Browsing by Author "Ragas Rojas, José Frank"

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    2 Golden rats and sick empires: portraying medicine, poverty, and the bubonic plague in La Peste
    (Manchester University Press, 2022) Ragas Rojas, José Frank; Palma Maturana, Patricia Nataly; González Donoso, Guillermo Adrián
    With a ten-million-euro budget and 400 extras on set, La Peste (The Plague) – a ten-episode TV show produced by Spanish communication conglomerate Movistar and aired in January 2018 – became not only the most ambitious production in Spanish television history but also an overnight sensation among viewers and critics. This chapter examines how La Peste combines historical accuracy and fiction to portray the role of medicine, health agents, and population around a late sixteenth-century epidemic outbreak. Its release coincided with the centennial of the Spanish flu that killed twenty to fifty million people around the globe. In placing the epidemic at the core of the narrative, the show unveils the multiple yet contradictory ways people from various social groups and backgrounds reacted to the pandemic: either to save their own lives, procure a cure for others, or to take advantage of the crisis. The chapter highlights what makes La Peste a relevant case to study. As part of its marketing campaign, the production team deliberately sought to trespass the screen and insert the narrative into people’s daily lives. This team designed in advance of the TV series an interactive website with digital resources on the history of medicine and historical sites. Furthermore, in the days prior to the launch, several golden rats appeared in the streets of Seville to announce the show. While some viewers expressed their discomfort with the crude scenes depicting poor living conditions, others engaged with the campaign. As a result of this, La Peste constitutes a fascinating example of the possibilities offered by TV shows as vehicles for disseminating historical medical knowledge to a vast audience.
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    Feeding prejudices. Chinese Fondas and the Culinary Making of National Identity in Peru
    (Routledge, 2019) Palma Maturana, Patricia Nataly; Ragas Rojas, José Frank
    The recent boom of Peruvian gastronomy has not only catapulted chefs and national dishes to the world stage, prompting the emergence of a national sentiment of pride and unity around local cuisine, it has also exposed the selective way Peruvian cuisine has been constructed, favoring dishes associated with coastal areas and reifying an estranged yet contentious approach toward ethnic dishes with large presence in the country, especially Chinese food. This chapter examines the ubiquitous—and also neglected—Chinese contribution to Peruvian cuisine, analyzing its spread nationwide during the Age of Migration (1860s–1930s). We show how both fondas chinas (Chinese restaurants) and chifa became crucial arenas where national identities and the role of immigration were contested and disputed by policy makers, the Chinese community, and ordinary citizens. Although fondas provided an affordable alimentary alternative for thousands of lower class limeños, they were constantly under attack by elites and the press. Located mainly in Lima’s Chinatown, Chinese fondas were under permanent scrutiny by police officers and health inspectors. Authorities portrayed Chinese immigrants as carriers of diseases responsible for epidemics, a discourse conveniently exacerbated during the bubonic plague outbreaks. Other cities with a large presence of Chinese immigrants, such as San Francisco in California, experienced similar conflicts. Drawing from a wide array of sources, e.g. travelers’ logs, newspapers, cartoons, and official health reports, we aim to illuminate the role played by Chinese gastronomy in the establishment of a trans-Pacific community.
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    History of Pandemics in Latin America
    (University of Chicago Press, 2023) Ragas Rojas, José Frank
    This essay revisits the scholarly production around three major pandemics in the region: (a) the Third Plague Pandemic; (b) HIV/AIDS in the 1980s; and (c) COVID-19. The essay aims to provide a comprehensive set of resources (both printed and digital) in four languages (Portuguese, Spanish, English, and French) to examine how scholars have approached these phenomena and how their scope and interpretations have changed over time. Historians of health paid particular attention to sociocultural aspects of the disease, which enabled them to consider usually-neglected actors, such as patients of Indigenous and African descent with their own medical traditions. This added more complexity to our understanding of how these pandemics were fought and received. In addition, the essay suggests that COVID-19 prompted the emergence of historians of health as public scholars. They actively used social networks and other digital tools not only to communicate about the long history of diseases and pandemics in the region, but also to provide an authorized or informed perspective amid misinformation and fake news. In addition, the internet was crucial to the development of helpful databases and virtual conferences beyond academic campuses and paywalls.
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    Perú y la memoria global de las víctimas de covid-19
    (2021) Ragas Rojas, José Frank
    The change in relationships with the victims of coronavirus is one of the most disturbing and least explored consequences of all the ways in which covid-19 has altered our lives over the last year. This essay examines the various strategies Peruvians have developed to compensate for the inability to attend funerals and burials in person due to government-imposed social distancing measures. The use of digital platforms, mainly social media, made it possible to recreate funeral rites and allowed the necessary grieving under adverse circumstances. Using a comparative approach, the essay concludes that it is necessary to erect a memorial to the victims of covid-19 as a way of raising public awareness, and that of future generations, about the need to prepare for an eventual future pandemic.