ABSTRACT
Mexico City enforced a fi ve-day quarantine in early May 2009, closing government offi ces, businesses, and bars to limit the spread of new infection. The city’s reaction was not in itself surprising; the same basic strategy to contain infectious disease has been trusted for centuries, as London’s treatment of plague in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries attests.2 But businesses and individuals struggled as a result, and citizens were left distressed by worry over disease and their economic problems.3 Exemplifying both concerns is the statement from the orange seller, above. This resident of Mexico City was among many who suspected that the Mexican government had concocted the H1N1 fl u scare to distract Mexicans from the nation’s economic problems, but at the same time, the clamor for Vitamin C kept him in business. This complex crisis situation and its equally complex interpretation mark at least two common plague-time phenomena: fi rst, citizens adapted rapidly to physical changes in the operation of their city, and second, rumor had convinced many people that the government was willing to appropriate a well-worn story-a dangerous disease has threatened the city!—in order to manipulate the populace. The H1N1 threat has already grown since Mexico City’s fi rst brush with the disease, but only in time will we be able to re-examine the fl u’s social and political impact in addition to its mortal one. Will the opinions of the orange seller, for example, be viewed as the byproduct of a government that had alienated its citizenry, as the remarks of a callous opportunist, or as a realistic account of life during an epidemic? Will the eyes of history read this fl u as a common disease outbreak, or as an episode appropriated in discussions regarding Mexico City’s twenty-fi rst century political and economic struggles?4
