La historia visual del Manicomio General La Castañeda, 1910-1968

Identifier:  TDX:4486

Handle: https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11797/TDX4486

Authors:  Marines De Mária Campos, María Enriqueta

Abstract:
This research, from the methodology of visual history, performs an analysis of the images that circulated in the press of the General Insane Asylum La Castañeda, from its inauguration on September 1, 1910 until its closure on June 29, 1968. The visual and written sources will help to interpret the period to be studied from the viewpoint of documentary photography. To this end, we will focus on the construction of the image of madness and the change of visuality assigned to it over time, its function and social use as a historical and aesthetic document. We are talking about photographs that at the time disturbed the national conscience in important milestones of Mexican history. The corpus of photographs chosen begins with the foundations of the hospital, the symbolic presence of modernity, as well as the visuality of madness through the national discourse, addressing the fifty-eight years of existence of the asylum. In this way, it is intended to demonstrate that the asylum was the result of a period that excludes and judges otherness, marginalizing and excluding it from the discourse of official construction of national identity. At the same time and in parallel, we will see the construction of a knowledge-power from entering into madness from its protagonists. For all this, the discourse of this research will be presented through the narrative of photographic visuality. Then, at the beginning of the 20th century, photography will be used for identification and social control. All this will also lead us to question the idea of madness as a fatal destiny traced by biology, to begin to assume it as a social choice agreed upon by a marginalized society. From the image, La Castañeda offers us the possibility of approaching the daily life of the subjects who wandered through marginal spaces. We will do so, always through the eyes of the photographers described here.