Containing the poor : the Mexico City Poor House, 1774-1871 / Silvia Marina Arrom.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Arrom, Silvia Marina, 1949-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Hospicio de Pobres (Mexico City, Mexico)--History.

Hospicio de Pobres (Mexico City, Mexico).

Almshouses--Mexico--Mexico City--History.

Almshouses.

Mexico City (Mexico)--Social policy.

Mexico City (Mexico).

Mexico City (Mexico)--Economic conditions.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (415 p.)

Place of Publication:

Durham : Duke University Press, 2000.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

In 1774 Mexico City leaders created the Mexico City Poor House—the centerpiece of a bold experiment intended to eliminate poverty and impose a new work ethic on former beggars by establishing a forcible internment policy for some and putting others to work. In Containing the Poor Silvia Marina Arrom tells the saga of this ill-fated plan, showing how the asylum functioned primarily to educate white orphans instead of suppressing mendicancy and exerting control over the multiracial community for whom it was designed.For a nation that had traditionally regarded the needy as having the undisputed right to receive alms and whose affluent citizens felt duty-bound to dispense them, the experiment was doomed from the start, explains Arrom. She uses deep archival research to reveal that—much to policymakers’ dismay—the Poor House became an orphanage largely because the government had underestimated the embeddedness of this moral economy of begging. While tracing the course of an eventful century that also saw colonialism give way to republicanism in Mexico, Arrom links the Poor House’s transformation with other societal factors as well, such as Mexican women’s increasing impact on social welfare policies.With poverty, begging, and homelessness still rampant in much of Latin America today, this study of changing approaches to social welfare will be particularly valuable to student and scholars of Mexican and Latin American society and history, as well as those engaged in the study of social and welfare policy.

Contents:

The problem of beggars and vagrants, 1774-1871

The foundation of the poor house

The experiment in practice, 1774-1805

Reform of the poor house, 1806-1811

Independence and decline, 1811-1823

Republican difficulties, 1824-1855

La reforma, reorganization, and crisis, 1856-1863

Recovery during the second empire, 1863-1867

The liberals return, 1867-1871.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references (pages [365]-383) and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9780822396420

0822396424

OCLC:

891395176