Ana García Jácome
Color photograph of a group of children in white elementary school uniforms marching on a street while a adults watch from the sidewalk. Four children in the front row are holding a large white banner with red letters that read “Protestamos Contra La Polio” (We Protest Against Polio).

Children from the city of Tezihutlan, Puebla protest against polio, 1990.

Black and white photograph of a glass vial filled with liquid. A white label reads Poliorzima PX-24 followed by a blurry text.
El Sol newspaper front page with a header in bold black letters that reads, “Maravillosas curas de la poliomielitis.” Below the header and the newspaper’s name is a dark black and white photograph that shows a man dressed in white administering an injection on the leg of a child held by two women.

“Maravillosas curas de la poliomielitis,” El Sol (Phoenix, AZ), June 5, 1959. 

Polyptych of nine different black and white photographs of different sizes and formats. Four photographs are covered in white and only small sections are visible: the Ministry of Health’s logo, hands pointing at legs, crutches, hands administering oral vaccine to a child, medical tools. Three photographs have white rectangles framing a section of the scene: a boy with crutches being stared at by some adults, a young woman holding a young child with leg braces, a woman holding a baby while a doctor administers a vaccine. In two photographs, white circles cover the faces of children, one on a child with crutches, and two on children with no visible walking aids.

Poliomyelitis in Mexico, 1950s–1970s.

This project, We Protest Against Polio, departed from a letter that I found at the Historical Archive of the Ministry of Health in Mexico City in 2019. In the letter from 1984, a man who described himself as Doctor Reinaldo Martínez Gutiérrez asked the Ministry of Health to fund an exhibition of his work about polio. He claimed to be the first person in the world to have developed a cure for Poliomyelitis and wanted to present his research. Follow up letters with the Ministry of Health suggested suspicion about the doctor’s claims, since his treatment drug, Poliorzima PX-24, was not registered in the country’s pharmaceutical records. A final letter of rejection was filed in the archive and the exhibition didn’t happen. I researched further into Dr. Reinaldo and found that he studied medicine (but was never certified) at the University of Guadalajara in Jalisco, Mexico, where he developed a thesis focused on the nervous system. He developed the formula Poliorzima PX-24, a combination of five different formulas that acted upon different symptoms of Poliomyelitis. Its development was based on the controversial claim that the nervous cells could be regenerated, and his studies contradicted a lot of previous scientific research. Dr. Reinaldo founded a clinic in downtown Mexico City where his formula was offered only to patients who hadn’t gone through surgery or other traditional treatments.

As controversial as these claims were, they were born out of and perpetuated the mainstream discourse on polio. Dr. Reinaldo promised a cure for polio, something that the state’s preventative approach had failed to provide. The government and media had built a narrative of polio as a threat to childhood because of its disabling consequences, and this resulted in a generalized motivation for a cure. We Protest Against Polio builds on the possibility of Dr. Reinaldo’s exhibition to examine the contradictions and weight of ableist rhetoric built around polio. It features a combination of materials I recreated from the Historical Archive, as well as my own illustrations, to create a para-fictional exhibition. The use of archival material with a fictional turn is, as writer Alan Gilbert states of artist Walid Raad’s work, “not a counter-memory, but an investigation of the ways in which memory is produced; not a counter-archive per se, but an interrogation of discursive formations constituting any archive as a compendium of present knowledge.”1 The name of the project references a photograph that I found on the website of the National Archive. The photograph shows a group of children in elementary school uniforms marching on a street, holding a large banner that reads “We Protest Against Polio.” The caption of the image on the website simply said: “Children from the city of Tezihutlan, Puebla protest against polio (1990).” The year on the caption situates the event during a time when Poliomyelitis was no longer an epidemic, yet the narrative the prior decades built is present in this image in an ironic, almost absurd way. The sign triggers a question, that in the current context of the Covid-19 pandemic becomes relevant once again: what does it mean to protest a disease, rather than societal structures?

—Ana García Jácome

1 Alan Gilbert, “Walid Raad’s Spectral Archive, Part One: Historiography as Process,” e-flux, no. 69 (2016): https://www.e-flux.com/journal/69/60594/walid-raad-s-spectral-archive-part-i-historiography-as-process/