"Worker, not Slave": Biopolitics, Late Costumbrismo and homo œconomicus in Porfirian Veracruz

Abstract

This essay examines the subjective dimension of labor practices and legal aporias during the Porfiriato. By employing the concept of biopolitics ‒as it was developed by Michel Foucault‒ the essay aims to deepen our knowledge of Mexican Liberalism during the second half of the nineteenth century and specifically, during the Porfiriato. It was at this time when the population was granted various freedoms, even as new forms of subjugation were generated. My analysis focuses on a little-known text from 1902, Perfiles del terruño by Cayetano Rodríguez Beltrán, a writer from Tlacotalpan, Veracruz. Vis-à-vis key Foucauldian concepts such as “economic-juridical ensemble” and homo œconomicus, I read Rodríguez Beltrán’s costumbrista typology of social characters in the Veracruzan entrepôt of Tlacotalpan as an attempt to safeguard a region’s cultural and racial identity while simultaneously subsuming its population as economic and juridical subjects.

Keywords: costumbrism, Porfiriato, Veracruz, narrative