Containing the Poor : The Mexico City Poor House, 1774-1871

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. "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 the former beggars by establishing a forcible interment 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." On the fifth of March, 1774, Viceroy Antonio Maria de Bucareli announced a radically new policy toward the beggars of Mexico City: I have resolved . . . that the opening of the Poor House shall be on the nineteenth of this month, to which end I order that all beggars of both sexes present themselves to said hospice, where they shall be treated with charity and allowed to leave . . . if their fortunes vary, be it through inheritance, donation, or a means of earning a living, taking advantage of the training they shall receive, so that they cease to be beggars. . . . A social history of poverty in Mexico City, based on a study of a poorhouse designed to incarcerate and train "deserving" beggars to be productive and responsible citizens.