UC Riverside

This dissertation looks at the effect of the arrival of cholera to the far northwestern province of Tucumán. This project participates in a relatively new historigraphical approach that has emerged within Latin American studies in the last decade: "sociocultural history of disease." I study the interaction between politics and culture, within the epidemics, in order to foreground the political agency of marginalized people and regions. The project determines the role that provincial politicians and public health played in center-periphery relations and the place of disease and health within the state-building project. I deviate from the literature on state-formation, which overemphasizes the role of the nation's capital and coercion, by highlighting the work of Tucumán in forming the Argentine state.

"Disease and Democracy" analyzes the relationship between province and state through the study of two cholera epidemics in 1868 and 1886. Through an analysis of medical dissertations, newspapers, government reports, memoirs, traveler reports, private correspondence, songs, tales and stories examined in libraries and archives in Buenos Aires, La Plata, Córdoba and Tucumán, I utilize the epidemics as a lens through which I explore the fractious relationship between politics and health. Studying epidemics is especially productive because the stress that epidemics place on society illuminates areas of the social fabric that would otherwise go unnoticed. My research reveals multiple instances in which the provinces took the lead in creating services and institutions that established the presence of the state in the interior, and created a balance between the needs of the state and provincial autonomy.