Historian Publishes Book on Suicide and Modernity in Mexico

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Kathryn Sloan

Kathryn Sloan, associate dean in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences, has published a cultural and social history of suicide in early 20th century Mexico with the University of California Press.

Death in the City: Suicide and the Social Imaginary in Modern Mexico is one of the few books that examine suicide in Latin American history.

At the turn of the twentieth century, many observers considered suicide to be a worldwide social problem that had reached epidemic proportions. Marshaling suicide inquests, goodbye letters, court testimonies, newspapers' reporting, illustrated broadsides, medical studies and forensic reports, Sloan argues that suicide was a touchstone for public discourse about the consequences of modernity and changing gender roles in Mexican society.

Likewise, the condition of Mexico's youth, who seemed the most bent on self-destruction, alarmed observers who lamented the corrupting influences and vices of urban life.

Featuring chapters on the changing cultural and medical meanings of suicide, dramatic public suicides in symbolic spaces, vernacular memorialization at sites of suicide, and meanings inscribed on the suicidal body, the book also argues that Mexican essayist and poet Octavio Paz was dead wrong. Mexicans did not taunt, caress or laugh at death. Death was not their welcome friend. Mexicans displayed a myriad of emotions and grieved in the face of the suicide epidemic that consumed their youth across the cusp of the twentieth century.

Sloan's previous works include Women's Roles in Latin America and the Caribbean (Greenwood, 2011) and Runaway Daughters: Seduction, Elopement, and Honor in Nineteenth-Century Mexico (New Mexico, 2008).