La Castañeda Insane Asylum

Front matter

La Castañeda Insane Asylum

Narratives of Pain in Modern Mexico

Cristina Rivera Garza Translated by Laura Kanost

CHAPTER V Looking Insane 121

CHAPTER VI The Pain of Becoming Modern: Suffering and Redemption in the Medical Histories of La Castañeda 146

CHAPTER VII Con-juring the Body: Making History and Fiction 163 Introduction by Ileana Rodríguez

ILLUSTRATIONS

Guests at the grand opening of the

General Insane Asylum in Mixcoac, 1910 111 La Castañeda, ca. 1915-1920 112 La Castañeda, ca. 1915-1920 113 La Castañeda, ca. 1920 114 La Castañeda, ca. 1920 115 La Castañeda, ca. 1930 116 La Castañeda ca. 1930 117 La Castañeda, ca. 1930 118 La Castañeda, ca. 1935 119

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE

Working across genres (historiography, criticism, narrative, poetry, translation, blogging, and social media), contemporary US-Mexico borderlands writer Cristina Rivera Garza accentuates absent presences through figures of revoicing and rewriting. In her research on the roles of patients, doctors, and authorities negotiating meanings of mental illness in early twentieth-century Mexico City, Rivera Garza frames doctor-patient interactions as a translation process: a self translation of nonverbal experience into language to fashion personal stories that are then translated into linear narrations and medical diagnoses. She seeks the traces of this negotiation in archived medical files: “the text is not just a collection of traces: it is a collection of traces and inscriptions in constant and perpetual competition.”

Rivera Garza's writing about this dynamic is itselfa chain of translations: La Castaneda: Narrativas dolientes desde el Manicomio General, México, 1910-1930 (2010) is a rewriting of her 1999 novel, Nadie me verá llorar (translated by Andrew Hurley as No One Will See Me Cry) and academic history essays drawing on the research for her 1995 dissertation, written in English. My English translation of La Castañeda consciously adds another layer to this palimpsest, a collection of constantly competing traces. Philosopher Walter Benjamin, a crucial reference point for Rivera Garza, described translation not as a reproduction of meaning but as a work's afterlife, “a transformation and a renewal of something living" (The Task of the Translator, 1921, p. 256, translated by Harry Zohn). In the works of Rivera Garza, there is an uneasy coexistence of that "something living" and its transformations: life and afterlife haunt each other.

Writing about her approach to the archives of La Castañeda asylum, Cristina Rivera Garza imagines "interviewing" a text like an anthropological informant. Following this lead, to form my approach as a translator of her words, I listened for what her characters and narrators could tell me about what translation means within Rivera Garza’s writing, It is a narrative world of doubles, shifting identities, incomplete communication, writers and rewriters, lives and afterlives. Her works problematize language and self, in part by highlighting translation. The narrator of La cresta de Ilión (2002), translated by Sarah Booker as The Iliac xiii xiv Translators Note

Crest, is farious to be unable to understand the language apparently spoken by only two female characters; their opaque communication holds the narrator in uncomfortable powerlessness. Non-translation is a tactic and also a quality of language. Intellectual detective novel La muerte me da (2007) asks not only “whodunit” but also: Who are these characters? What is the relationship of authors to their readers? Is writing a violent act? Is violence a sort of writing? And what is our role as readers in that dynamic? Early in the novel, as the female detective asks the character named Cristina Rivera Garza about one ofthe Alejandra Pizarnik poems left by a serial killer at a murder scene, the fictional Rivera Garza wonders, “How can I communicate to the Detective that the task of the poem is not to communicate, but just the opposite: to protect that space of the secret that resists any communication, any transmission, any attempt at translation?" [Cómo comunicarle a la Detective que la tarea del poema no es comunicar sino, todo lo contrario, proteger ese lugar del secreto que se resiste a toda comunicación, a toda transmisión, a todo esfuerzo de traducción?” (55-56)]. Translation, like communication through language in general, has limits. The murderer's voice reflects shortly thereafter, “to be able to listen . . . it is always necessary to be a little bit outside of your own head. Out of your mind. ... In the end, you never know for sure exactly whose words they are" [“para poder escuchar [. . .] siempre es necesario estar un poco fuera de uno. Fuera de Si. [. . .] A final de cuentas uno nunca sabe a cierta ciencia de quién son las palabras" (77).] Likewise, the protagonist of the story “La alienación también tiene su belleza,” from Ningún reloj cuenta esto (2002), translated by Sarah Booker as “There is also Beauty in Alienation,” is a young woman who moves to another city for a new job as a translator and becomes transformed into her own Other. To participate in translation, in reading, or communication in general, we enter into a play of voices and selves, lives and afterlives. In Rivera Garza’s fiction, selves and writings coexist and interact, and silence is a part of communication.

Within this context, Rivera Garza's multi-genre body of work on the social history of La Castañeda insane asylum in early twentieth-century Mexico City is an extended meditation on how she wants to tell this particular story and to what extent it can be told, layering voices and accentuating silences, appropriations, and translations. In La Castañeda, Rivera Garza views the task of historians as a type of translation: “this process of translation (from the language of one time to that of another) is, in my opinion, the fundamental task that modern societies have entrusted to historians.” Furthermore, she sees individuals” written accounts of their own experiences as translations themselves: “Marino García translated himself, first for himself (if we accept that remembering is a

Translators Note xv process that involves situating the past in the context of the present) and, still more fundamentally, for the medical resident, upon whose expert judgement his future depended." Her writing about these histories/translations calls for a process-oriented ethnographic mode: "Something should happen in the real and true world, I insist, in the world of flesh and blood citizens, when the texts of our memory take on the syntactical, cultural, political challenge of embodying the narrative strategies of the documents upon which they are based.” A translation following this mode would, in turn, strive to embody and make visible the strategies that form the source text and its translation.

This physicality of narration shapes the opening image of La Castañeda. More than a transformation or an afterlife, La Castañeda is a living severed part of a body that is simultaneously Self and Other:

You and I are in the presence of the strange case ofa conjoined twin brother separated at birth from his double, his mirror image, his opposite. The other body. The sister (because novela is a feminine word) took her first steps toward the end of 1999, and from that point onward, never had the desire or inclination to look back. Nadie me verá llorar: No One Will See Me Cry. Torn from himself, the brother was silent. Shut away in drawers or lost in endless, interchangeable lists of files, the conjoined twin brother learned to contemplate the always warm contours of his scar. Living flesh. A rending more than a parting of ways. A dismemberment.

You and l are in the presence of an act of violence. We are at a point of restitution.

In fact, this text has still other living kin, other selves. Portions of the Spanish text of La Castaneda are adapted and translated from work that Rivera Garza published in English in academic journals. As a translator reading a Spanish text that contains translated passages, I strained to hear what may have been the English source text, which in turn may have been influenced by the author’s mother tongue, Spanish. I listened not only for source text passages written in English, but behind them and infusing them, a research process conducted partially in Spanish, working with Spanish-language archival materials. A coherent English voice smoothing over all these competing traces would obscure the palimpsestic character of La Castañeda rather than participating in its attempt to make visible its method and embody the narrative strategies of the documents on which it is based. My translation strategically calls attention to the multiple interacting layers just beneath its surface. I stretch and contort English sentences beyond convention to leave traces of the Spanish structures. I create the xvi Translators Note occasional glimpse of a Spanish or Spanish-inflected English source text through word choices or constructions that differ from the expectations of idiomatic English. I add explicit references to culture- or language-bound concepts. Rather than producinga smooth new voice that would drown out the competing voices of the source text, this translation strives to encourage readers to attune their ears to polyphony.

A PREFACE IN FIVE VOWELS

You and I are in the presence of the strange case of a conjoined twin brother separated at birth from his double, his mirror image, his opposite. The other body. The sister (because novela is a feminine word) took her first steps toward the end of 1999, and from that point onward, never had the desire or inclination to look back. Nadie me verá llorar: No One Will See Me Cry. Torn from himself, the brother was silent. Shut away in drawers or lost in endless, interchangeable lists of files, the conjoined twin brother learned to contemplate the always warm contours of his scar. Living flesh. A rending more than a parting of ways. A dismemberment.

You and I are in the presence of an act of violence. We are at a point of restitution.

This book is a debt that was some fifteen years overdue. First it was a master's thesis, and years later, it was a doctoral dissertation. Then, something else emerged from the pages of that manuscript: its opposite. The days were short, cold with rain and frost. Ice often glazed the streets. One morning, at the sight ofa mountain of snow engulfing a vehicle, I fell to my knees. I asked myself what I was doing there. I answered myself: I will write a book. Its opposite, which was at once its daughter and its conjoined twin sister, formed little by little, page by page, to help me survive that winter and all the other winters. The novel accomplished its mission, in effect, but it cost of the life of her twin brother, who languished away, hidden or betrayed—hidden and betrayed. You and I are at a point of restitution. I said that before.

The thing about conjoined twins is that whether or not they know or recognize one another, they both need one another. After all, they are offshoots of the same xvii xviii A Preface in Five Vowels root. One is the reason for the other, and vice versa. No One Will See Me Cry is also this collection of narratives of pain, although they are enunciated in an enigmatic way. This collection from a faraway place and time is also that novel in which a woman smiles at a camera lens and asks: “How does one become a photographer of the mad?” Matilda Burgos and Joaquín Buitrago were here. Diamantina Vicario and Eduardo Oligochea were here. Each book has its own relationship to language: a sign of what one can do, how far one can go while still grasping some notion of the way back.

I hesitated about the relevance of publishing a book so long overdue. In the end, curiosity got the best of me. What would it become once it had been translated into Spanish and transformed, or partially transformed, from purely academic writing into the way I write today? Would it withstand so many border crossings? Would it collapse in the attempt? And here we go once again. The book journeyed from English into Spanish, returning to English now in Laura Kanost's translation. What is the name of this game? Is it madness? Is it border-crossing addiction? Perhaps it is just that once started, true conversations are ceaseless, spanning entire eras (from early twentieth- to early twenty-first-century Mexico), territories (Mexico and the United States), and fields—of knowledge, experience, affect.

The value of a book is not its novelty. In this case, its value lies in readings yielding keys that just might unlock a mystery.

Introduction

UCH HAS BEEN WRITTEN about madness: its history, its causes

and effects, its symbols, its changing nature and many names. Doc-

tors, artists, lawyers, criminologists, and historians, to mention just a few modern professions, have used the tools of their disciplines to attempt to capture the evasive world believed to lie beyond reason. Such attempts are often guided by stereotypes: the tormented genius, the creative lunatic, the seer. I wont lie: suspiciously similar views also drove the first stages of this research. The book that resulted from year upon year of reading dusty, yellowed archival documents aims first and foremost to transcend those impressions. This goal does not stem from the actions of a novice. Rather, the objective took shape as my contact with the documents from La Castañeda General Insane Asylum grew closer, more intimate, and consequently, more uncomfortable.' Perhaps it can all be explained by a series of gestures: hands shutting a file in complete frustration, eyes looking upward in disbelief at what they see before them, a body desperate for air making its way through the exit. The classic madman was nowhere to be found. The ideal madwoman was conspicuously absent. In their place, captured in broken phrases and terrible handwriting, were words. Half-written or mixed up, histories were lying there. Beginning the day that a man still unknown to me suggested I visit the archives of the Secretaría de Salubridad y Asistencia (Department of Health and Welfare), where the documents of the General Insane Asylum were just beginning to be organized, what I read little by little were words expressed by or about very real men and women in early twentieth-century Mexico. Far from any stereotype, these flesh-and-blood men and women attempted to articulate—sometimes rapidly and abruptly, sometimes stuttering and repeating themselves over and over—their human experience with mental illness. The histories in which that corporeal and spiritual experience lived, and still lives, became the starting point and the destination where this book proposed, and still proposes, to arrive: the narratives, joined together despite their lack of harmony, that made it possible for early twentieth-century madness to become intelligible for the contemporary observer.

Narratives

Although I use “histories” and "narratives" interchangeably, lending these words a transparency they lack, I generally do so in relation to Hayden White's concept of narrative as a system of discursive meaning production.’ In the present book, I explore the discursive strategies that La Castañeda General Insane Asylum psychiatrists and inmates employed to produce historical and concrete meaning relating to mental illness. One of my arguments is that this process was fueled by, and in turn fueled, ongoing debates about the definitions of gender, class, and nation that took place between 1910 and 1930, the early years of both the principal state asylum in Mexico and the country's revolutionary period.

Within an examination room in an institution that had been located on the outskirts of Mexico City ever since its brilliant September 1910 grand opening, often accompanied by family members and police, and certainly constrained by the items on an institutional questionnaire, the encounter between the psychiatrist and the inmate was marginal in appearance only. The contentious dialogue about the medical diagnosis could only exist because a tense and volatile society was facing the challenge of a violent, dislocated present, soon compounded by the challenge of national reconfiguration. The words “crazy,” “irrational,” or "strange" were little more than loaded dice in this context: after all, the definition of rational and productive behavior, that according to some would move the country forward, depended on this vocabulary. In other narratives, this moving forward has been referred to as the modernization process or, alternately, the construction of the modern Mexican state. Let me be clear that in these pages I am not attempting to determine whether particular inmates really, truly had the conditions with which they were diagnosed as psychiatric patients. Nor am I interested in shedding an ironic, retrospective light on the diagnostic errors made by very early practitioners of modern Mexican psychiatry. I fundamentally do not aim to give a voice to historical subjects who have their own voices, to which so many institutional files bear witness. Instead, I draw upon concepts from medical anthropology, especially ethnographic approaches, exploring the plot lines, core metaphors, and rhetorical devices that structure illness, which are drawn from cultural and personal modes for arranging experiences in meaningful ways and for effectively expressing those meanings.’

In a strict sense it could be said, following Arthur Kleinman, that the patients who were confined in the state asylum developed illness narratives bearing traces of the various ways patients perceived, lived with, and responded to the symptoms of their conditions, while the psychiatrists developed disease narratives, that is, reclassifications of illnesses in terms of their theories of disorder. The starting and ending points of these two discursive practices are, to no one's surprise, not only different but also antithetical. In this book, however, I am less interested in exploring how these two starting points became divergent, and potentially contradictory, and more interested in how they produced one another in immediate contact within a context that they both helped to create. To use a metaphor from cultural anthropology, I am more interested, then, in the process of writing the cultural text and less in the written text that looms in the imagination as autonomous and complete? Implicitly calling for acting and creating culture, this perspective also underscores the relevance and complexity of the contact situation through which a culture is created, or, as Mikhail Bakhtin argued, the point (or the concrete utterance ofa speaking subject) where centrifugal as well as centripetal forces are brought to bear.

Dominated by tension and characterized by irregularity, the contact situation does not imply, according to William Roseberry, establishing a line of reference between two autonomous cultures (or languages), but rather, the intersection of at least two, and often more, historical processes, each of which developed in contradictory, irregular ways.”

In the medical cases that concern this book, the physical contact situation in which psychiatrists and inmates found themselves was a public welfare institution dedicated to treating men, women, and children diagnosed with mental illnesses. It was located on the periphery of a city that was experiencing enormous growth and at the temporal boundary between regimes often described as opposites: the last year of the modernizing administration of Porfirio Diaz and the earliest phase of revolutionary Mexico. Within these two concentric circles in both space and time, psychiatrists and inmates produced the semiotic contact situation: an often-heated, broken dialogue best described by the Bakhtinian concept of the active understanding that characterizes internal dialogism. In it, one assimilates the word under consideration into a new conceptual system, that of the one striving to understand, establishes a series of complex inter-relationships, consonances and dissonances with the word and enriches it with new elements. It is precisely such an understanding that the speaker counts on. Therefore, his orientation toward the listener is an orientation toward a specific conceptual horizon, toward the specific word of the listener; it introduces totally new elements into his discourse;

it is in this way, after all, that various different points to view, conceptual horizons, systems for providing expressive accents, various social languages come to interact with one another.*

Throughout this book, I argue that psychiatrist-inmate interaction, as registered in the institution's medical files, was at once less harmonious and less uneven than described in medical exegesis of the time.’ It was less harmonious because patients’ acquiescence to psychiatric diagnosis involved some degree of dissent and friction, and less uneven because, even within asylum hierarchies, psychiatrists welcomed and indeed encouraged the very necessary participation of patients and their families in making diagnoses.

In the intimacy of the poorly equipped observation room, or among many individuals in overcrowded wards, psychiatrists and inmates engaged in a more forceful, dynamic, and at times even volatile relationship. Together, crossing fragile bridges fraught with misgivings and distrust, they authored polysemic, polyvocal, heteroglot narratives with which—fleetingly, fragmentarily—they captured the fluid realities of mental illness. These dialogical constructions arose from the tension produced by human contact as they saw, heard, and evaluated one another. These narratives emerged, then, more through skillful negotiation than utter opposition."

In Pain

Medical anthropologists who work with living subjects have described, often memorably, the high level of complexity and subtlety that characterizes psychiatrist-patient interactions. As Wittgenstein famously said, speaking about the body, about bodily sensations, is not an easy task. Saying: This is my mouth. Saying: It hurts here. I feel this or that. Or I felt it. Speaking about the mind. Saying: These are the various defeats of my will. All of these aspects only become more bewildering when attempting to trace voices from the past that make their way to the present, inscribed in clinical histories. Here. Although the General Insane Asylum medical files cannot replicate the richness of an ethnographic account or take the place of fieldwork, they do contain interpretations of mental illnesses produced by psychiatrists and patients alike." Because diagnoses constituted then, as they do now, a thoroughly semiotic activity involving analysis of one symbol system followed by its translation into another, they reveal the distinctive discursive strategies used by asylum doctors and inmates as they debated the meanings of mental illnesses in early twentieth-century Mexico.”

Doctors strove to elevate the scientific status of their profession by committing to a linear narrative linking physical cause and mental effect through the use of psychiatric categories produced in Europe, particularly ideas related to degeneration theory, later substantiated and sometimes recast through concrete evidence from local cases. The emphasis doctors placed on an order of argumentation, which they perceived as replicating an order of things, only reinforced their faith in the progressive and ascending nature of revolutionary society. Inmates, on the other hand, brought stories of their lives with illness. Organized in conjunction with specialists and within the narrow confines of the medical questionnaire, these life histories manifested inmates’ remarkable drive to explain why and how their illnesses began and evolved.

If, as anthropologist Ruth Behar has argued, having both a life story to tell and the willingness to tell it implicitly involves the ability to rename and remake the world in which they were born, then this drive was hardly inconsequential. As Behar also described when tracing the biography of a street vendor named Esperanza, the rhetorical devices and scripts used to organize a life story vary across time, culture, and gender. Esperanza divided her story into three stages, namely suffering, anger, and redemption, which she illustrated through rich vignettes, usually in dialogue form.

Although asylum inmates certainly did not enjoy the flexible arrangement by which Esperanza reconstructed her life, they too organized their life stories through devices that were often at odds with doctors’ notions of what a life is and how it should be recounted. Instead of employing a logic of achievement replicating the apparent inevitability of progress, inmates eloquently stressed instances of physical and spiritual suffering in fragmented plotlines dominated by deterioration. Although real events varied greatly, the majority of inmates located suffering at the outset of their lives: a broken home, rampant poverty, alcoholism, domestic violence, and especially among women, sexual abuse.

Illness was not presented, then, as a point of rupture within the upward linear trajectory of a life. Rather, illness appeared as a flash of light that illuminated ongoing wreckage. The reasons fluctuated, but most of them were shaped by loss: the death of a child, sudden or long periods of abandonment and neglect, lost love. As inmate Olga I. concisely put it, these were bitter lives, ditches surrounded by high walls. They had, then, their own flavor; they belonged to a distinctive metaphorical universe.

As they recounted the stories of their lives with mental illness, inmates privileged lived experience. In doing so, they privileged deterioration over improvement, dispersion over unity, failure over success. They spoke from the other side of progress. They did it directly, in a series of moves without intermediaries: raw words. Both in content and in form, what inmates’ illness narratives brought to the psychiatric hospital, and more precisely, to the eyes and ears of the doctors, were the ruins of modernity: those highly significant fragments that for Walter Benjamin constituted an emblem ofthe transience, fragility, and destructiveness of capitalist culture. Working as allegories, these narratives clearly countered the vanguard myth of progress so valued by Mexican elites both before and after the revolution.” Like Benjamin's angel of history, these stories invited the listener, and now invite the reader, to contemplate the past with a retrospective rather than prospective gaze, and to notice and make newly vivid the destruction as it has really taken place in body and spirit. Lacking happy endings, or endings of any sort for that matter, and open to permanent and irreconcilable tension, the content and the form of these stories implicitly questioned the sources of inmates' troubles.

And that, in fact, is the primary argument of this book.

Psychiatrists and Inmates Debate

General Insane Asylum diagnoses not only shed light on the divergent rhetorical methods and contrasting scripts through which doctors and inmates constructed mental illnesses but also made it clear that doctors’ and inmates’ interpretations were the result of their necessary contact, a process that is particularly evident in the frequent use of indirect quotations in clinical histories. Let us see. The medical actors of La Castañeda were facing off for the first time in the institution's observation ward. Primarily educated in pre-revolutionary schools and often set in their convictions about the inevitability of progress, male doctors structured the interview ritual according to questions included on the official questionnaire. Asylum inmates, often men and women of limited means in the early years of their adult lives, answered as many questions as their conditions permitted. If family members were present, as was often the case, they spoke too, sometimes answering on behalf of the inmates. On other occasions, lacking other alternatives, they made do with the point of view ofa police officer or a social worker. While in still other, less frequent, cases inmates were willing and able to write their own versions of their lives with mental illness, doctors always noted data and professional observations in designated spaces on the medical questionnaire. Driven by their need to supply evidence to support their diagnoses, doctors included selections from inmates’ discourse, especially those that presented the most obvious challenges to their understanding. There, in the brief space afforded by the official questionnaire, doctors noted the occasional word that validated their point of view but also the anecdote that escaped their comprehension, the story that seemed implausible, or as contemporary cultural historians recognize, the joke that certainly did not make them laugh."

Doctors removed inmates’ discourse from the context of their lives and placed it— rendered in fragments and appropriately offset by quotation marks—within the context of their own discourse, with which they collaborated, perhaps involuntarily, although also out of necessity, in the punctuation of both. As natural and expected as indirect quotations may seem, both for doctors and for asylum patients at the beginning of the twentieth century, these quotes implied a complicity that upset, albeit momentarily, the hierarchies that shaped life within the institution. They also demonstrated that, at least within the context of the asylum and, more specifically, within the context of the medical file, the past of ordinary citizens, of the weakest of the weak, in this case, had become citable. If, as Walter Benjamin stated in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” only a redeemed humanity has a past that is citable at every moment, this was not an insignificant event for the inmates, the doctors, or the clinical histories they produced together.” Thus, the medical files containing the traces of this dynamic interaction— patient identification, history, causes and evolution of the mental condition, mental and physical exam results, diagnosis, and treatment— could be interpreted, or used, as some sort of redemption. The beginning.

In the end, though, institutional diagnoses were recorded by General Insane Asylum doctors and not by inmates, which is relevant medically, culturally, and ultimately, politically. Although indirect phrases brought the doctors and inmates together, upending asylum hierarchies if only for a moment, the signature that appeared at the end of every entry restored the uneven terrain upon which both actors moved. That reinstated dynamic is what we read.

Sex, Violence, and Redemption

The doctors at La Castañeda documented some eighty different diagnoses during the first three decades of the twentieth century. This number not only revealed the lack of systematization in psychiatric classifications in early twentieth-century Mexico but also reflected the constant interaction that shaped them. Both medical and non-medical factors played fundamental roles in that process. This book closely examines the formation and evolution of the group of diagnoses classified as moral insanity, essentially because the debates that produced them made strikingly manifest the interaction between society and mental illness. Cases of moral insanity, for example, were closely tied to ongoing deliberations about the suitable place for women, and more specifically for women's sexuality, in society at large. Some future book, perhaps being written at this moment, could delve into cases of alcoholism, which bore a direct relationship to contemporary arguments about the correct configuration of masculinity. Likewise, beyond their sheer number, epilepsy diagnoses shed light on the particular dynamic of family care when challenged by a chronic condition.

Medical files for cases of moral insanity often have an extraordinarily ample page count. Whether handwritten or typed, accompanied by personal letters, public manifestos, or even drawings, these documents confirm that when the topic at hand was female patients’ sexuality or their suffering linked to social and domestic violence, the debate between psychiatrists and female inmates tended to be extensive. Replete with intimate information about their daily lives and pointed interpretations of their bodies’ social and sexual interactions, cases of moral insanity have enabled me to explore the construction of concepts of gender, class, and nation from the most personal and dynamic, most obscure and twisting perspective of the medical interview. These points of view helped to shape definitions of mental illness, and more broadly, medical practices in the General Insane Asylum.