Suicide, Modernity, and Social Angst in Mexico, 1880–1910

This paper explores youth suicide in Porfirian Mexico (1876-1911) as communicated through newspapers, the popular press, and official investigations. Indeed society seemed gripped by the fear that a ‘suicide fever’ had infected its young citizens and promised to doom the Mexican nation to degradation and despair. Besides reporting on group suicides in Paris and a suicide club in London, journalists detailed instances in Mexico of spurned lovers drinking poison, best friends entering suicide pacts, and deflowered girls shooting themselves to escape the shame. The media hysteria that ensued illuminates several social concerns of the era. In earlier decades, a suicide might have been viewed as a singular desperate act. In Porfirian Mexico, an era of unprecedented modernization, the public viewed the spate of youth suicides as nefarious byproducts of economic and social progress.

            The paper complements the presentations of Rosenthal and Ruggiero by focusing on how everyday lives were impacted by modernization and progress. An individual might commit the solitary act of ending his or her life, but this desperate act was imbued with multiple social meanings that reverberated through many layers of society. Like Ruggiero’s immigrant suicides, Mexicans worried that an impressionable youth would commit copycat suicide, especially as they read popular literature or read crime gazettes. Just as individuals assigned changing meanings to the streetcar, suicide was received in different ways in urban society.  Whether viewed as an egotistical act of self-destruction or a noble performance of self-sacrifice, the public discourse about youth suicide and culture illuminates larger tensions about liberalism and modernization in Porfirian Mexico.