Bioethnography, the combination of ethnographic observation and biochemical sampling, is a synthetic method for understanding environmental and bodily interactions. DOHaD researchers can use bioethnographically derived data to examine the complex processes that shape health and disease. Using examples from a longitudinal birth cohort study in Mexico City, the authors describe how bioethnography, which begins with an open-ended observational stage, can counteract some of the limitations of DOHaD research, which can be reductionist and universalising. DOHaD researchers often focus on the behaviour of individuals, especially mothers, instead of on the political-economic processes and environments that contribute to poor health and inequality. In addition, DOHaD researchers, who often reside in high-resource environments, tend to universalise their own experience rather than identify relevant research questions for people living in different circumstances. To combat reductionist and universalising tendencies, bioethnography allows researchers to develop inductively derived hypotheses and then test these in specific contexts. Validating and testing theories derived from bioethnographic methods in the same population where they were observed can fill critical gaps in DOHaD research that seeks to understand the complex relationship between environments and disease over the lifecourse.

Nine servants were murdered on the night of October 23, 1789: five men and four women. In contrast to Dongo, his uncle, and the killers, every detail of the biographies of these working people has disappeared. This chapter attempts to restore their place in history by imagining what three of these humble employees did on the day of the crime, a recreation of the typical experiences of plebeian daily life in late eighteenth-century Mexico City.

Palace guardsman José Gómez Moreno started his diary with anecdotes relating to the strange occurrences which seemed to happen so frequently in late eighteenth-century Mexico City. Freak accidents, fires, murders, kidnappings, and assaults were not uncommon. While he certainly showed a fascination for the oddities of the day – from balloons to the viceroy’s wig – the halberdier paid special attention to the 246 executions that he witnessed over the course of twenty-two years, an average of just over eleven per year. Some years saw more hangings, garrotings, and burnings than others. Annual executions peaked in 1790, with a total of thirty-two in the first full year of Viceroy Revillagigedo’s reign.

The eighteenth century saw a series of reforms in judicial structures and practices, including the creation of the Acordada and the division of the capital city into cuarteles. These reforms may have contributed to more draconian approaches to justice in New Spain, as evidenced by an increasing number of corporal punishment sentences in the late 1780s and a peak in executions in 1790. This year also represents a watershed in the history of the Novohispanic judiciary due to the creation of Mexico’s first salaried corps of nightwatchmen. Arguably, the shock of the Dongo massacre motivated Revillagigedo to create this new institution.

This chapter discusses Dongo as an indvidual and a representative of the ideal of Spanish masculinity. Both the fictional versions of Dongo and the real historical person possessed the essential characteristics for a man at the pinnacle of honor: wealth, piety, distinguished Spanish lineage, and charity. He also showed loyalty to the Spanish crown through his service to the Mexican viceroys. Dongo’s ancestry and actions exemplify the ideals of the privileged few at the top of the eighteenth-century Novohispanic social pyramid.

The presence of the Catholic Church and the imposition of religious beliefs and practices onto the newly found inhabitants of the Americas was perhaps one of the biggest catalysts of transition during the early modern period. This chapter focuses on the literature that was produced for, and by indigenous peoples within the religious realm. It considers different discursive genres that are emblematic of the transitions that natives experienced when they were into close and sustained contact with religious institutions, such as plays for conversion and evangelization, sermons, catechisms, spiritual biographies, and other prescriptive literature.

Often studied as a transitory step towards the late consolidation of Italian opera in Mexico, the activities of the Spanish tenor and composer Manuel García in Mexico City from 1827 to 1829 call for a more nuanced analysis. The spatial reconceptualisation pursued by transnational and global histories as well as the redefinition of cultural borders triggered by postcolonial studies give us the tools to address García’s Mexican career as a key moment in terms of understanding the effects and issues raised by the spread of Italian opera in Latin America at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The chapter rethinks García's activities in Mexico City as comprising one of the first (while at the same time highly problematic) cultural encounters between Europe and the young Latin American nation after its emancipation from Spain (1821). Until then, mutual perceptions between Europe and Mexico were distorted by the intrusive cultural politics of imperial Spain. After independence, such misperceptions became more marked. Perceived as a familiar expressions of Europeanness, Italian opera became the arena where issues of identity and otherness were discussed. A close reading of the operas García composed for Mexican audiences will reveal how Italian opera changed by absorbing and reflecting the multiple postcolonial tensions of Mexico City.

We describe a collaborative training program aimed at improving access to and quality of integral abortion care, with a focus on the legally induced termination of pregnancy (ToP) program (ILE in Spanish) in Mexico City, after its decriminalization in 2007.Where legal framework is altogether or severely restricted, formal teaching and training for medical and nurse students is extremely poor, and access to recommended surgical and medical technologies is limited. On the contrary, where the law favors ample access to the procedure, updated, evidence-based guidelines and protocols usually ensue. In Mexico City, training health professionals immediately followed, and even preceded, legal changes, with in-service person-to-person trainings up to a mentoring and a Training of Trainers (ToT) modality, which presently assure that 100% of ILEs are done with recommended technologies. Training in abortion and related care, should ideally be integrated in pre-service curricula, to assure its sustainability and eliminate related stigma.

The Introduction opens with a "job talk" by Cayetano de Cabrera y Quintero for the chair of rhetoric at the Royal and Pontifical University in Mexico City. Cabrera's argument that eloquence is "the life blood of cities" then serves as a way to introduce the main argument of the book, namely that the classical rhetorical tradition contributed to the ideological coherence and equilibrium of the early modern Iberian World, providing important occasions for persuasion, legitimation and eventual (and perhaps inevitable) confrontation. The Introduction also provides an overview of the history of the classical rhetorical tradition from antiquity to the Renaissance revival of letters and outlines the meta-geographical framework employed in the book, namely that of the Iberian World as an alternative to national, national-imperial and regional studies frameworks. It concludes with brief outlines of the book’s six chapters.

Chapter 5 argues that the classical rhetorical tradition was not only a means to disseminate Iberianized Catholicism or the “negotiated” political ideology of the Hispanic Monarchy, but also shaped the expression of local identities, including creole patriotism (patriotismo criollo) in New Spain. In particular, this chapter focuses on a little-known late humanist Latin oration delivered in 1745 at the Royal and Pontifical University in Mexico City, which represents the first “Mexican” reaction to the Bibliotheca Mexicana controversy, a transatlantic debate started by a prominent Spanish antiquarian Manuel Martí (1663–1737) who claimed that the New World was an intellectual desert. Foregrounding this largely unknown episode in the most important intellectual controversy of the eighteenth-century Iberian Atlantic allows us to interrogate how membership in the Iberian World was constructed, and in particular how local patriotisms interacted with larger Iberian political and cultural identities. In the end, it seems that the identity of so-called creoles (American-born Spaniards) was constructed within a larger pan-Hispanic and pan-Catholic identity centered on membership in the larger space of the Iberian World and the “Republic of Letters.”

Carmen made its debut in the Spanish Americas when the local networks of opera were at their apex, with a constant stream of singers from Europe and a desire for new repertoires outside the main staples of Italian opera. In this chapter, considering sources from across the region, we discuss four layers of Carmen’s reception in the Americas. First, the reception of the opera beyond the stage, in the form of vocal scores, arrangements for military bands and isolated numbers. Second, the perception of Carmen as a French opera, and the way it served as a vehicle for French opera companies in the final decades of the nineteenth century. Third, the idea of Carmen as Spanish, and how different countries considered that hispanicity as part of their own culture and theatrical expectations. Finally, we discuss how the habanera in Carmen was perceived as part of a larger contemporary debate on the transatlantic popularity of the habanera as a musical genre, its origins, ethnicity and its moral and musical character.