Monuments of Progress: Modernization and Public Health in Mexico City, 1876 –1910

Claudia Agostoni

Copublished with University Press of Colorado

$49.95 hc
$34.95 sc
Available Now
1-55238-094-7 hc
1-55238-103-X sc
248 pp.
5.5" x 8.5"
8 b/w illustrations
Latin American and Caribbean series, No. 4
ISSN 1498-2366

World rights, excluding U.S.A. and territories

Latin American Studies

About the Book

In this groundbreaking book, Agostoni examines modernization in Mexico City during the era of Porfirio Díaz. She outlines the relationship between “enlightened” ideals of orderliness and hygiene to Mexican initiatives in public health. The implementation of new health policies and programmes — such as the construction of a drainage system for the Valley of Mexico — were of utmost importance for the symbolic legitimation of Porfirio Díaz’s long-lasting regime (1876–1910), which emphasized modernization over individual rights and liberties. Thus, projects involving drastic engineering measures, authoritarian sanitary administration, and urban improvements were paramount in transforming the city into a health-giving environment.

Providing detailed analyses of the objectives and activities of the Superior Sanitation Council, and, in particular, the work of the sanitary inspectors, Monuments of Progress provides a fresh take on the history of medicine and public health by shifting away from the history of epidemic disease and heroic accounts of medical men to looking at public health in a broader social framework. Agostoni’s unique study builds on a small, but fast-growing, body of literature on the history of public health in Latin America and represents a growing interest in the social and cultural history of public health in this area.

“… a solid, interesting contribution to the history of Mexico by examining the quest for modernization through public health, engineering projects, and popular monuments.”
William H. Beezley, professor of history, University of Arizona

An Isis review of this book can be found here on page 186.

About the Author

Born in Mexico City, Claudia Agostoni earned her M.Phil. and Ph.D. in Latin American Cultural Studies from King’s College London, University of London. Her dissertation, on which this book is based, won the British-Mexican Society Postgraduate Prize for Best Thesis. She is currently a full-time researcher at the Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas, at Universidad Nácional Autónoma de México and lectures in Latin American colonial history.

Contents

Contents
List of Illustrations
List of Tables
Acknowledgments
Introduction

1
Urban Ideas and Projects for Mexico City: the Late Eighteenth Century
Urban Space and Public Health
The Unsanitary City
Viceroy Revillagigedo and Urban Sanitation

2
The Control of the Environment
The Community of Hygienists
The Contradictory Proofs of Progress and the City
Dangerous Elements
Elements of a Healthy City

3
The Expansion and Diagnosis of the City
The Expansion of the City
The Superior Sanitation Council and the Sanitary Code
The Memoirs of the Sanitary Inspectors
The Diagnoses of the City

4
The Modern City
Towards the Secular City
The Image of the Modern City
Monuments and the 1877 Decree
Cuauhtémoc
Ahuítzotl and Itzcóatl
Benito Juárez and Independence
Monumental Space and Cleanliness
Contents

5
The Conquest of Water
The Problem: Water
The Drainage System
The Sewage System
Hygiene in the Centennial Celebrations and the Porfirian Inheritance

Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Orders

For information on how to order this book, please click here.