessed the health of children in order to gauge the progress of the nation.³ Newspapers came alive in the early twentieth century with stories of young men and women who, at or just over the age of majority (age twenty-one), committed suicide in dramatic fashion. The extant body of suicide inquests from 1900 to 1930 also confirms that adolescents killed themselves at higher rates than younger and older citizens. The fact that youth, who were ostensibly full of promise, were self-destructing spurred national reflection and attempts to understand the roots of this unsettling pattern. Continuity of action and reaction, more than divergence, characterized the two eras and how different actors approached the social problem of suicide.

Mexico City changed dramatically from 1900 to 1930. Its population reached 471,000 in 1910, a 50 percent increase from 1895, and women made up 53 percent of the migrant influx.4 By 1930, the population had surged to 1,029,068. The city had tripled in size since 1895.⁵ Whether drawn by the capital’s economic promise or propelled from their homes by the ravages of war, women came to Mexico City to take advantage of newly expanded employment opportunities and public activities. Many households lacked a male head, and women had to work to support their families. Young women in particular filled the demand for typists, shop workers, cigarette makers, and other positions in the urban economy. Modern leisure activities that found men and women mingling in department stores, cinemas, and cabarets threatened existing gender ideology that located honorable women in the home. This gender order gone awry correlated with the rise of suicides in the city. Journalists and editors discussed suicide and used the menace of the unnatural deaths to lament disturbing aspects of a changing world. Moreover, they shaped rational discourses on morality and honor to legitimize their position to forge public opinion. They even assigned honor or dishonor to suicide victims and used their sensational deaths to criticize their peers and rival newspapers. Instead of pistols, journalists wielded words as weapons in this discursive field of honor.⁶

Death was an inescapable reality of modern urban life. No matter how municipal planners attempted to separate the dead and dying from the healthy, capitalinos (residents of Mexico City) confronted the impermanence of life on a daily basis. Traversing the city by carriage, trolley, car, or on foot took inhabitants past rotting carcasses of stray dogs, diseased and infirm beggars, shops peddling caskets, funeral processions, cemeteries, and public memorials to heroes long since deceased but commemorated in uniquely Mexican fashion on the anniversary of their deaths.⁷ Capitalinos paused in their everyday movements around the city to take in the sights. They might observe a state funeral or ride in the same streetcar as mourners destined for one of the public graveyards flanking the urban center. Modern city life brought with it “mechanized killings” in the form of railroad accidents,8 trolleys derailing and careening into bystanders, and construction mishaps. Certainly, the spectacle of suicides committed in public spaces deepened residents’ intimacy with their own transience.⁹ Reporters played up the dangers of urban life by showcasing sensational suicides and murders on the front pages of major newspapers, complete with sketches or photographs of the deceased. Broadsides illustrated by José Guadalupe Posada depicted the coming apocalypse, serial murder, patricide, and the torture of children. It is no wonder that urbanites questioned their own existence when assaulted with words and images reminding them how vulnerable life could be. In fact, newspapers stood in for guides to committing suicide by outlining methods used, listing places deaths took place, and describing the particulars of leaving behind a suicide note. In effect, media coverage defined a cultural grammar of suicide.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Mexico had one of the lowest suicide rates in the world. Yet capitalinos who perused the numerous forms of media that proliferated at the time were receiving the message that suicides were rising at an alarming rate every day in Mexico City. By 1910, El Imparcial was selling one hundred thousand copies a day, and a satiric penny press was flourishing in the capital.¹⁰ All classes had their dailies. Print media played a significant role in sparking a moral panic that exaggerated the frequency and pace of suicides. The practice of sensationalizing news to attract readers and, ultimately, advertisers, propelled a shift from reporting political views and commentary to chronicling violent death. A review of Mexican newspapers and medical journals in the early 1900s would convince a reader that suicide had indeed reached sweeping proportions in the nation’s capital. Capitalinos shared this collective sentiment with the publics of New York, Vienna, Paris, and London—all cities with modern print media. Indeed, throughout the nineteenth century, city dwellers worldwide believed that their societies were sickened by suicide epidemics, and this opinion became more entrenched during this heady age of modernization that came as the next century loomed on the horizon. In their eyes, plagues of self-murder in urban centers were a result of technological and economic changes proving to be too much for some individuals. Suicide rates served as barometers of the health of a society but also as a gruesome badge of modernity. This sad indicator placed Mexico at the table of modern nations.

Modernity is a slippery and troublesome concept, especially when applied to turn-of-the-century Latin America, as it was “still a fantasy and a profound desire” at that point.11 Theorists argue that modernity was not a linear progression from barbarism to civilization or a cataclysmic break between past and present. Rather, it was defined by watershed processes such as urbanization, secularization, industrial capitalism, rationality, scientific discovery, and the reification of the individual. Porfirian and revolutionary planners focused on modernizing the physical spaces of Mexico City. Porfirio Díaz favored Parisian-style boulevards and monumental buildings, while Secretary of Public Education José Vasconcelos commissioned artists like Diego Rivera to create murals that would rewrite history and instill revolutionary values in the citizenry. Part and parcel of Mexico’s modernization efforts during both eras were the “civilizing missions” aimed at rehabilitating rural migrants, defining and redefining women’s roles, and directing an empirical gaze at solving social problems like suicide, mental illness, and crime.¹²

The law did not punish those who committed suicide alone and of their own will. Assisting or coercing someone to commit suicide, however, was a punishable offense. In the late medieval period, a suicide might be denied a Christian burial and have his or her assets seized, but Enlightenment sensibilities that deemed suicide a rational choice or a result of insanity swayed juries and judges. Likewise, punishing heirs by confiscating the property of suicides also seemed less just in the modern era.¹³ However, it is important to note that this shift in attitude was not clear-cut.¹⁴ Cultural and legal leniency toward suicides and their heirs was indeed a sentiment of early modern Europe, but the harshness usually associated with medieval views was neither long term nor absolute.¹⁵ Zeb Tortorici discovered that even priests in colonial Mexico did not view suicide in categorical terms. Priests buried in sacred ground one of their religious brothers who had committed suicide because they ruled that his body showed signs of regret. They read the body of the suicide and judged that their fellow priest had shown remorse, repented his decision, and struggled to free himself of the noose but that it had been too late.¹⁶ Second thoughts and remorse allowed the priest a Christian burial.

Historians have paid meager attention to the phenomenon of suicide in Mexico, or in the rest of Latin America for that matter. One monograph treats the subject of suicide in Cuba, and there have been shorter essays and theses that examine the topic in other nations.¹⁷ A Cuban sensibility accepted suicide as an escape route from a conflicted life. Cubans may have killed themselves for the same motives as people from other countries, but Cuban society viewed voluntary death as acceptable in many cases. Other studies focus on state and media responses to self-murder, paying little or no attention to the subjectivities of the suicides themselves. Suicide as a social phenomenon was truly an aspect of the modern era, emerging when states began to compile statistics on death, crime, and other measures that could disclose the fitness of society. The social meanings and interpretations of suicide reveal the myriad ways in which Mexicans experienced the world as liberal reforms and scientific advances impacted their daily lives. This study views the universal act of suicide from a historical viewpoint to understand the deed and its meanings in its cultural and temporal milieus. Although commentators romanticized suicide less often in the violent era of revolution than they had in the Porfiriato, both periods witnessed a transformation in the relationship of the self to society and the relationship of the citizen to the nation. The newspaper coverage was correct on at least one account: young, single men and women committed most suicides in these epochs.

Gender was a crucial factor in how people approached self-murder. Scholars have viewed suicide as a largely male event in Victorian and Edwardian London, imperial Russia, the post–Civil War U.S. South, and colonial and national Cuba.18 Yet in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many Mexicans believed suicide to be a peculiar affliction of lovelorn youths and women. Official statistics, however, show that women did not kill themselves in especially large numbers but that young people did commit suicide more often than older individuals. Yet in a society preoccupied with the vicissitudes wrought by rapid social and economic changes, the spectacle of female and youth suicide magnified fears about the future. An expanded capitalist economy and workforce necessitated the employment of women. Social commentators argued that women had played important and sometimes very public roles in the revolution, but Mexican modernity in the 1920s and ’30s prescribed “modernized patriarchy” or scientific motherhood as opposed to a republican motherhood of earlier times.¹⁹ Both reified women’s place in the home, although modernized patriarchy recognized women’s capacity to be modern housewives who could apply science and technology to their domestic chores. Many believed family values steeped in religious mores were the best defense against suicide. Indeed, society believed that women ought to bear the travails of life’s miseries with greater resolve than men because they had their traditional domestic refuge. Consequently, gender disorder—the perception that women increasingly transgressed norms by, for example, stepping out alone or challenging male authority—troubled some capitalinos. Specialists thought women committed suicide because they strayed from their prescribed gender roles. When men ended their lives, it was the “price of civilization.” In prevailing gender ideology, madness or death awaited the woman who rejected the virtues of domesticity and piety.20 The belief was that entering the world of men in work, politics, public spaces, and even art and literature would expose women to the same conditions that provoked suicidal impulses in men. The urban public space—its pace, sights, sounds, and dangers—provided the potential catalysts of self-destruction.

This is not a general study of death in Mexico. It is a study of suicide as a window on Mexican society and culture in a rapidly changing age. During the early twentieth century, Mexicans believed their nation to be in crisis. The specter of self-annihilation agitated the social imaginary of this dynamic society. Voluntary death spurred questions about the individual’s relationship to the social whole. Louis Pérez argues that Cubans possessed a cultural understanding of suicide as self-sacrifice, especially in the defense of the nation. For example, Cuban politician Eddie Chibás shot himself on a live radio broadcast to protest corruption and political gangsterism, and his sacrifice resonates with Cubans to this day. Suicide could also be less heroic, however, and still be accepted by Cubans as a “plausible response to life.”²¹ Early twentieth-century Mexicans empathized with the motives or life circumstances that propelled individuals to self-murder, but they did not think it integral to what it meant to be Mexican (lo mexicano). Their responses to suicide echoed those of other urban centers: they worried about it, they studied it, and they wrote about it. Mexicans did not consider suicide to be an acceptable escape route or a measure to winnow the weak from the population. The act of suicide and the way it was interpreted by society reveal multiple meanings. Condemnation, sarcasm, empathy, and admiration were just a few of the ways that Mexicans responded. Argentines during the same time period viewed suicide to be an unpatriotic and antisocial act. Immigrants committed suicides at higher rates than native-born citizens, and experts viewed the scourge as a moral epidemic that could infect other social groups. Moreover, Argentine physicians regarded suicide as a European problem that immigrants planted on their soil. In other words, the “seed” of suicide had been rooted in immigrants before they planted their feet on South American soil and took the fatal steps to their deaths. Many also believed that an “excess of civilization” that was antithetical to the “psychology of the gaucho” led to self-murderous impulses in Argentines.²²

Whereas scholars like Michael MacDonald, Terence Murphy, and George Minois²³ argue that the secularization of society led to the decriminalization of and greater forgiveness for the act of suicide, Susan Morrissey reminds us that religiosity persisted at the same time that societies became more secular. In early twentieth-century Mexico, even political leaders and intellectuals who embraced secularism still viewed suicide as a moral problem that ought to be condemned.24 Likewise, Morrissey bristles at those who tell suicide as a story of modernity, arguing that scholars have been too influenced by Émile Durkheim’s 1897 treatise on voluntary death, which placed its causes firmly in the alienating effects of modern society. Morrissey agrees that secularization was a top-down model of social change implemented by modern states, but she persuasively reasons that secularization coexisted with the religious: “The religious and secular are not opposing, however, but mutually complicit and highly political categories. Modern states continue to delimit the public domain of religion in a variety of ways; and secular powers have sacralized certain principles, such as the nation and the inviolable rights of the individual.”²⁵ Morrissey examined suicide in imperial Russia, but her findings reveal many insights that also apply to the Mexican case. Secularization impulses began in Mexico during the Bourbon era and intensified in the nineteenth century as the country developed laws, civil codes, and political institutions. However, as several scholars have shown, liberal and anticlerical views did not equate with irreligiosity.²⁶ Morality and moral solutions to social problems like suicide prevailed among conservatives and liberals alike. Those improbable bedfellows believed that religion could inhibit self-murderous urges. Both political camps saw suicide as a crisis of morality. In other words, Mexico proceeded along a path of secularization like other nations of its time, but religious and moral prescriptions for individual and social problems did not fall away.

What set late Porfirian and revolutionary Mexico apart from Cuba and Argentina but in line with late imperial Russia was the preponderance of adolescent suicide. Statistical data from the time is rife with problems, but newspaper coverage supports surviving court records that show that young Mexicans under the age of twenty-five had the greatest likelihood of ending their lives. Regardless of the accuracy of statistics, Mexicans believed their young compatriots to be killing themselves at alarming rates. If a death wish infused the youth of the nation, what lay ahead for society? Émile Durkheim positioned suicide as the barometer to measure the vigor of a society. Suicide was another form of unnatural death, like homicide, that fueled the anxieties of urban residents and set the state apparatus to analyzing the phenomena and proposing remedies. However, whereas most believed that the compulsion to commit murder surfaced in the criminal mind, the impulse to commit self-annihilation was something more complex and unknowable. Journalists and medical experts vacillated between blaming atavism, degeneration, and environmental factors in the urban environment for propelling some individuals to leap in front of a trolley or gulp down rat poison.

The first part of the book presents the social and forensic context of suicide and death. Chapter 1 lays out the numerical and statistical context for the chapters that follow. It presents an analysis of the 157 extant suicide inquests from 1900 to 1930 collected by the Tribunal Superior de Justicia de Distrito Federal and currently housed in the Archivo General de la Nación. Statistics and statistics gathering at the turn of the twentieth century were inherently unreliable and subject to human error and values. However, the impulse to collect moral statistics in the late Porfirian era, with the rise of the sciences of sociology, psychology, and criminology, speaks volumes about what mattered to the intellectuals who governed the nation. It is clear that not all suicide inquests survived, as newspaper coverage of individual suicides very rarely coincides with case files in the archive. Furthermore, some families may have been able to have suicide files destroyed to protect their reputations. Moreover, incidences of suicide may have been still higher, as some suicides were likely deemed accidents or hidden by loved ones. The chapter discusses individual incidences of suicide and attempted suicide and examines such variables as age, gender, class, occupation, month, time of day, method, and origin.

Chapter 2 builds on the previous discussion to analyze the path of a suicide victim from body to corpse to cadaver. Some suicides undertook elaborate measures to prepare their bodies for death. Women, in particular, were likely to don their finest clothing and coif their hair. A few of them were determined to leave behind an exquisite corpse. Reporters and medical investigators had the first access to a corpse at the scene of death. Next, police station officials transferred the corpse to the Hospital Juárez for autopsy, and it essentially became a cadaver for scientific inquiry. Finally, it found its resting place in one of the many modern cemeteries or ossuaries that skirted the city. My analysis draws on the official forensic reports in the inquest files, newspapers reportage, visual sources like crime scene drawings and photographs, and popular culture to examine the scopophilic gaze directed at the female body. Officials read the suicidal body like a text and imbued it with multiple meanings informed by gender and class ideologies.

The next three chapters examine the meanings attached to suicide from multiple perspectives—the social, the medical, and the popular. A review of multiple newspaper articles and editorials from the secular and Catholic press, broadsides of José Guadalupe Posada, suicide letters, literature, and poetry provides the documentary base for chapter 3. The discussion analyzes the multiple narratives derived from numerous social imaginaries that competed and sometimes cooperated to make sense of the perceived suicide epidemic that shook Mexican society. The agents of suicide—those who succeeded and left a note behind, and those who attempted but failed to self-destruct—also interpreted their deaths in their own words. Fortunately for a researcher many years later, court officials investigated suicides to make sure they were not acts of homicide. They interviewed those who failed to kill themselves as they convalesced in hospitals or at home. Some claimed mental illness, but most said that they had sought the fatal escape because they had lost in love or had become estranged from loved ones. Others could not face the loss of their private or public honor and viewed death as a better alternative. Chapter 4 examines medical and forensic approaches to self-murder. Some Mexican scientists believed the causes of suicide to be biological and environmental. Others followed Émile Durkheim’s arguments and placed the roots of suicide squarely in the urban environment. The environment was the modern city, its rapid pace, its changing technology, and the increasing alienation of the individual from family, community, and religion. Newspapers advertised a myriad of tonics and medicines to cure neurasthenia and other afflictions caused by excessive nervousness. Class and gender played significant parts in the interpretation and judgments of suicides, and these narratives acted out in media, judicial, and medical discourse. The documentary base of this chapter includes contemporary medical school journals, insane asylum intake questionnaires, case files of patients incarcerated in the asylums, and forensic medicine publications.

Theories of the production and everyday use of space to examine the public suicides of young men and women in symbolic public places of Mexico City in the first decades of the twentieth century take center stage in chapter 5. Individuals that opted for a public suicide made self-conscious decisions about how they would die, in particular choosing death sites for their personal and cultural meanings. Attempting to construct their selves in their suicides, young women in particular employed tropes of honorable death and conformed to a cultural logic of female suicide.27 They took great pains to choose the site and method of their sacrifice in order to communicate significant meanings through their deaths. Men chose specific spaces in the city to author their deaths as well. Indeed, the locations of public suicides were not neutral geographies where life simply transpired. The production and the use of spaces in cities were constantly in tension. The people that designed public spaces and those that moved through them participated in their social construction.

Chapter 6 dissects how Mexicans processed and came to terms with death, especially tragic deaths of youth. It examines the moral panic that arose regarding the perceived propensity of youth to commit suicide and engage in other violent behaviors. The documentary base of this chapter draws mostly from editorials and media coverage that bemoaned the self-destructive impulses of adolescent Mexicans. The chapter also contrasts competing attitudes about death and how death ought to be commemorated in official and popular practice and discourse. I draw from the approaches of anthropologists and historians of emotions to read incidences of vernacular mourning and memorialization at suicide sites (popularly referred to as “stains of blood”) for their political messages of marking untimely violent death and personalizing public issues like youth suicide.