Petitioning for Rural Healthcare in Twentieth-Century Oaxaca, Mexico

• In Event: Rural Healthcare

English Abstract

In the 1930s and 1940s, Indigenous empiric nurses, or those who learned through practice and experience, labored alongside medical students in the southern state of Oaxaca, Mexico. Medical students arrived in rural communities as part of federal efforts to address the uneven distribution of health services in urban and rural areas. Their reports often included tales of resistance from Indigenous healers and communities, largely in part because they were specifically asked to do so. However, municipal authorities actively sent solicitudes (requests) and denuncias (complaints) that document the ways that Indigenous communities actively petitioned for state-sponsored clinics, practitioners, medicine, vaccines, and supplies in mid-century Oaxaca. They selectively supported and engaged with the state’s rural health projects while making claims to health-based rights which continued to expand following the military phase of the revolution. To combat an overemphasis on conflict, this paper relies on medical theses, solicitudes, and denuncias found in state and municipal archives to understand how Indigenous nurses and communities responded to and produced new knowledge in the face of the state’s expanding rural health projects.

Author

• Marissa Nichols, Emory University