La Castañeda Insane Asylum

La Castañeda Insane Asylum Narratives of Pain in Modern Mexico Cristina Rivera Garza Laura Kanost : Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Rivera Garza, Cristina, - author. Title: La Castañeda Insane Asylum: narratives of pain in modern Mexico / Cristina Rivera Garza; translated by Laura Kanost. Other titles: Castañeda. English Description: Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, [] | Series: Sustainable history monograph pilot | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “An inside view of the workings of La Castañeda General Insane Asylum—a public mental health institution founded in Mexico City in only months before the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution”— Provided by publisher. Identiers: LCCN (print) | LCCN (ebook) | ISBN (paperback ; alk. paper) | ISBN (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Manicomio General La Castañeda (Mexico City, Mexico)—History—th century—Sources. | Psychiatric hospital care—Mexico—Mexico City—History—th century— Sources. | Mentally ill—Institutional care—Mexico—Mexico City. | Mentally ill—Mexico—Mexico City—Interviews. Classication: LCC RC.M R (print) | LCC RC.M (ebook) | DDC ./ —dc LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/ LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/ Copyright © by the University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Publishing Division of the University. Manufactured in the U.S.A. This book is published as part of the Sustainable History Monograph Pilot. With the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Pilot uses cutting-edge publishing technology to produce open access digital editions of high-quality, peer-reviewed monographs from leading university presses. Free digital editions can be downloaded from: Books at JSTOR, EBSCO, Hathi Trust, Internet Archive, OAPEN, Project MUSE, and many other open repositories. While the digital edition is free to download, read, and share, the book is under copyright and covered by the following Creative Commons License: CC BY-NC-ND .. Please consult www.creativecommons.org if you have questions about your rights to reuse the material in this book. When you cite the book, please include the following URL for its Digital Object Identier (DOI): https://doi.org/./ We are eager to learn more about how you discovered this title and how you are using it. We hope you will spend a few minutes answering a couple of questions at this url: https://www.longleafservices.org/shmp-survey/ More information about the Sustainable History Monograph Pilot can be found at https://www.longleafservices.org. To Irg For John Dickerson (–) and Scott C. Murray John M. Hart, Thomas O’Brien, and Susan Kellogg Yolanda Garza Birdwell and Walter Birdwell — Cristina Rivera Garza For Danny J. Anderson — Laura Kanost Translator’s Note xiii A Preface in Five Vowels xvii Introduction Words in a Title La Castañeda General Insane Asylum, – Entryway: A Mental Health Routine The Psychiatric Interview: The Fox and the Goose Through My Narrative I Was Born, My Narrative Sustains Me: Women Authoring Selves Looking Insane The Pain of Becoming Modern: Suering and Redemption in the Medical Histories of La Castañeda Con-juring the Body: Making History and Fiction Introduction by Ileana Rodríguez Notes Bibliography Guests at the grand opening of the General Insane Asylum in Mixcoac, La Castañeda, ca. – La Castañeda, ca. – La Castañeda, ca. La Castañeda, ca. La Castañeda, ca. La Castañeda ca. La Castañeda, ca. La Castañeda, ca. La Castañeda, ca. – ’ Working across genres (historiography, criticism, narrative, poetry, translation, blogging, and social media), contemporary US-Mexico borderlands writer Cristina Rivera Garza accentuates absent presences through gures of revoicing and rewriting. In her research on the roles of patients, doctors, and authori- ties negotiating meanings of mental illness in early twentieth-century Mexico City, Rivera Garza frames doctor-patient interactions as a translation process: a self-translation of nonverbal experience into language to fashion personal sto- ries that are then translated into linear narrations and medical diagnoses. She seeks the traces of this negotiation in archived medical les: “the text is not just a collection of traces: it is a collection of traces and inscriptions in constant and perpetual competition.” Rivera Garza’s writing about this dynamic is itself a chain of translations: La Castañeda: Narrativas dolientes desde el Manicomio General, México, – () is a rewriting of her novel, Nadie me verá llorar (translated by An- drew Hurley as No One Will See Me Cry) and academic history essays drawing on the research for her dissertation, written in English. My English translation of La Castañeda consciously adds another layer to this palimpsest, a collection of constantly competing traces. Philosopher Walter Benjamin, a crucial reference point for Rivera Garza, described translation not as a reproduction of meaning but as a work’s a erlife, “a transformation and a renewal of something living” (The Task of the Translator, , p. , translated by Harry Zohn). In the works of Rivera Garza, there is an uneasy coexistence of that “something living” and its transformations: life and a erlife haunt each other. Writing about her approach to the archives of La Castañeda asylum, Cristina Rivera Garza imagines “interviewing” a text like an anthropological informant. Following this lead, to form my approach as a translator of her words, I listened for what her characters and narrators could tell me about what translation means within Rivera Garza’s writing. It is a narrative world of doubles, shi ing identi- ties, incomplete communication, writers and rewriters, lives and a erlives. Her works problematize language and self, in part by highlighting translation. The narrator of La cresta de Ilión (), translated by Sarah Booker as The Iliac xiii xiv Translator’s Note Crest, is furious to be unable to understand the language apparently spoken by only two female characters; their opaque communication holds the narrator in uncomfortable powerlessness. Non-translation is a tactic and also a quality of language. Intellectual detective novel La muerte me da ( ) asks not only “whodunit” but also: Who are these characters? What is the relationship of authors to their readers? Is writing a violent act? Is violence a sort of writing? And what is our role as readers in that dynamic? Early in the novel, as the female detective asks the character named Cristina Rivera Garza about one of the Alejandra Pizarnik poems le by a serial killer at a murder scene, the ctional Rivera Garza wonders, “How can I communicate to the Detective that the task of the poem is not to communicate, but just the opposite: to protect that space of the secret that resists any communication, any transmission, any attempt at translation?” [“¿Cómo comunicarle a la Detective que la tarea del poema no es comunicar sino, todo lo contrario, proteger ese lugar del secreto que se resiste a toda comunicación, a toda transmisión, a todo esfuerzo de traducción?” ( –)]. Translation, like communication through language in general, has limits. The murderer’s voice reects shortly therea er, “to be able to listen . it is always necessary to be a little bit outside of your own head. Out of your mind. In the end, you never know for sure exactly whose words they are” [“para poder escuchar [. .] siempre es necesario estar un poco fuera de uno. Fuera de Sí. [. .] A nal de cuentas uno nunca sabe a cierta ciencia de quién son las palabras” ( ).] Likewise, the protagonist of the story “La alienación también tiene su belleza,” from Ningún reloj cuenta esto (), translated by Sarah Booker as “There is also Beauty in Alienation,” is a young woman who moves to another city for a new job as a translator and becomes transformed into her own Other. To par- ticipate in translation, in reading, or communication in general, we enter into a play of voices and selves, lives and a erlives. In Rivera Garza’s ction, selves and writings coexist and interact, and silence is a part of communication. Within this context, Rivera Garza’s multi-genre body of work on the social history of La Castañeda insane asylum in early twentieth-century Mexico City is an extended meditation on how she wants to tell this particular story and to what extent it can be told, layering voices and accentuating silences, appropria- tions, and translations. In La Castañeda, Rivera Garza views the task of historians as a type of translation: “this process of translation (from the language of one time to that of another) is, in my opinion, the fundamental task that modern societies have entrusted to historians.” Furthermore, she sees individuals’ written accounts of their own experiences as translations themselves: “Marino García translated himself, rst for himself (if we accept that remembering is a Translator’s Note xv process that involves situating the past in the context of the present) and, still more fundamentally, for the medical resident, upon whose expert judgement his future depended.” Her writing about these histories/translations calls for a process-oriented ethnographic mode: “Something should happen in the real and true world, I insist, in the world of esh and blood citizens, when the texts of our memory take on the syntactical, cultural, political challenge of embodying the narrative strategies of the documents upon which they are based.” A translation following this mode would, in turn, strive to embody and make visible the strategies that form the source text and its translation. This physicality of narration shapes the opening image of La Castañeda. More than a transformation or an a erlife, La Castañeda is a living severed part of a body that is simultaneously Self and Other: You and I are in the presence of the strange case of a conjoined twin brother separated at birth from his double, his mirror image, his opposite. The other body. The sister (because novela is a feminine word) took her rst steps toward the end of , and from that point onward, never had the desire or inclination to look back.

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