Stains of Blood

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

A Social History of Suicide in Mexico City, 1900–1930

Chapter 1 presents an overview of scientific politics and the drive to collect and record moral statistics. Extrapolating from the extant suicide inquests, the chapter also analyzes suicide by gender, time of day and year committed, method, and reasons professed by the victims.

The Modern Disease

Chapter 4 examines medical and forensic approaches to self-murder. Some Mexican scientists believed the causes of self-murder to be biological and environmental. Others followed Emile Durkheim's arguments and placed its roots squarely in the urban environment. The environment was the modern city—, its rapid work paces, its changing technology, and the increasing alienation of the individual from family, community, and religion. Newspapers advertised a myriad of tonics and medicines to cure neurasthenia and other causes of excessive nervousness. Class and gender played significant parts in the interpretation and judgments of suicides, and these narratives were acted out in the media and in, judicial, and medical discourse. The documentary base of this chapter includes contemporary the journals ofmedical schools journals, insane asylumthe intake questionnaires of insane asylums, case files of patients incarcerated in the asylums, and forensic-medicine publications.

Conclusion

The brief conclusion emphasizes the universality of Mexican attitudes and approaches to death. It refutes the suppositions of post-revolutionary Mexican intellectuals who theorized a unique Mexican character. Thinkers like Samuel Ramos and Octavio Paz—, and more recently, Claudio Lomnitz—have perpetuated a myth that Mexican society can be best defined by death. I wrap up the main arguments of the study of suicide to put to rest the idea that Mexicans possess a singular death cult.

From Corpse to Cadaver

This chapter travels the path of the suicide victim from live body to corpse to cadaver of the suicide victim. Some suicides undertook elaborate measures to prepare their bodies for death. Women, in particular, donned their finest clothing and coiffed their hair. A few of them were determined to leave behind an exquisite corpse. Reporters and medical investigators had the first access to corpses at the scenes of death. Next, police station officials transferred the corpse to the Hospital Juárez for autopsy, and it essentially became a cadaver for scientific inquiry. Finally it the corpsefound its resting place in one of the many modern cemeteries or ossuaries that skirted the city. The analysis draws on forensic reports, newspaper reportage, visual sources, and popular culture to examine the scopophilic gaze directed at the female body. Officials read the suicidal body like a text and imbued it with multiple meanings informed by gender and class ideologies.

Introduction

The introduction begins with a summary of various Mexican archetypes that have led to the notion that Mexicans possess a unique death cult and cavalier attitude toward dying. The study is situated in the historiography and a brief description of Mexico City on the cusp of the twentieth century is described.

Media, Moral Panic, and Youth Suicide

A review of multiple newspaper articles and editorials from the secular and Catholic press, broadsides of José Guadalupe Posada, suicide letters, literature, and poetry, examines the sociocultural meanings of suicide in Mexico to provide the documentary base for Chapter chapter 3. The discussion analyzes the multiple narratives derived from numerous social imaginaries that competed and sometimes cooperated to make sense of the perceived suicide epidemic that shook Mexican society. The agents of suicide—--those who succeeded and left a note behind, as well asand those who attempted but failed to self-destruct—--also interpreted their deaths in their own words. Fortunately for a researcher many years later, court officials investigated suicides to make sure they were not acts of homicide. They interviewed those who failed to kill themselves as they convalesced in hospitals or at home. Some claimed mental illness, but most sought the fatal escape because they had lost in love or had become estranged from loved ones. Others could not face the loss of their private and/or public honor and viewed death as a better alternative.

Death in the City

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