Susan Antebi
In 1973, Luis Buñuel received a letter from Dr. Benjamin Viel, Chilean specialist in public health and family planning, and admirer of Buñuel’s film Los olvidados (The Young and the Damned, 1950). The letter included the following statement:
Hay una frase en Los olvidados que ha tenido profunda influencia en mi decisión de dedicar mi profesión de médico al control de nacimiento. La madre interrogada por un psicólogo, ante la acusación de ‘usted no quiere a su hijo’, contesta, ‘¿y por qué había de quererlo? Ni siquiera recuerda la cara de quien me violó cuando tenía 14 años’. Nunca he visto una acusación más clara al supuesto instinto maternal.
(There is a phrase in Los olvidados that has had a profound influence on my decision to dedicate my medical career to birth control. The mother, questioned by a psychologist, faced with the accusation that ‘you don’t love your son’, replies, ‘and why should I love him? I don’t even remember the face of the guy who raped me when I was fourteen’. I have never seen a clearer refutation of supposed maternal instinct.)
(Viel, quoted in Sánchez Vidal 2004: 93)
1
The explicit purpose of the letter was to ask Buñuel to direct a film on the topic of population control. As Viel notes, Buñuel had been cited by Carlos Fuentes earlier the same year as having said: ‘Creo que la lucha de clases no es ya el problema central. El verdadero problema es el control de la natalidad y el equilibrio ecológico’ (‘I believe that class struggle is no longer the central problem. The real problem is birth control and ecological balance’) (ibid.). Needless to say, the director did not take up Viel’s suggestion, leaving us only to imagine the results of what such a film project might have entailed.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Viel did not choose to mention the famous line of the blind musician, don Carmelo, who shouts at the end of the film, ‘¡Ojalá los mataran a todos antes de nacer!’ (‘If only they killed them all before they were born!’) in reference to the delinquent street children depicted in Los olvidados. This jarring conclusion and its gesture of retroactive violence must surely have caught the attention of the family planning physician. Moreover, it is a key instance of the complexity surrounding the film’s depiction of disability, caught between the evocation of a grotesque corporeal aesthetics in which physical disability – in this case, blindness – corresponds to moral cruelty, and reference to societal ills, such as juvenile delinquency, which are inscribed on individual bodies and may inspire correctives, violent or otherwise.
The tension between these closely interrelated modes of disability representation in Buñuel’s film is central to my analysis in the present chapter. I pay particular attention here to the juxtaposition of the work’s capacity to trigger a visceral response, and its articulation of social problems that instead demand thought or action. These two aspects of the film, and the director’s ability to contain them both in a single work, have in fact shaped the critical importance and reception of Los olvidados. The unique combination of visceral aesthetics and social critique has helped to determine the film’s location at a turning point in Buñuel’s career and in twentieth-century Mexican cultural production in general. As I argue, the film’s use and depiction of disability are crucial to its ability to straddle and complicate the divide between aesthetics and critique. The roles and representations of disability in Los olvidados emerge, in turn, through the relationship between these competing but interlinked projects. The combined display of, on one hand, corporeal difference as moral cruelty, and on the other, violent action determined by conditions of socioeconomic inequality, reveals bodies at odds with their surroundings, and vice versa. In addition, through this juxtaposition Buñuel’s film articulates a critical interweaving of violence and vulnerability as specific to Mexican revolutionary modernity.
In a sense, the imperfectly-defined opposition between aesthetics and critique reflects what Sebastiaan Faber has described as Buñuel’s ‘impure modernism’ (2012: 63), shaped by a combination of aesthetic, political and commercial goals.
2 Many critics, including Faber, read
Los olvidados as a key work in Buñuel’s career, in part because of the film’s effective merging of seemingly disparate cinematic projects. Buñuel’s combined approach, or ‘impurity’, allowed the film to surprise and challenge audiences, breaking with expectations regarding Mexican society and cinema, social realism and the nature and intention of radical critique. Disability plays important roles in both Buñuel’s broader trajectory as avant-garde writer and director – of which this film forms a part – and in
Los olvidados’s discourse of social protest. For this reason, disability itself emerges at the centre of Buñuel’s unique and often jarring combination of cinematic techniques. The uncertainty of this combination in turn helps to produce a work that is, as Ernesto Acevedo-Muñoz describes, ‘amoral’ in relation to Mexico as subject matter, and key to understanding ‘Mexico’s revolutionary crisis’ (2003: 73, 61). The crisis here refers in part to ongoing socio-economic inequality, exacerbated by urbanisation and modernisation, as evidence of the Revolution’s failure to deliver its promises. Such forms of injustice also contributed to an aesthetic crisis regarding what constituted Mexican cultural and national identity (2003: 77). Buñuel’s film effectively situates disability within this crisis, through its depiction of bodies that do not and cannot fit seamlessly into the violent contexts they inhabit or create, and, perhaps most interestingly, through a refusal to finally judge the roles of such bodies in relation to Mexican moral or cinematic values.
Benjamin Viel’s above-mentioned letter appears to have been inspired by elements of social critique present in Los olvidados, though it points towards a solution that is never addressed in the film itself. A fragment of the letter is reproduced in a monumental 2004 study of Los olvidados, published by Televisa and including the original screenplay as well as many film stills. Viel’s writing might surprise the reader for its direct tone and rather literal ascription of a message to Los olvidados, as well as for its emphasis on a topic with no clear connection to Buñuel’s interests as a filmmaker. The juxtaposition of a discourse of population control with the scenes and stories of the film also appears to suggest in a more general sense that Los olvidados offers the viewer the dynamic of a problem that corresponds to a specific solution. The problem, an urban scenario of violence and suffering, would from this perspective point towards a needed or proposed response, whether this might take the form of class revolution, social reform or, as Viel bluntly advocates, birth control.
Approaching Buñuel’s classic film via the framework of problem and solution does in fact correspond to a history of some responses to the work. Julie Jones has argued that
Los olvidados was, from Buñuel’s own perspective a documentary film, but one that was never explicit in its proposal for change. Jones writes: ‘The film itself presents no answer, and this absence left a number of reviewers, evidently accustomed to the problem-solution structure common in the documentary, at a loss’ (2005: 23). The film’s ambivalence in relation to the specificity of solutions to the problems it portrays in part reflects Buñuel’s desire to let the spectators reach their own conclusions through contact with the work (ibid.). At the same time, the uncertain role of the problem-solution structure in
Los olvidados points to the complexity of competing aesthetic and political projects in the film. The problem-solution dynamic shares the screen here with less programmatic gestures, guided in part by Buñuel’s surrealist trajectory, and by Spanish literary influences, including the picaresque.
3Disability representation in
Los olvidados might at first appear to be limited to the depiction of just two characters, the above-mentioned blind (and cruel) don Carmelo, and a more minor character, the legless man who is attacked and robbed by a group of street children near the beginning of the film. These figures are in fact only part of the story, but as Agustín Sánchez Vidal suggests, their juxtaposed presence in the film links this work to Buñuel’s previous films such as
La edad de oro (
The Golden Age, 1930) and to Dalí’s text,
Vida secreta (
Secret Life, 1942) thus revealing the importance of both surrealism and Sadean tendencies in
Los olvidados.
4 From this perspective, the explicit violence surrounding the representation of these disabled characters becomes part of a distinctly surrealist moral universe. At the same time, when recreated in an urban, Mexican mid-century setting, the violence goes to work in new directions, in opposition to traditional Mexican filmic representations of local community values.
5 Viewers may read such scenes as part of an amoral universe, in Acevedo-Muñoz’s terms, or as one aspect of a social critique of injustice. The representation of disability appears at the centre of the film’s ambivalence here, whether the disabled character is a victim – as in the case of the attack on the legless man – or a perpetrator – as when don Carmelo inflicts physical or verbal abuse on children.
‘Los cuerpos rotos son caros a Buñuel’ (‘Buñuel is fond of broken bodies’) writes Julia Tuñón (2003: 138), with reference to the classic eye-cutting scene in
Un chien andalou (1929) as well as to ‘enfermedades y mutilaciones’ (‘illnesses and mutilations’) throughout the rest of his work (2003: 139). Henri-Jacques Stiker, for his part, also notes the prevalence of ‘boiteux, nains, sourds et surtout aveugles’ (‘cripples, dwarfs, deaf people, and especially blind people’) in Buñuel’s films (2007: 16). For Stiker, one of very few critics to address disability explicitly in Buñuel, disabled characters in films such as
La edad de oro, Viridiana (1961) and
La voie lactée (
The Milky Way, 1969) as well as in
Los olvidados, tend to represent social ills. But in addition, in Stiker’s view, the films suggest that such ills, like the disabilities offered as their metaphors, have no solution; rehabilitation thus does not figure in Buñuel’s cinema of disability.
6 This second observation regarding the absence of a solution aligns with the above-mentioned link between disability representation and the director’s surrealist tendencies.
A more complete picture of the role of disability in
Los olvidados emerges, however, when one extends beyond explicit corporeal impairments to consider the overall social field represented in the film. The ‘forgotten ones’ who define this field as modern, urban, poor and marginalised, are themselves victims of social inequality, and perhaps strangely, of the fact of being young. In this precarious setting, youth and childhood become markers of ongoing potential social ill, as representative of the growth of a poor, hence undesirable, population sector. Classic disability studies criticism has argued that, as in the case of explicitly represented physical disability, social ill in narrative is frequently destined for rehabilitation or erasure (see Davis 2002; Stiker 2007). It may also be explained in terms of a corporeal or genetic abnormality affecting a family or community lineage and emerging on and through the bodies of offspring.
7 In this way, social problems such as poverty, crime and domestic violence come to denote a temporal trajectory of disability as collective history and potential reproductive future, hence requiring intervention. While Buñuel’s depictions of physical disability, as suggested, generally avoid such a discourse of rehabilitation, a different pattern appears when the field of disability is broadened to include the context of social ill and social reform.
In the film’s opening credits, Buñuel includes thanks to several heads of state-sponsored agencies, including Dr. José Luis Patiño Rojas, psychiatrist and Director of the Clínica de la Conducta, founded in 1948 at the request of President Miguel Alemán (see Villaseñor Bayardo 2004: 335). In Sergio Javierĺ Villaseñor Bayardo’s account, Patiño Rojas briefly describes his work with ‘problem children’ or those who had difficulty studying, and his collaboration with Buñuel. Buñuel himself emphasises the various sources he researched for the film, including, ‘Juvenile Court…reports of…social workers…clinics for the retarded…reports on individual beggars’.
8 This seemingly eclectic combination of sources from which Buñuel drew his material offers useful perspective on varied categories of deviance or abnormality in mid-century Mexico, as well as the potential conflation of these categories. Buñuel’s interest in Patiño Rojas’s work at the Clínica de la Conducta, and in ‘problem children’ also points to a key link between
Los olvidados and the combined roles of healthcare and education in Mexico’s post-revolutionary period, particularly within the discipline of so-called psychopedagogy, a topic by which Buñuel actually claimed to be ‘inspired’ (Jones 2005: 22). The history of psycho-pedagogy in this period reveals complex interdependencies between notions of education, physical and mental health and hygiene, contributing to state-sponsored initiatives to classify and correct abnormality towards the goal of collective social improvement. Whether the thanks to Patiño Rojas may be read as a direct advocacy of state-sponsored social reform is a debatable point. Nonetheless, the connection does suggest that the social marginalisation of the young characters represented in
Los olvidados derives meaning from the concept of abnormality in circulation at the time. Such so-called abnormality was defined through a range of intersecting factors, including physical and psychological characteristics, academic performance, markers of ethnicity and economic status and histories of family illness, alcoholism and criminal records.
A 1954 text co-authored by Drs Alfonso Campos Artigas and Patiño Rojas documenting the work of the Clínica de la Conducta since its opening in 1948 provides relevant background on the notion of ‘problem children’ at the time, as well as insight into the role of psychopedagogy in defining the biological and social causes of categories of abnormality among the young Mexicans diagnosed at the clinic. The text describes the children according to classifications such as ‘débiles mentales’ (‘mental weaklings’), ‘psicóticos’ (‘psychotics’), ‘epilépticos’ (‘epileptics’), ‘neuróticos’ (‘neurotics’) and ‘sujetos que atraviesan etapas críticas transitorias, en quienes las variaciones psico-biológicas explican, en cierta forma, su pasajero desajuste con el medio ambiente que los circunda’ (‘subjects going through critical transitory stages, in whom psycho-biological variation explains, in a way, their temporary imbalance in relation to their surrounding environment’) (1954: 30). The authors return throughout the text to the role of the environment, noting, for example, ‘Conviene enfatizar que, aunque la debilidad mental es siempre orgánica, de origen, en alto número de casos la inadaptación infantil no es dada por ella misma, sino por el mal manejo psicopedagógico de tales menores’ (‘It is worth emphasising that although mental weakness is always organic in origin, in a large number of cases, the schoolchild’s maladjustment does not arise on its own, but because of the psychopedagogical mismanagement of such youth’) (Campos Artigas and Patiño Rojas 1954: 79). Buñuel would certainly have come across such theories in his research for the film; moreover, the medical specialists’ repeated insistence on a dynamic but uncertain relationship between ‘organic’ (or congenital) factors and environmental influence finds a clear echo in
Los olvidados, and in particular in the film’s multiple and ambivalent depictions of disability.
The Clínica de la Conducta was not the first of its kind, nor were the theories represented in the 1954 study new ones. The clinical work documented by Campos Artigas and Patiño Rojas appears within a post-revolutionary trajectory of national emphasis on the need to both measure and improve the characteristics of the Mexican population, especially through attention to children and youth. In this sense, Patiño Rojas’s clinic and the inspiration it provided for the creation of Los olvidados could be read as a critical culmination of decades of work, centred on the figure of the child as key to the definition, diagnosis and correction of individual and collective abnormality.
As an earlier example, one might consider Dr. Rafael Santamarina’s 1927 conference, presented at the second annual meeting of the International Association for the Protection of Infancy, in which the author discusses the concept of ‘educability’, and presents a graphic suggesting that a large percentage of Mexican school children fall outside its parameters. Santamarina’s notion of educability borrows from the work of Eugénie Monchamps and that of Georges Paul-Boncour, and is described as the tendency of the child to gradually begin to perform adult activities (1927a: 2). Santamarina’s graphic shows a scale of different groups of children in the Mexican context, based on their levels of educability. The vast majority are classified as ‘irregular’, though only a small group of these, tagged as ‘idiotas’ (‘idiots’) and some classes of ‘imbéciles’ (‘imbeciles’) are completely ‘ineducables’ (‘uneducable’). Levels of educability are further classified by causes, including psychic, physical, hereditary and social, and correspond to outcomes including apathy, maladjustment, weakness, blindness, deafness, lameness and poor life conditions, all of which negatively impact educability in varying degrees (1927b: n.p.). Curiously then, in this interpretation the less a child resembles an adult by beginning to behave like one, the more closely he corresponds to the overarching category of irregularity, which encompasses a range of disabilities and conditions, including poverty, and which in turn limit his ability to succeed in school. Inverting the analysis, one could also conclude that all of the disabilities and conditions included prevent the child from becoming like an adult, and hence from effectively reaching adulthood. In either case, the irregularity to which Santamarina refers is essential to childhood and childishness, and helps to define a separation between children and adults.
Insistence on the measurement and testing of children and on dissemination of statistical data was linked to goals of social reform and improvement of the population that would continue into the 1940s and beyond.
9 In this context the state – via the Ministry of Public Education – was mandated to address and remedy individual and collective pathology for the public good; and the public, in turn, was impelled to collaborate in the task, through hygiene and reproductive practices. The concept of mental hygiene, as well as theories of continuity and causality between physical and psychological abnormalities, perversion and immorality, also played an important role in the areas of public health and education, as evidenced in the 1937 formation of the National Institute of Psychopedagogy, which included a combined Servicio de Higiene Mental Escolar and Clínica de la Conducta. As Beatriz Urías Horcasitas notes, the same theories were brought to bear on the problem of crime, a connection of clear significance in considering Buñuel’s research for his film. Theories of criminal sociology in the early 1950s, for example, emphasised the importance of understanding the biological and psychological bases of criminal behaviour, the impact of the social environment in combination with inherited characteristics and the need to distinguish between combined and isolated categories of delinquency, laziness, mental illness and social parasitism (2007: 164–8).
The young characters at the centre of Los olvidados do not display, strictly speaking, the ‘broken bodies’ to which critics tend to refer when noticing the prevalence of visibly disabled people in so many of Buñuel’s films. Yet these characters depict disability in several other interrelated ways. They appear through interaction and symbolic association with the explicitly disabled don Carmelo, and with the unnamed, legless man, both of whom are victims of the youths’ assault in different scenes. In addition, their potential or realised criminal activities, including theft, assault and murder, link them to the previously mentioned sociological theories of degeneracy, mental illness and biopsychological disorder, available to Buñuel in his research into ‘problem children’ of the time. The leading figure and most violent member of the group is el Jaibo, who in one scene makes a brief reference to his childhood shaking attacks (‘temblores’), a probable allusion to epilepsy.
According to theories of eugenics, psychopedagogy and hygiene of the period, epilepsy was directly associated with delinquency. For example, a reference to epilepsy as cause of murder in a 1935 school hygiene text describes the condition as follows:
Aquel que tiene algo en su interior que quiere contener y no puede, aquel que no puede inhibirse, que cuando sufre algún choque no puede contener sus brazos y se va sobre el contrario y lo golpea, o aquel que en un momento dado o en un arranque de pasión no detiene sus brazos y da una puñalada no son otra cosa que grados diferentes.
(He who has something inside him that he wants to contain but can’t, he who cannot be inhibited, so that when he suffers some shock he can’t control his arms and hits his opponent, or he who at some point or in a sudden passion doesn’t restrain his arms and stabs someone, these are nothing but different degrees of the same thing.)
(Solís Quiroga 1935: 37)
10
Along the same lines, and within the logic of the film, el Jaibo’s violent actions and lack of moral constraint may therefore be interpreted as a direct result of this condition.
In two key scenes, the film connects disability to youth through violent interactions between the blind and aged don Carmelo and the marginalised children. The first case concerns Ojitos, a rural indigenous boy, abandoned by his father in the city, who comes to work as guide and assistant to don Carmelo, in exchange for limited and precarious food and housing, as well as frequent physical abuse. In the scene in question, after don Carmelo has punished Ojitos by pulling him off the ground by one ear, Ojitos picks up a concrete block and holds it in the air, as if about to hit the old man over the head with it. The boy resists his initial impulse and tosses the block to the ground. The effect of the sequence is heightened, inevitably, by don Carmelo’s blindness. The threat of the block in Ojitos’s raised hands suggests a visual pact between the younger character and the viewer, since don Carmelo is apparently not aware of the danger. This technique plays into the voyeuristic tendencies of the film, in letting the audience secretly witness both a potential, violent action before it unfolds, and the old man’s ignorance of what is about to take place. Yet when the block hits the ground, don Carmelo immediately responds to the sound by questioning what it was. His sarcastic repetition of Ojitos’ reply – ‘a rock that fell’ – informs the viewer that he is not so easily fooled. At the same moment, the camera shifts to focus on the knife in don Carmelo’s hands as he slices potatoes, thus transferring the violent potential from the heavy rock to an alternative and equally lethal instrument.
In a second instance, later in the film, Meche, a young girl and friend of Ojitos delivers donkey’s milk to don Carmelo, who pulls her onto his lap and comments on the nice smell of her hair. In reaction to this molestation, Meche lifts her skirt to retrieve a pair of scissors, which she holds as if about to stab the old man. She and Ojitos exchange glances and he gestures emphatically in favour of her obvious intention. As in the earlier sequence, blindness allows for a heightened intensity in the exchange; this time, the two children plot together silently, unbeknownst to don Carmelo, yet in addition, the viewer gains access to Meche’s sexualised body as she reveals her upper thighs while taking the scissors from the inner pocket of her skirt. At the same moment, don Carmelo laments his lack of eyesight which prevents him from seeing Meche. The scene thus repeats the voyeurism of the earlier one, though in this case positioning the viewer – via the camera – as both witness and substitute for don Carmelo’s paedophilic ‘gaze’.
Fig. 1: The blind don Carmelo is unaware of Ojitos’s threat to hit him with a concrete block. This scene underscores the reciprocally determined vulnerability of childhood and disability, as well as the instrumental relationship between disability and violence in the film.
Both scenes emphasise the mutual dependence of the blind man and the children, as well as their vulnerability to one another’s violent intentions. Unlike in the scenes of brutal assault and murder carried out by el Jaibo at other points in the film, here violence remains primarily at the level of gestured possibility, a threatening potential that may or may not be realised and therefore exerts ongoing control over its victims. The association between don Carmelo’s blindness, the specificity of which is crucial to the logic of the two scenes, and Ojitos’s and Meche’s youth, does suggest a metaphorical link between disability and childhood. Yet interactions in these scenes reveal a relationship that might be better described as metonymic, based not simply on one form of bodily vulnerability as symbolic substitute for another, but also on physical proximity that produces an ongoing displacement of intention and meaning between bodies. The violent gestures displayed by both don Carmelo and the children necessarily build on one another, through a web of vulnerability and defence of personal interests, in which it becomes difficult to distinguish clearly between cause and effect, perpetrator and victim, and perhaps ultimately between violence produced through physical difference and through social conditions.
In the first scene, don Carmelo lifts Ojitos by the ear because he has just overheard him talking to someone, and wants to find out who it was. The passerby in question was el Jaibo, who moments earlier had threatened to kill Ojitos if he told anyone he had seen him. Earlier in the film, el Jaibo had beaten another boy (Julian) to death after hitting his head from behind with a rock. The image of Ojitos with the concrete block raised as a weapon thus links a prior scene of violence to the present one, not only by suggesting that one act of violence tends to lead to another, but also by extending a sense of physical continuity between the characters and objects featured in these scenes. In the earlier scene, el Jaibo conceals the rock that he plans to use as a weapon by placing it in a sling that he wraps around his arm, feigning an injury. This false temporary impairment creates an effective hiding place for a weapon, while at once effectively disarming el Jaibo’s victim, who refuses to initiate a fight with a seemingly injured person. The false injury thus occupies the site of the weapon it hides, but in the process also becomes a weapon itself. Interestingly, el Jaibo ‘borrows’ the cloth for his sling from another boy, who had been wearing it around his neck because of a cough. In this way, the cloth as object creates continuity between scenes, marking physical vulnerability through a clever shift between the functions of protection and violent deception.
Fig. 2: El Jaibo uses a sling on his arm both to feign an injury and to conceal the rock with which he plans to attack Julian. As in
figure 1, invisibility is the key feature of the weapon. Disability, a false injury in this case, again becomes inseparable from the gesture of violence.
When Ojitos raises the concrete block as if to strike don Carmelo, the old man’s blindness serves the same purpose as el Jaibo’s sling from the earlier scene, for in each case the potential victim cannot see the weapon held by the aggressor. Violence, whether proposed as a gesture or consummated through an attack, serves to create an associative link between bodies, and between violent action and impairments or vulnerabilities. This is not only because, in an obvious sense, violence damages bodies, but more importantly because such actions depend on a fluid and repeating continuity between violence and corporeal difference.
These scenes of metonymic association between youth as a social problem and explicit physical disability thus demonstrate the film’s insistence on the complex intertwining of a discourse of social reform and a surrealism-inflected aesthetics of corporeal difference as violence. Youth is figured here as delinquency or vulnerability, through characters such as el Jaibo, Ojitos and Meche, while the blind and cruel don Carmelo is the primary representative of explicit physical disability. The visual continuity between these characters in their violent interactions suggests a language of disability that cannot be restricted to an individual body or ideology, but instead circulates and reveals itself as central to both Buñuel’s larger cinematic project and to the Mexican crisis of revolutionary modernity that the director encountered and fundamentally shaped.
NOTES
FILMOGRAPHY
Buñuel, Luis (dir) (1950) Los olvidados (The Young and the Damned). 80 minutes. Ultramar Films. Mexico.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Acevedo-Muñoz, Ernesto (2003) Buñuel and Mexico: The Crisis of National Cinema. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Campos Artigas, Alfonso and José Luis Patiño Rojas (1954)
La clínica de conducta y el niño problema. Mexico: Secretaría de Educación Pública.
Davis, Lennard J. (2002) Bending Over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism and Other Difficult Positions. New York, NY: New York University Press.
Norden, Martin F. (1994) The Cinema of Isolation: A History of Physical Disability in the Movies. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Rivera Garza, Cristina (2006) Nadie me verá llorar. Mexico: Tusquets.
Sánchez Vidal, Agustín (2004) Los olvidados: una película de Luis Buñuel. Mexico, D.F.: Fundación Televisa.
Santamarina, Rafael (1927a) ‘La cuestión de los anormales’. MS. Fondo Secretaría de Educación Pública, Departamento de Psicopedagogía e Higiene. Archivo General de la Nación. Mexico, D.F.
——— (1927b) ‘Clasificación del Dr. Santamarina’. MS. Fondo Secretaría de Educación Pública, Departamento de Psicopedagogía e Higiene. Archivo General de la Nación. Mexico, D.F.
Solís Quiroga, Roberto (1935) ‘El alcoholismo como causa de deficiencia mental. Especial para el nacional’. MS. Fondo Secretaría de Educación Pública, Departamento de Psicopedagogía e Higiene. Archivo General de la Nación. Mexico, D.F.
Urías Horcasitas, Beatriz (2007)
Historias secretas del racismo en México (1920–1950). Mexico: Tusquets.
Villaseñor Bayardo, Sergio Javier (2004) Voces de la psiquiatría. Los precursores. Guadalajara: Universidad de Guadalajara/Centro Universitario de Ciencias de la Salud.