Order and Progress of the Dead: Mexico City's Panteón de Dolores, 1879–1910

In 1877, the Mexico City government successfully purchased the Panteón de Dolores from its civilian owners with the purpose of founding a national cemetery. The purchase of the cemetery was the culmination of a long struggle to wrest away control of the dead from the Catholic Church and to bring burial practices in line with modern ideas about public health. Using a variety of sources including records of the Consejo Superior de Salubridad, administrative reports from cemetery directors, and newspaper reports, I demonstrate how government officials and cemetery administrators strove to maintain the panteon as a symbolic space of Porfirian order and progress.  Nevertheless, this struggle was often met with resistance by mourners, employees, and the messiness of death itself.
The paper focuses on the quotidian challenges of keeping order in the cemetery including nightly robberies, drunkenness of employees and mourners, and occasional murders. The vast area of the cemetery and its paltry security force made it vulnerable to petty thieves.  The cemetery was also frequently written up in the capital’s newspapers for violating burial regulations and as a crime scene.  Administrators struggled to restore its reputation and save their jobs. These incidents highlight the cemetery as a dynamic space that reflects the conflicts between tradition and modernity and order and progress that the living also experienced in the city.