Resumen de 'Like Herod's Massacre': Quarantines, Bourbon Reform, and Popular Protest in Oaxaca's Smallpox Epidemic, 1796-1797
At the end of August 1796, Balthasar Ruiz, a weaver from Teotitlán del Valle, departed with his son to sell woven goods in the mountainous region to the south. Over 23 days, he traveled a distance of 45 miles as the crow flies and upon his return was jailed when the boy fell ill with smallpox. The two had made a typical journey in an atypical time: administrators throughout the intendancy of Oaxaca were actively pursuing a program of contagion avoidance as smallpox spread there from Guatemala and Chiapas. What Oaxaca's intendant, Antonio de Mora y Peysal, called the “new project” consisted of regulating travel and commerce and isolating infected residents in casas de curación. In Teotitlán, textile producers found themselves at the outskirts of their village laboring to build a makeshift infirmary for their children and a camposanto, a consecrated field, for burial of smallpox victims. Months later, some from the village would call the regime a violation “like Herod's massacre.” At the time, quarantined in their village without access to markets or crops, there was little else for the men to do.
