On the 17th of August 1671, Manuel de Morales, a 49-year-old Angolan slave employed on a Dominican-owned sugar plantation in the Pacific coastal hotlands of what is now the republic of Guatemala, came before a priest and declared his intention to marry. Accompanying Morales was his proposed spouse, Inés Hernández, an Indian widow from the nearby town of Escuintla, capital of the colonial Guatemalan corregimiento of Escuintepeque in which the Dominican ingenio lay. Four male witnesses testified to the soundness of the proposed marriage between Morales and Hernández, two on behalf of each contrayente, or prospective spouse. Three of the witnesses were slaves: Silvestre Ramírez, defined as mulatto, and Jacinto Pereira and Miguel de la Cruz, both identified as black. The fourth was Diego de Arriasa, mulatto and free.

Lorenzo Barbosa had a big problem with his daughter Josefa. In June 1821, in Buenos Aires, young Josefa Barbosa was in love with Pascual Cruz. What bothered Lorenzo was that Pascual was a mulatto, while the Barbosa family was white. When the couple asked his permission to marry, Lorenzo vehemently opposed the union and withheld his consent. He was acting within his rights, since minor children (men and women younger than 25 and 23 respectively) were required by law to obtain parental permission to marry. To bolster his case, Lorenzo invoked the power of a colonial law issued in 1778, known as the Royal Pragmatic on marriage, which gave parents the right to block their children's marriages to “unequal partners.” Even though Buenos Aires had broken away from Spain in 1810, most colonial laws regarding family life, including the pragmatic, continued in force into the national period. But just as in colonial times, children retained the right to challenge parental opposition in court. If they chose to do so, the resulting case was known as a disenso.

A partir de la segunda mitad del siglo XIX se inició en la Argentina un proceso de crecimiento y diversificación económica y social que hizo posible para los hombres del ‘80 proyectar un orden de liberación y progreso. En efecto, la tarea de modernización tuvo sus primeras manifestaciones en torno a los años cincuenta, pero fue en los tiempos de la Argentina Moderna cuando se pudo dar forma definitiva al modelo agroexportador y su inserción al mercado mundial. La inversión de capitales extranjeros, la eliminación del “desierto” para obtener tierras económicamente productivas y la formación de un mercado de trabajo, a partir del disciplinamiento de la mano de obra nativa y el arribo de gentes de otras latitudes, fueron los aportes indispensables para poder concretarlo. Quedaba pendiente para el Estado de reciente organización-gracias al marco legal que concretaba la Constitución-un complejo desafío, el de “construir la nación.” El crecimiento económico estuvo acompañado por la consolidación del régimen político oligárquico de los “notables” que entendieron el ejercicio de la política como una facultad exclusiva de los que disponían de la riqueza, la educación y el prestigio social.

In the nineteen twenties a group of graduates from the Colegio de San Nicolás and the Universidad Michoacana in Morelia, the capital city of the state of Michoacán, drafted a program for the economic and social development of the countryside that, in the next decade, influenced federal policies and ideas about health care. This article examines the ideas and efforts of two Morelian physicians, Jesús Díaz Barriga (1891-1971) and Enrique Arreguín Vélez (1907-1989) who, during the 1920s and early 1930s, developed an incipient system of rural health in Michoacán. In 1935 they organized the First Congreso of Rural Hygiene, an event which they hoped would launch a state-managed system of rural health, and eventually the socialization of medicine in Mexico.