Unhealthy and Immoral: Temporary Lodgings in Mexico City, 1900-1920

Abstract

The local archives of Mexico City show diverse types of popular housings. Apart from the tenements that, no doubt, they were sheltering to most of the population, there existed temporary housings of different categories (boarding houses, inns and public bedrooms) in where there were staying not only the poor visitors of the city but a good part (report) of the population who did not have fixed residence. In the following pages there are described the material conditions of the temporary lodgings for poor inhabitants in this city at the end of the Porfiriato and during the revolutionary epoch. Likewise, there is characterized the governmental speech on which there were based the political ones of control of this type of housings that, in the first decades of the century XX, were a motive of culminating debates derived from the worries for the health and the "civilization" of the behaviors.