The "Ricitos de Oro". Hygiene and anti-hygiene as practices of children's culture. Querétaro (1950-1960)

N/A

Abstract

Aim. Document a culture of hygiene and anti-hygiene as part of the daily practices of childhood in Querétaro: a town in central Mexico in the 1950s, when the historical process called: "Transition to Modernity", involved the promotion of an urban lifestyle associated with the arrival of Western products, values and habits typical of a consumer society. The guiding questions are: what infrastructure and public health conditions existed? What commercial personal hygiene products were promoted in the press? What were the children's hygiene and anti-hygiene practices at the time? Background. Previous research shows the existence of unsanitary conditions - mainly urban -, associated with overcrowding in homes and the lack of public services such as drainage and drinking water for centuries, where the emphasis given to child hygiene focused on mortality and the medicalization of family life events, such as parenting or feeding; or in the politicization of misery, with speeches based

on the idea that it was necessary to modify the economic conditions of the people to improve their health, a prevailing position in Mexico within the framework of a totalitarian centralist government and a single ruling party. Problematization. As an area of opportunity, it is observed that, until now, hygiene and its complement, dirt, were not addressed as part of a children's culture. The works present the lack of cleanliness as a condition to eradicate, and do not consider that childhoods coexist with dirt inherently to their socialization; Leaving aside what happens in these scenarios and their possible meanings for younger people; position that is reversed here. Methodology. In this historiographic research, based on statistics, news and commercial guidelines from the press, photographs and qualitative sources, it is suggested that hygiene and anti-hygiene are part of the same system of child socialization, and that in modernity a category cannot exist without the other, so it is necessary to document both dimensions. Theory. Based on Vigarello (1991) and other sources, it is argued that the "hygiene-dirt" antagonism is a construct of Modernity, when body cleanliness is combined with cleanliness of clothing as ideals to achieve; which is an expression of a "change of era", where urbanization imposes new values that displace old superstitious beliefs, in this case related to the fear of water as the main means to sanitize the body and clean clothes. Results. Unhygienic in minors prevails as a constant, as well as a necessary condition to encourage the internal consumer market that makes the national economy grow, in a context of growing industrialization; However, at the level of culture, resistance associated with the lifestyle of rural areas and the conceptions around the values of hygiene that seek to impose as part of Modernity prevail. Conclusions. Minors are subject to the imposition of hygiene in their daily lives; However, that does not prevent them from giving shape to expressions of resistance against adult-centrist power, which are manifested through socialization with their peers where dirt cannot be missing.