la raza entra por la boca': energy, diet, and eugenics in colombia, 1890-1940

‘‘La raza entra por la boca’’: Energy, Diet,

and Eugenics in Colombia, 1890–1940

Stefan Pohl-Valero

While performing work, a person is truly an engine; this is because, ineffect, it transforms the heat energy contained in food into work. Weall recognize the analogy between a person regarded as an engine anda heat engine.—Alberto Borda Tanco, ‘‘El motor humano’’ (1914)

The vital reserves of our race—its development, its biotypologicalcharacteristics, the index of its advancement and average life span—restonly on the foundation of good diet.—Jorge Bejarano, Alimentacion y nutricion en Colombia (1941)

Introduction

I f German philosopher Immanuel Kant, in the late eighteenth century, sys-tematized the idea that humans could be divided and ranked according to

their capacity for illustration, leadership, and emancipation along a chromatic

Translated from the Spanish by Kathryn Litherland.—eds.

The results of the research conducted for this article are part of the project ‘‘Engineeringthe Social: The Relationship between the Natural and Social Sciences in the Constructionof the Modern Body in Colombia, 1870–1940,’’ funded by the University of Rosario ResearchFund (Fondo de Investigacion de la Universidad del Rosario, FIUR DVG-101). Differentversions of this article were presented at the faculty symposium of the University of RosarioSchool of Human Sciences, the Center for the History of Science at the AutonomousUniversity of Barcelona, the University of Valencia’s Lopez Pinero Institute for the Historyof Medicine and Science, the 54th International Congress of Americanists (Vienna, 2012),and the Latin American Studies Association’s 30th International Congress (San Francisco,2012). I wish to give special thanks to Max S. Hering, Julio Arias, Monica Garcıa, EmilioQuevedo, Franz Hensel, Oscar Saldarriaga, Rachel Laudan, Hayley Froysland, CarlosCardona, Adriana Alzate, Gustavo Vallejo, Thomas Fischer, and the HAHR editors andanonymous readers for their thoughtful critiques and suggestions.

Hispanic American Historical Review 94:3doi 10.1215/00182168-2694318 � 2014 by Duke University Press

scale at whose apex was the white race and below were the yellow, black, and redraces, respectively,1 a century later, Mexican intellectual and politician Fran-cisco Bulnes would propose a different classification: the race of wheat, the raceof rice, and the race ofcorn. Reproducing Kant’s racist hierarchy, Bulnes did nothesitate to assert, based on a nutritional analysis of these foods, that the ‘‘peopleof corn’’ were incapable of democracy, given that corn was ‘‘the eternal peace-maker of the indigenous races of the Americas, and the foundation of theirrevulsion toward becoming civilized.’’ Meanwhile, it was the ‘‘people of wheat’’(Europeans) who had reached ‘‘the highest degree of physical and mentaldevelopment.’’2 With a similar, if ambiguous, language of race and nutritionalconditions, Colombia’s intellectual elite, during the late nineteenth century andinto the first four decades of the twentieth, sought to restore the strength ofan impoverished—indigenous and mestizo—population that was consistentlythought to be weak and racially inferior but capable of physiological and hered-itary improvement. Such a regeneration, which would allow the achievementof national progress, was framed under a conceptual horizon that understoodthe human and social body in terms of a heat engine that transformed energy.3

This project of social engineering began to take shape in the last decades ofthe nineteenth century, when Colombian doctors, engineers, and lawyers werebuilding a nascent field of knowledge about work that appropriated andarticulated notions of thermodynamics, medical physics, political economy, andlaboratory physiology. At the heart of this research we find the pursuit of anideal that sought to optimize workers’ productivity from an energy-centricpoint of view; in it, diet began to be understood primarily as the energysource—measured using the thermodynamic unit of calories—needed for thehuman machine to work efficiently.4 The main objective of this article is todemonstrate how, between 1890 and 1940, this conceptualization of the pro-ductive body in terms of energy—and the definition of a balanced diet for thebody’s optimization and health—played a role in the way that the notion of raceacquired new meanings in the social thought of Colombian elites and in thestrategies put in place to achieve what these elites called the ‘‘regeneration’’ of

1. In this regard, see Castro-Gomez, La hybris, 40–41.2. Bulnes, El porvenir, 19, 11. For details on Bulnes, see Pilcher, ¡Que vivan los tamales!,

77–97.3. On the influence in Europe of an image of nature articulated through the laws of

thermodynamics in the modern conception of the body, society, culture, and the economy, seeClarke, Energy Forms; Mirowski, More Heat than Light; Pohl-Valero, Energıa y cultura;Rabinbach, Human Motor. In the Latin American context, these types of studies are still intheir very early stages. See, for example, Roldan, ‘‘Discursos alrededor.’’

4. In this regard, see Pohl-Valero, ‘‘Energıa, productividad y alimentacion.’’

456 HAHR / August / Pohl-Valero

the working classes. I further emphasize how discourses and campaigns aimed atwhat I will call social thermodynamics were understood by their own championsas one of the key elements in the heterogeneous local eugenics movement, sincethe physiological regeneration of bodies that elites sought to achieve was con-ceived of as a heritable characteristic that could thus improve future generationsof workers. By using a single framework of historical analysis to articulate thehuman engine metaphor, nutrition, and notions of race, as synthesized in thisarticle’s two epigraphs, this case study proposes a research approach that hasbeen little explored by scholars interested in how people in the first half of thetwentieth century thought about and attempted to intervene in the social milieu.At the same time, I wish to emphasize that the distinction between the biologicaland the cultural, which historians have used to classify and periodize the racia-lized discourses of the twentieth century, in this case becomes much more diffuse.

In the Colombian context, several studies have addressed the medicaliza-tion of society, the notion of race, and eugenics in the early twentieth century.These have paid special attention to a series of public debates among doctorsand educators held at the Municipal Theater of Bogota in 1920 and laterpublished under the title Los problemas de la raza en Colombia (The prob-lems of race in Colombia).5 Several of these historical analyses have identi-fied two general positions among the intellectuals involved. On the one hand,we have what we can call the biologicist view, based on hereditary and geo-graphic determinism, which held that the improvement of the Colombianrace required, on a fundamental level, the establishment of policies that wouldencourage the immigration of ‘‘white Europeans’’ (in addition to prenuptiallaws and sterilization campaigns). On the other hand, we have what we can callthe culturalist view, which held that the implementation of social reforms andpolicies, as well as educational and hygiene campaigns, would solve what theelite understood as the ‘‘problem’’ of how to enable Colombia to enter onto thestage ofcivilized and modern nations.6 This separation between the biologicistsand the culturalists has been understood within various frameworks: traditionalColombian bipartisan positions (where one position, that of the biologicists,corresponds to a more Conservative view, the other, of the culturalists, to amore Liberal outlook),7 differing theories of heredity (hard eugenics informedby Mendelianism, and soft eugenics informed by neo-Lamarckianism),8 and

5. Jimenez Lopez et al., Los problemas.6. For a historiographical analysis of the 1920 debate, see Munoz, ‘‘Estudio

introductorio’’; Noguera, Medicina y polıtica, 19–31.7. Munoz, ‘‘To Colombianize Colombia.’’8. McGraw, ‘‘Purificar la nacion’’; Runge Pena and Munoz Gaviria, ‘‘El evolucionismo

social.’’

‘‘La raza entra por la boca’’ 457

even Foucauldian theory (one group reflecting a strategy of discipline over theindividual, the other a population-based strategy of control).9 From a dia-chronic perspective, it has also been pointed out that in general terms thebiologicist view was the prevailing social outlook among elites during theConservative governments of the twentieth century’s first three decades, whilethe arrival of the Liberals into power in the 1930s shifted understandings of thepopulation, now articulated through knowledge that viewed the problem asmore social and cultural than biological.10

The international literature on the history of eugenics has pursued thistype ofanalysis in greater depth and complexity, highlighting the importance ofcomparative studies and noting eugenics’ multiple transnational connections aswell as the diverse appropriations of the science of ‘‘good breeding’’ and its rolein various projects of social reform, nation building, citizenship, and gender.11

This literature has also stressed the importance of more broadly analyzingthe historical development of the life sciences as one of the fundamentalsources of eugenicist ideas.12 For example, it has been more than a decade sinceFrank Dikotter pointed to the complex and multiple meanings that eugenicshas had in various countries, as well as its profound influence—crosscut byvarious racist ideologies—in social thought across the ideological spectrum.A multitude of intellectuals and doctors around the globe, Dikotter notes,embarked on what they understood as a ‘‘morally acceptable and scientificallyviable way of improving human heredity’’13 in the face of fears and anxietiesregarding modernity and the search for social and economic progress. How-ever, in arguing that a biologized view of society was a structuring element ofthe eugenics movement, Dikotter still adheres to the historiographical traditionlinking eugenics fundamentally to evolutionary theories (albeit diverse ones)and the metaphor of society as an organism: ‘‘Eugenics was not so much a clearset of scientific principles as a ‘modern’ way of talking about social problems inbiologizing terms: politicians with mutually incompatible beliefs and scientists

9. Saenz Obregon, Saldarriaga, and Ospina, Mirar la infancia, 90; Castro-Gomez, ‘‘Razasque decaen,’’ 108–9.

10. In addition to the references in the previous note, see Pedraza Gomez, ‘‘El debateeugenesico’’; Dıaz, ‘‘Raza, pueblo y pobres’’; Munoz, ‘‘To Colombianize Colombia.’’

11. For a recent survey, see Bashford and Levine, Oxford Handbook. For the case of LatinAmerica, the pioneering works are Stepan, ‘‘Hour ofEugenics’’; Borges, ‘‘ ‘Puffy, Ugly, Slothful,and Inert.’’’ For Colombia, see, among others, Villegas Velez, ‘‘Nacion, intelectuales de elite’’;McGraw, ‘‘Purificar la nacion.’’

12. Levine and Bashford, ‘‘Introduction,’’ 4.13. Dikotter, ‘‘Race Culture,’’ 467.


with opposed interests could all selectively appropriate eugenics to portraysociety as an organic body that had to be guided by biological laws.’’14

Clearly, this idea that society was ‘‘an organism subject to the same laws ofevolution as living organisms’’ was a key element in the so-called medicalizationof society.15 For Colombia—as for other countries in Latin America—thisconception of evolution appeared to be more neo-Lamarckian than Darwinianor Mendelian, which helped give the local eugenics movement its particularcharacteristics.16 Since the appearance of Dikotter’s article, the history ofeugenics has significantly expanded its perspectives and fields of analysis,17 butit is still very rare to find among such research work that takes the notions aboutbiology current at the time—and consequently the notion of the biologizationof politics and society—and incorporates aspects such as the analogy of thebody-machine and the physiology of nutrition.

Here I propose that paying attention precisely to the cultural constructionof a physiological field of knowledge about work and diet, articulated throughthe analogy of the human body as a machine that transforms energy, enrichesthe historical analysis of eugenics in several respects. This approach allows us todisentangle some of the multiple meanings that were built around the biologicaland to therefore get closer to the meanings that were historically attached towhat we usually call a biologized view of social problems. In turn, this allows usto historicize both the biological and the social, which implies rethinking thedistinction between a biologicist view and a culturalist view.18 Some historio-graphies, both local and international, have used such an approach to periodizethe development of racialized social thought in the twentieth century. Here,instead of assuming that reality lends itself to a sharp division into cultural andnatural aspects and that the knowledge produced to account for these aspects iseasily separable, I propose an approach that understands scientific knowledgeand social order as produced in conjunction (a coproductionist view).19 I fur-ther propose that the scientific research of nature and society is performative,since it helps configure the biological and social realities it attempts to study.20

14. Ibid., 467–68.15. Noguera, Medicina y polıtica, 108–9.16. Stepan, ‘‘Hour of Eugenics’’; Noguera, Medicina y polıtica; McGraw, ‘‘Purificar la

nacion.’’ However, the presence ofa ‘‘negative eugenics’’ in Argentina has been highlighted byReggiani, ‘‘Depopulation, Fascism, and Eugenics.’’

17. Recent examples include Miranda and Vallejo, Darwinismo social; Bashford andLevine, Oxford Handbook.

18. On diet and the history of the social, see Vernon, ‘‘Ethics of Hunger.’’19. On the ontological distinction between nature and culture as a construction specific

to modern Western thought, see Latour, Nunca fuimos modernos.20. Jasanoff, ‘‘Ordering Knowledge’’; Pohl-Valero, ‘‘Perspectivas culturales.’’


As noted by historians of the life sciences such as Donna Haraway andNelly Oudshoorn, problematizing the modern division between culture andnature allows us first to understand this ontological separation as a particularcultural construction that has served precisely to impose different forms ofknowledge (separate scientific disciplines) to address these seemingly irrecon-cilable realms (e.g., the difference created by social science itself between[natural] sex and [cultural] gender). Second, it allows us to address scientifictheories of the natural not simply as transparent reflections of what is out there(body, sex, genes, and hormones, for instance) but as a series of discourses andpractices mediated by, among other things, cultural stereotypes about men andwomen as well as more generally by asymmetrical power relations.21 Scholars ofrace such as Peter Wade propose that this theoretical pathway may provideexplanatory power in the context of an Anglo-Saxon historiography that hastraditionally produced a very rigid historical notion of race that moves from abiological sort of racism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to acultural one from the mid-twentieth century onward. As Wade mentions, thisperiodization of racism ‘‘involve[s] the naturalisation of culture and the cul-turalisation of nature: this dual dynamic makes it unclear what is being talked ofas natural and what cultural in a given context and thus provides the possibilityof seeing the natural as cultural and the cultural as natural. . . . Enquiry intowhat ‘nature’ (and blood, genes and biology) mean in a given context helps us tosee the flexible ways racial discourses work.’’22

Thus, in this article I approach the body-machine analogy as a culturalartifact, rooted in a particular historical context, that helped to denaturalize thepopulation’s power to do work and at the same time to naturalize the ideal of anindustrialized society governed by an ethic of energy-centric productivism.23

This social thermodynamics allowed a series of knowledges, practices, andinstitutions to be assembled that together helped shape a specific reality ofhuman nature and, therefore, particular strategies for governing the popula-tion. In this process, diet became a field of research and a social interventionarticulated in the language—simultaneously natural and cultural—of theenergy-centric physiology of nutrition and through a particular conception ofheredity that, within the field of childcare (or, as I will discuss below, whatexperts called ‘‘puericulture’’), suggested that the human machine’s optimiza-tion for work was a heritable condition.

21. Haraway, Simians; Oudshoorn, Beyond the Natural Body.22. Wade, Race, 15.23. Pohl-Valero, in ‘‘Perspectivas culturales,’’ develops the concept of ‘‘cultural artifact’’

as a methodological pathway ofanalysis for the history of science. For a historical overview ofthe concept of the body-machine as a cultural artifact, see Morus, ‘‘Introduction.’’


Nutrition, Energy, and Race

In the first two decades of the twentieth century, we begin to note Colombiandoctors’ growing interest in the dietary habits and nutritional characteristics ofpopulations in different regions of the country. These doctors encouraged thestate to regulate diets and working conditions in accordance with the modernscience of nutrition. In 1911, Conservative doctor and hygienist Pablo GarcıaMedina, who would play a key role in consolidating and centralizing publichealth in Colombia,24 noted that ‘‘the deficient diet of our working class shouldlead us to reflect on the dire consequences that this has, not only on individualand collective health, but on the future of the race; if modern hygiene has anyimportant role to play among the popular classes, it is certainly in its rela-tionship to the social problems that nowadays concern most of the world’sgovernments, problems it can contribute to solving in an effective way.’’25

Garcıa Medina’s conception of the human body’s functioning was clearlyenergy-centric: ‘‘In man, as in any organism engaged in activity, energy isconstantly being developed, which is manifested in the movements we perform,in the heat our body produces, in the electricity that is developed in the tissues,etc., etc. Organs take in the food they need to produce this energy from theexterior.’’26 Thus for this hygienist, the ‘‘future of the race’’ was intimatelyconnected with the working class obtaining a diet with sufficient calories for thetype of work performed, as well as the clothing and living conditions needed tohelp the energy balance of such work activities.27

One of the pioneering works that Garcıa Medina mentions with respect tothese issues was that of Manuel Cotes, a physician who at the First NationalMedical Congress in 1893 presented a study on the diets of laborers from thehigh plateau of Bogota. At the center of his analysis we find the goal ofincreasing the ‘‘productive power of the country,’’ insofar as it was possible toactually ‘‘restore strength annihilated by work’’ through what came to be calledthe ‘‘balanced diet.’’28 Cotes, who in the future would be president of theDepartmental Board of Hygiene of Magdalena, conducted a thorough study ofmore than 200 workers, categorizing them into three types and indicating theaverage salary and diet of each. Based on this, he established that their diet was

24. See Quevedo et al., Cafe y gusanos, 167.25. Garcıa Medina, ‘‘La alimentacion,’’ 161. This article was originally published in

1911 in Revista Medica de Bogota: Organo de la Academia Nacional de Medicina 29, nos. 345–346:107–19.

26. Garcıa Medina, ‘‘La alimentacion,’’ 171–72.27. Ibid., 172, 174.28. Cotes, Regimen alimenticio, 41–42.


insufficient to meet the energy expenditure incurred in their work activities,which, he asserted, could cause ‘‘the bankruptcy of the living machine.’’29 Cotesurged participants at the First National Medical Congress to recognize theimportance of indoctrinating schoolchildren and workers in the rules ofhygiene and nutrition so as to teach them how to become efficient machineryfor the nation’s advancement. The state was to oversee and regulate laborers’wages in order to ensure that they were sufficient to meet ‘‘basic needs’’ forfood, housing, and shelter.30

As did Garcıa Medina and other doctors of the time, Cotes understood thatdiet played a central role in improving the race. The concept of race used inthese discourses was ambiguous, sometimes referring to the general Colombianpopulation and sometimes to regional groups—for example, to the ‘‘Anti-oquian race’’ or to indigenous communities. Cotes himself wondered about thephysical, moral, and intellectual capacities of the ‘‘Indians of the high plateau ofBogota,’’ or the ‘‘Chibcha tribe,’’ noting that ‘‘the physical and moral strengthof a people is developed, advantageously, in direct and precise proportion to thefoods it consumes.’’31 For Cotes, the Chibcha had enjoyed a diet that was, at thetime of the conquest and during the colonial period, ‘‘substantial and restor-ative,’’ which was ‘‘proof of the strength and intelligence of this powerful andwealthy race.’’ He lamented the mid-nineteenth-century policies of economicliberalism, particularly the state’s ‘‘incredible decision to abolish Indian reser-vations,’’ for cutting short the configuration of a mestizo race ideally suited forwork under high-altitude atmospheric and climatic conditions.32 According toCotes, the barrier to Indians’ progress, and the cause of their racial weakness,could clearly be deduced from a combination of factors that were political(economic liberalism, specifically the disappearance of reservations), social(poor education and low wages), and physiological (wear on the human machinedue to poor diet) in nature. As he went on to speculate, ‘‘if those [Republican]governments had heeded the instruction of those people and taken positivesteps to ensure that wages were sufficient to offset the cost of the work provided,those people—free, intelligent, and industrious—surrounded by the endear-ing affections of home, would have been the solid foundation of a new raceformed by crossing and selection, in the best physical condition to overcome theatmospheric and climatic action of these altitudes better than any otherimmigrant race.’’33

29. Ibid., 6.30. Ibid., 47–48.31. Ibid., 24.32. Ibid., 25–26.33. Ibid., 25.


With respect to workers from other regions, the classification of their laborand moral capacities also depended on their diet and the amount of energy theyingested from it. Pointing to statistics on meat consumption in different regionsof the country, Cotes highlighted the ‘‘physiological absurdity’’ that con-sumption decreased with increasing altitude. This was one reason why workerson ‘‘the coast and in Antioquia [had] greater strength to work than those ofBoyaca and the high plateau of Bogota, since the diet of the former [was]superior to that of the latter, which therefore [made] them more robust andmore intelligent.’’34 Garcıa Medina wielded the same argument in a study of thelaborers from the plains of Casanare. Although this physician declared that thelocals’ diet was limited and monotonous (mainly rice, cassava, bananas, andlarge quantities of meat and coffee), it was sufficiently nutritious; this resulted ina ‘‘smart, talkative, and brave’’ population that enjoyed great muscular strengthand resistance to fatigue. In contrast, mountain dwellers were ‘‘weak, anemic,and lazy’’ because they ate much less meat than those from the plains.35 Nowonder Carlos Michelsen, a doctor who authored one of the first works ondietary hygiene in the city of Bogota, did not hesitate to say that, based onnutritional and statistical studies, ‘‘the size, power, strength, and morality ofwell-managed nations develop in direct proportion to the consumption ofmeat.’’36

Meanwhile, in 1913 Miguel Triana, an engineer, naturalist, and traveler,made note of the keys to achieving social progress and the regeneration of theColombian population from a perspective that was equally energy-centric butdiametrically opposed to the above regional and racial classifications. Thisengineer stressed that the Andean highlands, despite being an area where‘‘locomotion is tiresome, where the heart invests a greater amount of effort tocirculate blood in the various regions of the human body, and where the frigidtemperatures require an increased amount of work from farmworkers foragricultural production,’’ was precisely the best place to take advantage of the‘‘multitude of forces that the mountain conceals.’’37 The climatic and physio-logical conditions there, claimed Triana, had shaped the highlanders’ extensivecapacity for work as well as a character that was ‘‘brave, thrifty, persevering, andastute,’’ unlike the ‘‘children of the plains,’’ who were ‘‘weaker in every way thanthe former.’’38 This ‘‘sociology of the mountain,’’ as he labeled it, pointed the

34. Ibid., 39.35. Pablo Garcıa Medina, quoted in ibid., 45–46.36. Michelsen, ‘‘Carne,’’ 55.37. Miguel Triana, ‘‘Sociologıa de la montana,’’ El Grafico (Bogota), 1 Mar. 1913. (This

publication is unpaginated.)38. Ibid.


way for ‘‘compatriots of Indian blood’’ all over Colombia to leave behind the‘‘classification of inferior races,’’ if they learned how to leverage and optimizetheir energy resources.39 In its fullest extent, the sociology proposed by Trianareflected the energy-centric paradigm in which it was inscribed, as it assertedthat ‘‘the degree of civilization and culture could be measured in mechanicalunits of thermodynamics. The psychic life and social progress represented, inthe final analysis, pure consumption of heat.’’40 As the civil engineer AlbertoBorda Tanco explained in 1914, ‘‘while performing work, a person is truly anengine,’’ and the ‘‘maximum useful work that a laborer could produce’’ wasmeasurable precisely with the thermodynamic unit of energy. He suggested (inthe passage that provides one of this essay’s epigraphs) that the factors thatdetermined the daily amount of work produced by the ‘‘human motor’’ wereanalogous to those affecting the thermal machine: ‘‘race,’’ or ‘‘the brand of themotor’’; ‘‘health’’ and ‘‘amount of food and air,’’ or ‘‘the good condition [of themotor]’’; and so on.41

The words of these hygienists and engineers betray the complex andinterconnected physiological, racial, social, and moral aspects with which elitessought to produce a population ideally suited, in terms of energy, for the nation’sprogress and modernization, as they understood this ideal. These discourseson, and incipient investigation of, social thermodynamics were framed in thecontext of a Conservative policy of institutional regeneration, centralist andinterventionist in nature. This policy was directed first against the allegedpolitical instability caused by the federalist Liberal governments of the mid-nineteenth century; then, after the Thousand Days’ War and the loss of Panama,it was channeled by a more pragmatic spirit into the pursuit of economicdevelopment for national progress.42 The idea offorging a ‘‘new race,’’ as Cotescommented, captured an important aspect of the Regeneration’s project ofsocial and moral reform.43 This project, in its physiological and energy-centricfacets, not only sought to produce an efficient working class but also helped togenerate, albeit in a contradictory fashion, hierarchical and reductionist ethnicand regional classifications.

In the first decades of the twentieth century there was thus a growingpush on the part of the medical profession for state intervention into social

39. Ibid.40. Ibid.41. Borda Tanco, ‘‘El motor humano,’’ 211–12.42. See Bejarano, ‘‘El despegue cafetero.’’43. On the moral, social, and racial project of the Regeneration policy period, see

Froysland, ‘‘Regeneracion de la raza.’’


issues such as the regulation of wages and food prices, occupational hygieneconditions, and education on hygiene and diet. All these were issues thoughtabout and proposed, at least in part, based on the ideal of achieving maximumperformance of the human machine and avoiding its alleged racial degenera-tion. Although the advent of the Liberal governments in the 1930s generallyshifted discourses and policy initiatives on the labor and health of workers froma paternalism informed by the Catholic ideal of charity to a more populistposition that attempted to integrate and co-opt the labor movement, this focuson energy and racial dimensions in the push to increase the country’s productivepower continued to structure how intellectuals framed and intervened in someof the workers’ social problems.44

Indeed, if in 1920 Colombian agriculturalists read with interest thatthermodynamics and nutrition were bringing new solutions to the so-calledproblem between capital and labor, insofar as these topics allowed them ‘‘tocalculate the fuel needed for the work of the human machine’’ and thus toscientifically define workers’ daily wages,45 years later, in 1935, the same agri-cultural journal would publish an equally energy-centric conceptualization offood and the body that reflected throughout the interconnected natural andcultural aspects that formed the conceptual horizon for defining and resolvingthe ‘‘social question’’:

When public opinion is preoccupied with questions about the debilitationof race, the decline in birthrates, improving the lot of workers, wages,pensions, manual laborers, laws concerning care for the elderly, the sick,and the incurable, and when the socialists say that the ‘‘social question’’

44. In his institutional and sociopolitical history of public health in Colombia, MarioHernandez characterizes the national health system between 1910 and 1929 as one guided byinstitutions governed by the Catholic ideal of charity, but with the growing presence of acommunity of physicians intent on modernizing health care through government-influencedpublic and private hygiene. This process intensified in the context of an incipientconsolidation of the working class during the 1920s, although the government wouldcontinue with a policy of limited state intervention. Hernandez characterizes the 1930s as aperiod in which both Liberals and Conservatives agreed to give the state a leading role inmanaging workers, the unemployed, and the poor. This period witnessed the initial momentsofa transformation from charity to state-controlled public assistance. With the creation of theMinistry of Health, social security, the National Welfare Fund, and other institutions in the1940s, it seemed that a state public health system had been consolidated; however, it wasstructurally fragmented, dividing its services and institutions among the poor, workers(further divided into those sectors of workers with enough clout to pressure the government),and the rich. Hernandez Alvarez, ‘‘La fractura originaria.’’

45. R. G. C., ‘‘Modo de obtener,’’ 227–28.


is a matter of the stomach, one must educate about the best output thatcan be obtained from the human machine. Mechanics, electricians, andagronomists know all about handling machines, but they do not knowabout nutritional needs.46

Laurentino Munoz, a Liberal doctor and director of the National Depart-ment of Hygiene between 1936 and 1938, argued also, in 1939, that the‘‘biological tragedy of the Colombian people’’ was based largely both on poornutrition that failed to ‘‘invigorate the race’’ and on a government that had notknown how to properly ‘‘make use of human energies for noble and redemptivepurposes.’’47 Thus, most Colombians were in a state of ‘‘physiological misery,’’with ‘‘biological strength that merely sufficed for vegetative functions’’ andinsufficient to ‘‘produce and create wealth.’’48 The framework ofenergy-centricproductivism within which this discourse was inscribed is reflected in a dis-cussion of the workday. Munoz defended his call to reduce workers’ dailyschedules to eight hours on the assumption that this would prevent ‘‘physio-logical fatigue’’—that is, the wearing down of the living machine.49 With this,workers’ performance would improve:

In response to the establishment of the eight-hour day in our Country, theobservation was made that both the private and state economies wouldbe greatly harmed because the Colombian worker does not yield thesame output as those in other countries where hygiene defends the humanmass and alcohol does not destroy men . . . but due to that same bodilysituation, the Colombian worker necessitates that the task not lead to fatigue,with this word being understood in a physiological sense; with an 8-hourworkday the Colombian worker—most of whom are sick—will at leastenjoy some rest, and during his waking hours, despite his condition, he willoutperform what he could do in 10 or 12 hours of continuous work.50

This energy-centric and racial perception of the ‘‘social question’’ alsoemerged in the work carried out by the Ministry of Labor, Hygiene, and SocialWelfare, created in 1938. One of the first booklets the ministry published as

46. Borda Tanco, ‘‘Ciencia de la alimentacion,’’ 14.47. Munoz, La tragedia biologica, 22.48. Ibid., 1.49. On the configuration of the physiological concept of fatigue in the late nineteenth

century, see Rabinbach, Human Motor.50. Munoz, La tragedia biologica, 140–41.


part of its educational campaign reported on a study on the diet of the workingclass in Bogota; it addressed, among other aspects, family types, income levels,food eaten, and market prices, as well as the chemical composition of theconsumed food’s nutrients and its vitamin and caloric content. The ‘‘dietaryinsufficiency’’ of the workers—who could not compensate for the energy costof their work activities—was cited as the main cause of the population’s‘‘degenerative’’ process.51 This type of study, the ministry claimed, should bewidely disseminated to ‘‘make the public understand the foundations of thebiological policy’’ that the government was trying to develop and to ‘‘form aclear health awareness among all social classes in the country.’’52

It is thus possible to generally argue that the conceptual horizon thathelped to structure elite social thought between 1890 and 1940 had a commonelement based on the ideal of generating more productive working subjectswithin the framework of a capitalist economy. This social engineering gearedtoward the racial invigoration and physiological regeneration of the popula-tion—and which shifted between biological policies and social policies—wasdiscursively configured during the Conservative period of the Regenerationand had a clear resonance in political institutions and initiatives during theLiberal Republic.53 But before we explore the actions unleashed by this socialthermodynamics, it is important to highlight that the same energy-centricconception of the human body, as well as the idea that the optimized organismcould inherit this condition (as discussed below), can be understood as a lan-guage constructed within a particular cultural context and not merely thebiological component of social thought. Put another way, it is not that therewere clearly differentiated and bounded sets of knowledge about the naturaland cultural components of reality, which people attempted to grasp andmanage, but rather that reality took on a particular form when a series ofknowledges, practices, and institutions were assembled. In our case, thatassembly focused on the cultural artifact of the body-machine.

Body-Machine and Social Thermodynamics

One of the disciples of Conservative hygienist Garcıa Medina was CalixtoTorres Umana, a pediatrician who in his 1913 medical school thesis conducted a

51. Socarras, Alimentacion de la clase obrera, 37.52. Ibid., 3.53. The history and sociology of work in Colombia during the first half of the twentieth

century has not paid sufficient attention to the racial dimension in its analysis. Aninnovative study on this topic for the case of Peru is Drinot, Allure of Labor.


detailed investigation into the metabolic capabilities of the residents of Bogotaand Tunja. Torres reviewed the historical development of nutrition, stressingthat this field of science had reached its maximum development when it man-aged to effectively integrate the first law of thermodynamics into its conceptionof metabolism: ‘‘The principle of the conservation of energy is thus applied tothe animal just as accurately as to the steam engine.’’54

This analogy, which was beginning to structure the way in which people’sdiet and work capacity were studied and manipulated, should not be considereda transparent reflection or explanation of human nature embodied in the bio-logical discourse of nutrition. As Donna Haraway has clearly pointed out, it wasin the European industrial context of the second half of the nineteenth centurythat ‘‘scientists materially constituted the organism as a laboring system,structured by a hierarchical division of labor, and an energetic system fueled bysugars and obeying the laws of thermodynamics.’’55 The now classic work ofAnson Rabinbach on the modern ties between the economy, health, and pro-ductivity offers a detailed study of the process by which, during the momentaddressed by Haraway, human nature was constructed around the modernconception of the body as a thermodynamic engine.56 As I have discussedelsewhere, in Colombia at this same time, this analogy underwent a complexprocess of appropriation, in which cultural, religious, economic, and episte-mological elements played a role in how social thought among both Con-servative and Liberal elites integrated an interpretation of the body that, whilematerialistic and at first considered a source of social disorder, allowed theseelites to quantify the work potential of the population while reducing their realexistence, physical and intellectual, to a mere condition of transforming andoptimizing energy.57 If the mid-nineteenth century saw an emphasis on the‘‘grievous error’’ of ‘‘some writers who have equated man with a machine,’’58 inthe early twentieth century the ideas that ‘‘every worker’’ was ‘‘a machine thatundergoes deterioration’’ and needs ‘‘to repair itself continuously,’’ and that‘‘the force this wonderful human machine uses to act is energy,’’ had become astructuring element in how to address social reality.59

Torres Umana’s study was a true reflection of how this energy-centricconception of the organism-machine, inextricably related to the representation

54. Torres Umana, Sobre metabolismo, 14–15.55. Haraway, Modest_Witness, 97.56. Rabinbach, Human Motor.57. Pohl-Valero, ‘‘Energıa, productividad y alimentacion.’’58. So asserted a political economy manual that was used to study this science in

Colombia in the 1860s. Petano y Mazariegos, Manual, 110.59. Sz, ‘‘El ahorro de energıa,’’ Cromos (Bogota), 7 Feb. 1920, p. 33.


of an industrial and productive society, in turn helped to define some of thesocial problems that were perceived as most pressing for the Colombiannation.60 In fact, this physician’s research was presented at the Second PanAmerican Scientific Congress, held in Washington, DC, in 1916–1917, as anexample of the highlights from the most relevant national research.61 On theinitiative of the US delegation, the Colombian government was asked to chooselocal speakers for this conference. Dr. Carlos Esguerra, president of theNational Academy of Medicine, proposed to make this choice based on whetherthe projects ‘‘are of national interest and reflect the sciences that our academiescultivate.’’62 The fact that a study framed within the energy-centric physiologyof nutrition was chosen demonstrates the perception that this field of knowl-edge was key to confronting—while simultaneously defining, as Torres himselfnoted—the nation’s ‘‘most significant problems.’’63

His work was based on physiological and chemical measurements taken inBogota and Tunja, which, when statistically compared with European averages,would acquire social significance with respect to the Colombian population’scapacity for progress as well as the racial superiority or inferiority of differentregional and national physiologies. This quantification of difference was basedon average measurements of body temperature, capacity of the thoracic cavity,red blood cell counts, and the chemical composition of urine, which Torresobtained from population samples categorized as ‘‘working class’’ and ‘‘upperclass.’’ Torres compared these results with those obtained in similar studies ofEuropean populations, arguing that ‘‘our soil is rich enough in nutrient mate-rials and our foodstuffs have nothing to envy in those of the temperate zones.’’He concluded that ‘‘our race . . . is under attack by a principle of physiologicaldegeneration that renders it incapable of defending itself against the harshnessof high altitudes.’’64 Thus although local foods were sufficiently nutritious, themetabolic capacity of the highland population—including the upper classes—

60. At that time a slow process of industrialization and urbanization was beginning totake place in some cities of Colombia—Medellın and Bogota—that would little by littlereplace the colonial model of production with modern manufacturing. For scholars such asSantiago Castro-Gomez, it was not only the implementation of a new form of productionthat generated policies to produce modern subjects but also precisely the desire and thevirtuality of that industrialization, which structured the policies and governing of life evenprior to the achievement of its material conditions. Castro-Gomez, Tejidos onıricos.

61. Torres Umana, ‘‘La nutricion.’’62. Carlos Esguerra, quoted in Ministerio de Instruccion Publica, Republica de

Colombia, ‘‘Undecima parte,’’ 149.63. Torres Umana, ‘‘La nutricion,’’ 52.64. Ibid., 64.


to assimilate them was lower than that of European populations, which resultedin a greater predilection toward certain diseases and reduced work capacity.

It would seem that the local human machine was less efficient in its abilityto transform food energy into physical and intellectual work than ones locatedelsewhere.65 Although the altitude was one of the immediate causes of thisdecline of human efficiency, Torres indicated that it was very likely that if thesame measurements were taken for inhabitants of other regions, they wouldyield similar results. This was because, in addition to its altitude, Colombia’slocation in the seasonless equatorial tropics, with its specific atmosphericcharacteristics, could result in such biological inferiority.66 One generalizationfrom this energy-centric and hierarchical view of the races was very wellsummed up a few years later by a reporter for the cultural magazine Cromos, whoassured that it was the capacity of the ‘‘blonde races’’ (European and American)to develop ‘‘energy’’ that led to the subjugation of Colombians abroad and thatcaused Colombians to experience ‘‘reverence, fear, [and] submission.’’67

Teacher training programs unmistakably reflected the consolidation of thissocial thermodynamics and its emerging role in state policies for the governanceof life. In 1917, in response to demands for more hygiene education for thepopulation, the government designated the official text for nutrition instructionin Colombia’s teacher training schools: a treatise written by Rafael ZerdaBayon, a doctor and chemist, entitled Food Chemistry, Adapted to the Economic andHygienic Needs of Colombia. The Ministry of Public Instruction bought 3,000copies for distribution at these educational institutions, which served to trainfuture teachers for public schools throughout Colombia.68 The goal was toensure that teachers had sufficient knowledge to pass on to Colombian childrenthe foundations of a dietary hygiene that would maintain health and achieve anenergy balance between what they consumed and what they expended in labor.In the text Zerda Bayon defined the science of diet as a thermodynamic analysisseeking to optimize the body’s productive capacity: ‘‘Thermo-alimentation isthe study of the nature of the foods needed to contribute a number of caloriescompatible with good health during work. . . . A balanced diet. . . . should meet

65. For a comparative analysis of the various conceptions held by Mexican and Peruviandoctors on the issue of the pathology or physiological normalcy of the ‘‘highland races’’during this same period, see Chazaro, ‘‘La soledad ‘local.’ ’’

66. Torres Umana, ‘‘Cuarta Conferencia,’’ 169.67. Gonzalo Parıs, ‘‘Energıa,’’ Cromos (Bogota), 21 Sept. 1918, p. 161.68. Contract between Ministry of Public Instruction and Rafael Zerda Bayon, Consejo

de Estado, Sala de lo Contencioso Administrativo, 27 Mar. 1917. Zerda Bayon, Quımica, 7,includes a transcription of the contract but omits the number of copies purchased.


the functional needs of the body and be of good quality, in a quantity pro-portional to the work a person performs.’’69

In the early years of the twentieth century, several hygiene manuals forschoolchildren and mothers were also published, paying special attention tochildren’s diets. As one of these noted in 1905, ‘‘having attributed the visibledegeneration of our race to the action of the environment and to the vague andindefinite effects of time, we have not trained our attention on the real agents ofour weakness and decay.’’70 Its author, Dr. Jose Ignacio Barberi, together withTorres Umana and other doctors, would in 1917 found the Pediatric Society ofBogota as an initiative attacking precisely those ‘‘agents of weakness and decay.’’The purpose of the society was

to develop and perfect, among us, the study of children’s diseases, promotetheir upbringing and provide care for their diseases; to that end it willpropose the founding of free clinics in various districts of the city, it willtry to establish the institution known as the ‘‘Gotas de Leche’’ [Drops ofMilk], and it will concern itself with using all possible means to disseminatechild-rearing methods in accordance with modern hygienic ideas; toaccomplish this, its members will regularly give talks for mothers whowish to improve the health of their children. It will thus be a scientificand educational society as well as a charitable organization.71

The Drop of Milk program was created in Bogota one year later. Althoughthis institution, intended to provide milk to poor children whose mothers wereunable to adequately meet their nursing needs, has been generally understoodas a social welfare program in the Catholic tradition of charity,72 it was alsoframed within the scientific field of diet and public hygiene. In fact, thePediatric Society of Bogota was appointed to lead the ‘‘scientific aspect of theinstitution,’’73 defining the milk rations that children should consume in caloricterms according to age and weight. Several physicians of the day served asinterns in these institutions and carried out their medical school theses onchemical and caloric analyses of the diet these children received, as well as on

69. Zerda Bayon, Quımica, 151–52.70. Barberi, Manual de higiene, iii.71. Mission statement of the Pediatric Society of Bogota, 27 May 1918, Archivo General

de la Nacion, Bogota, Republica, Ministerio de Gobierno, seccion 4ta Personerıas Jurıdicas,tomo 6, fol. 151.

72. Castro Carvajal, Caridad y beneficencia.73. ‘‘Estatutos del Patronato de ‘Gotas de Leche,’ ’’ Archivo General de la Nacion,

Bogota, Republica, Ministerio de Gobierno, seccion 4ta Personerıa Jurıdica, tomo 6, fol. 131.


the statistical reconstruction of the ‘‘exact racial type [of the Colombian child]at different ages.’’74 This institution, a private initiative that enjoyed anincreasing amount of government support, was portrayed in 1919 by Liberalhygienist Jorge Bejarano as a space to shape ‘‘beautiful examples of race andvigor’’ and to achieve the ‘‘renovation of the peoples.’’75 In 1933, at thebeginning of a Liberal period following more than 40 years of Conservativegovernments, there were about 30 Drop of Milk centers and nurseries in 17cities, where they prepared an average of 150,000 infant bottles per month.76

Both the Drop of Milk centers and the school cafeterias, the latter estab-lished in different Colombian cities in the 1930s, sought to instill the principlesof a scientific diet in mothers and children and to teach them to think of theirbodies as heat engines that should be in optimal condition for transformingfood energy into productive work.77 School vacation colonies, launched at theend of that decade, offer another excellent example of these social engineeringlaboratories. Rural adolescents from different parts of the country gathered atthese colonies for three-month periods of ‘‘physiological restoration’’ through ahygiene system that included physical education and a balanced diet.78 Both thecafeterias and the colonies were coordinated by the Ministry of NationalEducation, which in turn began a major campaign of popular cultural diffusionin 1935 known as the Village Library (Biblioteca Aldeana).79 The contents ofthese libraries, which were intended to reach every municipality in the country,included a series of technical booklets with practical skills for the rural popu-lation. Knowledge about energy in one’s diet and the functioning of the body-machine was a central theme in several of these. As one of these texts states,

74. Andrade B., Contribucion del estudio, 10–11.75. Jorge Bejarano, ‘‘Las Gotas de Leche: Su significado y valor social,’’ Cromos (Bogota),

27 Sept. 1919, pp. 189–90. Bejarano became later, in the 1940s, one of principal promoters ofnutritional policies in Colombia. In 1941 he published a book on nutrition based on thepremise (as elaborated in the quote from this book cited as an epigraph to this essay) that racialhealth depended fundamentally on a good diet, and that ‘‘the races that take advantage of newknowledge of nutrition [will have] longer longevity, greater height, more vigor, and higherculture.’’ Bejarano, Alimentacion y nutricion, 7.

76. For statistical data on this institution between the months of October and November1933, see ‘‘Gota de Leche.’’

77. According to the report by Calixto Torres Umana at the Tenth Pan American HealthConference and the Third Pan American Conference on Eugenics and Homoculture,held jointly in 1938 in Bogota, Colombia was home to 638 ‘‘school cafeterias, intended toensure free food for malnourished schoolchildren,’’ distributing meals to 100,000 children.Torres Umana, ‘‘Alimentacion,’’ 468.

78. Solano Lozano, ‘‘Colonia escolar,’’ 34.79. On the Village Library, see Silva, Republica Liberal.


‘‘Our body is a precious machine that needs special attention. Its various partsmust work in perfect harmony. . . . Like any other machine, the body needs fuelto work. This fuel, however, must be consistent with the nature of eachmachine. . . . When the fuel is adequate and is properly developed in everyorgan, the machine produces good work. But if the food is inadequate, or is ill-prepared in any of its various phases, disease ensues.’’80

Thus all these institutions and cultural campaigns advocated that thepopulation start to perceive their own bodies as machines that could be regu-lated to improve productivity. This capacity for self-regulation led, in turn, toan understanding of these institutional spaces, as well as the body itselfand eventhe kitchens of Colombian households, as social laboratories for physiologicalregeneration and the optimization of the human machine. Another of theVillage Library booklets expressed it eloquently: ‘‘If the laboratory of your bodycannot take, from the substance that an individual ingests as food, what it needsfor all the mentioned purposes’’ of alimentation, then its ‘‘health’’ and ‘‘vitalresistance’’ would be ruined. Likewise, it was hoped that, thanks to the scienceof nutrition, ‘‘the kitchen [would become] a laboratory where the raw materials,which are raw or unprocessed foods, must be transformed into healthy anddigestible meals, and not into poisons that are all the more harmful the moreappealing they are to the palate.’’81

This project of social thermodynamics also appeared in the outreach workof the Ministry of Labor, Hygiene, and Social Welfare. In 1940, two years afterits creation, the ministry published a booklet on Comprehensive Child Hygieneand Diet, which proposed the ‘‘improvement of the biological, social, and moralconditions of the new generations’’ through a balanced diet for the popula-tion.82 As the authors pointed out, the field of nutrition research should includeanalysis of ‘‘production, transportation, consumption, education, the energyand biological value of foods and their mixtures, [and] setting a living wage, sothat a fair correlation is established between the purchasing power of labor andthe cost of biological needs (food, shelter, clothing, and entertainment).’’83 Oneof the expected results of the ministry’s campaigns was the optimization of whatthe booklet’s authors did not hesitate to call the ‘‘social energy’’ of the country:

80. Nuestros alimentos, 7–8.81. Bonilla, ‘‘Alimentacion defectuosa,’’ 5, 15. Emphasis added. Bonilla defined the

sources of alimentation as ‘‘all the materials that the body makes use of to build and replace itstissues, to regulate its functions, to promote its development and its health, and to obtainthe energy necessary to conserve heat and perform work.’’ Ibid., 5.

82. Gamboa Echandıa and Pedraza, Higiene integral, 6.83. Ibid., 51.


‘‘If the body does not get sufficient food of appropriate quantity and quality, itwill not . . . be able to develop the energy to work. This latter aspect of theproblem is the most important one, and also the one that presents the greatestdifficulties. . . . All governments . . . should intervene to normalize the multiplefactors that affect diet, since it is the source of social energy and the foundationfor the defense of individual and collective health.’’84 But if nutrition wasidentified as a key element for a social engineering aimed at regulating the body-machine in order to improve national productivity, it was simultaneouslyrelated to the eugenic idea of producing better generations of workers.

Puericulture, Inheritance, and Alcoholism

The preface of the above-mentioned 1940 booklet stressed that the ‘‘campaignsfor child and maternal protection pursued by the national government’’ werepart of the science of ‘‘puericulture,’’ a field whose most significant progress hadbeen achieved in the realm of diet.85 The booklet’s authors understood puer-iculture to be a central element in a eugenics designed to prevent hereditarydefects (‘‘dysgenic elements’’) caused largely by poor maternal and childnutrition.86 In fact, the science of puericulture, as a branch of pediatrics whoseapproach did not separate the biological from the social, had attracted interestfrom several Colombian doctors since the early twentieth century. One of itsmain promoters in France, Adolphe Pinard, had a great impact in Colombia,which included the translation of his book Puericulture (Parenting Newborns) in1907 by a Bogota publisher.87 This field of science, which Pinard’s followers inColombia defined as one that ‘‘involves the investigation of all knowledgeconcerning reproduction, conservation, and improvement of the human spe-cies,’’ was understood as a critical source for improving the race.88 SeveralColombian physicians emphasized Pinard’s idea that birth defects could be pre-vented before and after procreation through appropriate measures understood

84. Ibid., 50.85. For the history of this French term, and its relationship to and differences from the

English one of eugenics, see Schneider, Quality and Quantity, 55–83.86. Gamboa Echandıa and Pedraza, Higiene integral, 4. The first chapter of the book

explains the concept of eugenics and advocates ‘‘eugenic measures’’ such as ‘‘sterilization, thefight against miscegenation with inferior races, regulation of immigration, regulation ofmarriage, moral and sex education, reeducation of abnormal persons, and measures ofsocial hygiene.’’ Ibid., 6. However, the bulk of the booklet was devoted to the nutritionalcomponent of childcare.

87. Pinard, La puericultura.88. Vernaza, Higiene escolar, 11.


as forms of eugenics, a science that ‘‘by persevering in its efforts . . . will one daytransform inheritance from a blind force transmitting evils into a force respon-sible for surrounding the child’s cradle with gifts.’’89

One of the fundamental concepts that informed puericulture and thatallowed the diet of parents and children to be conceived of as a eugenicscampaign was the neo-Lamarckian idea of the inheritance of acquired char-acteristics.90 As physician Jose Salazar explained in his 1921 thesis, germ cellsdegenerate by the direct action of certain diseases and the intoxication of theparents. This degeneration acted on ‘‘the seeds that have not yet been com-bined, through their carriers, creating, at their origin, what have been called‘hereditary defects.’’’ For example, parental alcoholism, even a short timebefore the baby was born, could generate alterations in the protoplasm of thegerm cells, producing ‘‘pathological generations that continue to threatenseveral successive generations in the form of hereditary vices or defects.’’91 AsNancy Stepan has noted for Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico, strong cultural linksbetween Latin America and France (especially in medical education), as well ascertain Catholic values from these countries (condemning practices such assterilization), were important factors in the way in which a ‘‘soft’’ eugenics wasappropriated and articulated, informed by neo-Lamarckian notions of inheri-tance and an emphasis on public health campaigns.92

Torres Umana himself, a follower of neo-Lamarckian assumptions and apromoter of puericulture, related eugenics with nutrition and did not hesitateto say that ‘‘other than generation and inheritance, in biology there is noproblem as momentous as nutrition.’’93 In the midst of this growing interest inthe scientific study of nutrition as a way to improve and secure the future of therace, it is not surprising that the same Torres Umana was among those invitedto the 1920 discussion of the ‘‘problems of race in Colombia’’ before an audi-ence crowded into the Municipal Theater of Bogota. Torres’s presentation was,in fact, a summary of the results of his aforementioned metabolic research from1913, and in it he once again assured that it was ‘‘an experimentally proven factthat there exists in us [the inhabitants of the Cundinamarca and Boyaca high-lands] the signs of biological weakness.’’ But at the same time, science andhygiene could ‘‘replace what nature has not managed to achieve in its process of

89. Gartner, Notas sobre puericultura, 11.90. For details on the eugenics movement in France and its neo-Lamarckian focus,

see Schneider, Quality and Quantity.91. Salazar Estrada, Mortinatalidad, 8.92. Stepan, ‘‘Hour of Eugenics,’’ 17. For Colombia, see Noguera, Medicina y polıtica.93. Torres Umana, Problemas, 9.


adaptation.’’94 Citing the workers of Puerto Rico as an example, he highlightedhow modern hygiene had managed to transform them into ‘‘robust men’’ whosefavorable change ‘‘is increasingly accentuated in their offspring, because if theyinherit acquired characteristics in the unfavorable sense, all the more reason[would they inherit] those that are the result of a restoration by virtue of thebiological force that tends to lead individuals in the direction of their ancestraltypes.’’95 According to what we have seen in the previous section, it is evidentthat for Torres Umana, the inheritance of acquired robustness implied the ideaof the body-machine’s energy optimization.

As Catalina Munoz indicates, the race debate rehearsed at the MunicipalTheater was not new and had already drawn the interest of mid-nineteenth-century elites in their quest for national economic progress. But now, saysMunoz, within the new economic and social context of the early twentiethcentury, similar concerns were again being formulated with respect to thepopulation’s capacity to move forward in the country’s modernization. Amidnascent industrialization, the building of commercial and technological infra-structure, and forays into international markets, as well as the emergence ofsocial tensions led by various actors (the working class, women, students), elitesfaced the ‘‘challenge of making sense of a changing social reality’’ with thesupport of geographical and medical theories that ‘‘afforded them tools theyused creatively to understand and order their reality.’’96 The important thing tonote here is that the field of knowledge on diet and work, framed within therepresentation of the human body as a heat engine—a symbol, in turn, of theideal of the modernization into which Colombia hoped to venture—consti-tuted one of the key elements in assigning an energy dimension to the notion ofrace and to the local eugenics movement starting in the early twentieth century.The body-machine could be regulated through diet—that is, its fuel—toachieve both its physiological regeneration and its productive optimization.This condition could then be inherited and hence lead the way toward thenation’s entry into its long-awaited modernity.

Indeed, if in 1911 the above-mentioned Conservative hygienist GarcıaMedina claimed that with an adequate diet the Colombian working populationcould produce future generations that ‘‘would not bear the seed of decay as theydo today but rather possess the physiological force necessary to save the racefrom the degeneration that holds it back,’’97 in 1935 one of the nutrition

94. Torres Umana, ‘‘Cuarta Conferencia,’’ 176, 180.95. Ibid., 178.96. Munoz, ‘‘Estudio introductorio,’’ 16.97. Garcıa Medina, ‘‘La alimentacion,’’ 170.


booklets produced for the Liberal cultural project of the Village Libraryindicated that deficiencies caused by nutritional neglect of children during theprenatal and postnatal periods were subsequently irreparable. Hence, thebooklet says, it is ‘‘necessary from this very day forward to apply today’s dietaryknowledge to children in order to structure their bodies and promote theirhealth and vigor, so that the coming generations might surpass ours.’’98 In bothdiscourses, the analogy of the body as a thermodynamic machine was present,and food was understood precisely as the fuel that could lead to both productiveand hereditary improvement.

From this perspective, alcohol consumption and its consequences in termsof labor and degeneration were widely discussed. As Jose Marıa LombanaBarreneche, a physician, argued at the beginning of the twentieth century,alcoholism—and in particular the constant consumption of chicha, an indige-nous beverage extracted from fermented corn very popular among peasants andworkers—was the main source that raised up ‘‘generations of people who werestarving and physically and morally degenerate, because we must not lose sightof the fact that race enters through the mouth; a well-fed population is apopulation that is strong, hardworking, independent, and proud, a nation of thefuture thanks to its progress in industry, the arts, and sciences.’’99

Within the framework of a debate that had been ongoing for more than100 years concerning the regulatory measures that should be taken againstchicha consumption so as to promote good morality, public order, and thehealth of the population, the tone of the arguments had transformed signifi-cantly at the beginning of the twentieth century, addressing not only the con-sequence of hereditary degeneration but also an energy aspect.100 Appealing toa kind of spontaneous, energetic sociology, Garcıa Medina explained the rea-sons why workers drank the famous drink. Moral weakness or bad habits hadbeen set aside in favor of an explanation of energy balance conditioned by therequirements of labor. Workers abused chicha, he suggested, to compensate foran insufficient diet lacking ‘‘certain primary elements compared to the effortthat must be employed to perform a job and repair tissue losses.’’ Chicha’s‘‘transient arousal tricks the body,’’ and for this reason ‘‘the worker thusbecomes accustomed to seeking the energy he lacks in alcoholic products,’’

98. Bonilla, ‘‘Alimentacion defectuosa,’’ 16–17.99. Lombana Barreneche, ‘‘Prevencion del alcoholismo,’’ 804.100. For discussion on the consumption of chicha at the end of the colonial period, see

Alzate Echeverri, Suciedad y orden, 171–201. On the history of chicha and hygiene debates,as well as campaigns concerning chicha in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, seeNoguera, Medicina y polıtica, 150–169; Calvo Isaza and Saade Granados, La ciudad en cuarentena.


leading to ‘‘alcoholism, not out of pleasure but out of his body’s need, whichcould be better satisfied by other means.’’101

From the perspective of energy productivism, the solution was not simplyto prohibit the consumption of chicha, which would amount to emptying thetanks of the productive social machine, but to prepare the drink properly, lowerits alcohol content, and combine it with other macronutrients, or at least find asubstitute for it. Thus, with the consolidation of a balanced diet, chicha—properly prepared—was considered by several chemists and physicians not asthe drink that ‘‘brutalizes’’ people but rather as the cheapest fuel they could putinto action in the human machine.102 For example, Zerda Bayon, in his afore-mentioned manual on food chemistry, highlighted the importance of beveragessuch as coffee and chicha, given that their chemical characteristics fostered in thebody a willingness to work and exercise and developed more energy, reducing thesense of fatigue. Although alcoholic beverages were presented as dangerous topeople in society (engendering violence, indolence, and slothfulness on the job),Zerda Bayon presented chicha as ‘‘the first nutritional drink available to a largenumber of populations in the Republic.’’ Its use was essential as a source ofcheapenergy for workers’ bodies, and once it was produced hygienically, under sci-entific parameters, he claimed that it would be the ‘‘most healthy, enjoyable, andnutritious of known [beverages], perfectly adaptable to the physical conditions ofhuman organization at these altitudes.’’103 Lombana Barreneche, in turn, rec-ognized that ‘‘as food, [chicha] has important qualities and is the staple food ofour humble workers, who pair it with nothing more than coarse bread and a bowlof porridge, to transform it into the energy they use to cultivate our fields or toperform work of another order.’’104

Although in the 1930s the campaign against chicha intensified and beerbegan to displace it as the new popular drink—in 1948, after the riots over thedeath of Liberal politician and social reformer Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, a nationallaw was enacted that banned chicha’s consumption—statistics as late as 1939showed that workers in Bogota consumed an average of 2,250 grams of chichaper day. For Francisco Socarras, a Liberal physician, it was precisely thanks to

101. Garcıa Medina, ‘‘La alimentacion,’’ 170–71.102. This does not mean that there was a consensus among nutritionists in this regard.

Both Calixto Torres Umana and Jorge Bejarano were fierce opponents of this drink, butin all cases there was an energy-centric and hereditary component to their arguments. For theuse of the expression ‘‘brutalize’’ in relation to chicha consumption, see Noguera,Medicina y polıtica, 158–59.

103. Zerda Bayon, Quımica, 357, 359.104. Lombana Barreneche, ‘‘Correspondencia sobre la chicha,’’ 360.


chicha—and to the fact that it was included in food consumption statistics—that Bogota’s workers achieved a caloric intake similar to that of workers inother countries. In fact, the popular drink, according to Socarras’s study, con-tributed ‘‘50% of the caloric regime,’’105 and without it the working class wouldbe unable to survive. His analysis of the issue was very similar to that of GarcıaMedina: chicha consumption derived from a physiological requirement ofenergy balance, and it was ‘‘the most important nutritional resource [by pro-viding the cheapest calories] that was left available for workers following risingmarket prices.’’106 Socarras, recalling the debate two decades earlier over the‘‘problems of race in Colombia,’’ upheld the idea that the Colombian popula-tion was subject to a ‘‘racial decline’’ mainly caused by a ‘‘poverty in diet,’’107 buthe nevertheless defended chicha consumption precisely because of its ability toprovide the energy necessary for the working classes.

Conclusions

Throughout the period under review, there seemed to exist a consensus on thepart of the Colombian scientific elite, both Conservative and Liberal, that abalanced diet was one of the keys for the nation’s entry into modernity, as itwould help to produce the sought-after healthy and productive population. Theideal of increasing the performance of the body-machine and achieving itsphysiological regeneration, as well as the idea that this social engineering wouldmanage, over the long term, to produce better generations of workers, helpedshape the social problem of nutrition and structure a field of research interestedin the population’s working and nutritional conditions as well as hygiene andeducation campaigns on nutrition. It also helped shape institutions such as theDrop of Milk, the school cafeterias, and the vacation colonies; it even played arole in the ‘‘scientific’’ manner in which minimum wages and working hourswere set for workers.

Importantly, in this process ofconstructing the social, the biological notionof the body was structured not only around the day’s current theories of evo-lution and inheritance but also, and most importantly, on the analogy of thehuman body as a machine that transformed energy. But this biologized view ofsociety that here we have called social thermodynamics, with its language ofcalories, the vitality of the people, work output, social energy, and physiologicalregeneration, was a cultural construct, not simply a transparent reflection of

105. Socarras, ‘‘Alimentacion de la clase obrera en Bogota,’’ 32.106. Ibid., 42.107. Ibid., 35.


human nature or the biological component of social discourse. It was within theframework of a nascent industrialization and the search for Colombia’s inser-tion into the productive logic of the modern capitalist world, as well as within aculture of statistical and comparative quantification, that this materialistic andenergy-centric view of the body was inscribed and appropriated—a view thatreduced existence to that which could be measured as a commodity, an energyand matter accounting system with fuel as the input and work as the output.This social thermodynamics was connected to the local eugenics movement tothe extent that the doctors and health professionals involved were predisposed,also due to cultural elements, toward a neo-Lamarckian view of inheritance.This view of inheritance had a great impact in Colombia through the nutritionalfield of puericulture. Thus, the constitution of a more productive workforce,thanks to the rational use of fuel for the human machine, was understood asan acquired characteristic that could be inherited.

From this perspective, the heterogeneity of social thought throughout thisperiod points not only to the fact that some adopted a biological view and othersa political one when it came time to address the problems of the population andits alleged racial degeneration, but also more fundamentally to the fact that inboth views, the natural and the cultural were deeply intertwined. At least withrespect to the social problem of nutrition, we are faced with the conjoinedpresence of strongly cultural elements such as the population’s food traditionsand habits, strongly charitable elements such as food aid to poor children,strongly social elements such as the education of the population and concernwith its working conditions, strongly political elements such as state regulationof minimum wages for the working classes, and strongly biological elementssuch as the metabolic and energy capacities of workers’ bodies in differentregions and their hereditary conditions. This raises the issue of proposinginterpretive frameworks that can serve as alternatives to the traditional modelthat separates the natural order from the cultural and social order. The startlingclaim of Lombana Barreneche that ‘‘race enters through the mouth’’ perhapscan be best explained from a coproductionist view such as the one proposedhere. It signals that the notion of race was moving back and forth, already in theearly twentieth century, between the biological and the cultural, between theinherited, the metabolic, the productive, and the external environment (geo-graphical elements, social conditions and classes, and cultural practices), andthat its meanings were multiple and ambiguous.108

108. Eduardo Restrepo has also noted the ambiguity of the notion of race among theColombian elites in the first decades of the twentieth century. However, he is not concerned


According to the above, by taking into account specific interventionsdirected toward the population it is possible, from a discursive and conceptualpoint of view, to contextualize the way in which the problem of nutrition wasconfigured in Colombia, using a periodization that runs from the end of thenineteenth century until the 1940s, when the context of the Cold War anddevelopmentalist discourse added new elements to the ways in which thisproblem was understood and addressed.109 Despite the different perceptionsthat were held, first by the Conservatives and then by the Liberals, regardingstrategies for modernization and for governing the working classes, it seemslikely that the energy productivism noted here was a shared element structuringthese perceptions. The legacy of the Conservative Regeneration in the first halfof the twentieth century, which historian Marco Palacios has called ‘‘Catholiccapitalism,’’ might encompass this social thermodynamics, albeit with differentnuances.110

Undoubtedly, further research is needed to detail the particulars andmodulations of this social thermodynamics project, its role in shaping notionsof race, and its ties to eugenics throughout this moment. We also need regionaland national comparative studies. Aspects such as the physiological normalcy orpathology of highland dwellers, the hierarchization of races according to themetabolic capacity of different ethnic groups, or the configuration of a scienceof work concerned with fatigue and racial vitality were the focuses of multipleresearchers starting in the late nineteenth century in many Latin Americancountries, and their positions and discourses were part of various nation-building projects.111 In all of them, however, a racialized view of the workingpopulation was deeply connected to a physiological and energy-centric con-ception of the human body.

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Stefan Pohl-Valero is Associate Professor of the History of Science at the Universidad del Rosario

in Bogota. In 2007 he received his PhD in the History of Science from the Universidad Autonoma de

Barcelona. He has been visiting professor at the Center of the History of Science at the Uni-

versidad Autonoma de Barcelona and at the Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero in Buenos

Aires. Since 2012 he has been editor of the ‘‘Social Studies of Health’’ section of the academic

journal Ciencias de la Salud. His book Energıa y cultura: Historia de la termodinamica en la Espana

de la segunda mitad del siglo XIX was published in 2011. He is currently working on a comparative

history of physiology in Latin America and on a cultural history of nutrition in Colombia.


la raza entra por la boca': energy, diet, and eugenics in colombia, 1890-1940

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