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Author ORCID Identifier

https://orcid.org/0009-0004-2122-3681

Date Available

5-1-2026

Year of Publication

2026

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

College

Arts and Sciences

Department/School/Program

Hispanic Studies

Faculty

Monica Diaz

Faculty

Alan Brown

Abstract

Disability in Mexico is a visually constructed category, shaped by a long genealogy of representation in which images of bodily difference actively participate in defining power and the management of all bodies. The discursive forces that define disability as unproductivity reduce body-minds to the service of the economic system, affecting our relationship with death, illness, reproduction, size, youth, and beauty. Across the Mesoamerican visual space, such representations have long unsettled dominant systems of truth about bodies. This dissertation examines how conceptions of disability are produced, negotiated, and reimagined through three historical moments and cultural expressions: Pre-Hispanic Mayan imagery, Mexican colonial codices, and modern Mexican votive paintings. Drawing on feminist, decolonial, and counter-ableist perspectives, I argue that these conceptions are continuously updated through visual genealogies that echo the past, shaping how disability is seen, interpreted, and lived.

Moving from Pre-Columbian Maya and Olmec cosmologies, where physical difference is constitutive of creation and divinity, through the colonial reconfiguration of indigenous understandings of illness in Mexican codices, to modern votive paintings where medical and religious discourses compete in shaping cultural perceptions of vulnerability, the dissertation traces how difference has been persistently visualized, disciplined, and reimagined, demonstrating that disability cannot be understood apart from the visual histories that continue to produce it.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.13023/etd.2026.205

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