In 1915, during the Mexican Revolution, Mexico City suffered a severe food crisis. The Casasola photographic collection records people waiting in line for the distribution of corn. Library of Congress photograph metadata also preserves residents queuing for Red Cross soup amid famine conditions.
War and disrupted transport shook the system that carried food into the capital. The people in line were not abstractions in a political struggle; they were women, men and children who needed a meal that day. Neither corn nor soup could reach a household until its turn arrived.
History often compresses the episode into the phrase 'the year of hunger,' but the photographs show individuals waiting one by one. The larger the crisis, the more aid is distributed as one bowl, one portion and one person at a time. The queue was the narrow mechanism connecting the two scales.