Infecting a Revolutionary Nation: The 1918 “Spanish Flu” Pandemic in Mexico

This presentation examines Mexico’s experience with the 1918 global influenza pandemic, popularly known as the “Spanish Flu.” Available statistics suggest that Mexico was among the hardest hit of any country in the world, with as much as four percent of the national population (approximately 600,000 people) perishing as a direct result of the disease. In their response to the crisis, national leaders were confronted with peculiar challenges. The national public health system had been created in the late nineteenth century under a modernizing dictatorship that was overthrown in a bloody popular uprising in 1911, and since that time the nation had been in the grips of a devastating revolution that would claim over a million lives. Certain regions, such as the predominantly indigenous and overwhelmingly poor southern state of Chiapas, were especially vulnerable. In their responses to the epidemic, rural citizens often turned to local healing networks and informal medical practices and resisted national government incursion into village life.