Abstract

This paper examines the relationship between representations of drunkenness, morality and citizenship in early to mid-nineteenth century Mexican literature. During this period the body was conceptualised in moralistic terms, informed by Enlightenment philosophy, so that educated, civilised and virtuous individuals were expected to exercise reason in order to avoid indulging in vices like drunkenness as the consequence of their bodies’ irrational and sinful desires. José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi, Manuel Payno, Nicolás Pizarro Suárez and Juan Díaz Covarrubias all portrayed enemies of the Mexican nation as irrational, vice-ridden bodies in their fiction to highlight what needed to be expunged or defeated in order to make Mexico a rational, enlightened and modern nation. Fernández de Lizardi and Pizarro Suárez, moreover, also used their fictional characters to show that the good Mexican citizen would be formed through the process of conquering vice, and the vice-inclined body, through the application of reason, the acquisition of education and the obedience to the laws of a civilised society. If certain vices, such as drunkenness, gambling and indolence, seemed to be more prominent in Mexico among the lower class, mixed race and indigenous populations it was simply the result of government failures to provide these social and ethnic groups with the necessary access to education and good moral example. This provides an interesting contrast with prevailing opinions towards the end of the nineteenth century, when a more medicalised understanding of the body and alcohol’s effects upon it helped many intellectuals and politicians to conclude that certain social groups were biologically and hereditarily predisposed to moral failings.