Gender, Sexuality, and the Spatialization of Medical Systems in Postwar Mexican Development, 1950-1970

• In Event: The construction of Biopolitics: Space and Representation in Mexico, Chile and Brazil

Abstract

In the context of postwar development projects to modernize health in rural Latin America, doctors and anthropologists predicted and worried about an inherent opposition between “modern” western biomedicine and “traditional” indigenous knowledge. Using records from the Instituto Nacional Indigenista in Chiapas, Mexico, I excavate how the gendered spatialization of care, not cultural attachments to “tradition,” actually raised significant tensions between state medicine and indigenous Mexicans. State medicine was characterized by a hierarchical network of clinics with semi-public waiting rooms and private and de-personalized examination rooms staffed almost exclusively by male doctors and medical auxiliaries. In different villages in the part of Chiapas served by the INI’s clinics, indigenous men and women received care most often in their own homes attended by a mixture of family and often more than one healer. Based on an analysis of clinic attendance records, anthropologist field notes, and internal INI correspondence, I highlight how the spatial differences between indigenous traditional medicine and state medicine meant that indigenous women were less likely to take advantage of state medical resources, but they also sought to make its resources accessible by calling on other women to act as witnesses and intermediaries in encounters with doctors as well as by seeking to modify the conditions of clinical care. This paper adds to our understanding of the medical aspects of development in addition to expanding our understanding of the links between gender, sexuality, and state public health in Latin America beyond the historiographical focus on urban areas.

Author

• Josh Mentanko