Abstract

CRUZ SANTACRUZ, Rebeca. The obesity epidemic in Mexico: notes for its study from social history and genealogical thought. Inter disciplina [online]. 2022, vol.10, n.28, pp.465-506.  Epub Dec 05, 2022. ISSN 2448-5705.  https://doi.org/10.22201/ceiich.24485705e.2022.28.83311.

The study of the obesity epidemic in Mexico requires approaches that account for the intertwining of multiple dimensions and elements that are at stake for its emergence and reproduction. This paper recovers the perspective of Patricia Aguirre’s Social history of food, and proposes a periodization that includes three transitions, of which this article focuses only on presenting, as an example, an outline of the First transition (1900-1940). In addition, the notion of genealogy, conceived as a history of the present, addresses in a very general way the processes that eventually favored the emergence of the epidemic, in which economic, demographic, urbanization, political-ideological and health and food policy elements are intertwined, whose interrelationships shaped, as a whole, the cultural forms of the time -especially food-, which in turn had a retroactive impact on the consolidation and expansion of these processes. It is concluded that the First transition had, as its structural and articulating axis, the political transformation that the Mexican Revolution brought with it, whose ideological basis was the eugenic and social hygiene thought that permeated the era which produced decisive changes in demography, the processes of urbanization, educational, health and food policies that, collectively and retroactively, consolidated the capitalist model. It also shows some results of the interrelations between the political, economic and ideological-cultural dimensions and the changes in the social imaginaries that in turn modified the aspirations, behaviors and forms of consumption of a part of the urban population that strove to achieve the civilizing ideal promoted by the postrevolutionary governments, through the denial of the indigenous and peasant past and the imitation of the way of life of the upper classes and the foreign models that they assumed.

Also included are some examples of how the modification of the daily life of Mexicans began with the incipient incorporation of industrialized foods into their diet; the general context in which the first food industries appeared, the role of medicine and education in the configuration of eating practices, the role of radio in that of sleep practices and the role of transportation in people’s forms of mobility.

Keywords : epidemic; obesity; complexity; genealogy; transitions.

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