In 1991, a cholera epidemic broke out in the Americas, the first cases of which were reported in Peru. Within a few months, the disease spread to several countries in the continent, including Mexico. This epidemic was part of the seventh cholera pandemic, which began in Indonesia in 1961. The Americas had not experienced a cholera epidemic for about a century, so it was categorized as a reemerging disease. This paper seeks to examine the interrelationship between the reemergence of cholera and various socioeconomic factors, such as urbanization, migration, globalization and neoliberalism, as they favored unsustainable practices that contributed to the degradation of the environment and quality of life, thereby heightening the vulnerability of populations to the epidemic.

One hundred and twenty years ago, the Mexican government organized the first campaign against yellow fever in the country. The disease was declared eliminated in 1909; however, the revolution of 1910-1921 interrupted the sanitary measures, and epidemics returned. In 1923, a new campaign succeeded in ending the cases of urban yellow fever transmitted by Aedes aegypti throughout the country. However, due to the destruction of forests in favor of urban projects, from 1957 to 1959 there was a yellow fever epizootic in the jungles of southeastern Mexico that caused the almost total extinction of the monkeys. Again, campaigns were organized, but in 1970, a map showed that the entire coast of the Gulf of Mexico had been reinfected by Aedes aegypti. In recent years, there have been no reported cases of yellow fever in the country, but there have been cases of dengue, Zika and chikungunya, emerging diseases that are also transmitted by the bite of this mosquito. In 2022 the confirmed cases of dengue in Mexico were less than 13,000, in 2023 they reached 56,000, and in 2024 there are already more than 110,000 infected. The presentation will analyze the importance of climate change and the social determinants of health in the emergence and re-emergence of these diseases, particularly among the most vulnerable population groups, and will mention the use of new technologies that are beginning to be used to reduce the number of cases of these vector-borne diseases in a natural and sustainable way.

An indenture system (1834-1920) enabled the migration of labor from Bihar, called girmitiyas to the sugar plantations of the Caribbean and to Indian and Pacific Ocean islands. The bodies of these Bihari migrants were constantly subjected to surveilling and quarantining on both ends of their journey as they were suspected of carrying pathogens that could spread diseases on the lucrative plantations. The colonial concern was also in sending the most able-bodies colonial subjects as indentured labor. The South Asian historiography has a long tradition of examining colonized bodies “as a site of conflict between colonial power and indigenous politics” (Arnold, 1987). The plague epidemic of 1897 and the consequent surveilling of native bodies and homes caused enough resentment to occasion the assassination of the Plague Commissioner by Chapekar brothers. The Chapekar assassination ended up getting interpreted as reflecting anti-colonial vitriol and a legitimate nationalism. In contrast, the Bihari emigres fell in the wilderness of historiography with their movement, displacement, and future citizenship in an indeterminate state. This paper will speak to the response of the laboring classes to such administrative measures and make the case that such instances of resistance to medicalizing measures reflect on larger global and even transhistorical instances of state-community relationships. Though elusive, an expansive notion of disease, care, mitigation and patronage can be recuperated from this history that adds an expansive understanding of science and medicine that is relatively unhitched from the dominant histories of imperialism and capitalism.