Containing the Poor
eBook - PDF

Containing the Poor

The Mexico City Poor House, 1774-1871

  1. English
  2. PDF
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

Containing the Poor

The Mexico City Poor House, 1774-1871

About this book

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.

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Yes, you can access Containing the Poor by Silvia Marina Arrom in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in History & Mexican History. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Contents
  2. List of Illustrations, Figures, and Tables
  3. Acknowledgments
  4. Introduction
  5. 1. The Problem of Beggars and Vagrants, 1774-1871
  6. 2. The Foundation of the Poor House
  7. 3. The Experiment in Practice, 1774-1805
  8. 4. Reform of the Poor House, 1806-1811
  9. 5. Independence and Decline, 1811-1823
  10. 6. Republican Difficulties, 1824-1855
  11. 7. La Reforma, Reorganization, and Crisis, 1856-1863
  12. 8. Recovery During the Second Empire, 1863-1867
  13. 9. The Liberals Return, 1867-1871
  14. Conclusion
  15. Appendixes
  16. Sources of Illustrations
  17. Notes
  18. Glossary
  19. Bibliography
  20. Index