Public Welfare and Child Circulation, Mexico City, 1877 to 1925

Abstract

Nineteenth-century trends in abandonment to Mexico City's foundling home, the Casa de Niños Expósitos, reflected changing social, economic, and political enti tlements to family life. Even as liberal governments rewrote family law and reor ganized welfare, abandonment remained linked to constructs of family honor and ritual kinship datingfrom the colonial period. But by the late 1890s, migration and economic stress had created a new poor who relied on ritual kin to resist perma nent relinquishment of children to the state. The welfare bureaucracy, in turn, facilitated the acquisition of children by households of means through adoption. After the Mexican Revolution, the emerging revolutionary state centered child welfare on medicine and social hygiene but continued to rely on internment. With out social services providing material support to families, however, single mothers remained at risk for separation from their children.