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Monstrous Births and Creole Patriotism in Late Colonial Mexico

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2015

Nora E. Jaffary
Nora E. Jaffary*
Affiliation:
Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec
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Extract

On February 8, 1785, the Gazeta de Mxico, one of New Spain's first news periodicals, published an announcement from the city of Guanajuato celebrating the recent birth of a pair of conjoined twins:

Doa Rafaela Cortshas delivered two children from one birth, joined together at the back of their heads by the skull. They received the holy waters of baptism and were christened Joseph Nepomuceno Guadalupe and Joseph Ignacio Guadalupe Many people, admiring these rare effects of nature, have visited them, and there has been no record in these twins of any deformity or defect in their separate and agile bodies The few doctors and surgeons residing in the city have considered separating them, but have not found it advisable because of the manner in which they are united, and every day more news circulates about their existence and longevity, causing ever more admiration for them given that the first one was born foot-first, and in delivering him, the midwife discovered the knot that joined the two heads.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Americas , Volume 68 , Issue 2 , October 2011 , pp. 179 - 207
Copyright
Copyright © Academy of American Franciscan History 2011 

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References

The Fonds Qubcois de la recherche sur la socit et la culture Nouveaux Chercheurs program provided funding for this research. All translations from Spanish are my own. Thanks to The America two anonymous readers and its editorial board for their useful input as well as to Edward Osowski, Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert, Christian Bcrco, Shannon McSheffrey, Jordi Montblanch, and Emma Park. Meg Leitold diligently scoured Gazeta microfilms to ensure I had missed no monsters.

1. Gazeta de Mexico, Tom, I, nm. 33 (March 22, 1785), p. 267.Google Scholar

2. The topic of monstrous births has been largely untouched in the context of colonial Latin America, although it is one Martha Few addresses in her current research on Guatemala. See her Atlantic World Monsters: Monstrous Births and the Politics of Pregnancy in Colonial Guatemala in Gender and Religion in the Atlantic World (1600-1800), Vollendorf, Lisa and Dana, Kostroun, eds. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), pp. 205–222 Google Scholar and That Monster of Nature: Gender, Sexuality, and the Medicalization of a Hermaphrodite in Late Colonial Guatemala, Ethnobistory 54:1 (Winter 2007), pp. 159–176. Announcements of unusual births in Mexican papers are briefly treated in Virginia Guedea, La medicina en las gacetas de Mxico, Mexican Studies/Estudios mexicanos 5:2 (Summer 1989), pp. 175–199 and Ann Drwall Adank, Patricia, Accommodation and Innovation: The Gazeta de Mxico, 1784–1810 (Ph.D. diss., Arizona State University, 1980), pp. 222–230, 240–247.Google Scholar

3. For discussions of creole patriotism and the generation of narratives of Mexican history, see Flores-cano, Enrique, National Narratives in Mexico: A History (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006), pp. 220–260 Google Scholar and Caizares-Esguerra, Jorge, The Making of a Patriotic Epistemology, in How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001 ), pp. 204–265.Google Scholar On the issue of colonial science and creole patriotism, see Caizares-Esguerra, Jorge, New World, New Stars: Patriotic Astrology and the Invention of Indian and Creole Bodies in Colonial Spanish America, 1600–1650, American Historical Review 104:1 (February 1999), pp. 33–68 CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Cowie, Helen, Peripheral Vision: Science and Creole Patriotism in Eighteenth-Century Spanish America, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 40 (2009), pp. 143–155.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

4. For further discussion of this issue, see Blum, Anne S. et al., Women, Ethnicity, and Medical Authority: Historical Perspectives on Reproductive Health in Latin America, working papers (San Diego: University of San Diego, 2004). http://escholarship.org/uc/item/8q4485r0.Google Scholar Last accessed July 20, 2011.

5. Marley, David, Introduccin, Gazeta de Mexico (January-August 1784), facsimile edition (Mexico: Rol-ston-Bain, 1983), p. 4.Google Scholar

6. Tavera Alfaro, Xavier, Documentos para la historia del periodismo mexicano, siglo XVIII, in Estudios histricos americanos (Mexico: El Colegio de Mxico, 1953), p. 340.Google Scholar Tavera has collected here a number of sources treating the periodical found in the Archivo General de la Nacin, Mexico (hereafter AGNM), Historia, v. 399.

7. Adank, Drwall, Accommodation and Innovation, p. 135.Google Scholar

8. Marley, , Introduccin, p. 2.Google Scholar

9. Alfaro, Tavcra, Documentos para la historia del periodismo mexicano, p. 331.Google Scholar

10. Quoted in Maria del Carmen Ruiz Castaeda, La tercera gaceta de la Nueva Espaa, Gazna de Mxico (1784-1809), Boletn del Instituto de Investigaciones Bibliogrficas (July-December 1971), p. 142.

11. Castaeda, Ruiz, La tercera gaceta de la Nueva Espaa, p. 144.Google Scholar

12. Adank, Drwall, Accommodation and Innovation, pp. 158–160.Google Scholar

13. Gazeta de Mxico, Tom. I, nm. 3, (February 11, 1784), p. 20.

14. Gazeta de Mxico, Tom. I, nm. 43 (October 23, 1787), p. 417.

15. Gazeta de Mxico, Tom. I, nm. 4 (February 25, 1784), p. 28.

16. Gazeta de Mxico,Tom. Ill, nm. 26 (February 24, 1789), p. 253.

17. Adank, Drwall, Accommodation and Innovation, p. 96.Google Scholar

18. Ibid., p. 166.

19. Samayoa, Marianne B., More than Quacks: Seeking Medical Care in Late Colonial New Spain, Social History of Medicine 19:1 (2006), p. 8;CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed Guedea, La medicina en las gacetas de Mexico, p. 197.

20. Adank, Drwall, Accommodation and Innovation, pp. 100, 136.Google Scholar

21. See Guedea, La medicina en las gacetas de Mexico and Cowie, Peripheral Vision.

22. Jaffary, Sec Nora E., Edward, VV. Osowski, , and Porter, Susie S., Mexican History: A Primary Source Reader, (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2010), pp. 185–187.Google Scholar On the Catholic foundations of the Mexican Enlightenment, see Vockel, Pamela, Alone Before God: The Religious Origins of Modernity in Mexico (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002).Google Scholar

23. For a recent discussion of the promulgation of Guadalupe as patriotic symbol, see Florescano, Enrique, Imgenes de la patria a travs de los siglos (Mexico: Taurus, 2005), pp. 71–98.Google Scholar See also Poole, Stafford, Our Lady of Guadalupe: Tiie Origins and Sources of a Mexican National Symbol, 1531–1797 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996)Google Scholar and Brading, D.A., Mexican Phoenix: Our Lady of Guadalupe: Image and Tradition across Five Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).Google Scholar

24. Greer, Alan and Bilinkofif, Jodi, Colonial Saints: Discovering the Holy in the Americas (New York: Routledgc, 2003), pp. 17–18;Google Scholar Myers, Kathleen, Redeemer of America: Rosa de Lima (1586-1617), The Dynamics of Identity, and Canonization, in Greer and Blinkoff, Colonial Saints, pp. 251,Google Scholar 259, 272; and Taylor, William B., Mexicos Virgin of Guadalupe in New Spain: An Inquiry into the Social History of Marian Devotion, American Ethnologist 14(1987), p. 281.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

25. Antonio Rubial Garca, Tierra de prodigios: Lo maravilloso cristiano en la Nueva Espaa de los siglos XVI y XVII, in Siguat, Nelly, ed., La Iglesia Catlica en Mxico (Zamora, Michoacn: El Colegio de Michoacn, 1997), p. 263.Google Scholar For further discussion of this issue, see Garcas, Rubial La santidad controvertida: hagiografa y conciencia criolla alrededor de los venerables no canonizados de Nueva Espaa. (Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autnoma de Mxico, 1999).Google Scholar

26. Caizares-Esguerra, Jorge, Nature, Empire, and Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), pp. 46–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

27. Cited in Caizares-Esguerra, , Nature, Empire, and Nation, p. 54.Google Scholar

28. Caizares-Esguerra, , Nature, Empire, and Nation, p. 55.Google Scholar

29. Brading, David, The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal State, 1492-1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 275, 440.Google Scholar

30. Gazeta de Mexico, Tom. 1, nm. 2 (January 28, 1784), pp. 12–13.

31. See Voekcl, Alone Before God.

32. Voekcl, , Alone Before God, pp. 67–71;Google Scholar Larkin, Brian, The Very Nature of God: Baroque Catholicism and Religious Reform in Mexico City (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2010).Google Scholar

33. For further discussion, see Osowski, Edward W., Indigenous Miracles: Nabua Authority in Colonial Mexico, (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2010), pp. 193–194.Google Scholar

34. On the history of obstetrics in Mexico, see Len, Nicolas, La obstetricia en Mxico. Notas, bibliogrficas, tnicas, histricas, documentaras y criticas de los orgenes histricos hasta el ao 1910, (Mexico: Tip. de la vda. de F. Daz de Len, 1910);Google Scholar on Bourbon-era transformations in Mexican medicine, see Hernndez, Luz Mara, Learning to Heal: The Medical Profession in Colonial Mexico, 1767-1831 (New York: Peter Lang, 1997) and Voekel, Alone Before God, pp. 170–189.Google Scholar

35. Caizares-Esguerra, , How to Write the History of the New World, pp. 305–320.Google Scholar

36. Caizares-Esguerra, , Nature, Empire, and Nation, pp. 62–63.Google Scholar

37. Click, Thomas F., Science and Independence in Latin America (With Special Reference to New Granada), Hispanic American Historical Review 71 (1991), p. 332.Google Scholar

38. The mortality rates in these unusual births were high. Announcements were generally published a few weeks after the births; at the time of publication, offspring were surviving in 13 out of 24 instances of multiple births and only three out of the 20 monstrous births.

39. Gazeta de Mxico, Tom. V, nm. 74 (December 30, 1793), pp. 709–710.

40. Premo, Bianca, Children of the father King: Touth, Authority, and Legal Minority in Colonial Lima, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), pp. 99–100.Google Scholar

41. Reproduced in Con la sangre de todo un dios. La caridad del sacerdote para con los nios encerrados en el vientre de sus madres difuntas , Relaciones24:94 (Spring 2003), pp. 201–248.

42. Segura, Ignacio, Avisos saludables a las parteras para el cumplimiento de su obligacin, (Mexico: D. Felipe de Zuiga y Ontiveros, 1775), p. 8.Google Scholar

43. On medieval associations of monstrosity and the devil, see Bovey, Alixe, Monsters and Grotesques in Medieval Manuscripts (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002).Google Scholar

43. Gruzinsky, Serge and MacLean, Heather, Images at War: Mexico From Columbus to Blade Runner (1492-2019), (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001), p. 165.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

44. Few, Adantic World Monsters, p. 211.

46. Few, Monster of Nature, pp. 170–171.

47. Knoppcrs, Laura Lunger and Landes, Joan B., eds., Introduction, Monstrous Bodies/Political Monstrosities in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), p. 8.Google Scholar

48. Crawford, Julie, Marvelous Protestantism: Monstrous Births in Post-Reformation England (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), p. 9.Google Scholar

49. Spinks, Jennifer, Wondrous Monsters: Representing Conjoined Twins in Early Sixteenth-Century German Broadsheets, Parergon 22:2 (2005), p. 81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For similar characterizations, see Brammall, Kathryn M., Monstrous Metamorphosis: Nature, Morality, and the Rhetoric of Monstrosity in Tudor England, Sixteenth Century Journal 27:1 (1996), pp. 3–21.Google Scholar

50. Daston, Lorraine and Park, Katharine, Wonders and the Order of Nature 1150-1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998), pp. 175–190.Google Scholar

51. Burke, Peter, Frontiers of the Monstrous: Perceiving National Characters in Early Modern Europe, in Monstrous Bodies/Political Monstrosities, p. 28.Google Scholar

52. Burke, , Frontiers of the Monstrous, p. 37.Google Scholar

53. Maja-Lisa von Sneidern, Joined at the Hip: A Monster, Colonialism, and the Scriblerian Project, Eighteenth-Century Studies 30:3 (1997), p. 214.

54. Sneidern, Von, Joined at the Hip, p. 214.Google Scholar

55. Daston, and Park, , Wonders and the Order of Nature, pp. 190–201.Google Scholar

56. Ibid., pp. 13, 192; see also Daston, Lorraine and Park, Katharine, lUnnatural Conceptions: The Study of Monsters in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century France and England, Past and Present 92 (August, 1981), p. 23.Google Scholar

57. Adank, Drwall, Accommodation and Innovation, pp. 222–223, 240-241.Google Scholar

58. bid., p. 241.

59. AGNM, General de Parte 1799 v. 76 exp. 208, 153. This is possibly the same monstrous child as the one discussed below and pictured in Figure 4; the bodys construction is the same, and the geographic and temporal context could apply to both cases. The boys father in the earlier Gazeta notice is recorded as Antonio Ramn.

60. Daston, and Park, , Wonders and the Order of Nature, pp. 201–209.Google Scholar

61. Ledere, Georges Louis, Buffon, comte de, Natural History, General and Particular, by the Count de Buffon, translated into English. With occasional notes and observations by the translator. Vol. 2. of 9 vols. (Edinburgh: printed for William Creech, 1780–1785), p. 416.Google Scholar Eighteenth-Century Collections Online, . Last accessed February 22, 2007.

62. Daston, and Park, , Wonders and the Order of Nature, p. 172.Google Scholar Similar observations are included in Stephen Pender, No Monsters at the Resurrection: Inside Some Conjoined Twins, in Monster Theory: Reading Culture, Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).Google Scholar

63. For example, the 1780 dictionary Diccionario de la lengua castellana compuesto por la Real Academia Espaola defines monster as something produced against nature, but also as anything excessively large or extraor-dinary in any tine.

64. Gazeta de Mxico, Tom. I, nm. 30 (February 8, 1785), p. 241.

65. Gazeta de Mxico, Tom. I, nm. 4 (February 25, 1784), p. 28.

66. Gazeta de Mxico, Tom. I, nm. 39 (July 12, 1785), p. 349. A similar announcement originating in Chi-lapa ran a few months later in the Gazeta de Mxico, Tom. I, nm. 51 (November 22, 1785), p. 441.

67. There is a community called Santa Catarina Quiane just south of Oaxaca City. Penelope Orozco Snchez, the curator of the Biblioteca Francisco de Burgoas exhibits, informed me that the library has no means of further tracing the larger manuscript from which this page is extracted, or its author.

68. These multiple meanings are found in several eighteenth-century editions of the Diccionario de la lengua castellana published by the Real Academia.

69. Gazeta de Mxico, Tom. I, nm. 30 (February 8, 1785), p. 267.

70. Gazeta de Mxico, Tom. Ill, nm. 31 (May 19, 1789), p. 306.

71. Gazeta de Mxico, Tom. V, nm. 74 (December 30, 1793), pp. 709–710.

72. Gazeta de Mxico, Tom. VI, nm. 86 (December 23, 1794), p. 709.

73. Besides the perfectly formed and organized infant body described above, the Gazeta also reported the birth of a girl born with only one eye, all of whose members were perfect and compiete bciow the neck. Gazeta de Mxico, Tom. XI, nm. 16 (August 18, 1802), p. 121. A baby born with a monstrous face and several other irregularities nevertheless possessed a perfect right arm. Gazeta de Mxico, Tom. I, nm. 23 (November 17,1784), p. 185. A 1787 notice described an eight-year-old boy born without arms and only one leg who managed to move about with the most perfection. Gazeta de Mxico, Tom. II, nm. 37 (June 19, 1787), p. 370. Two similar sets of fetuses arc similarly described in Gazeta de Mxico, Tom. II, nm. 40 (August 21, 1787), p. 395 and Tomo III, nm. 10 (June 17, 1788), p. 74. Martha Few found a similar case of conjoined twins born with two distinctly perfect bodies, despite their possession of three legs in Guatemala in 1675. Few, Atlantic World Monsters, p. 213.

74. Gazeta de Mxico, Tom. XI, num. 45 (September 28, 1803), p. 365.

75. Gazeta He Mxico, Tom. VI, nm. 71 (November 13, 1794), p. 638.

76. Gazeta de Mxico, Tom. II, nm. 13 (July 11, 1786), p. 153.

77. Gazeta de Mxico, Tom. XIII, nm. 32 (April 19, 1806), p. 257.

78. Gazeta de Mxico, Tom. I, nm. 21 (October 20, 1784), p. 169.

79. Gazeta de Mxico, Tom. I, nm. 30 (February 8, 1785), p. 267.

80. Ibid.

81. Gazeta de Mxico, Tom. I, nm. 51 (November 22, 1785), p. 440.

82. Gazeta de Mxico, Tom. VI, nm. 77 (November 13, 1794), p. 638.

83. Gazeta de Mxico, Tom, V, nm. 74 (December 30, 1793), p. 709.Google Scholar Other medical procedures arc detailed in Gazeta de Mexico, Tom, V, num. 9 (May 8, 1792), p. 84;Google Scholar Tom, I, num. 33 (February 8, 1785), p. 267;Google Scholar Tom, I, num. 25 (April 19, 1785), p. 282;Google Scholar and Tom, V, num. 9 (May 8, 1792), p. 84.Google Scholar

84. Archivo General de Indias [hereafter AGI], MP-MEXICO, 420BIS/26-02-1789/Criatura deforme. New-Spains viceroy sent another similar notice to the king of Spain with an accompanying image in 1817. AGI, ESTADO, 31, . 57/31-05-1817. Martha Few discovered that the cadaver of the 1675 monstrous child was displayed in the homes of Santiagos elite citizens. Few, Atlantic World Monsters, p. 214.

85. AGI, Mapas y Planos, Filipinas, 105.

86. Premo, Children of the father King, 137.

87. AGI, Mexico, 1426.

88. David Bradings The First America is the standard treatment of creole patriotism.

89. For a discussion of the origins of the idea of American degeneration, see Ralph, Bauer and Mazzotti, Jos Antonio, Introduction: Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas, in Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas: Empires, Texts, Identities, Bauer, Ralph and Mazzotti, Jos Antonio, eds. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), pp. 1–57.Google Scholar For a discussion of emergent seventeenth-century creole nationalism in the Peruvian context, see Mazzotti, Jose Antonio, El Dorado, Paradise, and Supreme Sanctity in Seventeenth-Century Peru, in Creole Subjects, pp. 407–411.Google Scholar

90. Quoted in Brading, The First America, p. 429.

91. Creole patriotism in historical writings is dealt with by Florescano in National Narratives in Mexico and by Caizares-Esguerra, in The Making of a Patriotic Epistemology. On creole patriotism and scientific writing, see Caizares-Esguerra, , New World, New Stars; David, Goodman, Science, Medicine, and Technology in Colonial Spanish America: New Interpretations, New Approaches, in Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, 1500–1800, Daniela, Bleichmar et al., eds. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), pp. 9–34; and Helen Cowie, Peripheral Vision.Google Scholar

92. Quoted in Brading, The First America, p. 429.

93. Brading, The First America, p. 430.

94. Leclerc, George Louis, comte de, Buffon, The Natural History of Animals, Vegetables, and Minerals; With the Theory of the Earth in General. Trans, from the French by W. Kenrick, L.L.D. and J. Murdoch., Vol. 1 of 6 vols. (London: T. Bell, 1775–1776), p. 270.Google Scholar Eighteenth-Century Collections Online, Gale Cengage Learning, . Last accessed February 22, 2007. The volume number and page cited here are for the original print edition, as scanned and posted at the website.

95. Ibid., pp. 275,286.

96. Gazeta de Mxico, (March 10, 1784), p. 45.

97. Maja-Lisa von Sncidcrn addresses the history of their reception in Joined at the Hip, pp. 213-231.

98. Gazeta de Mxico, (December 30, 1793), p. 710.

99. The Gazeta again held up New Spains ability to produce exceptional fetuses to that of Europe in a 1786 announcement that likened a girl born in Guanajuato with her heart outside her body to the boy who the celebrated physician Martn Martinez in the Imperial Court of Madrid observed in the year 1706. Gazeta de Mxico, (June 27, 1786).

100. Clavijero, Francisco Javier, Historia antigua de Mxico (Mexico: Editorial Porra, 1991), p. 455.Google Scholar For further discussion of Clavijcros writings, see Brading, The First America, pp. 450—464.

101. Clavijero, , Historia antigua, p. 511.Google Scholar

102. Cowic, Peripheral Vision, p. 150; Adank, Drwall, Accommodation and Innovation, p. 208;Google Scholar and Goodman, , Science, Medicine, and Technology, p. 27.Google Scholar For more extensive treatments of Alzate and his relationship to the notion of creole patriotism, see Fiona, Clark, Read All About It: Science, Translation, Adaptation, and Confrontation in the Gazeta de Literatura de Mexico, 1788-1795 Science in the Portuguese and Spanish Empires, 1500-1800, Daniela, Rlcichmar, Paula De, Vos, Huffine, Kristin et al., eds. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), pp. 147–177 Google Scholar and Caizares-Esquerra, Jorge, How to Write the History of the New World, pp. 281–300.Google Scholar