1. Susan Morrissey’s formulation of power versus subjectivity is instructive here. See Morrissey, Suicide and the Body Politic in Imperial Russia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006). For an analysis of the construction of oneself in self-destruction, see Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (New York: Routledge, 1992).
2. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Verso, 1982).
3. Ann S. Blum, Domestic Economies: Family, Work, and Welfare in Mexico City, 1884–1943 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 179.
4. Rate of population increase is from Joanne Hershfield, Imagining la Chica Moderna: Women, Nation, and Visual Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 24. Total population of city in 1910 is from Robert M. Buffington, A Sentimental Education for the Working Man: The Mexico City Penny Press, 1900–1910 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 7.
5. Pablo Piccato, “Urbanistas, Ambulantes, and Mendigos: The Dispute for Urban Space in Mexico City, 1890–30,” in Reconstructing Criminality in Latin America, ed. Carlos A. Aguirre and Robert Buffington (Wilmington, DE: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), 119.
6. Pablo Piccato, The Tyranny of Opinion: Honor in the Construction of the Mexican Public Sphere (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 64–66, 81–82, 88–90.
7. Matthew D. Esposito, Funerals, Festivals, and Cultural Politics in Porfirian Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2010); Claudio Lomnitz-Adler, Death and the Idea of Mexico (New York: Zone Books, 2005).
8. Lomnitz-Adler, Death and the Idea of Mexico, 377.
9. Ibid., 23–27.
10. Buffington, Sentimental Education, 11.
11. Ana M. López, “Early Cinema and Modernity in Latin America,” Cinema Journal 40, no. 1 (Fall 2000): 49.
12. James Scott coined the phrase “civilizing missions” to mean internal colonization efforts on the part of a state. See James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999).
13. Michael MacDonald and Terence R. Murphy, Sleepless Souls: Suicide in Early Modern England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
14. What is less understood is the popular reaction to suicide. Incidences abound of communities desecrating the gravesites of suicides long into the early modern period. See Donna T. Andrew, “Debate: The Secularization of Suicide in England, 1660–1800,” Past and Present 119 (1988): 158–165.
15. Alexander Murray, Suicide in the Middle Ages, vol. 2, The Curse on Self-Murder (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 398–405. Murray also found that medieval thinkers were less concerned with attempted suicides than with suicides. He argues that the immorality of the action was less important than the loss of the human life.
16. Zeb Tortorici, “Reading the (Dead) Body: Histories of Suicide in New Spain,” in Death and Dying in Colonial Spanish America, ed. Martina Will de Chaparro and Miruna Achim (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2011), 58.
17. Louis A. Pérez, To Die in Cuba: Suicide and Society (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Tortorici, “Reading the (Dead) Body,” 53–77; Ignacio Maldonado y Morón, Estudio del suicidio en México: Fundado en Datos Estadísticos (Mexico City: Ignacio Escalante, 1876); Francisco Javier Beltrán Abarca, “El suicidio en México: Problema social, individuo y poder institucional (1830–1875)” (PhD diss., Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2011); Jesús Moran, Ligeras consideraciones sobre el suicidio (Mexico City: Escuela Correccional, 1891); Paulo Drinot, “Madness, Neurasthenia, and ‘Modernity’: Medico-Legal and Popular Interpretations of Suicide in Early Twentieth-Century Lima,” Latin American Research Review 39, no. 2 (June 2004): 89–113; Alberto del Castillo Troncoso, “Notas sobre la moral dominante a finales del siglo XIX en la Ciudad de México: Las mujeres suicidas como protagonistas de la nota roja,” in Modernidad, tradición y alteridad: La ciudad de México en el cambio de siglo (XIX-XX), ed. Claudia Agostoni and Elisa Speckman (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2001), 319–338. More recently, an entire journal issue was devoted to the subject of suicide in Chile. See Revista Historia y Justicia, no. 5 (October 2015–April 2016), www.revista.historiayjusticia.org/edicion/numero-05.
18. Morrissey, Suicide and the Body Politic; David Silkenat, Moments of Despair: Suicide, Divorce, and Debt in Civil War Era North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Victor Bailey, This Rash Act: Suicide across the Life Cycle in the Victorian City (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998); James Maxwell Anderson, Daily Life during the Spanish Inquisition (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2002); Ty Geltmaker, Tired of Living: Suicide in Italy from National Unification to World War I, 1860–1915 (New York: Peter Lang, 2002); Irina Paperno, Suicide as a Cultural Institution in Dostoevsky’s Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997); Pérez, To Die in Cuba.
19. Mary Kay Vaughan, “Modernizing Patriarchy: State Policies, Rural Households, and Women in Mexico, 1930–40,” in Hidden Histories of Gender and the State in Latin America, ed. Elizabeth Dore and Maxine Molyneaux (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 194–214. Ageeth Sluis argues that the 1920s and ’30s were a small window when post-revolutionary women had greater access to public and political roles. See Ageeth Sluis, Deco Body, Deco City: Female Spectacle and Modernity in Mexico City, 1900–1939 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015), 14–15.
20. Howard I. Kushner, “Suicide, Gender, and the Fear of Modernity,” in Histories of Suicide: International Perspectives on Self-Destruction in the Modern World, ed. John Weaver and David Wright (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 29.
21. Pérez, To Die in Cuba, 5.
22. Kristin Ruggiero, Modernity in the Flesh: Medicine, Law, and Society in Turn-of-the-Century Argentina (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 158–160.
23. George Minois, History of Suicide: Voluntary Death in Western Culture, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).
24. Morrissey, Suicide and the Body Politic.
25. Ibid., 5–6.
26. Pamela Voekel, Alone before God: The Religious Origins of Modernity in Mexico (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002).
27. In Mexico and elsewhere, it could be argued that a cultural logic existed to explain female suicide. Killing oneself to cover shame or deception in love was understandable. In fact, when a young, single woman killed herself, it was assumed she had been deceived. Gayatri Spivak analyzes the cultural logic of sati (the immolation of widows) in Indian culture. See Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 66–111.
1. Dirección General de la Estadística, “Estadística General de la República Mexicana,” Periódico Oficial, no. 5 (Mexico City: Secretaría de Fomento, 1890), iii.
2. Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo, Mexico at the World’s Fairs: Crafting a Modern Nation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 128–130.
3. Dirección General de la Estadística, Boletín demográfico de la República Mexicana, no. 2 (Mexico City: Secretaría de Fomento 1898), 7–9.
4. Francisco Barrera Lavalle, Apuntes para la historia de la estadística en México, 1821 a 1910 (Mexico City: Tip. de la vda. de F. Díaz de León, sucs., 1911).
5. Barrera Lavalle, “Historia de la estadística,” 20–21.
6. For 1900 statistic, see Claudia Agostoni, Monuments of Progress: Modernization and Public Health in Mexico City, 1876–1910 (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2003), 26; for 1910, see Paul Garner, Porfirio Díaz: Profiles in Power (New York: Routledge, 2001), 174; and for 1930, see Francisco Alba, The Population of Mexico: Trends, Issues, and Policies, trans. Marjory Mattingly Urquidi (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1982), 37.
7. Agostoni, Monuments of Progress, 26–29.
8. Charles Adams Hale, The Transformation of Liberalism in Late Nineteenth Century Mexico (New Haven, CT: Princeton University Press, 1989), 27.
9. Ibid., 29.
10. Ibid., 33.
11. Ibid.
12. Pablo Piccato, City of Suspects: Crime in Mexico City, 1900–1931 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 221.
13. Kenneth Martin Pinnow, Lost to the Collective: Suicide and the Promise of Soviet Socialism, 1921–1929 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), 143.
14. Jack D. Douglas, Social Meanings of Suicide (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), 172.
15. Lambert Adolphe Quetelet and Enrico Morselli agreed on the regularity of suicides and denied the role of individual agency in the act. See Paperno, Suicide as a Cultural Institution, 23.
16. Douglas, Social Meanings of Suicide, 9.
17. Morrissey, Suicide and the Body Politic, 181.
18. Agostoni, Monuments of Progress, 29–30.
19. Laura Cházaro, “Reproducción y muerte de la población mexicana: Cálculos estadísticos y preceptos higiénicos a fines del siglo diecinueve,” in De normas y transgresiones: Enfermendad y crimen en América Latina (1850–1950), ed. Claudia Agostoni and Elisa Speckman (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2005), 57.
20. Douglas, Social Meanings of Suicide, 8.
21. Henry Morselli, Suicide: An Essay on Comparative Moral Statistics (New York: Appleton Press, 1882), 367.
22. F.S. Bridges, P.S. Yip, and K.C. Yang, “Seasonal Changes in Suicide in the United States, 1971 to 2000,” Perceptual and Motor Skills 100, no. 3 (June 2005): 920–924.
23. George Howe Colt, November of the Soul: The Enigma of Suicide (New York: Scribner, 2006), 183–184. Morselli also posited that male suicide rates in Italy correlated with height because he observed that the number of suicides increased from south, where men were on average shorter, to north, where men were on average taller.
24. Brian Palmer, “The Season of Renewal and Suicide,” Slate, December 7, 2012, www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2012/12/suicide_rate_season_there_more_suicides_in_spring_and_not_during_the_holidays.html. The medical articles cited in Palmer’s article include E. Petridou, F.C. Papadopoulos, C.E. Frangakis, A. Skalkidou, and D. Trichopoulos “A Role of Sunshine in the Triggering of Suicide,” Epidemiology 13, no. 1 (January 2002): 106–109; and K.S. Chew and R. McCleary, “The Spring Peak in Suicides: A Cross-National Analysis,” Social Science Medicine 40, no. 2 (January 1995): 223–230.
25. María Luisa Rodríguez Sala de Gómezgil, “Suicidios y suicidas en la sociedad Mexicana” (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales, 1974), 75.
26. Lombroso believed that meteorological and climatic conditions combined with additional factors led to crime and rebellion. He noted that more crimes occurred in the southern regions of Italy and France than in the northern parts. See Cesare Lombroso, Crime, Its Causes and Remedies (Boston: Little, Brown, 1911), 13.
27. Julio Guerrero, La génesis del crimen en México: Estudio de psiquiatría social (Mexico City: Vda de C. Bouret, 1901), 98.
28. Luis Fuentes Aguilar and Consuelo Soto Mora, “Influencia de los frentes meteorológicos en la incidencia de suicidios en México,” Anuario de geografía 17 (1977): 225.
29. Alfonso Quiroz Cuarón, Tendencia y ritmo de la criminalidad en México (Mexico City: Instituto de Investigaciones Estadísticas, 1939), 94–96.
30. Mariano Ruiz-Funes García, Endocrinología y criminalidad (Madrid: Javier Morata, 1929), 152.
31. Rodríguez Sala de Gómezgil, “Suicidios y suicidas,” 71.
32. Howard I. Kushner, American Suicide (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press), 111. Miller published two sermons on the topic of youth suicides in the early nineteenth century. A century earlier, Puritan minister Cotton Mather had sounded the alarm about suicides by adolescents and blamed them on bad parenting.
33. William Bowman, “Despair unto Death? Attempted Suicide in Early 1930s Vienna,” Austrian History Yearbook 39 (2008): 144.
34. Pérez, To Die in Cuba, 138.
35. “Aristocratic revolver” was mentioned in “Teórica del mal, las novelas,” El Amigo de la Verdad, August 17, 1895, p. 2.
36. “Averiguación del suicidio de Olivia Rosenthal,” caja 1575, exp. 282011, December 4, 1919, Tribunal Superior de Justicia de Distrito Federal, Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City (hereafter cited as TSJDF).
37. “Averiguación del suicidio de Elvira Quintanar,” caja 1791, exp. 322756, December 28, 1923, TSJDF.
38. Deborah Blum, The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York (New York: Penguin, 2011), 2.
39. John Parascandola, King of Poisons: A History of Arsenic (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2012), 162–164.
40. Ibid., 156.
41. “Suicidio de María Dolores Priego,” caja 492, exp. 87541, November 30, 1906, TSJDF.
42. Deborah Blum, Poisoner’s Handbook, 96.
43. Ibid., 105.
44. “Pseudosuicidio de González Castro, Santa,” caja 2310, exp. 424631, September 7, 1929, TSJDF.
45. “Suicidio frustrado de Flores, Carmen,” caja 1253, exp. 218716, November 28, 1914, TSJDF. A death notice is included in the file.
46. Martin I. Wilbert, “The Sale of Bichloride Tablets,” Public Health Reports 28, no. 46 (November 14, 1913): 2399–2405.
47. Deborah Blum, Poisoner’s Handbook, 57.
48. Ibid.
49. “Denuncia de hechos pos las lesiones e intento de suicidio de Díaz, Carmen,” caja 1936, exp. 350863, March 28, 1925, TSJDF.
50. “Suicidio de Alfonso D. Vallejo,” caja 1469, exp. 260465, October 18, 1918, TSJDF.
51. “Suicidio frustrado de Carlota Alatorre,” caja 1290, exp. 230015, October 20, 1914, TSJDF.
52. “Averiguación del suicidio de Berlín, Luz María,” caja 2107, exp. 384411, April 4, 1927, TSJDF.
53. United States Congress House Committee on Ways and Means, White Phosphorus Matches: Hearings before the Committee on Ways and Means of the House of Representatives, Sixty-Second Congress, Second Session on H.R. 2896, January 10, 1912 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1912).
54. “Suicidio frustrado de María Concepción Avendaño,” caja 1107, exp. 196167, July 19, 1911, TSJDF.
55. Mid-nineteenth-century commentators explained the differing rates of suicide among men and women by the divergence in motivations. Women committed suicide because they had loss honor. However, their protection in home and marriage guarded them from opportunities or situations where they could lose honor. Therefore, the conclusion was that men killed themselves at greater rates because they had greater social roles and larger responsibilities. It was thought that financial hardship or physical illness propelled men to commit suicide. See Kushner, American Suicide, 97–101.
56. “Suicidio de José Díaz,” caja 1055, exp. 175785, March 25, 1911, TSJDF.
57. Timothy J. Henderson, The Worm in the Wheat: Rosalie Evans and the Agrarian Struggle in Puebla-Tlaxcala Valley of Mexico, 1906–1927 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 46.
58. Steven B. Bunker and Victor M. Macías-González, “Consumption and Material Culture in the Twentieth Century,” in A Companion to Mexican History and Culture, ed. William H. Beezley (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, 2011), 88–89.
1. Modernity as defined by sociologist Anthony Giddens seems the most appropriate term to describe this era in Mexican history. According to Giddens, modernity connotes a society characterized by an ideology that views the world as open to change through human action, an economy oriented to industrial production and a free market, and political institutions formed to provide some semblance of democracy. See Anthony Giddens and Christopher Pierson, Conversations with Anthony Giddens: Making Sense of Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 94.
2. Chris Shilling, The Body and Social Theory (Los Angeles: Sage, 2012), 191–192; Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press in association with Basil Blackwell, 1991).
3. Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity.
4. Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. A.M. Sheridan (New York: Routledge, 2012).
5. Elizabeth Hallam, Jenny Hockey, and Glennys Howarth, Beyond the Body: Death and Social Identity (New York: Routledge, 2005), 8.
6. Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2013).
7. Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body.
8. Margaret Higonnet, “Speaking Silences: Women’s Suicide,” in The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Susan Rubin Suleiman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 69.
9. Gabino Barreda, “Algunas consideraciones sobre el suicidio,” La Escuela de Medicina, no. 14 (January 15, 1883): 114.
10. Jean Franco, Plotting Women: Gender and Representation in Mexico (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 96. For an excellent analysis of the murder trial and Gamboa’s contemplation of the corpse of Esperanza Gutiérrez, see Robert Buffington and Pablo Piccato, “Tales of Two Women: The Narrative Construal of Porfirian Reality,” Americas 55, no. 3 (January 1999): 391–424.
11. Franco, Plotting Women, 97.
12. Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body, x–xi.
13. Ibid., 142–143.
14. Pérez, To Die in Cuba. Pérez makes a compelling case for Cuban society’s acceptance of suicide, as well as for the political nature of suicide in Cuba.
15. Mario Alva-Rodríguez and Rolando Neri-Vela, “The Practice of Forensic Science in Mexico,” in The Global Practice of Forensic Science, ed. Douglas H. Ubelaker (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2015), 201–202.
16. Ibid., 202–203.
17. Ibid., 204–205. Some of the subjects of these theses are the use of the microscope in forensic investigations, identifying persons, determining whether wounds were caused pre- or post-mortem, the criminal responsibility of epileptics, and the management of corpses.
18. Ibid., 205.
19. Código Penal para el Distrito Federal y Territorio de la Baja California sobre delitos del fuero común y para toda la República sobre delitos contra la Federación (Mexico City: Imprenta de Flores y Monsalve, 1874). The code went into effect in 1871.
20. Luis Hidalgo y Carpio and Gustavo Ruiz y Sandoval, Compendio de medicina legal: Arreglado a la legislación del Distrito Federal (Mexico City: Imprenta de Ignacio Escalante, 1877), 634–638.
21. Alfonso Quiroz Cuarón, Medicina Forense (Mexico City: Editorial Porrúa, 1977), 384.
22. Hidalgo y Carpio and Ruiz y Sandoval, Compendio de medicina legal, 645–650.
23. Ibid., 634–638.
24. Jonathan Michael Weber, “Hustling the Old Mexico Aside: Creating a Modern Mexico City through Medicine, Public Health, and Technology in the Porfiriato, 1887–1913” (PhD diss., Florida State University, 2013), 88.
25. Hidalgo y Carpio and Ruiz y Sandoval, Compendio de medicina legal, 612–613.
26. Ibid., 613–622.
27. Ibid., 90–93.
28. Ibid., 93–104.
29. Ibid., 105.
30. Ibid., 106–109.
31. Ibid., 111–116.
32. Foucault, Birth of the Clinic.
33. “El ‘chic’ en el suicidio,” El Imparcial, February 24, 1898.
34. Ibid.
35. Sonya Lipsett-Rivera, Gender and the Negotiation of Daily Life in Mexico, 1750–1856 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012), 138.
36. “Se causaron la muerte por no resistir el deseo de lujo,” El Diario, November 7, 1909, p. 1; “Eranse dos vidas, que un día descubrieron su drama,” El Imparcial, November 8, 1909, p. 2. See chapter 5 for a fuller discussion of this public suicide drama.
37. French journalists also reported tailor’s tags from the clothes worn by murder victims in Paris in 1869. See Gregory K. Shaya, “Mayhem of Moderns: The Culture of Sensationalism in France, c. 1900” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2000), 130.
38. “Suicidio en el bosque de Chapultepec,” El Demócrata, March 3, 1916, pp. 1, 6, 8.
39. “Suicidio de una señorita,” El Univeral, September 4, 1930, pp. 1, 6.
40. “Suicidio en el bosque de Chapultepec,” El Demócrata, March 3, 1916, p. 1.
41. Ibid., p. 6.
42. Ibid., p. 8.
43. “Suicidio en el bosque de Chapultepec,” El Demócrata.
44. “Un sangriento drama entre gentes de nuestro pueblo,” Excélsior, March 3, 1919, p. 1.
45. Ibid.
46. Ibid.
47. Ibid., p. 5.
48. Ibid., pp. 1, 5.
49. “El drama conyugal de la Calle de Rosas Moreno se hace cada día más misterioso,” El Demócrata, November 13, 1920, p. 1.
50. “El cadaver encontrado en el fondo de una zanja,” El Universal, September 20, 1930, sec. 2, p. 1.
51. Ibid.
52. Edgar Allan Poe quotation from “The Philosophy of Composition,” quoted in Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body, 59.
53. Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body, 69.
54. José Guadalupe Posada, Corrido dedicado al 16 de Septiembre de 1897 (Mexico City: Vanegas Arroyo, 1897) depicts the deceased Velázquez on an operating table, surrounded by military men and others dressed in suits and top hats. The cover page shows sketches of four men involved in the conspiracy that led to the inspector’s death: Velázquez, the murdered Arnulfo Arroyo, Miguel Cabrera, and Antonio Villavicencio.
55. James Alex Garza, The Imagined Underworld: Sex, Crime, and Vice in Porfirian Mexico City (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 163–171. Garza suggests that many believed that the ex-inspector was actually murdered in his cell.
56. Etching of double suicide, Ilustración Popular, April 30, 1911, p. 1.
57. Shaya, “Mayhem of Moderns,” 274.
58. Elizabeth Hallam, Jenny Hockey, and Glennys Howarth, Beyond the Body: Death and Social Identity (New York: Routledge, 2005), 90.
59. Patrick Frank, Posada’s Broadsheets: Mexican Popular Imagery 1890–1910 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998), 153.
60. See, for example, Epigmenio Velasco, “Inconsequencias de la prensa de información: El suicidio de la Srita. Noecker,” El Abogado Cristiano, December 16, 1909, p. 4; and “El ‘rapto’ Gaona-Noecker: Consideraciones legales,” La Iberia, 17 December, 1909, p. 1.
61. Castillo Troncoso, “Notas sobre la moral dominante,” 332.
62. A coleta is the ponytail worn by a matador. Mafia de coleta means the “mafia of the bullring,” which includes matadors, promoters, managers, etc.
63. José Guadalupe Posada, Sufrimientos, reflexiones y consejos de la suicida de María Luisa Noeker: En la otra vida, (Mexico City: A. Vanegas Arroyo, 1909).
64. “Gaona Fails and Weeps in Ring,” Mexican Herald, January 17, 1910, p. 1.
65. “Noecker Asks Court for Time Extension,” Mexican Herald, January 28, 1910, p. 4.
66. “Gaona sale para Europa el miercoles,” El Diario, 4 March, 1910, p. 1.
67. “Rapto y suicidio de María Luisa Nocker,” caja 0912, exp. 159578, December 5, 1909, TSJDF.
68. Frank, Posada’s Broadsheets, 165. When a rival drunk bullfighter boarded a train in Toluca and verbally dishonored Gaona’s reputation, the “Gaonista” conductor shut the man up with punches to the face, and when they pulled into Mexico City, the inebriated man was taken to the police station. See “El Diestro ‘Corrillo’ es aporreado.” La Democracia (Toluca), January 2, 1910, p. 3.
69. Phyllis Lynn Smith, “Contentious Voices amid the Order: The Porfirian Press in Mexico City, 1876–1911” (PhD diss., University of Arizona, 1996), 53–54.
70. Robert M. Buffington, Criminal and Citizen in Modern Mexico (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 33.
71. “Numerosos crímenes se cometieron el sábado,” Excélsior, February 24, 1919, pp. 1, 7.
72. Jonathan Michael Weber, “Hustling the Old Mexico Aside: Creating a Modern Mexico City through Medicine, Public Health, and Technology in the Porfiriato, 1887–1913” (PhD diss., Florida State University, 2013), 170–171.
73. Reglamento de Hospital Juárez de la Ciudad de México: Diario Oficial, 78, no. 42 (June 17, 1905): 935. The 1905 regulation also set out the hospital’s mission to cooperate in the education of students at the Escuela Nacional de Medicina.
74. “En el Hospital Juárez se hace negocio con los cadáveres?” Universal Gráfico, July 23, 1929, p. 1.
75. “Monstruosa plaga de ratas en el Juárez,” El Univeral, June 25, 1930, sec. 2, p. 1.
76. “Autorización para que varios practicantes hagan dissecciones al cadáveres no reclamados,” legajo 44, exp. 2, September 6, 1920, Manicomio General, Beneficencia Pública, Establecimientos Hospitalarios, Mexico City (hereafter cited as BP, EH).
77. “Relativo a la Junta Médica Citada por el Director, y donde concurrieron los Dres. Rosendo Amor, Diodoro Espinoza y Ernesto Urlich, para tratar sobre la mejor distribución y tramitación de los cadáveres del Establecimiento,” legajo 22, exp. 31, April 5, 1919, Hospital General, BP, EH.
78. “Petición por depósito de cadáveres,” legajo 15, exp. 16, August 2, 1929, Hospital Juárez, BP, EH.
79. Amanda M. López, “The Cadaverous City: The Everyday Life of the Dead in Mexico City, 1875–1930” (PhD diss., University of Arizona, 2010), 48. This dissertation also includes an excellent discussion of the relationship between class and space in the cemetery.
80. Phillipe Ariès, Images of Man and Death, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 238.
81. Amanda M. López, “Cadaverous City,” 34.
82. Lomnitz-Adler, Death and the Idea of Mexico, 265. See also Esposito, Funerals, Festivals, and Cultural Politics, 45–46.
83. Voekel, Alone before God.
84. Amanda M. López, “Cadaverous City,” 48–49.
85. Thomas W. Laqueur, “Cemeteries, Religion and the Culture of Capitalism,” in Revival and Religion since 1700: Essays for John Walsh, ed. Jane Garnett and Colin Matthew (London: Hambledon Press, 1993), 184–186.
86. Ibid.
87. Amanda M. López, “Cadaverous City,” 41.
88. Ibid., 52–53.
89. Mary Ashley Townsend, Here and There in Mexico: The Travel Writings of Mary Ashley Townsend, ed. Ralph Lee Woodard Jr. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2001), 215.
90. Amanda M. López, “Cadaverous City,” 69–70.
91. Weber, “Hustling the Old Mexico Aside,” 53–57.
92. Ibid., 58–59.
93. Ibid., 82.
94. Lyman L. Johnson, ed., Death, Dismemberment, and Memory: Body Politics in Latin America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2004).
95. Will Fowler, Santa Anna of Mexico (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 224.
96. Alan Knight, “The Several Legs of Santa Anna: A Saga of Secular Relics,” in Relics and Remains, ed. Alexandra Walsham (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 227–255.
97. Samuel Brunk, “The Mortal Remains of Emiliano Zapata,” in Death, Dismemberment, and Memory: Body Politics in Latin America, ed. Lyman L. Johnson (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2004), 141–178.
98. Manuel Acuña wrote the poem “Canto a Rosario.” Years later, Ildefonso Estrada y Zenéa wrote Las Víctimas del Amor: Análisis del Canto de Manuel Acuña a Rosario (Mexico City: Imprenta de Ildefonso Estrada y Zenéa, 1906) and read aloud his analysis of Acuña’s canto in the Mexican Arcade. The author was also one of Acuña’s pallbearers.
99. “Los Funerales de Manuel Acuña,” El Eco de Ambos Mundos, December 12, 1873.
100. Ibid.
101. “La Exhumación de los Restos de M. Acuña,” Excélsior, October 29, 1917, pp. 1, 7.
1. “Averiguación del suicidio de Beatriz Norman,” caja 2106, exp. 384232, July 4, 1927, TSJDF.
2. Susan Morrissey uses the phrase “arbiters of the self” as the title of one of the chapters of her book Suicide and the Body Politic in Imperial Russia. She analyzes suicide notes in imperial Russia and argues that the suicides penned notes to explain their reasons for killing themselves or to condemn their foes and thereby shape the public discussion that followed in newspapers or the familial processing of grief in the aftermath of the death. See Morrissey, Suicide and the Body Politic, 149–173.
3. See Pablo Piccato, The Tyranny of Opinion: Honor in the Construction of the Mexican Public Sphere (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010) for a discussion of pre-Porfirian journalism as key to the construction of Mexican public culture.
4. John C. Weaver, A Sadly Troubled History: The Meanings of Suicide in the Modern Age (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Press, 2009), 22.
5. Beltrán Abarca, “El Suicidio en México,” 81–82.
6. Morrissey, Suicide and the Body Politic, 5–6.
7. Laureana Wright de Kleinhans, “El Suicidio,” pt. 1, Violetas del Anáhuac, December 2, 1888, p. 583.
8. Ibid., p. 584.
9. Laureana Wright de Kleinhans, “El Suicidio,” pt. 2, Violetas del Anáhuac, December 9, 1888, p. 596.
10. Ibid., pp. 596–597.
11. Cristina Devereaux Ramírez, Occupying Our Space: The Mestiza Rhetorics of Mexican Women Journalists and Activists, 1875–1942 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2015), 74–75.
12. Lucía G. Herrera J., “El suicidio,” Las Hijas de Anáhuac, January 22, 1888, p. 95. The author byline noted that the poem was written in 1880.
13. Shaya, “Mayhem of Moderns,” 3.
14. Ibid., 256. Shaya’s study centers on Paris, France, during the late nineteenth century. There are strong parallels between French and Mexican sensationalism and the reading public in those countries. Robert Buffington argues that the penny and workers’ press in early twentieth-century Mexico City fostered a popular liberalism and class consciousness among laborers. More significantly, however, he points out that penny press editors gained access to the public sphere of ideas and discourse to assert citizenship rights for workers. See Buffington, Sentimental Education, 14–15.
15. “La epidemia negra: Suicidios y suicidas,” El Imparcial, March 23, 1898, p. 1.
16. Ramón L. Alva, “Boletín del ‘Monitor,’” El Monitor Republicano, July 4, 1895, p. 1.
17. Brothers Ramón L. Alva and Luis Alva edited El Monitor Republicano until it ceased publication in 1896. Loyal to the liberal constitution of 1857, the Alvas constantly criticized científicos like Justo Sierra and the style of Porfirian liberalism that did not heed the no-reelection stipulations of the constitution. For a fuller discussion of the conflict between the Alvas and Porfirian liberalism, see Charles A. Hale, The Transformation of Liberalism in Late Nineteenth-Century Mexico (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 114–115.
18. “El suicidio: Medios de combatirlo en la prensa,” El Imparcial, June 16, 1899, p. 1.
19. “Los progresos del suicidio en México,” El Nacional, July 11, 1900, p. 1.
20. Luis Lara y Pardo, La prostitución en México (Mexico City: Librería de Ch. Bouret, 1908); Julio Guerrero, La génesis del crimen en México: Estudio de psiquiatría social (Mexico City: Viuda de C. Bouret, 1901); Carlos Roumagnac, La estadística criminal en México (Mexico City: Imp. de Arturo García Cubas Sucesores Hermanos, 1907); Roumagnac, Los Criminales en México: Ensayo de Psicología Criminal (Mexico City: Tipografía “El Fenix,” 1904).
21. “Homicidios y suicidios,” La Convención Radical Obrera, March 14, 1897, p. 1.
22. M.B. Carillo, “El suicidio y la embriaguez,” El Hijo del Trabajo, April 24, 1881, p. 2.
23. “Cancer Social,” La Caridad, June 27, 1890, p. 1.
24. Ibid.
25. “Los órganos del liberalismo,” La Caridad, July 10, 1890, p. 1.
26. “La inmoralidad,” La Caridad, September 12, 1890, p. 1.
27. Silvio [pseud.], “El Suicidio,” El Hijo del Trabajo, April 11, 1880, p. 2.
28. “Condenación del suicidio,” El Diario, October 25, 1906, p. 1.
29. “El suicidio: Plaga de modo,” El Popular, January 2, 1897, p. 1. Hydrotherapy was a common method utilized in asylums to treat any number of mental illnesses.
30. “El suicidio,” El Nacional, June 21, 1897, p. 1.
31. “Los suicidios de ayer,” El País, July 11, 1900, p. 1.
32. “Suicidio, regicidio y barbarie,” El País, August 4, 1900, p. 1.
33. “Tres suicidios en un día,” El País, August 23, 1900, p. 1.
34. “El filosofismo moderno en política,” El País, October 4, 1900, p. 1.
35. “Los que avanzamos y lo que retrocedemos,” El País, November 4, 1900, p. 1.
36. Frank, Posada’s Broadsheets, 175–176.
37. The tower of the cathedral that Silva refers to was known as the Tower of Suicides. See chapter 5 for further discussion.
38. “Ahorcado ante el altar: Suicidio típico y sensacional,” El Imparcial, May 29, 1906, pp. 1, 5.
39. “La última nota, triste canción,” illustrated by José Guadalupe Posada, undated, Swann Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
40. José Guadalupe Posasa, Cogida de Rodolfo Gaona en la plaza de toros de Puebla, el 13 de Diciembre de 1908 (Mexico City: Antonio Vanegas Arroyo, 1908–09).
41. Frank, Posada’s Broadsheets, 158–159. See also Kathryn A. Sloan, Runaway Daughters: Seduction, Elopement, and Honor in Modern Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press), 77–78.
42. “El suicidio y la fe religiosa,” El Imparcial, September 4, 1905, p. 1.
43. “Qué Bárbaro!” El País, September 5, 1905, p. 1. Founded in 1868 by Gabino Barreda and José Díaz Covarrubias, the Escuela Nacional Prepatoria prepared future political leaders and inculcated the ideals and values of positivism through its curriculum. For more information about the institution, see Piccato, Tyranny of Opinion, 135; and Hale, Transformation of Liberalism, 154–155. The school and some of its more reported suicides are discussed in chapter 3.
44. “Qué Bárbaro!” El País.
45. “Pecadores y creyentes: Todavía el suicidio y la fe religiosa,” El Imparcial, September 7, 1905, p. 1.
46. “Es falso lo dicho por ‘El Imparcial,’” El País, September 9, 1905, p. 1.
47. “El suicidio,” La Ciudad de Dios, April 13, 1902, p. 8.
48. “Suicidio de un sacristán: Relaciones entre el ateísmo y el suicidio,” El Imparcial, June 1, 1906, p. 1.
49. “Otro Fanático Suicida: El suicidio y la fe,” El Imparcial, June 15, 1906, p. 1.
50. “Teórica del mal, las novelas,” El Amigo de la Verdad, August 17, 1895, p. 2.
51. “Un pernicioso contagio en la moral social: La venta de libros obscenos,” El Imparcial, October 20, 1900, p. 1.
52. Agustín Aragón, “Influencia social y moral de la lectura de novelas en la juventud,” Revista Positiva 3 (1903): 263.
53. Ibid., 270.
54. “Contribución a la estadística del suicidio en la republicana mexicana,” La Escuela de Medicina 7, no. 6 (November 15, 1885): 78.
55. Luis G. Urbina quoted and paraphrased in “Condenación del suicidio,” El Diario, October 25, 1906, p. 1.
56. “Condenación del suicidio,” El Diario.
57. Luis G. Urbina, “¡El pueblo se mata!” El Imparcial, October 23, 1906, p. 1.
58. Ibid.
59. Kessel Schwartz, “The Theme of Suicide in Representative Spanish American Novels,” Hispania 58, no. 3 (September 1975): 446.
60. Las olas altas was the first of four novelettes that made up one story. The other installments, also published in El Mundo, were La baja marea, El vendedor de periódicos, and Las olas muertes (1899). Cynthia K. Duncan, “Juan Mateos (1831–1913),” in Dictionary of Mexican Literature, ed. Eladio Cortés (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992), 411–413; María Teresa Solórzano Ponce, “Juan Antonio Mateos (1831–1913),” La República de las letras: Asomos a la cultura escrita del México decimonónico, vol. 3, Galería de escritores, ed. Belem Clark de Lara and Elisa Speckman Guerra (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2005), 337.
61. Solórzano Ponce, “Juan Antonio Mateos,” 337.
62. Camarista was a double entendre. It could mean maid of the bedchamber (male in this case) or a member of the congress, the Cámara de Diputados.
63. “Una novela inmunda é infecciosa,” La Patria, May 26, 1899, p. 1.
64. “Una novela inmoral,” El Universal, June 1, 1899, p. 2.
65. Buffington, Sentimental Education, 8.
66. For a discussion of working-class reading choices, see ibid.
67. “Se suicidó apurando una fuerte dosis de cianuro de mercurio: El mal de Werther,” El Demócrata, August 24, 1920, p. 1.
68. Francisco Montes de Oca directed two other liberal penny press papers, Gil Blas and El Popular. In 1897, he accused Rafael Reyes Spíndola of receiving government subsidies for El Imparcial. They faced each other in a duel that same year. Neither was killed. Mexican law prohibited dueling, but the elite classes condoned it, and journalists in the 1800s routinely challenged each other to spar on the “field of honor.” See Piccato, Tyranny of Opinion, 245–251.
69. “Los suicidios y las muertes misteriosas: La influencia de la inmoralidad,” La Gran Sedería, July 22, 1897, p. 1. Despotism in the government and in families was believed to be a common motivation for suicide in imperial Russia. See Morrissey, Suicide and the Body Politic in Imperial Russia, 242–256.
70. “Una doliente resolvió así arrancarse la existencia,” El Universal, April 3, 1930, sec. 2, p. 1. José Vargas Vila possessed deeply anti-U.S. sentiments and radical liberal views. Steeped in the modernismo movement, Vargas Vila’s novels titillated and offended readers. He presented scandalous scenarios and taboo sexual practices that resulted in his being excommunicated and his books being banned by schools and bookshops. See Raymond Leslie Williams, The Colombian Novel, 1844–1987 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991), 39.
71. Schwartz, “Theme of Suicide,” 446.
72. Jorge Isaacs wrote just one novel, María, which was reputed to be the most popular nineteenth-century Latin American novel. The book tackled such themes as impossible love, María’s Jewish ancestry, and a crumbling aristocracy, and Isaacs wrote in the purely Romantic style of his era. See Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 78, 188–189.
73. “Una doliente resolvió así arrancarse la existencia,” El Universal, April 3, 1930, sec. 2, p. 1.
74. “El suicidio por miseria: No tiene razón de ser en México,” El Imparcial, October 16, 1901, p. 1.
75. “El suicida de ayer,” El Imparcial, August 29, 1902, p. 1.
76. “Se causaron la muerte por no resistir el deseo de lujo,” El Diario, November 7, 1909, p. 1.
77. A secret suicide club in Bridgeport, Connecticut, was one such group that newspapers covered over the years. For other examples, see “Suicide Clubs,” Deseret Weekly 45 (1892): 552.
78. “Los modas parisienses: Suicidio de cuatro mujeres,” El Imparcial, July 27, 1897, p. 2; “Los dramas de París: Suicidio de cuatro mujeres,” El Imparcial, August 5, 1897, p. 1. In her study of suicide in Edwardian and Victorian London, Olive Anderson found that the suicides of children and hardworking seamstresses merited great sympathy in English society. See Olive Anderson, Suicide in Victorian and Edwardian England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
79. “Los dramas de París: Suicidio de cuatro mujeres,” El Imparcial, August 5, 1897, p. 1.
80. “Suicide Increasing,” Mexican Herald, November 27, 1909, p. 1.
81. “La tragedia de ayer en Hotel Viena,” El Imparcial, April 14, 1899, p. 1.
82. “La tragedia en el Hotel Viena: Los suicidas,” El Universal, April 15, 1899, p. 1.
83. “Dramático suicidio de dos mujeres,” El Imparcial, April 20, 1911, pp. 1, 8.
84. Gonzalo de la Parra, “La Eterna Tragedia del Amor,” Ilustración Popular, April 30, 1911, p. 1.
85. “Un suicidio a duo, es la última palabra de la locura trágica,” La Demócrata, November 30, 1921, pp. 1, 2.
86. “Suicidio de dos rivales desdeñados por la amada,” El Universal, May 22, 1930, pp. 1, 3.
87. “Empujados al suicidio por causas que se ignoran,” El Universal, November 19, 1930, sec. 2, pp. 1, 8.
88. Morrissey, Suicide and the Body Politic, 149.
89. Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body, 65.
90. “Un suicidio que da mucho de que hablar: Una señorita que no revelaba pena alguna, se suicidó sin que dejara explicación de su proceder,” Excélsior, November 7, 1917, pp. 1, 4.
91. “Casi un record de suicidios y no puede morir,” Excélsior, January 9, 1930, p. 1.
92. “Suicidio de Micaela Balcazar,” caja 1671, exp. 299596, December 26, 1921, TSJDF.
93. Ibid.
94. Paperno, Suicide as a Cultural Institution, 106.
95. “El Castigo a un burlador,” El Universal, April 3, 1930, sec. 2, p. 1.
96. “Suicidio de una loca,” El Imparcial, December 21, 1905, p. 1.
97. “Suicidio frustrado de Humberto Ubico,” caja 1752, exp. 314843, March 1, 1922, TSJDF.
98. “Denuncio de hechos por las lesiones e intento de suicidio de Carmen Díaz,” caja 1936, exp. 350863, March 28, 1925, TSJDF.
99. “Intento de suicidio (Alberto Brusco),” caja 2219, exp. 406009, August 18, 1928, TSJDF.
100. “Intento de suicidio de Eliazer Tello,” caja 2154, exp. 392339, December 22, 1928, TSJDF.
101. “Sin que se sepa la causa, una joven se mata con estricnina,” Excélsior, March 23, 1919, pp. 1, 5.
102. Michael D. Jackson, The Palm at the End of the Mind: Relatedness, Religiosity, and the Real (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 87n21.
103. “Intento de suicidio de Baños Ayala, Lucrecia,” caja 2289, exp. 419937, July 11, 1929, TSJDF.
104. “El suicidio de Antonio Mira, ha puesto sangriento epílogo a la tragedia de la suntuosa Colonia Roma,” El Demócrata, September 13, 1921, pp. 1, 6.
105. For an interesting discussion of bodily comportment and status, see Sonya Lipsett-Rivera, Gender and the Negotiation of Daily Life in Mexico, 1750–1856 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012).
106. “El suicidio de Antonio Mira, ha puesto sangriento epílogo a la tragedia de la suntuosa Colonia Roma,” El Demócrata, September 13, 1921, pp. 1, 6.
107. Katherine Elaine Bliss, Compromised Positions: Prostitution, Public Health, and Gender Politics in Revolutionary Mexico City (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), 44.
108. “Suicidio espantoso,” El Imparcial, March 18, 1905, p. 1.
109. Bliss, Compromised Positions, 44.
110. “Suicidio frustrado (Carlota Alatorre),” caja 1290, exp. 230015, October 20, 1914, TSJDF.
111. “Suicidio frustrado de Carmen Flores,” caja 1352, exp. 237261, March 10, 1916, TSJDF.
112. “Averiguación sobre el suicidio de Dolores García Vda. de Córdoba,” caja 1977, exp. 358618, August 24, 1926, TSJDF. A medical publication doubted the efficacy of serum of Query, even though it had seemed to cure syphilis in a laboratory rabbit. See “La pretentida sueroterapia de la sífilis,” Gaceta Médica de México 1, no. 5 (February/March 1920): 151–152.
113. “Diligencias sobre el suicidio de Miranda, Manuel,” caja 1174, exp. 209116, November 19, 1912, TSJDF.
114. “Conato de suicidio de Hernández, Agustín,” caja 2170, exp. 395518, January 6, 1928, TSJDF.
115. “Joven novillero se suicidó en un tranvía,” El Univeral, November 13, 1930, sec. 2, p. 1.
116. “Averiguación de intento de suicidio,” caja 0094, exp. 016887, June 25, 1901, TSJDF.
117. It seems that Tiro Suiza may have been a gun club with a cantina.
118. “Averiguación del suicidio de Enrique Minetti,” caja 1013, exp. 180283, September 19, 1910, TSJDF.
119. “Suicidio de José Díaz,” caja 1055, exp. 175785, March 25, 1911, TSJDF.
120. Laura Isabel Serna, Making Cinelandia: American Films and Mexican Film Culture before the Golden Age (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 64–65.
121. Lola la Chata may be the infamous Lola of later tabloid coverage. Lola la Chata, or María Dolores Estévez Zuleta (1906–1959), was an infamous drug trafficker who became well known in Mexico City in the 1930s. In the 1920s, she sold marijuana, morphine, and heroin, along with chicharrones, in La Merced. See Elaine Carey, “Selling Is More of a Habit Than Using: Narcotraficante Lola la Chata and Her Threat to Civilization, 1930–1960,” Journal of Women’s History 21, no. 2 (Summer 2009): 62–89. It is said that Lola la Chata was one of the inspirations for William Burrough’s writings. Presumably, she was his source for heroin during his Mexico days.
122. “Averiguación del suicidio de Beatriz Norman,” TSJDF.
123. “¿Por qué se privó de la vida el millonario D. Juan Balme?” El Imparcial, August 6, 1908, pp. 1, 8.
124. “Averiguación sobre el suicidio de Guillermo Lemus,” caja 1977, exp. 358652, September 2, 1926, TSJDF.
125. “Suicidio frustrado por Pedro López,” caja 1117, exp. 197964, October 17, 1912, TSJDF.
126. “Lesiones e intento de suicidio,” caja 1511, exp. 269830, July 9, 1918, TSJDF.
127. “Averiguación de intento de suicidio de Raymundo Luna Ruiz,” caja 1911, exp. 341961, June 4, 1925, TSJDF.
128. Lisa Lieberman, “Romanticism and the Culture of Suicide in Nineteenth-Century France,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 33, no. 3 (July 1991): 628.
129. “Mujeres y niños han de ser ajenos a la crónicas del crimen,” Excélsior, March 26, 1930, pp. 1, 4.
1. “Averiguación del suicidio de Solís, M. Consuelo,” caja 2290, exp. 420118, April 14, 1929, TSJDF.
2. Carlos Pereyra, “La sociología abstracta y su aplicación á algunos problemas fundamentales de México,” Revista Positiva, no. 3 (August 13, 1903): 351–386. Revista Positiva began publication in 1901. The phrase “order and progress,” appeared on its masthead. The journal was the mouthpiece of the scientific political elite, who endeavored to solve Mexico’s social problems with scientific methods and solutions.
3. Diego Pulido Esteva, “Imágenes de la locura en el discurso de la modernidad, salud mental y orden social a través de las visiones médicas, criminológico, legal, y literaria (Ciudad de México, 1881–1910)” (PhD diss., Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2004), 17; Claudia Agostoni, “Médicos científicos y médicos ilícitos en la Ciudad de México durante el Porfiriato,” Estudios de Historia Moderna y Contemporánea 19 (January–July 2000): 13–31. Irena Paperno found that alienist ideas about the external causes of suicide prevailed in nineteenth-century Russia as well. Positivists held sway in this same era. Paperno notes, “The transition from the medical to social model of man was achieved by transferring notions that traditionally described the individual body to the collective body of society.” See Paperno, Suicide as a Cultural Institution, 26.
4. Epilepsy does lead to scarring of the frontal lobe. However, epilepsy is not classified as a mental illness today.
5. Weaver, Sadly Troubled History, 35; Beltrán Abarca, “El suicidio en México,” 79–80.
6. For a discussion of some relevant court cases, see Pablo Piccato, “The Girl Who Killed a Senator: Femininity and the Public Sphere in Postrevolutionary Mexico,” in True Stories of Crime in Modern Mexico, ed. Robert Buffington and Pablo Piccato, 128–153 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2009); and Victor M. Macías-González, “The Case of the Murdering Beauty: Narrative Construction, Beauty Pageants, and Postrevolutionary Mexican National Myth,” in Buffington and Piccato, True Stories of Crime in Modern Mexico, 215–247.
7. Código penal para el Distrito Federal y Territorio de la Baja California sobre delitos del fuero común y para toda la República sobre delitos contra la Federación (Mexico City: Tipografía de Flores y Monslave, 1874), art. 34; Código penal para el Distrito y territories federales (Mexico City: Talleres Gráficos de la Nación, 1929).
8. Susan K. Morrissey argues that this was also true of positivist thinkers in imperial Russia. See Morrissey, Suicide and the Body Politic, 198.
9. For example, see Robert Buffington and Pablo Piccato, “The Narrative Construction of Porfirian Reality,” in Buffington and Piccato, True Stories of Crime in Modern Mexico, 25–51; and Piccato, City of Suspects.
10. Historian Francisco Javier Beltrán Abarca noted that an 1870 article in El Monitor Republicano hypothesized that suicide occurred in individuals with a “terrible and insatiable hunger for riches.” See Beltrán Abarca, “El suicidio en México,” 79–80. This judgment surfaced again in 1909, when a reporter for El Diario covering a double suicide in Chapultepec Park argued that the young Tepito residents killed themselves because they could not fulfill their desires for luxury and social mobility. “Se causaron la muerte por no resistir el deseo de lujo,” El Diario, November 7, 1909, p. 1. See chapter 5 for a discussion of the Chapultepec case.
11. Weaver, Sadly Troubled History, 36–37.
12. Ibid., 38–39.
13. Luis Vergara y Flores, “Neuropatía y aberración intelectual,” Medicina Científica 6, no. 13 (1893): 200–204.
14. Hale, Transformation of Liberalism, 142. Barreda would also reject Darwin’s ideas of evolution, or transformismo, and debate his two most prominent students, Porfirio Parra and Manuel Flores, on the rigor of the scientific method that informed his views on evolution and its applicability as a social theory. See Hale, Transformation of Liberalism, 207–209.
15. Gabino Barreda, “Algunas consideraciones sobre el suicidio,” La Escuela de Medicina, no. 14 (January 15, 1883): 161.
16. Ibid., 162.
17. Voekel, Alone before God.
18. Thomas Walter Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).
19. Ann-Louise Shapiro, “Disordered Bodies/Disorderly Acts: Medical Discourse and the Female Criminal in Nineteenth-Century Paris,” in Gendered Domains: Rethinking Public and Private in Women’s History, ed. Dorothy O. Helly and Susan M. Reverby (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 96.
20. Ibid.
21. Cristina Rivera-Garza, “She Neither Respected nor Obeyed Anyone: Inmates and Psychiatrists Debate Gender and Class at the General Insane Asylum La Castañeda, Mexico, 1910–20,” Hispanic American Historical Review 81, nos. 3–4 (August and November 2001): 657.
22. “Las crises clitoridianas al principio o en el curso de la ataxia locomotriz progresiva,” La Escuela de Medicina, no. 10 (November 15, 1884): 131–132.
23. José de J. Castañeda, Máximo Silva, and Carlos Aguilera, “Contribución a la estadística del suicidio en la República Mexicana,” pt. 1, La Escuela de Medicina, no. 6 (November 15, 1885): 78.
24. Ibid., pt. 2, La Escuela de Medicina, no. 8 (December 15, 1885): 103.
25. Horacio Barreda, “Estudio sobre ‘El Feminismo,’” pts. 1–4, Revista Positiva, no. 103 (January 1, 1909): 1–10; no. 104 (January 29, 1909): 45–60; no. 105 (February 20, 1909): 77–86; no. 106 (March 26, 1909): 109–126.
26. William French, “Prostitutes and Guardian Angels: Women, Work, and the Family in Porfirian Mexico,” Hispanic American Historical Review 72 (1992): 529–555.
27. Richard von Krafft Ebing, “La menstruación como causa de irresponsabilidad mental en la mujer,” La Escuela de Medicina, no. 45 (November 15, 1894): 935–936.
28. Asti Hustvedt, Medical Muses: Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century Paris (New York: W.W. Norton, 2012), 12–13. See also Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830–1980 (New York: Penguin, 1987); and Shapiro, “Disordered Bodies.”
29. Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda’s Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History (New York: W.W. Norton, 2010), 152–159.
30. Hustvedt, Medical Muses, 26.
31. Ernesto Rojas, “La hysteria psiquica: Tesis para sustentar examen de especialista en Psiguiatria” (master’s thesis, Escuela Nacional de Medicina, 1909).
32. Clinical file, “Augustina P.,” caja 2, exp. 20, September 10, 1910, Archivo Histórico de Salubridad y Asistencia, Beneficiencia Pública, Establecimientos Hospitalarios, Manicomio General, Expedientes Clinicos, Mexico City (hereafter cited as AHSA).
33. Clinical file, “Imelda J.,” caja 2, exp. 56, June 2, 1910, AHSA.
34. During the Porfiriato, women who transgressed the feminine ideal were more likely to be categorized as suffering from mental maladies provoked by immorality. Mental diseases were believed to have physical and/or mental causes. See Martha Lilia Mancilla Villa, Locura y mujer durante el porfiriato (Mexico City: Editorial Círculo Psicoanalítico Mexicano, 2001); and Andrés Ríos Molina, “La locura durante la Revolución Mexicana: Los primeros años del Manicomio General La Castañeda, 1910–1920” (PhD diss., El Colegio de México, 2009), 122–140.
35. Ríos Molina, “La locura durante la Revolución,” 93.
36. Like hysteria, tuberculosis was considered a female disease and linked to poor working-class women. See Diego Armus, The Ailing City: Health, Tuberculosis, and Culture in Buenos Aires, 1870–1950 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).
37. Hustvedt, Medical Muses, 22.
38. “Hospital para mujeres demente,” El Nacional, May 11, 1895.
39. Clinical file, “Herlinda M.,” caja 2, exp. 2, July 3, 1909, AHSA.
40. Sloan, Runaway Daughters.
41. Clinical file, “Teresa O.,” caja 2, exp. 13, July 26, 1905, AHSA. Teresa O. is also discussed in Rivera-Garza, “She Neither Respected nor Obeyed Anyone,” 677.
42. Nancy E. van Deusen, “Determining the Boundaries of Virtue: The Discourse of Recogimiento among Women in Seventeenth-Century Lima,” Journal of Family History 22, no. 2 (1997). Also see the case of a girl named María discussed in Sloan, Runaway Daughters, 165–166. María refused to engage a man named Francisco when he tried to talk with her on the street, and she ended up pelting him with rocks to force him to move away. When brought in front of a judge, she defended her actions as honorable. Honorable women did not talk to strange men, as it called into question their reputations.
43. Rivera-Garza, “She Neither Respected nor Obeyed Anyone,” 674–675.
44. Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Fasting Girls: The History of Anorexia Nervosa (Vintage Books, 2000), 102–104.
45. Clinical file, “María Carmen M.H.,” caja 224, exp. 21, April 12, 1928, AHSA.
46. George Miller Beard, A Practical Treatise on Nervous Exhaustion (Neurasthenia): Its Symptoms, Nature, Sequences, Treatment (New York: E.B. Treat, 1888), 24–31.
47. “Clausura de las sesiones de la Academia Nacional de Medicina,” El Nacional, August 7, 1895, p. 1.
48. Beard, Practical Treatise, 127, 100.
49. Ibid., 38–104.
50. “La locura del dinero,” El Nacional, August 30, 1900, p. 2.
51. Tic-Tac [pseud.], “Semana alegre,” El Imparcial, September 10, 1899, p. 1.
52. Shaya, “Mayhem of Moderns,” 46–47.
53. Christopher E. Forth, “Neurasthenia and Manhood in Fin-de-Siècle France,” in Cultures of Neurasthenia: From Beard to the First World War, ed. Marijke Gijsqwijt-Hofstra and Roy Porter (New York: Rodopi, 2001), 329.
54. Shaya, “Mayhem of Moderns,” 53.
55. Forth, “Neurasthenia,” 332–333.
56. “Extranjero: Una consulta médica; Charcot y Mottet; Locos neurasténicos,” Diario del Hogar, June 22, 1892, p. 1.
57. Advertisements for these products started to appear in La Escuela de la Medicina in 1887. The advertisement for Neurosine Prunier appeared in La Escuela de la Medicina, no. 1 (February 15, 1903). Another ad in the same issued noted the endorsement of Dr. Demetrio Mejia, a faculty member at the medical school, for the efficacy of Preparatión de Wampole (Wampole’s Preparation) in treating anemia, exhaustion, and nervous weakness.
58. Beard, Practical Treatise, 171.
59. Ibid., 192–243.
60. “¿Por qué se suicidan? Contra la neurastenia: El trabajo,” El Imparcial, June 1, 1908, p. 1.
61. Ibid.
62. “La neurastenia se está apoderando de nosotros y no es enfermedad utópica: Entrevista con el Sr. Dr. Zárraga,” El Imparcial, November 25, 1908, pp. 1, 2.
63. Santiago Rustiñol, “La neurastenia,” La Iberia, March 4, 1909, p. 2.
64. “La Neurastenia: ¿Es una enfermedad imaginaria? Desgraciadamente no,” La Iberia, May 1, 1909, p. 2.
65. Antonio Gota de Zaragoza, “El neurismo creciente de nuestro tiempo,” La Escuela de Medicina, no. 19 (October 15, 1909): 488–445.
66. Cristina Rivera-Garza, “Por la salud mental de la nación: Vida cotidiana y estado en el Manicomio General de la Castañeda, México 1910–1930,” Secuencia, no. 51 (September–December 2001): 73–74.
67. Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra and Roy Porter, eds., Cultures of Neurasthenia: From Beard to the First World War (New York: Rodopi, 2001), 21.
68. Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848–1918 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 135–136.
69. Nancy Leys Stepan, “The Hour of Eugenics”: Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 24–25, 67–68.
70. Stephanie Sharon Ballenger, “Modernizing Madness: Doctors, Patients and Asylums in Nineteenth-Century Mexico City” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2009), 259.
71. José Olvera, “Discursos sobre causas de las neurosis en México,” El Observador Médico: Revista Científica de la Asociación Médica de Pedro Escobeda 1, no. 4 (February 1870): 52–53.
72. Ballenger, “Modernizing Madness,” 266.
73. Ríos Molina, “La locura durante la Revolución,” 65–67. Ríos Molina cites Dr. Rafael Caraza, who theorized that indigenous Mexicans did not suffer from mental illness because their closeness to nature protected them from modern influences that might stimulate the passions. See Rafael Caraza, “Informe que el médico cirujano del Hospital de San Hipólito que suscribe, rinde sobre el estado mental de Marcelino Domingo,” El Observador Médico, no. 5 (1879): 34–39.
74. Ríos Molina, “La locura durante la Revolución,” 70–72.
75. Hale, Transformation of Liberalism, 185–186.
76. Jorge Molina Avilés, “Psicología y positivismo: La enseñanza de la psicología durante el porfiriato; 1896–1910,” in 100 años de la psicología en México 1896–1996, ed. Juan José Sánchez Sosa (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1997), 23.
77. Ríos Molina, “La locura durante la Revolución,” 68.
78. Michel Foucault, History of Madness, ed. Jean Khalfa, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa (New York: Routledge, 2009).
79. Porfirio Parra, Ensayo sobre la patogenia de la locura (Mexico City: Tipografía Literaria, 1878).
80. Ballenger, “Modernizing Madness,” 257. Porfirio Parra argued that doctors should not dabble in the metaphysical moral causes of mental illness and should instead concentrate on the physiological ones. See Parra, Ensayo sobre la patogenía de la locura.
81. Ballenger, “Modernizing Madness,” 259.
82. Ríos Molina, “La locura durante la Revolución,” 122–140.
83. Mariano Rivadeneyra, quoted in Ballenger, “Modernizing Madness,” 263. See also Rivadeneyra’s thesis, “Apuntes para la estadística de la locura en México” (master’s thesis, Escuela Nacional de Medicina en México, 1887).
84. Ballenger, “Modernizing Madness,” 279.
85. Ibid.
86. Ibid., 270. Cathy Popkin found that the same was true for late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century hysteria cases in Russia. See Popkin, “Hysterical Episodes: Case Histories and Silent Subjects,” in Self and Story in Russian History, ed. Laura Engelstein and Stephanie Sandler (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 189–216.
87. For more on pulque and Spanish and Mexican attempts to control its production, the conviviality associated with it in working-class barrios, and its perceived relationship to cultural degeneration, see Áurea Toxqui, “Breadwinners or Entrepreneurs? Women’s Involvement in the Pulquería World of Mexico City,” in Alcohol in Latin America: A Social and Cultural History, ed. Gretchen Kristine Pierce and Áurea Toxqui (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2014), 104–130; and Deborah Toner, Alcohol and Nationhood in Nineteenth-Century Mexico (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015).
88. Clinical file, “Ramona M.,” caja 2, exp. 1, June 9, 1909, AHSA.
89. Rivera-Garza, “She Neither Respected nor Obeyed Anyone,” 670.
90. Ibid., 661.
91. “De sociedad: Elegantes nupcias,” El Imparcial, September 13, 1903, p. 2.
92. “Society Notes,” Mexican Herald, June 12, 1898, p. 8.
93. “Society: Premier Social Event,” Mexican Herald, March 1, 1908, p. 18.
94. “La Señora Doña Manuela Collantes de R, es la dama encerrada en el manicomio,” El Demócrata, December 3, 1916, p. 1.
95. “El Dr. Schemonti afirma que nunca ha reconocido a la Señora Collantes,” El Universal, December 6, 1916, p. 1.
96. “El Sr. Director de la Beneficencia Dr. Sepúlveda, visita a la Señora Collantes en el manicomio,” El Universal, December 7, 1916, pp. 1, 3.
97. Ibid.
98. “La Señora Collantes de Rivero saldrá pronto del Manicomio de la Castañeda,” El Universal, December 9, 1916, pp. 1, 3.
99. “El Señor Lic. Collantes rocogera a su hija del Manicomio de la Castañeda: No nos intimidan los poderosos menos podremos callar ante Ramón Rivero,” El Universal, December 10, 1916, p. 1.
100. Enrique O. Aragón was a prominent Porfirian specialist in psychiatry. He published “Psiquiatría: Los síndromas mentales,” Gaceta Médica de México 7 (1912): 183–226. In this essay, he catalogued symptoms of various mental disorders, including onanism, nymphomania, and effeminacy in men, rather than any underlying causes of the conditions.
101. “El Dres. Collantes y Ruiz Erdozain no firmaron el dictamen contra la Señora Collantes,” El Universal, December 17, 1916, p. 1.
102. “El Señor Director del ‘Manicomio’ dirige una carta a ‘El Universal,’” El Universal, December 18, 1916, pp. 1, 2.
103. “El Dr. Saldaña dictaminó en favor de la Sra. Collantes cuando era médico del manicomio,” El Universal, December 19, 1916, pp. 1, 4.
104. Rivera-Garza, “Por la salud mental de la nación,” 63.
105. Ibid., 79–80.
106. “El asunto de la Sra. Collantes de Rivero,” El Universal, December 22, 1916, p. 1.
107. “Rindió se declaración el Director del Manicomio General, Dr. Agustín Torres,” El Demócrata, December 26, 1916, p. 1.
108. Diario Oficial, vol. 70, pt. 2 (1932), https://books.google.es/books?lr=&redir_esc=y&hl=sv&id=biJUAAAAYAAJ&dq=editions%3AOCLC7646514&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=manuela+Collantes+.
109. “En México, la beneficencia pública no hace obra de caridad, sino labor de inquisición,” El Demócrata, July 26, 1919, p. 1.
110. “¡Se mueren de hambre los dementes!” El Demócrata, August 27, 1919, pp. 1, 10.
111. “El Presidente de la Huerta visitó el manicomio,” El Demócrata, September 11, 1920, pp. 1, 3.
112. Rivera-Garza, “Por la salud mental de la nación,” 81.
113. “Las boticas extrañan un serio peligro,” Excélsior, February 17, 1919, pp. 1, 3.
114. “En breve las boticas dejarán de ser un peligro,” Excélsior, February 18, 1919, pp. 1, 7.
115. “Inmoralidad de las boticas y las droguerías,” Excélsior, August 30, 1919, pp. 1, 9.
116. “Una investigación que puede ser sensacional: Los permisos para la venta de medicinas de patente,” El Universal, February 13, 1930, pp. 1, 8.
117. “Medicinas falsificadas que causan la muerte,” El Universal, June 21, 1930, sec. 2, pp. 1, 4.
118. “La existencia de arsenicales falsificados,” El Universal, June 25, 1930, sec. 2, pp. 1, 4.
119. “Recetas con sustancias no exentas de peligro,” El Universal, July 15, 1930, sec. 2, pp. 1, 4.
120. Niño Fidencio was a folk healer who lived in Nuevo León and had many devoted followers. He died at the age of forty in 1938. See Dore Gardner, Niño Fidencio: A Heart Thrown Open (Albuquerque: Museum of New Mexico Press, 1994); and Carlos Monsiváis, “El Niño Fidencio,” in Entre la magia y la historia: Tradiciones, mitos y leyendas de la frontera, ed. José Manuel Valenzuela Arce (Mexico City: Plaza y Valdés, 2000), 107–120.
121. “Recetas con sustancias no exentas de peligro,” El Universal, pp. 1, 4.
122. See, for example, the advertisement of Dr. McLaughlin’s electric belt in El Imparcial, July 8, 1900, p. 2.
123. Advertisements in El Demócrata, October 28, 1915, p. 2; and October 14, 1921, p. 3.
Portions of this chapter were published before. See Kathryn A. Sloan, “Death and the City: Female Public Suicide and Meaningful Space in Modern Mexico City,” Journal of Urban History 42, no. 2 (2016): 396–418.
1. Pérez, To Die in Cuba.
2. The deaths of these young men were first commemorated at the beginning of the restored republic, in 1871, and the celebration gained prominence during the Porfiriato. During the revolution, leaders like Francisco Madero and Victoriano Huerta continued to preside over the ceremony. See Enrique Plasencia de la Parra, “Conmemoración de la hazaña épica de los niños heroes: Su origen, desarollo y simbolismos,” Historia Mexicana 45, no. 2 (October–December 1995): 241–279.
3. In Mexico and elsewhere, it could be argued that a cultural logic existed to explain female suicide. Killing oneself to cover shame or deception in love was understandable. In fact, when a young, single woman killed herself, it was assumed that she had been deceived. Gayatri Spivak analyzes the cultural logic of sati (the immolation of widows) in Indian culture. See Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 66–111.
4. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Ben Highmore, Michel de Certeau: Analysing Culture (New York: Continuum, 2006), 81. See also Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo, I Speak of the City: Mexico City at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); and Néstor García Canclini, Culturas híbridas: Estrategias para entrar y salir de la modernidad (Mexico City: Editorial Grijalbo, 1990).
5. Michael Johns, The City of Mexico in the Age of Díaz (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997), 9–11.
6. William H. Beezley, Mexican National Identity: Memory, Innuendo, and Popular Culture (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2008), 107.
7. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991).
8. Ibid., 56. Lefebvre does argue that abstract space must also be ahistorical when social struggle in the production of that space is rendered invisible. Although Porfirian planners attempted to homogenize the public spaces of El Centro, it was difficult to erase a history that had so many markers of pre-Columbian and colonial cultures.
9. Claudia Agostoni, Monuments of Progress: Modernization and Public Health in Mexico City, 1876–1910 (Boulder: University Press of Colorado,, 2003), 80.
10. Cristina Barros and Marco Buenrostro, Vida cotidiana: Ciudad de México 1850–1910 (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica USA, 1996), 14.
11. Johns, City of Mexico, 11.
12. Tenorio-Trillo, I Speak of the City, 72.
13. Barros and Buenrostro, Vida cotidiana, 18.
14. Johns, City of Mexico, 32.
15. Tenorio-Trillo, I Speak of the City, 289.
16. Susie S. Porter, “‘And That It Is Custom Makes It Law’: Class Conflict and Gender Ideology in the Public Sphere, Mexico City, 1880–1910,” Social Science History 24, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 122–123.
17. Ibid., 125.
18. Robert South Barrett, Standard Guide to the City of Mexico and Vicinity, 1900 (St. Louis: Modern Mexico, 1900), 39–41.
19. Andrea Kristine Moerer, “Changing Chapultepec: Construction, Consumption, and Cultural Politics in a Mexico City Forest, 1934–1944” (PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 2013), 16.
20. Katherine Elaine Bliss and Ann S. Blum, “Dangerous Driving: Adolescence, Sex, and the Gendered Experience of Public Space in Early-Twentieth-Century Mexico City,” in Gender, Sexuality, and Power in Latin America since Independence, ed. William E. French and Katherine Elaine Bliss (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007).
21. Porter, “And That It Is Custom Makes It Law,” 124.
22. “Suicidio con estricnina,” El Imparcial, December 20, 1900, p. 1. Note that is unclear whether the reporter surmised her plan or learned of her strategy from a family member or friend. It was not uncommon for reporters of papers like El Imparcial and El Demócrata to imagine the psychological state and motivations of young suicides.
23. “El suicidio del ayer,” El Imparcial, April 27, 1905, p. 1.
24. “Envenenamiento de Ana María Schlonwbits, como intento de suicidio,” caja 882, exp. 152549, April 27, 1909, TSJDF.
25. “Suicidio en la Alameda: Despojó del cadaver,” El Imparcial, May 25, 1897, p. 1.
26. “Dos señoritas elegantes se suicidaron ayer en Chapultepec,” El Imparcial, November 6, 1909, p. 1; “Dos Sritas. se suicidaron ayer en Chapultepec: Se las encontro por tierra enlazadas en postrer abrazo, se mataron por decepciones de amor,” El Diario, November 6, 1909, p.1.
27. “Se causaron la muerte por no resistir el deseo de lujo,” El Diario, November 7, 1909, p.1. Another article agreed that the girls killed themselves because they could not have the pleasures and material riches they coveted, but it also pleaded with reporters to stop covering the “vulgar act.” See “Crímenes vulgares: Dos niñas románticas y un asesino,” La Patría, November 9, 1909, p. 5.
28. “Dos señoritas elegantes se suicidaron ayer en Chapultepec,” El Imparcial.
29. “Mystery of Suicides Has Not Been Solved Yet,” Mexican Herald, November 8, 1909, p. 1.
30. “Dos señoritas elegantes se suicidaron ayer en Chapultepec,” El Imparcial.
31. The newspaper of the expatriate Spanish community reported that Elias Rojas admitted that he was the boyfriend of both girls. “Doble suicidio en Chapultepec,” El Correo Español, November 6, 1909, p. 2.
32. “Dos Sritas. se suicidaron ayer,” El Diario.
33. “Girls Drink Poison, and Embracing, Die,” Mexican Herald, November 6, 1909, p. 1.
34. See, for example, “Anoche se ahorcó . . . era joven y bella, de sus cartas se desprende que murió loca de amor,” El Imparcial, November 10, 1908, p. 1; and “El suicidio por amor,” Boletín de Policía, November 7, 1909, p. 9.
35. “Se causaron la muerte por no resistir el deseo de lujo,” El Diario.
36. “Carrozas blancas condujeron al cementerio a las suicidas,” El Diario, November 9, 1909, p. 2. For a discussion of cemeteries and class in Porfirian Mexico, see Amanda M. López, “Cadaverous City.”
37. “Eranse dos vidas, que un día descubrieron su drama,” El Imparcial, November 8, 1909, p. 2.
38. Jaap van Ginneken, Crowds, Psychology, and Politics, 1871–1899 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 79.
39. “Un doble suicidio por amor,” Boletín de Policía, November 28, 1909, p. 5.
40. Public parks were chosen sites of other suicides and attempted suicides. See, for example, “Suicidio de Jorge Córdova,” caja 0116, exp. 017701, July 7, 1901, TSJDF; and “Envenenamiento de Ana María Schlonwbits, como intento de suicidio,” TSJDF.
41. Anton Rosenthal, “The Arrival of the Electric Streetcar and the Conflict over Progress in Early Twentieth-Century Montevideo,” Journal of Latin American Studies 27, no. 2 (1995): 319–341.
42. John Lear, Workers, Neighbors, and Citizens: The Revolution in Mexico City (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 26.
43. “Encierra todo un indescifrable enigma el suicidio del joven José Amieva,” El Demócrata, January 7, 1920, p. 1.
44. “A bordo de un automóvil, un joven romántico se arrancó ayer la vida,” El Demócrata, April 17, 1921, p. 1. The sub-subtitle read: “He had taken a nice ride to the beautiful Chapultepec Forest, and no would believe that this man would let black ideas take his brain” (Había hecho un agradable paseo al hermoso Bosque de Chapultepec, y nadie hubiera creído que aquel hombre llevara en el cerebro tan negras ideas).
45. “Suicidio en el Bosque de Chapultepec: La Srita. Guadalupe Ponce, por causas que se ignoran, apuró en fuerte veneno en la calzada de las violetas, de aquel pintoresco lugar,” El Demócrata, March 3, 1916, p. 1.
46. Ibid.
47. “Una cortada y un baño en el estanque de Chapultepec,” El Universal, August 19, 1930, p. 1.
48. “Suicidio en el Ferrocarril del Valle: Drama en un tren,” El Imparcial, March 2, 1898, p. 1.
49. “Intento de suicidio: Curiosa escena,” El Imparcial, May 2, 1899, p. 2.
50. “En averiguación de la causa de la muerte de Luis Garcia Rivero,” caja 169, exp. 029825, August 19, 1902, TSJDF.
51. “Suicidio,” El Imparcial, April 20, 1902, p. 4.
52. “En averiguación de la causa de la muerte de Luis Garcia Rivero,” TSJDF.
53. “La tragedia en el Panteón Español, tres entrevistas, amor inmenso, Sin él, ni el cielo!” El Imparcial, August 28, 1902, pp. 1, 4.
54. Pérez, To Die in Cuba, 157.
55. “Suicidio de Gastón Moreno,” caja 2257, exp. 413300, September 6, 1929, TSJDF.
56. “Averiguación sobre el intento de suicidio que cometió Efrén Muñoz,” caja 1641, exp. 293547, April 16, 1921, TSJDF.
57. A ratero is a pickpocket or petty street criminal. For an excellent study of this classification of urban crime, see Pérez, To Die in Cuba, 157.
58. “Suicidio de José Díaz,” caja 1055, exp. 175785, March 25, 1911, TSJDF.
59. “Suicidio por amor,” El Imparcial, May 30, 1897, p. 1. The reporter kept the identity of the girl secret, referring to her only as Señorita E.M.
60. “Desde el tercer piso de una casa de la 5a. Calle de Tacuba se arrojó ayer una joven,” El Independiente, August 1, 1913, pp. 1, 3.
61. “La Señorita María G. Servín se arrojó desde un tercer piso,” El Univeral, January 10, 1917, pp. 1, 3.
62. “Efluvios morbosos pueblan la urbe y un mal de suicidio enferma los jóvenes espíritus: La Señorita Matilde Chazaro, a cuyo dijera palabras de muerte un vago fantasma, se lanzó al espacio desde un balcón de su casa, privándose de la vida,” El Demócrata, March 31, 1920, p. 1.
63. “Intento de suicidio a Manuel Castellano,” caja 1792, exp. 323019, June 13, 1923, TSJDF.
64. “Intento de suicidio a Alberto Brusco,” caja 2219, exp. 406009, August 18, 1928, TSJDF.
65. The same held true in Cuba. Cuban women who committed suicide were especially likely to choose religious buildings as a place of death. See Pérez, To Die in Cuba, 143.
66. “Semana alegre: Influencias de las novelas sobre el hígado—Amores y suicidio a unos metros de altura,” El Imparcial, June 4, 1899, p. 1.
67. The cathedral in Mexico City’s central square was constructed on top of a former Aztec temple. The reporter references a circular stone that was excavated from the site on December 17, 1790, when workers were repairing the cathedral. It has been called a calendar and a sunstone, although most Porfirian-era experts believed that it was a ritual stone used as a sacrificial altar. It was mounted on an exterior wall of the cathedral until 1885 and now sits in the National Anthropology Museum.
68. “Extraordinario caso de suicidio: Señorita que se arroja de una torre de la Catedral,” El Imparcial, June 1, 1899, p. 1.
69. The article referred to the stone as a calendar, which is what it was thought to have been at the time.
70. “Extraordinario caso de suicidio: Señorita que se arroja de una torre de la Catedral,” El Imparcial, p. 1.
71. Sloan, Runaway Daughters, 124.
72. “Extraordinario caso de suicidio: Señorita que se arroja de una torre de la Catedral,” El Imparcial, p. 1.
73. “El suicidio de Sofía Ahumada: Libertad de los detenidos,” El Imparcial, June 2, 1899, p. 1.
74. “Semana alegre: Influencias de las novelas sobre el hígado—Amores y suicidio a unos metros de altura,” El Imparcial.
75. Ibid.
76. “Teórica del mal, las novelas,” El Amigo de la Verdad, August 17, 1895, p. 2. The editorial was attributed to “La mensajera” rather than “El mensajero,” hence my assumption that the writer was female.
77. “Suicidio de Sofia Ahumada: Desde la torre al suelo,” El Chisme, June 1, 1899, p. 2.
78. “Desde ‘La Torre de los Suicidios’ se arrojaron ayer una Sra., una Srita. y un niño,” El Imparcial, December 21, 1912, p. 1.
79. “El desamor de su padre precipitó el suicidio de la pobre Margarita,” El Imparcial, December 22, 1912, p. 1.
80. “Desde el torre al atrio,” El Demócrata, July 23, 1920, p. 1.
81. Ibid.
82. “Por que se privó de la vida la pobre Angelina,” El Demócrata, July 24, 1920, p. 7.
83. “Se suicidó apurando una fuerte dosis de cianuro de mercurio: El mal de Werther,” El Demócrata, August 24, 1920, p. 3.
84. Laura Isabel Serna, Making Cinelandia: American Films and Mexican Film Culture Before the Golden Age (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 47–49.
85. “Apelación interpuesta contra la sentencia pronunciada por el Juez Primero de lo Penal, que declaró no delito que proseguir en el suicidio de Angelina Ruiz,” caja 1602, exp. 287224, November 12, 1920, TSJDF.
86. Piccato, Tyranny of Opinion.
87. “Suicidio de Sofia Ahumada: Importante declaraciones,” El Chisme, June 2, 1899, p. 2.
88. Alberto del Castillo Troncoso, “Notas sobre la moral dominante a finales del siglo XIX en la Ciudad de México: Las mujeres suicidas como protagonistas de la nota roja,” in Modernidad, tradición y alteridad: La ciudad de México en el cambio de siglo (XIX-XX), ed. Claudia Agostoni and Elisa Speckman (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2001), 329.
89. Enrique Metinides, a crime photographer for La Prensa in the twentieth century, photographed a suicide by hanging at Chapultepec Park in 1977. The woman had a photograph of her beloved daughter who, on the day of her suicide, celebrated her quinceañera. Her estranged husband had barred her from attending. She asked someone to point out the oldest tree in the park and was later found hanging from it. See Trish Zeff, ed., 101 Tragedies of Enrique Metinides (New York: Aperture, 2012), 140–141.
90. “Una criada se suicidó ayer en la Alameda,” El Universal, January 15, 1930, p. 1.
91. “Una hombre que para matarse hace lujo de precauciones,” El Universal, June 15, 1930, sec. 2, p. 1.
92. Excélsior made the decision to stop reporting blood crimes in March 1930. A series of articles followed in several capital newspapers eulogizing the Excélsior’s decision. See, for example, “Emilio Rabasa une su elogio por Excélsior,” Excélsior, March 28, 1930, pp. 1, 10.
1. “Semana alegre: Influencias de las novelas sobre el hígado—Amores y suicidio a unos metros de altura,” El Imparcial, June 4, 1899, p. 1.
2. “Carrozas blancas condujeron al cemetario a las suicidas,” El Diario, November 9, 1909, p. 2.
3. “La nota trágica de la semana,” Semana Ilustrada, June 24, 1910, n.p.
4. “Corto sus desesperanzas y amarguras lanzándose desde el tercer piso del correo una hermosa señorita,” El Diario, January 11, 1914, pp. 1, 6; “El cuerpo de una bella joven fue a estrellarse en el pavimiento quedando en el sin vida,” El Independiente, January 11, 1914, pp. 1, 3; “La Señorita Sara Ramos se suicidó ayer arrojándose del tercer piso del correo,” El País, January 11, 1914, p. 1.
5. “Suicidio en el cuarto de la catedral: Un joven se arroja de cabeza al patio,” El Imparcial, January 9, 1907, p. 1.
6. History of emotions scholarship continues to grow. Lucien Febvre and the Annales school scholars are largely credited with historicizing emotions. See Barbara H. Rosenwein, “Worrying about Emotions in History,” American Historical Review 107, no. 3 (2002): 821–845; and Lucien Febvre, “Sensibility and History: How to Reconstitute the Emotional Life of the Past,” in A New Kind of History: From the Writings of Febvre, ed. Peter Burke, trans. K. Folca, (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), 12–26. More recently, Peter and Carol Stearns have advanced the study of emotionology. See Peter N. Stearns and Carol Z. Stearns, “Emotionology: Clarifying the History of Emotions and Emotional Standards,” American Historical Review 90, no. 4 (1985): 813–836.
7. Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2013).
8. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2012), 74–75.
9. Norbert Elias, The Civilising Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Malden, MA: John Wiley and Sons, 1994), 157–158. This work is also discussed in Shaya, “Mayhem of Moderns,” 66–68; and Jan Plamper, The History of Emotions: An Introduction, trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 49–50.
10. Elias, Civilising Process, 135.
11. Michelle Z. Rosaldo, Knowledge and Passion: Ilongot Notions of Self and Social Life (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Lila Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). See also Catherine A. Lutz and Lila Abu-Lughod, eds., Language and the Politics of Emotion (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
12. Paul Ekman, “An Argument for Basic Emotions,” Cognition and Emotion 6, no. 3 (1992): 169–200.
13. Ruth Leys, “How Did Fear Become a Scientific Object and What Kind of Object Is It?” in Human Facial Expressions: An Evolutionary View, ed. Alan J. Fridlund (San Diego: Academic Press, 1994).
14. Plamper, History of Emotions, 248–249.
15. William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 106, 125–126.
16. Barbara H. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 2.
17. Lomnitz-Adler, Death and the Idea of Mexico, 41–43. A “totem” is a unifying emotional symbol that unites a culture. Émile Durkheim argued that totems connected communities to their ancestors and provided primitive societies an entity to integrate community around religion. See Émile Durkheim, Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Carol Cosman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 171. This is also discussed in Plamper, History of Emotions, 83–84.
18. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). See especially chapter 2 on the highland tradition in Scotland, by Hugh Trevor-Roper.
19. Paul Westheim, La calavera (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1953); Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude: And Other Writings, trans. Lysander Camp, Yara Milos, and Rachel Phillips Belash (New York: Grove Press, 1985).
20. Lomnitz-Adler, Death and the Idea of Mexico, 52.
21. Paz, Labyrinth of Solitude, 57–61.
22. Carlos Monsiváis, “Los viajeros y la invención de México,” Aztlán 15, no. 2 (1984): 201–229.
23. Lomnitz-Adler, Death and the Idea of Mexico.
24. Brandes, “Is There a Mexican View of Death?” 138.
25. Ibid., 136.
26. Lomnitz-Adler, Death and the Idea of Mexico, 51–52.
27. Robert McCaa, “Missing Millions: The Demographic Costs of the Mexican Revolution,” Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 19, no. 2 (Summer 2003): 396. The figure of 1.4 million represents excess deaths and does not take into account other demographic variables like lost births or emigration.
28. Esposito, Funerals, Festivals, and Cultural Politics, 23.
29. Ibid., 25; Ariès, Hour of Our Death; Philippe Ariès, Western Attitudes toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present, trans. Patricia M. Ranum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 66.
30. Octavio Paz famously theorized that the Mexican taunts, caresses, sleeps with, and celebrates death, calling it “his most steadfast love.” See Paz, Labyrinth of Solitude, 57.
31. Claudio Lomnitz-Adler quoted in Carlos Alberto Sánchez, “Death and the Colonial Difference: An Analysis of a Mexican Idea,” Journal of Philosophy of Life 3, no. 3 (September 2013): 178.
32. Johns, City of Mexico; Esposito, Funerals, Festivals, and Cultural Politics; Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo, “1910 Mexico City: Space and Nation in the City of the Centenario,” Journal of Latin American Studies 28 (February 1996): 75–104.
33. Ma. Concepción Lugo, “Los espacios urbanos de la muerte,” Historias 40 (1998): 35–45.
34. Scholars have written extensively on tragic death and spontaneous memorialization. Some works include Peter Jan Margry and Christina Sánchez-Carretero, “Memorializing Tragic Death,” Anthropology Today 23, no. 3 (June 2007): 1–2; Peter Jan Margry, “Performative Memorials: Arenas on Political Resentment in Dutch Society,” in Reforming Dutch Culture, eds. Peter Jan Margry and H. Roodenburg, 109–133 (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008); Jack Santino, ed., Spontaneous Shrines and the Public Memorialization of Death (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006); and Erika Doss, Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). Historical works on death and commemoration in Latin America include Lyman L. Johnson, ed., Death, Dismemberment, and Memory: Body Politics In Latin America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2004); Esposito, Funerals, Festivals, and Cultural Politics; and Lomnitz-Adler, Death and the Idea of Mexico.
35. Doss, Memorial Mania, 67.
36. Jack Santino, “Performative Commemoratives: Spontaneous Shrines and the Public Memorialization of Death,” in Spontaneous Shrines and the Public Memorialization of Death, ed. Santino, Jack (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 10.
37. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities, 25.
38. C. Allen Haney, Christina Leimer, and Juliann Lowery, “Spontaneous Memorialization: Violent Death and Emerging Mourning Ritual,” OMEGA 35, no. 2 (1997): 162.
39. Piccato, Tyranny of Opinion.
40. Harriet Senie quoted in Doss, Memorial Mania, 68.
41. Doss, Memorial Mania, 67.
42. While not explicitly a history of emotions reader, True Stories of Crime in Modern Mexico analyzes sensational crime and media responses and speaks to the formation of publics of readers. See Buffington and Pablo Piccato, True Stories of Crime in Modern Mexico, 31–32, 59–60, 224–226.
43. Christiane Voss, “Film Experience and the Formation of Illusion: The Spectator as ‘Surrogate Body’ for the Cinema,” Cinema Journal 50, no. 4 (2011): 145. Also discussed in Plamper, History of Emotions, 285–286. See also Shaya, “Mayhem for Moderns.”
44. José Guadalupe Posada, “El fin del mundo es ya cierto,” (Mexico City: A. Vanegas Arroyo, 1899), www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/ppmsc.04579.
45. El Imparcial, June 7, 1914, p. 1; El Imparcial, July 13, 1910, p. 10; El Demócrata, April 17, 1921, p. 1; El Demócrata, April 13, 1921, p. 1.
46. Katrin Döveling, “Mediated Parasocial Emotions and Community: How Media May Strengthen or Weaken Social Communities,” in Theorizing Emotions: Sociological Explorations and Applications, ed. Debra Hopkins, Jochen Kleres, Helena Flam, and Helmut Kuzmics (New York: Campus Verlag, 2009), 315–337.
47. Pablo Piccato, “Homicide as Politics in Modern Mexico,” in Murder and Violence in Modern Latin America, ed. Eric A. Johnson, Ricardo Salvatore, and Pieter Spierenburg (Malden, MA: John Wiley and Sons, 2013), 117–118, 123. Piccato suggests that media depictions of murder and those who read these depictions contribute to the building of civil society and public sphere for the exchange of ideas.
48. Agostoni, Monuments of Progress, 84, 86–87.
49. “Corto sus desesperanzas y amarguras lanzándose desde el tercer piso del correo una hermosa señorita,” El Diario, January 11, 1914, pp. 1, 6.
50. “El cuerpo de una bella joven fue a estrellarse en el pavimiento quedando en el sin vida,” El Independiente, pp. 1, 3.
51. “Corto sus desesperanzas,” El Diario.
52. “La Señorita Sara Ramos se suicidó ayer arrojándose del tercer piso del correo,” El País, January 11, 1914, p. 1.
53. “Corto sus desesperanzas,” El Diario, January 11, 1914, pp. 1, 6.
54. Ibid.; “Busco en la muerte el fin de sus penas de amor,” El Imparcial, January 11, 1914, pp. 1, 5.
55. Susie S. Porter, Working Women in Mexico City: Public Discourses and Material Conditions, 1879–1931 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2003), 159–186.
56. “El cuerpo de una bella joven fue a estrellarse en el pavimiento quedando en el sin vida,” El Independiente, p. 1.
57. “Busco en la muerte,” El Imparcial, January 11, 1914, pp. 1, 5.
58. Ibid., 1.
59. Walter Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 40.
60. Shaya, “Mayhem for Moderns,” 244.
61. “Horrible suicidio en la Calle de Capuchinas,” El Imparcial, June 7, 1914, pp. 1–2.
62. “Desde el tercer piso de una casa de la 5a. Calle de Tacuba se arrojó ayer una joven,” El Independiente, August 1, 1913, pp. 1, 3.
63. Photograph, “Lugar donde cayó la suicida,” El Diario, August 1, 1913, p. 1.
64. “La nota trágica de la semana,” La Semana Ilustrada, June 24, 1910.
65. “Anoche se ahorcó . . . era joven y bella, de sus cartas se desprende que murió loca de amor,” El Imparcial, November 10, 1908, p. 1
66. “Abominable asesinato de una joven en la Puerta Falsa de Sto. Domingo,” El Diario, July 14, 1910, p. 1.
67. “El drama de la Puerta Falsa de Santo Domingo,” El Imparcial, July 14, 1910, p. 1.
68. “La tragedia de la Puerta Falsa de Sto. Domingo,” July 15, 1910, p. 5. Other articles that covered the case include “Amor, locura y sangre,” El Imparcial, July 13, 1910, p. 1; and “El drama de la Puerta Falsa” El Imparcial, July 14, 1910, p. 1.
69. “El suicidio de Sofía Ahumada: Libertad de los detenidos,” El Imparcial, June 2, 1899, p. 1.
70. Many scholars, essayists, and theorists have debated about Mexican attitudes toward death. One camp argues that there is a uniquely Mexican death way and a concomitant worldview that breeds indifference to death. See, for example, Paz, Labyrinth of Solitude; Lomnitz-Adler, Death and the Idea of Mexico; and Anita Brenner, Idols behind Altars: Modern Mexican Art and Its Cultural Roots (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2012). The opposing camp argues that this idea is myth-making par excellence and is perpetuated by the Mexican tourism industry and Mexico’s political leaders to oppress the underprivileged classes. See Roger Bartra, The Cage of Melancholy: Identity and Metamorphosis in the Mexican Character, trans. Christopher J. Hall (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992); and Carlos Monsiváis, “Los viajeros y la invención de México,” Aztlán 15, no. 2 (1984): 201–229.
71. Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Death without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
72. See, for example, John R. Flippin, Sketches from the Mountains of Mexico (Cincinnati: Standard, 1889), 271–276.
73. I borrow this phrase from Carlos Alberto Sánchez, although I disagree with his belief, shared by Octavio Paz, that Mexicans have a unique penchant for and indifference to death. See Sánchez, “Death and the Colonial Difference,” 11.
1. García Canclini, Culturas híbridas; Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life.
2. José Vasconcelos, The Cosmic Race/La raza cosmica, trans. Didier T. Jaén (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).
3. Alfred Adler, Understanding Human Nature: The Psychology of Personality (London: One World Publications, 1992).
4. Solomon Lipp, Leopoldo Zea: From Mexicanidad to a Philosophy of History (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1980), 9.
5. Octavio Paz, El laberinto de la soledad (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1963).
6. Paz, El laberinto de la soledad, 48.
7. Bartra, Cage of Melancholy.
8. Lomnitz-Adler, Death and the Idea of Mexico, 483.
9. Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University, 1990) 55–63.
10. Series editor and historian Paul Gillingham pointed out this analogy to me. Indeed, penny dreadfuls were not so different from the publications of the A. Vanegas Arroyo press in turn-of-the-century Mexico City.