The Medicalization of the Maya: Ethnicity, Culture and Morality in Postrevolutionary Yucatan

This presentation will examine how the medical establishment in Mérida and medical student brigades from the Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán interpreted the health conditions of rural Maya communities and prescribed solutions to the “Indian problem” in the 1930s and 1940s. In general, physicians identified Maya customs as the primary cause for the high incidence of endemic disease in rural Yucatán and suggested the modernization of Maya households through scientific domesticity and the moral reformation of the Maya family unit as the way to achieve rural development in the region. However, medical students trained in the postrevolutionary era simultaneously introduced social explanations for Maya degeneration that challenged the dominant cultural and ethnic frameworks of medical thought about indigenous health. Consequently, as Maya customs and mores became relevant subjects of medical inquiry among “revolutionary” doctors, medical students paved the way towards the rise of a social medicine that more directly heeded the call by President Lazáro Cardenas for the social uplift of campesinos.

This talk is co-sponsored by the Badash Speakers’ Series Fund

hm 10/4/09, 10/15