Hygienic Determinism, Cultural Essentialism, and Public Health in Ecuador and Guatemala, 1900-1950

Abstract

In Guatemala and Ecuador—two nations with large Indigenous populations—public health professionals and government officials attributed high incidences of infectious disease among indígenas (Indigenous people) to culture and customs rather than to structural determinants of abject poverty. Race played as much of a role as medical science in shaping how public health officials approached infectious-contagious diseases and the indígenas who contracted them in the first half of the twentieth century. To disparage indígenas and undermine their claims to citizenship, Guatemalan and Ecuadorian public health officials deployed cultural essentialism and hygienic determinism, by which I mean efforts to portray marginalized populations, particularly their practices and habits, as sources and propagators of diseases that compromise public health and ravage those same marginalizedpopulations.