Otomi: Metabolism, Nutrition, and the Classification of Indigenous Populations in Mexico in the 1930’S

The “Problematic” Otomi: Metabolism, Nutrition, and the Classification of Indigenous Populations in Mexico in the 1930’s Joel Vargas-Domínguez National Autonomous University of Mexico In the 1930s the Otomi ethnic group in Mexico became the subject of a broad scientific research program involving their metabolic and nutritional assess- ment. International agendas and the assumptions of contemporary racial science coalesced in an effort to understand the causes of the “backwardness” of this group. The aim of this paper is to show how Mexican physiologists and French medical expeditioners imagined the Otomi people as a group that could provide knowledge considered to be instrumental for creating public health policies in Mexico in order to “improve” the standard of living of indigenous people. 1. Introduction In post-Revolutionary Mexico, the Indian was conceptualized as a problem that needed to be solved. Indians were believed to be weighing down the nation and thought to constitute an obstacle for fulfilling its promised modern future (Bartra 1974). Thus, the scientific study of indigenous peo- ples in Mexico became, in the 1930s, a focus of anthropologists, physicians, and other experts, who sought to learn more about indigenous populations in order to solve this “problem.” In this paper I explore how this “problem-solving” was practiced, how and why particular groups of people were used as subjects of inquiry and intervention, how they were selected, and how they enabled the production of knowledge deemed useful to the state for improving the living conditions of these groups, in resonance with national and international public health goals. Importantly, despite the sizable literature focusing on the construction of Indians as problematic, less attention has been paid to the actual practices Perspectives on Science 2017, vol. 25, no. 5 © 2017 by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology doi:10.1162/POSC_a_00254 564 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/POSC_a_00254 by guest on 02 October 2021 Perspectives on Science 565 deployed to study them.1 This paper focuses on scientific practice—specifically, how materiality and practices are essential to the construction of knowledge (Hacking 1983; Pickering 1995, etc.). In doing so, I follow the approach of Cházaro ([2000] [2001]) and Suárez-Díaz (2014), who have explored how particular indigenous populations were mobilized to pro- duce scientific knowledge, how anthropological and medical knowledge was obtained from them, and how they were measured, quantified, trans- ported, and experimented upon. In addition, three recent studies are particularly relevant to my narra- tive. First, Pohl-Valero (2015) has pointed to ways in which physiology emerges as the intersection of local and global interests, recognizing the role of practices and instruments in the construction of a standardized physiology at the turn of the twentieth century. Second, Braun (2014) has shown how standardization and instruments can obscure knowledge about human variation, demonstrating that “race became a key organizing principle of spirometry in dialogue with other categories of difference— including occupation, social class, gender, and disability—whose cultural salience changed over time and place” (Braun 2014, p. xxiii).2 And finally, I build on the work of a recent volume edited by Dyck and Stewart (2016) that emphasizes the uses of humans in experiments, exploring how humans have become both the subject and objects of experiments and knowledge production. They argue that the subject of the experiment is as important as the researcher in the production of scientific knowledge. Within this volume, the work of Neswald (2016) is particularly relevant to my narra- tive, as she has shown that “successful” experiments in the physiology of nutrition and metabolism require ample cooperation and collaboration from the subject. Following this recent literature, I trace the practices employed in the selection, manipulation, and study of populations connected with broader 1. There is a growing literature addressing the concepts and discourse of Mexican elites of this period, from Vasconcelos’ La Raza Cósmica to Manuel Gamio’s Forjando Patria. This historiography has largely focused on the elites and their conceptual change (Knight 1990; Walsh 2004; Mijangos Díaz and Martínez Villa 2008; Araujo 2015). Also, research has focused on the creation and implementation of population policies in Mexico, which cen- tered on improving the social body, through the deployment of tools ranging from a focus on mental health (Suárez y López-Guazo and Ruiz Gutiérrez [2000] 2001; Urías Horcasitas 2007) to linguistic and cultural integration (Mijangos Díaz and López Torres 2011), to efforts in Mexico to control the reproduction of the unfit (Minna Stern 2011). Additional analyses have focused on “soft eugenics” and medical approaches to “improve” the indigenous body (Stepan 1991; Suárez y López-Guazo and Ruiz Gutiérrez [2000] 2001). 2. A similar approach has been taken by Vargas-Domínguez (2015, vol. 13) to show that instruments used to measure metabolism were also employed to differentiate populations in the 1920’s along racial lines. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/POSC_a_00254 by guest on 02 October 2021 566 The “Problematic” Otomi social interests to solve the “Indian problem.” By focusing on metabolic research of the Otomi in the Mezquital Valley in 1936, I show how physiology was used as a scientific reinforcement of previous ideas and assumptions about the Indian as different (as compared to the mestizo majority) and, specifically, “backwards.” The Otomi were crucial to the production not only of scientific knowledge about their own physiological character- istics, but also to the early institutionalization of indigenista policies. Their geographic proximity, I argue, facilitated their study by physicians based in Mexico City and central Mexico, and was a key reason why this population was mobilized in this kind of research. Moreover, through this case, I also bring to the fore the fact that the research agendas of local scientists became entangled with a global pursuit of “primitive” subjects of inquiry, which rendered the Otomi worthy of experimentation. A note on population-making is in order here. Hacking has argued that “classification and judgment are seldom separable. Racial classification is evaluation” (Hacking 2005, p. 109). I am not going to historicize the Otomi as a racial category, but I will show how the actors involved in this story relied on this category, and how purportedly neutral physiological data were incorporated into an already existing racial/ethnic classification. I argue through this historical case study that the Otomi population acquired a new physiological dimension—and thus an evaluation of its virtues and anomalies—that reformulated some of the meanings of being Otomi. In “Making Up People,” Hacking argues that “kinds” emerge with their classification (Hacking 2002). For Hacking two vectors are involved in creating the “other”: the “community of experts” who label their subjects of inquiry, and the “person labeled.” I note that while both vectors are without a doubt critical for understanding the Otomi, the historical resources available have silenced the Otomi voices of the 1930s, in an ex- ample of the asymmetries of power extant in this case of production of scientific knowledge. While we may hear whispers of these subjects of experimentation by studying the way they were part of this scientific research, reconstructing completely those silenced voices escapes the reach of this paper. Acknowledging this omission, this paper will focus mainly on the “community of experts” and on how they understood, described, and experimented on the Otomi people. 2. Thinking the Otomi as a Problem The analysis of the health, educational, and economic problem of the Indians in Mexico was an important part of Lázaro Cárdenas’ presidential agenda in the decades after the social Revolution (1934–1940). Several government secretariats during Cárdenas’ tenure focused on attending to the problematic situation of the indigenous populations. The Otomi Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/POSC_a_00254 by guest on 02 October 2021 Perspectives on Science 567 population was considered to offer a set of advantages as a group through which to address these issues, not the least of which was the fact that they lived in the Mezquital Valley, in Central Mexico. The Mezquital Valley was located in a key position, 150 km to the northeast of Mexico City, a place that was—and still is—the heart of the scientific establishment of the country. Centralization was thus a key operational criterion for selecting this group as a subject for experimentation: scientists working in the main scientific institutions in Mexico City could visit the Mezquital Valley, con- duct their research in situ, and return to Mexico City to elaborate on their findings within a single day. The region’s main municipality, Ixmiquilpan, in the state of Hidalgo, had a little more than 16,000 inhabitants in 1930, all of them living in rural conditions in small villages in what is called the Mezquital area (Secretaría de la Economía Nacional, Dirección General de Estadística 1930). Moreover, the Otomi showed “problems” associated with poverty, the result of a long history of land exploitation going back to the colonial period (Melville 1994). Most of the population of that area had been traditionally characterized as indigenous, and the Cárdenas administration expected the Mezquital area to serve as a model of how to solve the problems of the rest of the Mexican indigenous populations (Siurob 1936, p. 32). The institutional approach to solving the Indian problem, which only later (in the late 1940s) would be called Indigenismo, was still being configured in 1936, and the Otomi population became a crucial part of the first institutional approaches to create and implement public policies directed towards the Indian problem.3 Part of the solution to the problem was the introduction of education and health services to the area.

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