Zavala Becoming Modern 4

BECOMING TRADITION
Women, Gender,
and Representation
in Mexican Art
AD R lANA ZAVALA
THE PENNSYLVAN I A STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS I UN I VERSITY PARK, PENNSYLVANI A
Santa, La India Bonita,
and Mexican Maternity
In his description of the ideal "feminine" Mexican woman, Manuel Gamio asserted
that she was the "primordial factor" necessary for the harmonious evolution and well-
being of the Mexican people. As discussed in chapter 1, during the revolutionary de-
cade, feminists such as Hermila Galindo struggled to redefine the acceptable param-
eters of womanhood, and to some measure they challenged the idea that motherhood
was the only viable role for women. Yet despite challenges, like those staged at the
Feminist Congresses of 1916, Gamio and others equated womanhood with mother-
hood, which was to him the "foundation stone" of the future greatness of the nation. '
The "feminine woman" of Gamio's patria in effect was the epitome of the woman ren-
dered pictorially by Joaquin Ramirez and Alberto Bribiesca and textually in the pages
of El Album de fa Mujer. However, in describing her as equidistant from the feminist
and the servile woman, Gamio positioned her metaphorically as mestiza.
1
In other
words, she was the best of two traditions, the Western feminist and the "servile" in-
digenous woman. Gamio located his vision of the future (gendered) nation in the dis-
course of racial and cultural mestizaje, and he did so in the midst of social revolution.
In this chapter, I will examine how despite the emancipatory claims made on be-
half of the Revolution, femininity was resignified as exalting an essence ofMexicanness
rooted in a new version of tradition. Tradition was no longer based on bourgeois,
Christian values with selective traces of indigenous culture set in the distant past; in-
stead, in the revolutionary context, it was reinvented as a folkloric mix of contemporary
{ FOUR }
154
elements of Mexico's dual heritage-indigenous and European.J Working with treatises
like Gamio's and representations of woman such as those offered in the novel Santa and
by Sarurnino Herrin, we can better understand not just the image of the fallen woman
in Mexican culture, but of her new conceptual opposite: the pure, rraditional woman,
figured ideally as mestiza but with essential roots in indigenous culture. To realize the
mestizo ideal, a recovery project was in order. Indigenous femininity had ro be vali-
dated as worthy not just of emulation bur of incorporation. As we will see, by the end
of the revolutionary decade and well into the 1920s, the image of the "pretty Indian,"
the india bonita, was central to the discourse of national unification. As revolutionary
intellectuals like Gamio began to reform Mexican politics, society, and culture ro gener-
ate a renaissance in the aftermath of the violent decade of the civil war, the india bonita
was an apt substitute for the femme fatale of the cosmopolitan modernistas, and she even
became one of the key symbols for the nation because she was free of association to
most of the "histOrically tainted forms of the old body politic."
4
This archetype of moral and cultural purity was expressed in fascinating and con-
tradictory ways in a national beauty contest held in Mexico City in 1921 to elect the
nation's "prettiest Indian," the "India Bonita" contest. Staged early in the posrrevo-
lutionary administration of Alvaro Obregon, the contest codified the image of rural,
specifically indigenous womanhood as a trope of purity, an essential step in the process
of elaborating a "cosmic" mixed-race body politic. But rather than interpreting this
beauty pageant as an event that simply celebrated contemporary indigenous ethnicity
for the first time, a feminist interpretation such as I offer here demonstrates that the
beauty contest was fraught with sexual tension. In other words, it did much more than
mirror postrevolutionary nationalism; it served as a version of what Debra Castillo
calls a "distorting lens." Although couched in the revolutionary debate, the contest was
steeped in masculinist modernista discourse that coded the transition of the indigenous
woman into the urban milieu, for better and worse, "under the sign of prostitution."
5
Like Santa, its cinematic remakes and countless other depictions offallen women,
the "India Bonita" contest offered an opportunity for urban male intellectuals ro rake
salacious pleasure in the image of pure rural womanhood corrupted through con-
tact with the city. Furthermore, the discourse aired around the contest demonstrates
the continuity rather than the revolutionary rupture of the old Porfirian social order.
Despite long-standing claims of a complete rebirth in the wake of the Revolution,
evidence suggests a deep continuity between pre- and posrrevolutionary culture and
ideology, not to mention social hierarchies. As suggested by the lasting popularity of
Gamboa's novel, one place where important continuities persisted was in the urban
elite male's fascination with the trope of the corrupted rural innocent. In terms of
indigenous women, when "tainted," their contamination was figured not as a result
of male seduction (or rape) but as expressive of a duality. She was thus integrated into
mainstream society, but in so doing she also betrayed her people (nation, fami ly, hus-
BECOMING MODERN I BECOMING TRADITION
band, values, culture). This simplistic, patriarchal, and deeply racist duality sits at the
heart of Mexico's mythification of fa Malinche, given as a slave by the Chantal Maya
people to Hernan Cortes on the eve of the conquest ofMexico.
6
Despite the narrative
of betrayal, La Malinche and Cortes came to figure mythically as the mother and father
of the first mestizo, the first Mexican.
Reinventing La Malinche
In January 1921, the Mexico City newspaper El Universal announced irs plan to sponsor
a beauty contest in conjunction with the national celebration of Mexico's Centennial of
Independence from Spain. According to the newspaper's rules, the contest would elect
an india bonita as part of the centennial celebrations.- Beauty pageants, including those
with a populist orientation, were not new to Mexico City. In 1920, El Universal had
sponsored a contest to elect Mexico City's most charming "working girl," the Concurso
de fa Obrera Simpdtica.
8
However, the "India Bonita" contest was different because it
would be the first "racial contest," as described in the announcement, that would honor
the beauty of Mexico's indigenous women.
9
The contest is historically important be-
cause it was one of the earliest official events by the postrevolutionary elite to focus not
only on images of ideal womanhood but also that plainly signaled t he significance of
race and gender, as well as culture and class, in the formulation of a new body politic.
Although the Mexican state's need to develop a racial ideology based on the cel-
ebration rather than the historically shameful fact of racial hybridity has been the
subject of scholarly examination, the "India Bonita" contest offers a unique opportu-
nity to scrutinize the role assigned to gender in the development of postrevolution-
ary mestizaje. Mestizaje, a term rhar privileges Mexico's Indo-Hispanic heritage to the
exclusion of other ethnic and racial groups, is a melting-pot ideology that collapses
race and culture in order to champion the mestizo individual as a symbol of racial
and, therefore, national unity.'
0
Recent research has begun to offer a more complex
understandi ng of how some articulations of mestizaje were supported by dubious en-
gagements nor only with eugenic theories bur also with actual programs to improve
the racial "character" of t he Mexican people."
In September 1921, the new postrevolutionary admi nistration of President Alvaro
Obregon sponsored rhe celebration of the accomplishment of independence, in ef-
fect rewriting the previous centennial celebration of the declaration of independence
staged by the Diaz regime in 1910. Ir did so in part to demonstrate that Obregon's
government was sufficiently established so as to move beyond immediate concerns of
pacifying revolutionary unrest. Ir was also a useful way for the administration to ce-
ment its populist image through an array of festivities orchestrated for the enjoyment
of t he general public. Among the events was an exhibition of Mexican folk art orga-
nized by the painters Dr. Ad , Roberto Montenegro, and Jorge Enciso and an outdoor
Santa and La India Banita

1
55
156
event at Chapultepec Park called the "Mexican Evening" (Noche Mexicana), which
featured regional dances performed on a stage designed by the painter Adolfo Best
Maugard. " In keeping with the favorable reappraisal of folk art in the "Exhibition of
Popular Art," Best Maugard's stage set was inspired by the decorative floral motifs of
painted ceramics and lacquerware, craft items that incorporated indigenous, Spanish
and Asian cultural influences as a result of the Manila trade of the colonial era but
rhat were described in 1921 as indigenous in form and aesthetics. In her research on
the "system" whereby Best Maugard established his catalogue of motifs, which he then
used to teach Mexican schoolchildren to create an intrinsically Mexican style, Karen
Cordero Reiman has demonstrated that the focus on rural folk rather than European
culture helped construct a concept of "Indian ness" described as the heart and soul of
postrevolutionary Mexican identity. She notes that this so-called indigenous folk cul-
ture became a vehicle for the revolutionary nation's "return to cultural innocence."'
3
In their totality, the cultural events organized for the Centennial of 1921, includ-
ing the beginning of the famed Mexican mural movement, contributed to the for-
mulation of a new indigenista aesthetic and cultural order that was grounded in the
positive reappraisal of Mexico's contemporary indigenous people and their traditions.
It is crucial to note, however, the ways in which indigenous culture was not just reval-
ued but was in some instances invented and then placed in a relationship of mutual (if
unequal) dependence with European culture.
The idea of symbolic mestizaje is made explicit in Diego Rivera's fi rst mural. Upon
returning from a decade-long stay in Europe, Rivera (1886-1957) received a commis-
sion from Jose Vasconcelos to paint Creation for the auditorium of the Preparatoria
( Creacion; color plate 13). In the mural, which was conceived to show the evolution of
the Mexican people, two figures, male and female, nude and dark-skinned, sit at the
feet of a group of female allegorical figures representing the cardinal and theological
virtues.'
4
In bestowing enlightenment on the indigenous ''Adam and Eve," the virtues
catalyze the creation of mestizo Mexico.'
5
In describing them as "pure autochthonous
types," Rivera himself situated indigenous Mexico as dependent on Western European
culture for its transformation and, literally, its evolurion.'
6
When the mural was criti-
cized as foreign in irs conception on the grounds that its theme was "abstract" and its
form "cubistic" and even "futuristic," Rivera defended it.'- He described it as depicting
in a "hierarchical composition all of Mexico's races from the purest autochthonous
type to the Castilian, passing through various representative mestizo rypes."'
8
Rivera's
notion of the evolution of the Mexican people was rhus represented primarily as a
spiritual and folkloric process of cultural mestizaje. Indians sat in a separate realm
and were transformed by having Western values bestowed upon them. His conception
of that transformation was, as implied in his description of the mural, inspired and
informed by Vasconcelos's utopian notion that racial mestizaje would occur through a
process of dynamic aesthetic selection set in motion by spiritual enlightenment.'
9
As
minister of public education under Obregon, Vasconcelos was effectively the founder
and the patron, from 1920 to 1924, of the mural movement. In conceiving it, he was
inspired by the didactic aspect ofltalian Renaissance frescoes. In the postrevolutionary
context, he envisioned a public art that could educate Mexicans about their history,
culture, heritage, and, crucially, their future.
Rivera's Creation was painted at the same location where a decade earlier Justo
Sierra had commissioned Orozco to paint a mural (never executed) on human evo-
lution. Rivera's treatment of the subject notwithstanding, that coincidence seems
evidence enough to suggest a certain conceptual continuity between the pre- and
postrevolutionary era. Also, Rivera's interpretation suggests a patriarchal understand-
ing of the relationship between passive Indians and civilizing culture. Although the
centennial celebrations of 1921 were intended to challenge the unequal relationship of
the elite toward the masses expressed in the centennial celebration of 1910, the key ele-
ments nevertheless suggest that similar ideological structures remained in place. After
all, it would take more than a few years of cultural reconstruction to sweep away a
structure that was so entrenched.
As I have noted, the Diaz regime's Centennial was designed to demonstrate the
nation's accomplishments, showcased in events reserved for the enjoyment of Mexico's
elite and visiting foreign dignitaries. In contrast, the intellectuals associated with the
new government of Alvaro Obregon identified the 1921 Centennial as an opportunity
to claim a definitive break from the old order and the dawning of a new era that was
reconstructive, optimistic, and essentially populist. The new Centennial would also
demonstrate Obregon's success in bringing the decade-long revolution to an end, as
well as his commitment to articulating and fulfilling some of the social mandates of
the Revolution. Although most of the public events were aimed at Mexico City's pop-
ular classes, they nonetheless reveal the concurrent desire to transform urban culture
into a mestizo culture.
If the cientijicos under Dfaz had organized a historical pageant to show the (un-
equal) union of Spanish and Aztec culture, symbolized by the encounter between
Cortes and Moctezuma, in 1921, revolutionary intellectuals like Dr. Ad selected the
most palatable aspects of contemporary indigenous culture reframed as Mexico's "folk"
culture. Thus, they were in step with their European and U.S. counterparts, who were
similarly engaged in reviving their own folk traditions. Within that framework, the
event that most overtly championed Mexico's newly rediscovered indigenous culture
was El Universal's contest to elect Mexico's "India Bonita." The beauty contest offers
an unprecedented opportunity to study the ways in which discourses about race and
gender not only intersected bur also were at the heart of debates about national identity.
In the contest announcement, El Universal informed its readers that it would
select a young woman from the so-called Indian class who would reign over the
Centennial as the nation's "prettiest Indian." The term "Indian class" reveals the con-
Santa and La India Bonita

157
158
tinuation of a hierarchy through which peasantS were essentialized as Mexico's indig-
enous population (and vice versa) and situated on the lowest rung of the social latter.
The roots of this class hierarchy lay in the nineteenth-century liberal project of creat-
ing a unified nation by subsuming racial and ethnic differences within a discourse of
class. Nevertheless, as evidence of the nation's appreciation of her beauty and nobil-
ity, Mexico's "India Bonita" would receive J,ooo pesos and a generous array of gifts,
including the honor of presiding over Ei Universafs annual literary pageant and its
centennial parade float. She would also receive the privilege of a new set of socially
prominent godparents to be selected by the newspaper's editorial staff.'o
The staging of a beauty contest that "honored" the beauty and feminine qualities
of Mexico's female indigenous population rather than that of its bourgeois, nomi-
nally white women might appear to signal a radical break with hegemonic structures.
Indeed, as other scholars have argued, the contest offers evidence of the nascent recon-
ceptual ization of Mexican identity as decidedly "ethnic."" However, a feminist reading
shows that even if the indigenista foundations of the contest might appear destabiliz-
ing from one perspective, they actually restabilized the dominant patriarchal order and
indeed the outright racist and sexist ideological framework of the preceding era.
In his analysis of the contest, Ricardo Perez Montfort has pointed out that the
"union" of the winning India Bonita with her new godparents, described as "Spanish"-
in other words as socially "white" ---effected a symbolic mestizaje. " Furthermore,
the contest, like Ad's "Exhibition of Popular Art," contributed to what Mary Kay
Vaughan has called the "browning of the cultural nation."
23
Vaughan's description
of mestizaje as a "cultural" process is useful here because it points to the emphasis of
period intellectuals on the ways that mestizaje, and with it national unity, could be
realized through culture blending with the (implicit) hope of making actual biologi-
cal blending unnecessary. Reading between the lines, the emphasis on culture versus
biology is suggestive of the anxieties that continued to plague elite Mexicans well into
the postrevolutionary period over mestizaje as a process of biological miscegenation.
It is, however, evident that male desire, as expressed in the public debate around the
contest, betrayed an interest in more than symbolic mestizaje.
Such anxieties are evident in the period's premier treatises on mestizaje: Manuel
Gamio's Forjando patria (1916) and Jose Vasconcelos's La raza cosmica (1925). Both texts
advocated racial mixing, but they did so principally for the perceived benefitS that mes-
tizaje offered in the struggle to assimilate Mexico's indigenous people. In the midst of the
Revolution, in addition to classifying different types of woman, Gamio's treatise argued
that the goal of incorporating Indians into the nation would be facili tated if Mexico's
middle class also "indianized" itsel
24
However, Gamio also cautioned the bourgeoi-
sie against going to "ridiculous extremes" in its "reconciliation with the 1ndian."
21
His
admonition suggests anxiety in regard to which attributes of the dominant bourgeois
class might benefit Indians and, crucially, vice versa. Indeed, shortly after publishing his
treatise, Gamio seems ro have realized that his exhortation for reconciliation was naive
and premature. He subsequently undertook rhe project of studying Mexico's indigenous
groups in detail, beginning with an intensive archaeological and anthropological study
of the valley of San Juan Teotihuacin. The research he supervised there was published in
rwo massive volumes in 1922!
6
While conducting that research, Gamio also founded a
journal, Ethnos, which he dedicated to the "physical, intellectual, and moral redemption
of the great indigenous masses of Mexico."
2
- These projects were intended ro identify the
ways in which Mexico's indigenous population could productively (and reasonably) be
assimilated into the mainstream middle class.
In 1925, Vasconcelos argued somewhat more explicitly and deterministically that
a "new age" was imminent in Latin America, one rhat would be characterized by the
emergence of a fifth "cosmic" biological race!
8
Although overlooked by many, the
premise ofVasconcelos's argument remains inherently racist, notwithstanding the fact
that he identified himself as a mestizo and had experienced American racism growing
up on rhe border.
29
As Ana Maria Alonso points our, "Vasconcelos's notion of a cosmic
race reconfigure[d] heterogeneity in terms of homogeneity and rhus it reproduce[ d)
much of what he critique[d]."
10
Vasconcelos believed that Larin America would be the
home of a new universal race because "rhe Indian [offered] a good bridge for racial
mixing," bur also because "Blacks ... the other pole ... rhe opposite of the elements
ro be mixed" were "scarce."
3
'
Vasconcelos's seeming endorsement of racial hybridity in La raza c6smica has led
some Latin American and Latino/Chicano nationalists ro hail his theory, overlooking
its more problematic aspects, because it not only offers an apologia for miscegenation,
bur because ir seems ro champion it as a means ro achieve a universal blending of the
positive characteristics of rhe so-called four races (white, black, Asian, and Native
American)Y In his scheme, however, the so-called characteristics of rhe European
races remain securely at the top of a hierarchy of desirable racial attributes. In other
words, while his esteem for the Indian as a "bridge" for miscegenation was in many
ways revolutionary, undersrood in the context of a long history of racialist discourses,
it reinscribed the racist violence it purported ro challenge.n This is evident in his
claim that through mestizaje, the negative arrribures of the black, Asian, and Native
American races would be eradicated and those of the white race enhanced. Vasconcelos
never claimed that racial hierarchy would be eradicated; instead, the inference was that
while all the races would "improve," the white race, having now benefited from the
environmentally acquired strengths of the Other races, would remain securely at the
top of the hierarchy, even eventually obliterating them. According ro Vasconcelos, this
new, "fifth race" would merge the "naturally superior" attributes of rhe white race with
the environmentally acquired strengths of the darker races.
14
In terms of instrumentalizing rhis process, Vasconcelos's theory is interesting given
my argument that Indian women were eroticized ro facilitate its realization. Vasconcelos
159
t6o
argued that this fifth race would emerge through a "spiritually driven aesthetic eugen-
ics," whereby biological "dazzling" would be produced by "beauty and confirmed by
the pathos of love."
35
Vasconcelos thus invoked an "instinctual" rather than overtly in-
strumentalized eugenic process. He must have surely been aware that normative eu-
genic movements, such as in the United States and Germany, were motivated by an
unremitting belief in the superiority of the "white" race, the condemnation of racial
hybridity, and the eradication of racial miscegenation.
36
Thus the emanciparory claims
made by and for Vasconcelos's concept of the "cosmic" race bear reconsideration.
In late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Mexico and Latin America, social hy-
giene or the pseudoscience of eugenics centered on finding ways ro orchestrate (oxy-
moronically) eugenic miscegenation.r Conversely, Western European and American
eugenicists and scientific racists employed biologically marked categories of race to
support the claim that racial mixing necessarily resulted in degeneration. Unable to
deny the profoundly miscegenated reality of Mexico's population, Mexican eugenicists
like Gamio and Vasconcelos developed an ideological complex of race that focused on
constructive miscegenation, or the positive potentialities of racial mixing. According
ro Nancy Leys Stepan, unlike their British and American counterparts, who followed
Mendelian genetics, Mexican eugenicists followed less strictly deterministic neo-La-
marckian notions of heredity that blurred the boundaries between nature and nur-
ture.JB Nevertheless, they roo believed that unmanaged miscegenation could result in
perpetuating the wrong traits.
Stepan explains that Mexican eugenicists, like their counterpartS throughout Latin
America, embraced neo-Lamarckian genetic theory because their intellectual and sci-
entific ties were closer to France than to Britain. Furthermore, neo-Lamarckism al-
lowed for the "optimistic expectation that reforms of the social milieu would result in
[a] permanent improvement [of the race]."
39
This theory helped support related social
hygiene projects. For example, in 1899, Francisco Bulnes, a Porfirian social Darwinist,
argued that the substitution of a wheat-based diet for a corn-and-bean-based diet
would improve Indians' intellectual abilities.
40
Thus, while some Mexican eugenicists
grounded their racial theories and projects in "science" rather than "aesthetics," their
racialism should be understood as a matrix of biologically marked categories, compli-
cated by an understanding of race as an essence that included not only biology but
also culture, intelligence, and morality. The grounding of this racialist complex in
neo-Lamarckism allowed Latin American eugenics to take on a romantic character,
best exemplified by Vasconcelos's "aesthetic eugenics."
In that context, while the cultural applications of mestizaje were advocated for
the bourgeoisie, its racialist applications were consistently advocated as a means to
assimilate, in other words, "whiten," Mexico's indigenous popu1ation.
4
' At the fur-
thest extreme, while mestizaje might have been perceived as having the potential to
homogenize all of Mexico's polarized social and racial groups, I purposefully locate the
BECOMING MODER!\ I BECOMING TRADITION
extreme not in the notion of whitening Indians, because that is what Mexican elites
would have perceived as their prerogative. Instead, for the revolutionary elite of 1921,
not to mention the bourgeoisie, the extreme lay in the notion of"browning" the white
minority, or, to borrow Gamio's expression, "ridiculous extremes" of reconciliation.
In sum, the anxieties manifest in both Gamio's and Vasconcelos's treatises over the
potential in Mexico for racial degeneration are crucial to understanding that despite
their advocacy of biocultural blending, hybridity, or mestizaje, their texts should not
be construed as nonracist. After all, both men ultimately argued that the goal was to
assimilate or incorporate Indians, as well as blacks and Asians, culturally and biologi-
cally, into the dominant bourgeois, white minority, not the reverse.
In what follows, we will see that in the developing postrevolutionary era, the
anxiety provoked by the idea of racial mestizaje was mitigated (if only rhetorically) by
championing a notion of pure and authentic Indianness. However, the indigenous
cultural elements that were being newly reconstituted as authentic were not reduced
only to exotic stereotypes, as they had been in the Porfirian era as well, but authentic-
iry-Indianness-was divested of its potential political force by being feminized and
relegated to a passive procreative position within what remained an acutely gendered
and exploitative social and political hierarchy. Even if the "India Bonita" contest hinted
at the possibility of literally browning the white minority, the contest was nonetheless
characteristically unequal in the conceptualization of how hybridity was to occur. In
short, the contest demonstrates that for Obregonista intellectuals, mestizaje had sexual
as well as cultural and biological implications: as in the colonial social order, it was to
result from unions between dominant males and indias bonitas. The inrellectuals who
were enlisted to facilitate and promote the contest reasserted this power imbalance.
The "India Bonita" Contest
The "India Bonita" contest was first announced in the January 16 edition of El
UniversalY That this occurred one month after the inauguration of Alvaro Obregon is
unsurprising, as almost immediately Obregon and his associates set about to develop
programs to promote national unity, hoping also to gain political stability and thus
recognition from the international community. Obregon's associates in these efforts
included Manuel Gamio and Felix Palavicini. Palavicini, who had recently been ap-
pointed minister of foreign affairs, was also the publisher of El Universal. As a follower
of Boas, Gamio articulated the idea in the Mexican context that ethnic ascription
could be determined in cultural as much as racial terms.
What is less widely known is that Gamio was also Mexico's representative to the
~ e c o n d International Eugenics Congress, held in Washington, D.C., in September
1921.
41
While Mexico was celebrating the centennial of its independence from Spain
on September 15-16, and doing so, moreover, in a populist spirit, Gamio was in the
Santa and La India Bonita 161
162
United States attending an international conference on how to improve the world's
races. This suggests that even if Gamio and later Vasconcelos were among the few
eugenicists who maintained that fusion with indigenous Mexicans would provide
Europeans with beneficial attributes, as a vice president of the congress Gamio would
have been immersed in discussions on how eugenic policies might improve Mexico's
population, which was heavily indigenous, mixed-race, and largely impoverished.-H
While he modified such ideas to suit the realities of the Mexican context, his ap-
pointment to the congress dovetailed with his role as the leading judge in selecting El
Universal's "India Bonita," a position to which he was appointed in July 1921.
While the "India Bonita" contest appears to have been conceived as an entertain-
ing spectacle for El Universals bourgeois readership, by August the contest had become
the nexus for the public sorting of several key issues, among which were the follow-
ing: What defined an Indian? Her culture, class, or race? How best could Indians be
incorporated into the national polity? And which aspects of so-called Indian culture
were of value in the articulation of a new postrevolutionary national culture? In addi-
tion to engaging these pressing questions, the contest provided a public forum for the
articulation of an authentic paradigm of Mexican femininity. This paradigm was not
only positioned against the image of the modern feminist, but the "authentic" beauty
of the "India Bonita" contestants was also enlisted to reinscribe Mexico's sexual politics
through the articulation of two seemingly opposed discourses. The official discourse
sustained by the contest ennobled Mexico's so-called suffering race not only by exalting
indias bonitas on the basis of their ethnic, cultural, and physical attributes, bur also by
exalting their allegedly premodern sense of female virtue.
45
However, a second embed-
ded discourse emerged insofar as the contest enabled the retraining of the sexually
charged male gaze onto the body of the indigenous woman. Rather than opposed, these
two discourses, one ennobling and the other sexually objectifying, were in fact inter-
dependent in that both sought the same end: to promote the desirability of Mexico's
indigenous women among the nominally white and mestizo male population.
These goals were implicit in El Universals announcement of the "India Bonita''
contest. "Who is the prettiest Indian?" the announcement asked. Contrary to the
usual custom of honoring "beautiful women," El Universal would celebrate Mexican
independence by sponsoring a "completely racial contesr."
46
It is important here to
note the connotative subtext wherein "beautiful women" were not raced; that is to say,
at the very least they were socially white, and whiteness was invisible insofar as race
was concerned. The announcement went on to declare, "Never before has a [Mexican]
newspaper dignified its pages with the strong and handsome faces ffuertes y hermosas]
of the infinitude of indias who hail from the nation's lowest social class." This patron-
izing language was employed in the contest announcement, reprinted several times a
week from January to August. It betrays the contest as revolving around stereotypes of
class, race, and gender.
DE LA IHDI/. BONrTA ABAR
CARA TODA LA RlPUBUCA
f60 AHOGHf A
fl6RAL
6ARIBALD!
Bllali*ll
-.a aJnita
FIGURE 39 (LEFT)
Emma Garduno, El Universal,
January 25, 1921. Collection
Secretaria de Hacienda y
Credito Publico, Biblioteca
Miguel lerdo de Tejada,
Mexico City.
FIGURE 40 (RIGHT)
Teodomira Esquivel, El
Universal, March 17, 1921.
Collection Secretaria de
Hacienda y Credito Publico,
Biblioteca Miguel Lerdo de
Tejada, Mexico City.
As suggested by the announcement, the categories of working class and Indian
were often conAated. An individual's ascription to the category of "Indian" not only
was highly subjective, but it was usually determined by a member of a higher social
classY For example, on January 25, the newspaper published the photograph of its
first india bonita, identified as Emma Garduno (fig. 39). Readers were informed that
staff writer Hipolito Seijas, in the company of a staff photographer, had found Ms.
Garduno at one of the corn-grinding mills in Mexico City. She was described as an
"obrera simpatica," a charming working girl, with large brown eyes, who worked as a
domestic servant.<tll Despite being identified as a prospective india bonita, there is lirde
in the description of Emma Garduno to justify the ascription of indigeneity. Instead,
she was a member of the urban working class, a social standing reinforced by her hair-
style-pulled back with a large bow at the base of her neck-and her blouse, which was
modest yet Western in style. In fact, she bears some resemblance to Orozco's drawings
of colegialas, which illustrated Tablada's 1913 essay "Un pintor de Ia mujer." Thus, at this
stage in the contest, an india was si mply a female member of the poor urban class.
The notion that not only individual indias but Mexico's "suffering race" would be
ennobled by the "India Bonita" contest was conveyed expressly in the statements that
FIGURE 41
French contestants in an
international beauty contest
in Paris, El Universal, March 1,
1921. Collection Secretarfa de
164
accompanied the photograph ofTeodomira Esquivel, a candidate identified in early
March (fig. 40). In appearance, Teodomira was remarkably si milar to Emma Garduno,
and she was also identified as a domestic servant. However, the newspaper made a
crucial distinction when it described her as an "india legftima." In period jargon, this
implied that she was still closely associated with an indigenous group or village. In the
colonial era, "legitimate" Indians carne only from villages designated as "protected"
corporate entities. According to her entry, however, upon being selected as a candidate,
Teodomira declared: "I will only be an Indian until I become someone."
49
Presumably,
in being selected, Teodomira felt poised to become "someone." As a result, she could,
paradoxically, begin to shed her alleged Indian identity. Yet while Teodomira wore her
dark hair divided into C\vo long braids, her dress was Western in style, begging the ques-
tion as to the criteria upon which her "legitimate" Indian status was based.
BECQ)>.IING )>.10DERN I BECOMI:-JG TRADITIO:-;'
FIGU RE 42
Mexican contestants in an
international beauty contest in
Paris, / Universal, March 1, 1921.
Collection Secretaria de Hacienda
y Cn!di t o Publico, Biblioteca
Miguel Lerdo de Tejada, Mexico
City.
Apparently El Universals editorial staff was becoming aware of the inconsisten-
cies in the endeavor to identify indias in the urban environment of Mexico City. By
late February, the newspaper began publishing photographs of pretty indias from the
provinces. The photographs now highlighted the "Indian" culture of the young wom-
en by showing them dressed in regional costume, and in some entries even wearing
feathered headgear! And as if to justify the purely "racial" nature of its beauty contest,
the paper began publishing articles about beauty contests around the world whose
purpose was to celebrate ethnic diversity.
For example, in March, an article on an international beauty contest to be held
in Paris appeared on the front page of El Universal (fig. 41).
50
Accompanying photo-
graphs featured French contestants wearing distinctive peasant costumes, as well as a
few flappers; however, the French peasant costumes attest to the noble endeavor of
165
FIGURE 43
"Maria de la Mercedes Manero:
La mujer mas bella de Mexico"
(Maria de la Mercedes Manero:
The most beautiful woman in
Mexico), El Universal, Secci6n
de Arte, July 17, 1921. Collection
Secretaria de Hacienda y Credito
Publico, Biblioteca Miguel Lerdo
166
de Tejada, Mexico City.
linking national beauty to ethnicity or folk culture. The international contest was then
linked to the local context as it was declared that El Universal would oversee another
local contest to select "the most beautiful woman in Mexico" (la mujer mds bella de
Mexico), who would go on to represent the nation in Paris. Several viable Mexican
candidates were presented in a photo spread; needless to say, there was not an india
among them (fig. 42). In respect to social dynamics in Mexico, the valence of the
words chosen is crucial.
The use of the word bonita for one contest, as opposed to bella, or beautiful, for
the other was invested with explicit racial and class connotations. By describing the
subjects of one contest as "pretty female Indians," they were Indians first, then "fe-
males," versus "beautiful women." In addition, the word mds suggests that the "most
beautiful woman" contest would elect the woman, presumably white, who would rule
over all others. In comparison, the india bonita was simply one of many.
BECOMING MODERN I BECOMING TRADITIO:-!
Unlike irs assiduous daily coverage of the "India Bonita'' contest, information
on rhe search for "Ia mujer mas bella de Mexico" appeared only sporadically. On July
17
, El Universal announced the winner in the Mexican round of the international
conresr. Maria de Ia Mercedes Manero, a fair-skinned, auburn-haired Euro-Mexican,
would represent the nation in Paris (fig. 43).1' Yet again, the terms of this declaration
only serve to reinforce the perceived distinction between "pretty" and "beautiful" and
"india" and "woman."
In his analysis of the "ethnic" imperatives of the "India Bonita" contest for the de-
velopment of postrevolutionary nationalist indigenism, Rick A. Lopez has suggested
rhar perhaps El Universafs editorial board considered it unnecessary to school its read-
ership in the normative standard of beauty required to select Mexico's representative
in Paris; they did, however, see the need to explicate, on a daily basis, the standards for
selecting an Indian beauty.
52
This leads me to ask why Mexico's "India Bonita," who
like her peasant-costumed French counterparts was the alleged embodiment of the
folk, was nor automatically designated as Mexico's representative in France.
Perhaps the answer lies in the contradictions posed by the newspaper's running several
beauty contests concurrently: one to send Mexico's most beautiful woman to com-
pete in France; another, "racial contest" intended to overturn the hegemony of white
beauty contests, such as Miss Manero had won; and a third annual contest in which
a beauty queen was elected from the elite class as well, to preside over the literary
"Juegos Florales," inspired by the ancient Roman ludi jlorensei.H
These contradictions were made manifest first in February, when the newspaper
printed a photograph of another india bonita, Francisca Martin from the state ofYucarin.
On the same page was an illustrated essay praising the beauty of Justine Johnson, "the
most beautiful woman in the United Stares" (fig. 44).
54
Francisca Martin appeared stand-
ing, a pose that not only foregrounded her hand-embroidered white dress and the heavy
cross hanging from a long chain around her neck, bur was replete with ethnographic
connotations. In contrast, Justine Johnson appeared in a stylish three-quarter-profile
portrait that highlighted her pale shoulders and bobbed blonde hair. Oddly, though
Martin was denominated an india, her style of dress followed the tradition ofYucarecin
mestizas. Nonetheless, apparently she embodied Yucarecin tradition and Christian pi-
ety, whereas Johnson embodied moderni ty, emancipation, and nor inconsiderable sexual
allure. Although praised as beautiful, she sported the hairstyle that in Mexico City would
shortly trigger a public debate for being considered too modern and foreign.
Pelonas
In the mid-r920s (and even still today), women who cut their hair short were called
pelonas, or baldies. The term connotes a hairless birch by evoking xoloitzcuintli dogs,
which in pre-Conquest Mexico were considered intermediaries to the underworld but
FIGURF 44
"Justine Johnson: La mujer
mas bella de los Estados
Unidos" Uustine Johnson: The
most beautiful woman in the
United States) and "Francisca
Martin," El Universal, February
24, 1921. Collection Secretaria
de Hacienda y Credito Publico,
!68
were also bred for human consumption.
55
The juxtaposition posed berween Francisca
and Justine is highly suggestive given that fashionable bourgeois and aspiring work-
ing-class women alike were emulating the sryle embodied by Justine Johnson, rather
than the conservative, regional manner of Francisca Martfn.
In fact, Gamio himself had established a similar comparison in Forjando patria, in
which he described the servile woman, the feminist, and the ideal feminine woman.
In historical terms, however, he also focused on Aztec society. And basing his claims
on early chronicles and commentators, he described Aztec women as also divided into
three divinely ordained social types: wives/mothers, priestesses, and "public women."
Regardless of their preordained role, he claimed that Aztec women were innately
strong, industrious, and monogamous. 5
6
As I have already argued, through his three
contemporary types, Gamio enacted a kind of mestizaje, whereby the ideal feminine
woman possessed only the best attributes of the other two: the ability to work, if nec-
essary, domesticity, and natural sexual instincts.
In terms of the physical characteristics he attributed to the "masculinized femi-
nist," Gamio may have been eliding her with urban young women, who after bobbing
their hair in a style similar to Justine Johnson's (and Kahlo's) were assailed as pelonas.
A5 we know, in Mexico City in 1924 a public controversy erupted over young women
who bobbed their hair. A5 Anne Rubenstein has noted, the "opposition" to the vogue
for short hair and athletic bodies could be cast in terms of "defending national or
racial purity," and that the style for short hair was associated with the northeastern
United StatesY One writer described the "bob" as "rapada a Ia Boston" (razored a Ia
Boston).
18
Years later the poet Salvador Novo claimed that "long, straight hair was
Mexican women's inheritance from la Malinche" and that as a result pelonas attracted
more attention in Mexico as the objects of mockery.
19
To cur one's hair, Rubenstein
argues, suggested a desire to "resign from la raza cosmic a. "
60
Initially, press coverage of the pelona controversy evoked a sense of amusement.
In May, Revista de Revistas, the illustrated weekly for the Mexico City daily Excelsior,
dedicated an entire issue to las pelonas, including poems, cartoons, photographs, and
testimonials on the stylishness and hygienic aspect of short hair.
6
' The cover featured
an au courant rendering of a short-haired, cigarette-smoking modern girl framed by a
Rat background of shocking pink (color plate 14). The graphic geometry of her styl-
ishly coifed dark hair, cocked at a rakish downward angle serring off her pale slanted
eyes, and the curling plume of cigarette smoke reinforced the radically modern affect
of her fashion. Nothing in this image codes the pelona as Mexican; in fact, the image
was surely lifted from a contemporary portrait of the American showgirl and silent
film star Louise Brooks.
Inside the magazine, however, another cartoon hinted at the violence to come
(fig. 45). The caption notes that the cartoon was taken from the French daily La
Vie Parisienne and was tided "Samson's Revenge." As the caption states, "The im-
age speaks for itself."
6
' In July, the controversy heated up, as expressed in a cartoon
by one of Excelsior's featured illustrators, Ernesto Garda Cabral (fig. 46). It shows a
young woman weeping over her father's disapproval that she cut her voluminous hair.
Titled "Criteria femenino," the image pokes equal fun at the frustrated desires of
young women as well as patriarchal demands that they adhere to conservative notions
of respectable bourgeois femininity.
63
A year later, Jose Clemente Orozco rendered a
cartoon for the satirical newspaper L'ABC in which two women in a brawl yank each
other's hair out, rendering each other pelonas.
64
While a veritable "war," to borrow Rubenstein's term, was waged on pelonas, it
was not primarily young bourgeois, socially "white" young women-like the woman
in Garda Cabral's cartoon or Frida Kahlo-who were the primary objects of male
aggression. Instead it was dark-skinned obreras, precisely young women like Emma
FIGURE 45
"La revancha de Sanson"
(Samson's Revenge),
Revista de Revistas, May
25, 1924. Courtesy Nettie
Lee Benson Latin American
Collection, University of
Texas at Austin.
170
8Aa 4eliciOBa ca riu tura llena de "esprit" f r ance, se inti tula .. L:a
--'a 4e Sauon'' y Cue publica da por .. La Vi e Pariienne.'" Creemo..
.. M -.ceaita pues se explica por si misma.
Garduno or Teodomira Esquivel, who were chastised if they cut their hair. In at least
one instance, according ro the press, they were publicly humiliated for embracing the
latest fashion. In an essay in El Universal, in which he also called the bobbed-haired
young women "Claudinas," a writer under the pseudonym "Jacobo Dalevuelta" re
ported that one youngpelona affirmed that a woman's "right" tO cut her hair depended
on her "age, her health, and even her color." The pelona added that although she had
adopted the style, she could not imagine it on one of the "chubby women so repre-
sentative of our race," in other words, a woman of indigenous descent.
6
1 This pelona
evidently considered herself otherwise.
On the same day that Garda Cabral's cartoon of the weeping young woman ap-
peared in Excelsior, another tabloid reported that a young female student at a state-run
night school (in other words, a school for the working class) had been abducted and
.--------<:ARICATURAS DE "EXCELSIOR---------,.
CRITERIO FEMENINO :-: POR GAROA CABRAL
FIGURE 46
Ernesto Garcia Cabral, "Criterio
femenino" (Feminine Criterion),
Excelsior, July 22, 1924,
editorial page. Courtesy Nettie
Lee Benson Latin American
Collection, University of Texas
at Austin.
-IQut DO, '1 que no t.e lau d conar e1 ,.tot .......
-8i.. ...... lo que 1.6. quit rei que hq& et ricUn.lo oo ll e1\u \reD&otu ........ .
her head shaved.
66
The next day a copycat incident occurred when a mob of anti-
pelona students from the Preparatoria and the National School of Medicine assembled
in front of the latter to harangue and threaten passing pelonas and bob-haired female
classmates. Before the police arrived, the mob, shouting "death to pelonas," threw
buckets of water, soaking several pelonas and threatening to shave their heads in pub-
lic.67 El Universal reported that a sizable group oflong-haired women declared that for
every pelorza forcibly shaved, one of them would cut off her braids.
68
In the final analysis, perhaps the pelorza controversy was actually an attack on the
euphemistic colegiala, the poor and working-class young women who had over the
course of the revolutionary decade become increasingly visible and in some minds
increasingly brazen in their comportment in the public domain. In the press accounts,
the elision of the pelona with the Claudina and the colegiala suggests that the un-
rest was triggered more by increasing anxieties about underemployed sexually active
young women whose behavior required monitoring by social service agencies like the
Consejo Tutelar para Menores lnfracrores than it was by emancipating female stu-
dents, like Kahlo, at the Preparatoria.
69
In the May issue of Revista de Revistas (fig. 47),
the writer Carlos Serrano penned a long satirical essay, "The Reign of the Pelonas," the
EL REINAIJO DE Lfof fEl.9Nfi\J
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ct. Ulrta.... loa tat,dlos Is
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ride of which is a pun on "rule" or "governance" and "hairstyle" (reinadolpeinado). -o
Moreover, it was subtitled "An American Fashion Invading Our Midst." Serrano com-
mented particularly on the ways that working-class pelonas were flouting sartorial hi-
erarchies by copying a style appropriate for the (white) elite. The captions for several
illustrations note, for example, "Here, a little worker, rakes up rhe fashion" and "She's
rhe daughter of work, bur curs her hair like an aristocrat." These captions nor only ad-
dress the aesthetic incongruity of former indias cutting their braids, bur they suggest
anxiety over the visual blurring of class and race hierarchies.
Returning to the search for the "India Bonita," the eruption of the public scandal
over "las pelonas" was still three years off, and yet despite or because of changing fash-
ions, coupled with women's increasing agitation for social and political emancipation,
it was the traditional long-haired beauty of rhe pretty indias rhar El Universal empha-
sized as their phorographs appeared daily throughout the summer months of 1921.
La India Bonita: Maria Bibiana Uribe
On March 25, a photograph with a striking description of an india bonita appeared
(fig. 48). Mrs. Josefa de Morales nominated her goddaughter, Marfa Bibiana Uribe. In
her description, Mrs. Morales wrote:
Maria Bibiana was born and lives in a small town in the mountains near
Puebla. She is sixteen ... has a pretty wheat-colored complexion [and] de-
scends from the impetuous Aztec race. Maria Bibiana wears a woolen skirt
called a titixrle, which she wove on her loom. She winds it around her waist,
securing it with a cotton sash. Her quixquemetl, which she slips over her head
to cover her body, is also homemade from a single square of cottOn in which
she leaves an opening. She slips it over her head to cover her upper body [and]
she wears a folded quixquemetl on her head ro protect her from the sun.-
While ocher entries had shown young women wearing regional attire, the derailed
description of Maria Bibiana's costume was unique. No other contest entry made use
of words such as titixtle and quixquemetl in Nahuatl, rhe language of the inhabitants
of central Mexico and histOrically of the Mexica, or Aztec, people.
Notably, Marfa Bibiana was also the first contestant identified as "Aztec." She
thus had rhe distinction of being more than a generic Indian; instead, she was the
descendent of the indigenous people who had defended Mexico against the invading
Spaniards in the sixteenth century. This apparently made her exceptionally well suited
to reign over the nation's centennial celebrations because by August rhe "India Bonica"
contest had been linked nor only to Mexico's independence from Spain in 1821, bur
crucially to the quarrecentenary of the conquest of the Aztecs by the Spaniards in 1521.
FIGURE 47
Carlos Serrano, "EI reinado
de las pelonas" (The Reign
of the Pelonas), Revista
de Revistas, May 25, 1924.
Courtesy Nettie Lee Benson
Latin American Collection,
University of Texas at Austin.
1
73
174
Furthermore, intellectuals, if not El Universals readership, would nor have missed
the connection between Maria Bibiana and Gamio's encomium of the Aztec woman's
virtues in Forjando patria.
These discursive overlaps and continuities cannot have been accidental, and as
the contest unfolded and the summer months passed, opportunities were recognized
that extended far beyond the initial conception of the beauty contest. It is likely that
with Manuel Gamio's involvement, the historical conjunctions between the centenary
and the quatrecemenary of the Conquest became apparent. In addition, the utility
of exalting an india bonita in the midst of increased efforts to promote the fusion of
Mexico's biocultural duality would not have been lost on Gamio.
At the contest's inception, the indias bonitas were described both as Indian and
as working class, suggesting that they were perceived as recent migrants to the urban
environment. The violent decade of the Revolution had displaced countless rural peo-
ple, resulting in an unprecedented increase in the urban working class. Many of the
displaced were orphaned and abandoned young women, who, like the protagonist of
Gamboa's novel, had little recourse but ro seek low-wage work in the cities as domestic
servants and frequently as prostitutes.
Santos or Indios?
In the 1920s, Mexico City officials attributed the alarming numbers of sexual workers
to migration, and rhey publicly expressed concern over the epidemic proportions of
venereal disease that resulted.7
2
Another by-product of this migration was the shed-
ding of rural ways of life as people from the countryside were assimilated into the ur-
ban environment. Tellingly in Gamboa's novel, it is precisely Santa's cultural transfor-
mation that is most Aagged as evidence of her "fall." As Santa's srory begins, Gamboa
offers the reader a vivid description of the red-light district in Mexico City. Santa's
mere presence there, as a solitary young woman, casts her immediately under the sign
of prostitution. Her fate as a fallen woman is sealed when she is compelled to undergo
a medical examination for the state-run registry of prostitutes. Gamboa's language
throughout is vivid and steeped in corporeal references and metaphors. Following
this introduction, Gamboa moves back in time in order to establish Santa's provincial
and rhus metaphorically "pure" origins. He contrasts the seedy urban mise-en-scene
with a description of Santa in the "rural" milieu of her hometown, Chimalistac. He
writes that Santa was once like "all country girls," chaste and strong, because though
poor and ignorant she was raised among "breezes and flowers ... in the care of rhe
earth, our eternal loving mother." In rhe country, she was an "innocent lass," like "a
free bird with only the purest desires in [her] firm breasts."?J This subtle allusion ro
Santa's physical beauty establishes a counterbalance between her chastity and her in-
herem sensuality, which when dislocated from the country to the city, following her
BECOMING MODERN I BECOMING TRADI TION
11
B ConCUrso de Ia , I
India Bonita . 1
. . - ---1'
FIGURE 48
"Maria Bibiana Uribe,"
El Universal, March 25, 1921.
Collection Secretaria de
fal l from grace at the hands of a soldier from the nearby barracks, quickly transforms
into putrescence. Later, the proverbial ripeness of her body is revealed as a predisposi-
tion to corruption in both a moral and a physical sense.
74
Implicitly, the line between
ripe and fetid is easily blurred when the body is exposed to the negative influences of
the urban milieu.
In their examinations of Santa, Carmen Ramos Escandon and Debra A Castillo
have described Gamboa's unmistakable juxtapositions between the landscape (natural
and urban) and the female body and between sex and consumption, both carnal and
alimentary."
1
The latter are particularly relevant in regard to the indias bonitas, who
as "country girls" were also described in terms that evoke a desire to consume them.
Paradoxically, the urban milieu condemned in the novel-a cosmopolitan envi-
ronment of taxis, capitalist enterprise, and state-run social services, in other words, a
quickly homogenizing environment conducive to assimilation and modernization-
conforms precisely with the goals of both the pre- and postrevolutionary state. At the
same time, however, period anxieties over the rapid pace of modernization are evoked
by Gamboa's detailed, dystopian characterization of the city as the context for Santa's
75
176
FIGURE 49
"Maria Bibiana Uribe de Ia Sierra
de Puebla, proclamada Ia India
Bonita de Mexico" (Maria Bibiana
Uribe of the Sierra of Puebla,
proclaimed the India Bonita of
Mexico), El Universal, August
2, 1921. Collection Secretaria
de Hacienda y Credito Publico,
MARIA BIBIANA URIBlO LA SIERRA DE PU8lA
PROCLAMAUA lA INOlA!BONilA OE MX\G0l t

degeneration. The state's goals for infrasuuctural and social modernization norwith-
standing, for the urban elite the influx of rural migrants into their midst caused con-
sternation, particularly at moments when a weak social infrastructure, such as during
the Revolution, resulted in unsupervised migration and incorporation into the urban
milieu.7
6
These anxieties were expressed from the Porfirian through the postrevolu-
tionary era (and into the present) by the idiomatic classification-with deeply pejora-
tive connotations of a rural individual as an "indio" or "india." Working against such
connotations, intellectuals like Gamio, in tandem with events like the "India Bonita"
contest, sought to reinvest the term with a positive set of associations.
As an india bonita, Maria Bibiana Uribe offered the urban public an exception to
these patterns of unsupervised immigration and assimilation. First, she was no generic
india. Instead, she was described as a descendent of the Aztecs. It is also noteworthy
that Maria Bibiana came from an isolated village in the mountains of Puebla. Rather
than having already incorporated herself into the urban working class by migrating to
rhe city, she had remained safely tucked away, preserving her traditional way of life.
According to the newspaper account, she spent most of her time at her loom, engaged
in rhe traditional pastime of indigenous women. Her habits were rhus set in contrast
to rhe habits of transient indias, such as Emma Garduno or Teodomira Esquivel, who
came to rhe city and found work as domestic servants, seamstresses, laundresses, tor-
tilla makers, and prostitutes.7
7
On August 2, Marfa Bibiana Uribe was proclaimed the winner of the "India
Bonita" contest (fig. 49).'
8
In the days that followed, she was featured in countless
articles and dubbed the "obsidian-eyed princess."-
9
Victorious, she was hailed as "the
most beautiful from among hundreds of phorographs."
8
o According to this account,
Maria Bibiana's beauty was equal to that of the "ancestral princesses who, in rhe land of
Anahuac, had cast a spell on Hernan Cortes's knights."
8
' For the editors of EL Universal
and for revolutionary elites like Gamio and Felix Palavicini, Maria Bibiana embodied
"a fervent patriotic wish: that of associating to the ancient race, whose blood, like that
of the Spanish race, flowed through the veins of all Mexicans."
81
With char lofty praise,
Maria Bibiana's so-called Aztec heritage and, crucially, her gender, were invoked, met-
aphorically, in support of biological mestizaje.
Maria Bibiana was also implicitly likened to Ia Malinche. By exalting Marfa
Bibiana's beauty, virtue, and ethnic origins, mestizaje was rhetorically purified. Further,
she was nor only beautiful, bur she was young, and her presumed virginity could thus
be enlisted to promote a purified process of mestizaje as the key to national unifica-
tion. That she was pure, referring explicitly to her Aztec origins bur implicitly to her
presumed virginity, was made clear through press accounts and the panel of judges,
incl uding Manuel Gamio and rhe artist and archaeologist Jorge Enciso. The panel also
included Rafael Perez Taylor, the publisher of EL Universal, who in 1916 had written
about Orozco's "House ofTears" under the pseudonym "Juan Amberes," and rwo staff
writers, Aurelio Gonzalez Carrasco and Carlos M. Ortega.
In the article announcing Marfa Bibiana's triumph, both Gamio and Enciso af-
firmed that they considered her the "most authentic" of the eleven finalists based on
"her skin color, her black, silken hair and her small hands and feet." According to
Gamio, these characteristics confirmed her racial affiliation to the Azrecs.
83
He ex-
plained the scientific basis of his interest in her. First, he praised her limited use of
Spanish and her characteristic accent of the "Mexican" (meaning Nahua) people.
84
He reiterated that her physical features, costume, and ethnographic characteristics
demonstrated indubitably that she was an Indian. His eugenic inclinations emerged
when he assured El Universals readers that even if a blood test would not determine
the extent of Maria Bibiana's mestizaje, anthropometric rests could ascertain whether
in fact she possessed any mixed blood. Despite the assertion that all Mexicans carried
the co-mingled blood of rhe ancient race and the Spanish, Gamio still wanted to as-
sure his readers that resting Maria Bibiana's racial purity was unnecessary.
85
In so stat-
177
178
ing, Gamio sustained his theory that ethnic ascription was a combination of cultural,
linguistic, and racial characteristics.
86
Jorge Enciso also supported Gamio's assertions.
Enciso insisted that Maria Bibiana's gracefulness and humiliry only reconfirmed
their choice. Above all, he based his choice on her "aboriginal beaury," which resonated
with his "aesthetic sensibilities."
87
Enciso's sympathies were no doubt enlivened by the
fact that Maria Bibiana was not just a pretry Aztec, but she also contributed to the na-
tional craft industry. Her handwoven quixquemetl and titixtle, among the most val ued
indigenous handicrafts, dovetailed with objects displayed in the "Exhibition of Popular
Art." {And not to mention that weaving also had powerful biblical connotations.)MS
Ultimately, Gamio's and Enciso's assertions that Maria Bibiana was an authentic,
productive, and pretry india drew equally upon the revolutionary cultural discourses of
the day. First, her traditional way of life and her linguistic deficiencies were reclaimed
as indigenous and therefore national. Second, in terms of the social construction of
gender, her domestic habits and mannerisms, while exemplifying those of Gamio's
"servile" woman, were invoked as well to suggest that she was poised to transform,
through mestizaje, into the "feminine" ideal. The implication was clear: Maria Bibiana
embodied the kind of procreative femininiry to which all duriful Mexican women,
ethnic affiliation notwithstanding, should aspire.
These ideas were predicated on the convictions about "feminine" versus "mas-
culinized" women that Gamio had expressed in Forjando patria. Through the "India
Bonita" contest, he took the opponuniry once more to discuss appropriate gender
roles, publishing an essay, "The Indian Venus" {La Venus India), in conjunction with
Maria Bibiana's victory. In the essay, Gamio used the contest to define the virtues that
constituted ideal Mexican femininiry by declaring Maria Bibiana to be the "embodi-
ment of feminine beaury of the Mexican rype."
89
He justified his assertion by claiming
that the contest pointed to the need to establish an intri nsically Mexican canon of
physical and aesthetic beaury. Gamio argued that Mexicans had spent centuries slav-
ishly imitating the Hellenic canon. Referring back to the physical characteristics he
had identified as Marfa Bibiana's, he asserted that they were native to Mexico, whereas
Hellenic models of beaury were not only inappropriate but also impossible for mes-
tizo Mexicans to follow. Gamio stated that Mexico was poised to formulate its own
canon because the contest had turned the tide against prevailing "white" beaury coo-
tests.90 One cannot help but wonder what he thought of sending Maria de Ia Mercedes
Manero to Paris rather than Maria Bibiana Uribe.
According to Gamio, in addition to vindicating Mexico's "suffering race," Maria
Bibiana had inspired compassion in the "white minoriry," whose sympathy for Mexico's
indigenous people intensified upon seeing the "brown Virgin so exalted."
9
' He thus
affirmed Maria Bibiana's puriry by likening her to Mexico's patron saint, the Virgin
of Guadalupe.
9
' In other words, she was as virtuous as she was racially, culturally, and
authentically Mexican. Marfa Bibiana thus embodied Mexicos own version of the
"eternal feminine," a term expressly used in an interview conducted by the social col-
umnist for El Universal !lustrado, the newspaper's weekly magazine.
91
To pur it simply,
despite his earlier claim that indigenous women were not intrinsically servile, to him
they were nonetheless vehicles of culture, the creation of which was up to (white) men,
such as himself, who claimed the authority and the agency to orchestrate the nation's
future. Thus, even if the contest was nor rhe first attempt to posit an ideal "Indian"
beauty, it provided an ideal opportunity to reinscribe the status quo by gendering
rhe normally racialized terms oflndianness as feminine, and arguing rhar our of pure
Indian femininity and pure white masculinity a new ideal hybrid Mexican would be
created. The contest thus effectively gendered race and, by contrast, raced gender.
The "Indian Venus" was accompanied by two illustrations of indias bonitas.
the photographs were not of Marfa Bibiana bur of two other finalists.
94
This
demonstrates that Marfa Bibiana functioned synechdochically. She was the chosen
"India Bonita" for 1921, bur her beauty represented the new Indian ideal, which along
with her competitors set a new standard. Gamio's definition of a new aesthetic canon
thus was complete and, with it, his definition of the role of the Indian woman in
the postrevolutionary nation. Revolutionary women (namely, working-class women)
were to emulate Maria Bibiana's salient characteristics as Gamio and the other com-
mentators described: Mexican women were to be feminine. They were not to be active
revolutionaries, let alone modern, but traditional, beautiful, and contentedly mater-
nal. This assertion might seem to contradict the real role played by feminists such as
Hermila Galindo or revolutionary firebrands like Juana B. Gutierrez de Mendoza,
revolutionary fighters like Pepita Neri, Amelio(a) Robles, or the mysterious "Marfa
Zavala," known as "Ia destroyer" (fig. 50). Zavala's actual role in the revolution is
unknown, bur her photograph, in which she sits on railroad tracks, dressed as a man,
holding a leafY branch in her left hand and a shiny orb in her right, was found in
an album assembled in the 1930s by the collector Felipe Teixidor, a Catalan intel-
lectual who became a naturalized Mexican citizen in 1928. He had typed under her
photograph, "Marfa Zavala, ' La destroyer,' ayud6 a bien morir a los soldados" (Marfa
Zavala, "the destroyer," she helped soldiers die well). Whether rhe inscription is factual
is unknown, as is anything about the identity of rhe woman depicted. However, rhe
inscription, suggesting that she was a medicine woman of sons, relegates her to the
realm of helpmate rather than warrior, as suggested by her manner of dress.
95
Notwithstanding these and other images of empowered women, it was the im-
age of the "India Bonita" that was codified with increasing force after the close of
the revolutionary decade. The contribution of such women revolutionaries as Neri,
Robles, and presumably Zavala was gradually erased, and rather than being described
as soldadas, the feminine form of the Spanish word for soldier, they were described as
soldaderas. The suffix "-eras" connotes help or assistance rather than direct action in
battle.
96
And as Victor Madas Gonzalez, Joanne Hershfield, and Anne Rubenstein
179
!82
contribute best through cultural fusion; if they were "legitimately Indian," like Marfa
Bibiana and her cohorts, then they were poised to contribute to the nation's unity
through sexual union with dominant males.'
03
Although the notion of racial fusion as a unifying construct is usually credited to
Jose Vasconcelos, Gamio had actually anticipated Vasconcelos, first in 1916 in Forjando
patria and then again in 1920 in Ethnos, the same journal in which he announced his
participation in the eugenics congress.'
04
Gamio's praise of Maria Bibiana was couched
explicitly in the indigenist discourse developed there, which promoted the preser-
vation of the desirable attributes of Indian culture. Implicitly, however, by exalting
Marfa Bibiana as pure, clean, and beautiful while simultaneously promoting eugenic
methods as a means to attain a positively "fused" mestizo polity, Gamio was directing
his appeal to Mexican men.
Concurrent with Gamio's discursive efforts to ennoble the contest, a plainly las-
civious narrative emerged in other press accounts of Marfa Bibiana's beauty. Desire, as
expressed by two other writers, placed the "India Bonita'' contest and Marfa Bibiana
with it directly in the service of reinscribing the racial and class-based colonial order,
whereby men from the dominant, socially or nominally "white" classes enjoyed the
authority bestowed (symbolically) on them by Hernan Cortes to take possession of the
indigenous woman. In effect, the contest mobilized an "economy of desire," wherein
the "Indian" lower class, and in this case a particular indigenous woman, were situated
as objects of (sexual) consumption for middle- and upper-class men.
105
On the day her triumph was announced, El Universal published an interview with
Marfa Bibiana by the art and culture columnist Fernando Ramirez de Aguilar, writi ng
under the pseudonym "Jacobo Dalevuelta."
106
Using language remarkably similar to
Gamboa's in Santa, Dalevuelta began by describing Marfa Bibiana as shy and pretty.
Then he likened her beauty to that of the indigenous yoloxochitl flower (jlor de coraz6n;
heart flower). His comparison suggests a reference to the maiden Xochitl, shown in
Jose Obregon's Discovery of Pulque, who bewitched Tecpancaltzin with her beauty and
her offering of the fermented beverage pulque. In Nahuatl, xochitl means "flower," but
Dalevuelta's use of the Nahuatl word yoloxochitl suggests a reference to a particular
flower with medicinal and hallucinogenic properties. He ended his homage by stating
that Marfa Bibiana possessed the "beauty of a harem favorite in that enchanting land
of the orient."
107
Dalevuelta exoticized Marfa Bibiana in keeping with the long-stand-
ing practice of male elites, and moreover he cast her under the "sign of prostitution."
108
As noted above, in 1924, Dalevuelta voiced his opinion on the pelona controversy and
there too he used salacious terminology to express his "support" for the pelonas. '
09
Even more insidious, however, were the comments of the writer Aurelio Gonzalez
Carrasco, also a judge in the "India Bonita" contest. When interviewed about the
event, he responded in verse, stressing the use of several Nahuatl words." First, link-
ing the contest to the issue of women's suffrage, he stated in jest that the success of the
BECOMI:"'G MODERN I BECOMING T RADITION
contest was such that if women received the national vote, Felix Palavicini would like-
ly be elected Mexico's next president. He then suggested that Hipolito Seijas, the staff
writer in charge of the contest, should marry Marfa Bibiana in order to "keep her in
the family." Finally, continuing in rhymed verse, Gonzalez Carrasco described himself
as a cacomixtle, a carnivorous, nocturnal mammal, and he expressed his desire to "suck
Marfa Bibiana's bile."' " The double entendre is obvious and recalls yet again Gamboa's
own repeated use of carnivorous and cannibalistic language in describing male desire
for Santa.
112
Furthermore, as a night-prowling creature, a cacomixtle conjures the image
of a pimp. Although Gonzalez Carrasco's crude innuendo, so overtly freighted with
male desire, might appear to turn Gamio's encomium on its head, in truth it acts as
a kind of funhouse mirror, making strange and explicit the sexual politics of Gamio's
desire for biocultural fusion.
In the weeks that followed, Marfa Bibiana was featured almost daily in the pages of
El Universal. A detailed account was given of the day she was feted with a five-o'clock
tea at the home of Alberto Pani, Obregon's newly appointed minister of the interior
and a close associate of Felix Palavicini."J A photograph of the tea shows an unsmiling
Marfa Bibiana, looking rather like an ethnographic novelty in her simple cotton cloth-
ing as she stands in front of a large, gilt-framed European-style oil painting and along-
side Pani and his wife (fig. 51). She stands barefoot on a velvet cushion, a pretentious
conceit intended to highlight her delicate feet and the good treatment offered her by
the Panis. According to the account, the event was reserved for Mexico City's social elite
and the international diplomatic corps. For more popular audiences, Marfa Bibiana
was presented several evenings in a row at Mexico City's Teatro Colon in a musical
titled "Homage to the India Bonita." The review starred the popular Spanish actress
Marfa Conesa, who, dressed as an india bonita, performed a song-and-dance review."
4
Press photographs of Conesa dressed as an india and wearing a braided wig (she roo was
a pelona) demonstrate the degree of stereotyping that prevailed, Maria Bibiana's para-
digmatic authenticity notwithstanding (fig. 52). The evening also included a poem, "La
India Bonita," written by Julio Sesto, the same poet who in 1917 had written a review
of]ulio Ruelas's last paintings."
1
On a satirical note, the comedy duo Lupe Rivas Cacho
and Anastacio Otero staged a parody titled "El Indio Bonito" at the Teatro Lirico. In a
stereotyped characterization of two illiterate inditos named "Jorge and Ia India Bonita,"
Rivas Cacho and Otero spoke in the stilted Spanish attributed to indigenous peasants
for whom Spanish was a second language. In the skit, the two meet at the offices of
El Universal and scheme to become the "India and Indio Bonito." Despite the parody,
their dialogue was transcribed verbatim in the August 4 issue of El Universalllustrado,
which was dedicated to Marfa Bibiana and the contest."
6
On August 17, Marfa Bibiana's colorized portrait graced the cover of El Universal
Ilustrado (see color plate r). Once again the ethnographic character of the publicity
is betrayed by the fact that she is shown against a classic red and green fret, holding
EL UNIVERSAL /LUSTRADO
FIGURE 51
"Maria Bibiana Uribe ... five
o'clock tea ... ." El Universal
1/ustrado, August 11, 1921.
Collecti ons of the New York
Public Library, Astor, Lenox and
Tilden Foundations.
184
a delicately painted lacquered bowl such as those that were then on display in the
"Exhibition of Popular An." The portrait bears comparison to the portrait of the pefo-
na a Ia Louise Brooks, who appeared on the cover of Revista de Revistas three years later
(see color plate 14). Side by side on the cover of two competing illustrated weeklies, the
two images epitomize the seemingly polarized female archetypes of the pefona-Santa
and the quintessentially feminine type, the india bonita. Whereas Maria Bibiana bears
the standard of the folk, a lacquered bowl, her white blouse with the red and green
fret complete the tricolor of the Mexican flag, the pefona smokes in front of a field
shocking pink, the femininity of which only emphasizes her "masculinized" appear-
ance and habits. Thinking back to Gamio's claims about Mexican female types, the
goal was ultimately to "avoid ridiculous extremes" and force Mexican women along a
more moderate course.
E:L UNIVII:RSAt
.. LA FIESTA DELA INDIA BONITA EN El
-: Bi&-wrm.w LA al

A
Maria Bibiana's official coronation as Mexico's "India Bonita" was on August 16,
a date closely coinciding with the Spaniards final defeat of the Aztecs on August 13,
1521. The coronation was described in detail, highlighting the numerous standing ova-
tions that she received and the degree to which "all of Mexico" was overwhelmed
wi th love for the nation's "India Bonita.''"" At the end of August, a socially promi-
nent couple, Andres and Esperanza Fernandez of the city of Puebla, were selected to
be Maria Bibiana's godparents."
8
As gentry, it is not surprising that the Fernandezes
were described as "Spaniards." They expressed their plan to manage Maria Bibiana's
prize-winnings and to enroll her in the private convent academy attended by their
daughter."
9
Maria Bibiana's impending sequester to the convent school is reinforced
visually in her portrait in the midst of the Fernandez family by the transformation of
her quixquemetl into a wimple (fig. 53). In giving her an education, Fernandez stated
that Maria Bibiana would one day find herself "a well-trained woman."
12
o He was ap-
parently unmoved by Marfa Bibiana's own expressed wish to return to her village and
use her prize money to buy some animals and a plot of land where she could build a
house. Apparently Fernandez saw it as his prerogative to oversee the de-Indianization
of Marfa Bibiana Uribe.
FIGURE 52
"Marfa Conesa: Homenaje
a Ia India Bonita" (Marfa
Conesa: Homage to the
"India Bonita"), El Universal,
August 17, 1921. Collection
Secretarfa de Hacienda y
Credito Publico, Biblioteca
Miguel lerdo de Tejada,
Mexico City.
185
FIGURE 53
"Don Andres Fernandez y su
distinguida esposa ... " (Don
Andres Fernandez and his
distinguished wife ... ), El
Universa/1/ustrado, August
24, 1921. Collections of the
New York Public Library.
Astor, Lenox and Tilden
Foundations.
I86
In September, she was given a place of honor in El Universals allegorical parade
car. Seated in front of an Aztec sun stone and below Ef Universals emblem of an eagle
supporting the world on its wings, she reigned as the feminine allegorical embodi ment
of the new nation (fig. 54). The image recalls the use of the sun stone and globe on
the masthead of Las Hijas del Anahuac.
121
However, in a characteristically conflicting
message, Maria Bibiana shared the public's attention with another beauty queen of
the centennial celebrations, Guadalupe Lujan y Asunsolo, the daughter of a wealthy
family. While the early announcements for the "India Bonita" contest stated that the
winner would reign over the newspaper's literary competition, in the end it was Lujan
y Asunsolo who was crowned to inaugurate the Centennial at the "Juegos Florales"
(fig. 55).
122
Lujan y Asunsolo was the quintessence of bourgeois femininity, suggesting
that while indias like Marfa Bibiana were exemplars for the general population, white
womanhood remained the model for the elite.
Discursive Mestizaje
As a key event of the centennial celebrations of 1921, the "India Bonita'' contest invigo-
rated in a remarkably complex way the belief that Mexico's indigenous and European
biocultural heritage could be positively fused. Through the contest, the desire for na-
tional unity was articulated through two seemingly opposed bur interdependent dis-
courses. On the one hand, Manuel Gamio embraced the contest because it advanced
his definition of biocultural mestizaje. However, although his goals were framed in
terms of the progress and social unity of the postrevolutionary nation, his desires were
no less implicated than those of Aurelio Gonzalez Carrasco in gendering miscegena-
tion as a process occurring between European men and indigenous women.
J reiterate my point, referring back to Diego Rivera's first mural, Creation (see color
plate
13
), and to Jose Clemente Orozco's 1926 mural painting at the Preparatoria, Cortes
and Malintzin (Cortes y Malintzin; color plate 15). In contrast to Rivera's seemingly be-
nign rendering oflndo-Hispanic mestizaje as a disembodied evolution based on the in-
tellectual absorption ofWestern values, Orozco's mural is an explicit acknowledgment of
the biological and physically violent process of mestizaje. Orozco depicts mestizaje as the
result of the forced sexual union of a white male and an indigenous female. It is evident
that he was opposing Rivera's conception in Creation and the image of the Indian that
Rivera advanced in his mural cycle for the Ministry of Public Education.
123
There Rivera
created hundreds of meters of fresco in which generically Indian men perform their daily
tasks, ennobled in their white cotton pants and shirts and rustic huaraches, while Indian
women wearing titixtles and quixquemetl.s are nested into the landscape.
In contrast to the primordial figures in Creation or the folkloric Indians at the
Ministry, Orozco's naked Cortes and Malintzfn overwhelm the viewer. Painted in the
stairwell off the main courtyard of the school, the mural forces the viewer to look up
at the figures, which are positioned overhead on an angled ceiling. Malintzfn's richly
hued brown skin, black hair, and downcast eyes contrast with Cortes's pale gray eyes
and nearly immaterial complexion. Although their right hands are joined, Cortes re-
strains Malintzfn with his left arm, crossing it in front of her body. She appears as if
about to rise, her left hand poised for impending action. Cortes's gesture appears to be
necessitated by some subtle will on Malinrzfn's part.
At their feet emerges a male figure that swims toward the viewer out of some sort
of milky-gray primordial matter. Because Malintzfn and Cortes are equally important
in the composition, the mural makes clear that without Malintzfn the birth of the
mestizo nation would not have been realized. The mural thus destabilizes perceptions
of Malintzfn's perfidy, as well the desire to conjure their union as one based on love.
124
Whether or not this was Orozco's intention, at the very least his image of the union
of Cortes and Malintzfn evokes the power dynamic of mestizaje in terms of both race
and gender.
When period critics interpreted the swimming male figure as the "vanquished
Indian," Orozco objected.
125
Although they perceived the image as showing the Spaniard
trampling the Indian race, Orozco countered that the male figure at the base of the im-
age represented the past, the pre-Columbian era brought to a close by the Conquest.
He asserted that the image depicted the "balanced" transformation of Spaniard and
Indian into mestizo Mexico.
126
Further, Orozco stated that if any of the figures in the
panel represented the "Indian race," it was the figure of Malintzfn, a comment that
reaffirms the ways in which lndianness was routinely gendered feminine.
127
FIGURE 54
Marfa Bibiana, El Universal
1/ustrado, September 16, 1921.
Collections of the New York
Public Library. Astor, Lenox and
Tilden Foundations.
188
Orozco conceived of his representation of the Indian in the body of Malintzfn
in sympathetic terms. He stated that in all of his works he endeavored to "show the
Indian in all his virtue, suffering and heroism," adding that, unlike Rivera, he had
never dressed the Indian in the "ridiculous" and quintessentially folkloric costume of
the charro or china poblana."
8
It is perhaps not surprising, then, that in response to one
critic's notion that Rivera was rhe "painter of rhe race," Orozco retorted that the image
of the Indian advanced by Rivera was a "plague" and a case of "indigenist measles."
129
Orozco makes it clear that he opposed the representation of the nation in terms that
were predicated on the reduction of indigenous culture into Indian ness through rhe
romantic foregrounding of its most folkloric aspects. In the interest of not reducing
these muralists' complex bodies of imagery to these examples, it bears acknowledging
that Rivera's folkloric depictions suggest a deeply felt appreciation. However idealized
SENORiTA -GUADALUPE LUJAN Y ASUNSULO l 1
FIGU RE 55
Guadalupe Lujan y Asunsolo,
El Universal, August 8, 1921.
Courtesy Nettie Lee Benson Latin
American Collection, University of
Texas at Austi n.
or paternalistic his images might seem, their harmonious content, color, and compo-
sitions make them a pleasure to look at; in contrast, it can often be hard to find any
sense of empathy in Orozco's heavily expressionistic images, particularly in his late
murals.'
30
With their opposed interpretations of mestizaje, Rivera's and Orozco's murals
nevertheless provide evidence of the concern for coming to terms not just with in-
digenist cultural policies but also wit h the social experience of racial miscegenation.
Thus, Creation and Cortes and Malintzin serve as a foil for the images and ideas ex-
ami ned here. The juxtaposition of these two very different interpretations of mestizaje
reveal just how unstable the concept was in the mid-1920s. That instability was no-
where more clearly articulated than in the "India Bonita" contest and the debates that
emerged around it. Indeed, the proposition that the public would have consumed all
of these images together is reinforced in a cartoon, "El buen juez" (The Good Judge;
189
FIGURE 56
Ernesto Garcia Cabral, "EI buen
juez" (The Good Judge), Excelsior,
August 31, 1927. Courtesy Nettie
lee Benson latin Ameri can
Collection, University of Texas at
Austin.
B I BUEN JUE;AUJ(.ATU'"" ~ ... X( ELMOR'"
... r - ~ - - - - ~ - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - ~
...
....
...
n
..
...
..
,,
.
..
.Ul.&ADO:r ... .,..! ... ,o... ........ ,r.......,u .. cbdda.Mat1
- - - ~ - . , ......... ,u ... o. .... .............. ,
&IIPUADO; 1 y ..o u. ..... wert
_..... .......... tpaU. ....... ........... ._...._
.-.a" &.._ ... ....._.... r ...... ....,.. ...... ...........,..,_..,.
fig. 56), also by the cartoonist Ernesro Garda Cabral, published in Excelsior on August
31, 1927. In the cartoon, an inferred connection was made between the validation
of indigenous beauty in the "India Bonita" contest and the aestheticized Indians in
Rivera's murals at the Ministry of Public Education. Ultimately the conclusion offered
by the carroon was that "Indian beauty" was comical.
190
In the cartoon, an Indian woman enters her son in a beauty contest. When a
portly (white) man asks her how she dares to enter such an ugly child, she responds
that Rivera is one of the judges. She points our that her son looks just like the children
in Rivera's murals at the Ministry of Public Education. Similarly, a jab at the folklor-
ization of indigenous culture is suggested in the image of Celia Montalvan (see fig.
23). Momalvin was, like Marfa Conesa, a popular theater actress. Here she appears
seminude, in her own rendition of india bonita attire: her outfit is made entirely of
handwoven straw fans of the type an indigenous woman or a domestic servant might
have used to fan the fire at her hearth. This creative reuse of an item that became
recodified in the 1920s through efforts of intellectuals like Dr. Ad as an example of
folk art suggests a bourgeois disdain for the discourse of "arre popular" that revalued
native handicrafts, claiming that essential Mexican culture had irs roots in premodern
practices and Mexican aesthetics in premodern artifacts.
On a more serious note, Orozco's mural Cortes and Malintzin poses a striking
comparison to the image of Marfa Bibiana with both the Pani and the Fernandez
BECOMI NG MODERN I BECOMING TRADITI ON
iamilies. In these press images, as in the mural , indigenous womanhood is contained
by dominant (male) Euro-Western culture. And as the comparison to Orozco's mural
suggests, the "India Bonita" contest provided yet another opportunity for the elite and
bourgeois male to turn his paternalistic, domineering, and lascivious gaze upon one
of Mexico's most disempowered social entities: the indigenous woman. At another,
although not unrelated level, the conrest and Marla Bibiana Uribe were implicated
in men's desires to circumscribe the goals and aspirations especially of working-class
Mexican women.
By articulating a paradigm of indigeneity that was fundamentally feminine, and
inversely, by articulating a paradigm of femininity rooted in customs and attributes
purported to be indigenous, the conrest collapsed the potenrially volatile concept of
the "suffering race" with the silently suffering maternal archetype, the madre abnegada.
This symbolic slippage may have been intended to placate elite and bourgeois fears
that the elevation of the Indian as a national symbol might inspire further civil un-
rest. Thus the salutary discourse of the 1920s that emerged around the "India Bonita"
contest actually delimited the revolution's potential as a catalyst for the emancipation
of both women and indigenous people at a momenr when debates about emancipa-
tion were lively.'
1
' By exalting feminine "Indianness," the contest served ultimately to
reinscribe Mexico's patriarchal and colonialist sexual and social politics.
That reinscription was made fully manifest in the pages of Excelsior, EL Universals
main competitor. On August 4, a mere two days after Maria Bibiana was proclaimed
the winner of the "India Bonita" contest, Excelsior published a small column in
which it denounced the event.'
1
' It did so by mocking Marla Bibiana's presence at
the tea hosted at the home of the Minister of the Interior Pani. Pointedly, the writer
for Excelsior, Augusto Conde, alleged that like Pani's renowned collection of "fake"
European old-master paintings, Marla Bibiana was also a fake. Conde added that she
did not belong at a function attended by distinguished members of the diplomatic
corps and el ite Mexico City society. Further, he argued that it was to the detrimenr of
Maria Bibiana to expose her to such finery because upon returning to her "sad" vil-
lage she would only be disillusioned by the "lack of color, the backward people, and
her ignorant boyfriend."'
11
This last inference was fundamental. Several months later,
Excelsior resumed its criticism, this time directing it at undermining Marfa Bibiana's
authenricity in terms of both her racial purity and her virginiry.'
14
In an article published in April 1922, Excelsior claimed that Marla Bibiana Uribe
was not an india but a mestiza, because before her participation in the contest she had
never worn indigenous clothing. Excelsior claimed, moreover, that she was employed
as a hostess in a cantina that serviced workers from a hydroelectric dam in the nearby
mountains. She was rhus cast once more under the sign of prostitution. Finally, and
even more to the point, Excelsior claimed that at the moment that El Universal had
crowned Maria Bibiana Mexico's "India Bonita," she was not only not a virgin but was
192
pregnant with her first child, whose father, the "boyfriend" referred to by Augusto
Conde, she had recently wed.'
15
Maria Bibiana's personal life aside, Excelsior's claims serve to further sustai n the
points made here. The allegedly ennobling purpose of the "India Bonita" contest
notwithstanding, EL Universal's own coverage of the event had served to crystallize
the notion that ideal indias were culturally pure only if sexually uninitiated. Their
sexual initiation, in the service of the nation, was the prerogative of men like Aurelio
Gonzalez Carrasco and Fernando Ramirez de Aguilar "Jacobo Oalevuelta." As such,
self-proclaimed revolutionary intellectuals like Gonzalez Carrasco, Ramirez de Aguilar,
and even Manuel Gamio positioned indias bonitas as desirable receptacles, whether in
symbolic or actual terms, for the revolutionary, that is to say, state-managed misce-
genation of the nation. That Marfa Bibiana had already borne a child by someone of
her own socioeconomic class and ethnic group might well have made her ineligible
for ideal Indian status even in Gamio's estimation. In doing so, she had already under-
mined the state's role in the eugenic instrumentation of what would shortly be dubbed
the "cosmic race."
Important scholars such as Ricardo Perez Montfort, Aurelio de los Reyes, and
more recently Rick A. LOpez have examined the "India Bonita" contest as evidence
of the postrevolutionary intelligentsia's rediscovery of Mexico's indigenous heritage.
They argue, rightly, that the contest served to forge, for better and worse, a new eth-
nic national identity. Successful or not, while such indigenist projects were intended
as revolutionary ruptures of the old Porfirian social order, an analysis of the contest
through the lens of gender leads ro a bleaker conclusion.
In Ihe Gender of Modernity, Rita Felski challenges the insistence that whether cul-
tural or political, rhe work of the European avant-garde was radically new in contrast
to outdated rradition.'
36
Similarly, the paternalistic, not to mention racist, debates
rhar emerged both in support of and against rhe "India Bonita" contest ultimately
constituted not a revolutionary rupture, bur rather a reinscriprion of already-familiar
models of what Felski terms "competitive masculinity." Thus I argue that a contest
that appeared ro advance a new racial and cultural politics and, as a result, seems revo-
lutionary from one perspective, actually inscribed a "new" version of the old dominant
order. In other words, even if men like Gamio validated Marfa Bibiana Uribe's au-
thentic "Indian" beauty and set her in an indigenist formulation of a (purely) mestizo
aesthetic canon, the "India Bon ira" contest actually betrays the rhetorical nature of the
revolutionary stare's claims of enfranchising the marginalized. It points to the ambigu-
ity of modernity as expressed through the reunified nation. By articulating a "revolu-
tionary" and indigenisr paradigm of Mexican femininity constituted by authenticity
and virginal purity, the contest paradoxically also worked to promote the desirability
of its indias bonitas among the urban male population. And while the semiotic system
of the contest, like that of revolutionary nationalism, might appear new, it was in
BJ::COMING MODERN I BECOMING TRADITION
many respects built upon preexisting and still-pervasive social, cultural, and ideologi-
cal structures.
In retrospect, rather than comributing tO the constitution of a new cultural and
ideological landscape, the "India Bonita" comest was more accurately a reinvention
of the trope of the encounter between Mexico's rural and urban elemems, a trope fa-
mously and imimately articulated in Gamboa's Santa. Rather than catalyzing a break
with the old order, El Universals Concurso de La India Bonita merely reinstated Mexico's
long-standing patriarchal social and sexual politics. This fact was made plainly visible
not just in Ramirez de Aguilar's and Gonzalez Carrasco's lascivious statemenrs, but in
Excelsior's revelations about Marla Bibiana Uribe, whether factual or not. With their
claims that she was both inauthentic and moreover not a virgin, she was sacrificed at
rhe altar of an ideologically laden power struggle between Obregonista intellectuals
and others who apparently opposed the celebratory and inclusive rhetoric and sought
tO assert their own version of the nation's cultural, racial, and gender politics.
In the final analysis, the election of Marla Bibiana Uribe as Mexico's "India Bonita"
for 1921 demonstrates that like earlier reinventions of Mexico's indigenous heritage, for
example, during the Enlightenment in the late eighteenth century and again in the
context of liberal reforms in the mid-nineteenth century, Manuel Gamio and his col-
leagues were less than original.'r Like earlier attempts, they were concerned with defin-
ing and therefore constructing their own ideologically useful notion of the "lndian."'
38
As demonstrated by the contest, they sought ways to find suitable "subjects" to fir their
construction. Notwithstanding their effons, the diverse people encompassed within
the terms they employed-such as indio and indigena-lacked any such sense of shared
pan-Indian or possibly even Mexican identity. If they did, it was in situations where
they, like Maria Bibiana, negotiated interactions with the dominant elire.'
39
What the
"India Bonita" contest did secure was a represemarive example of a pretty Indian maid-
en and, crucially, an operative definition of the Indian and how that Indian could be
incorporated into the master narratives of the postrevolutionary state.
The significance of rhe term "incorporation" and irs root in the Latin word incor-
porare, to embody, is equally critical. As Guillermo Palacios and others have argued,
"incorporation" (incorporacion) in indigenisr discourse implies the "modernization
and conversion of indigenous people intO acculturated Western subjecrs."'
40
In other
words, it suggests homogeneity of the ethnic minority, not heterogeneity of the domi-
nant class. In contrast, integration {integracion) suggests a schema wherein unity is
the goal, but without the a priori assumption of the superiority of modern Western
culture. In other words, integration allows for heterogeneity and plurality. The degree
to which thinkers debated the differences between theories of incorporacion versus
integracion is evident in the fact that while Gamio remained an advocate of incorpora-
tion, another influential indigenist, Moises Saenz (Gamio's predecessor and founding
director of the lnteramerican Indigenist Institute in 1940), while an initial supporter,
'93
194
became one of its staunchest critics on the basis of its assumptions of hierarchy and su-
periority. The frequent use of such terms in the period texts should not be overlooked.
They reveal important ideological differences and point to the ways that the notion of
a single "cosmic race" was predicated on the concept of incorporation, of a "new" kind
of homogeneity; indeed the very term "cosmic" implies a new form of superiority.
Along these lines, not only was Marfa Bibiana's affiliation with the Nahua culture
group (termed "Mexican" in the period) of importance, but her particular somatic
type was highly relevant, constituting, ultimately, a template of ideal female Indian
beauty. She was chosen as the "India Bonita" of 1921 precisely because she could be
poised literally for physical assimilation-in other words, incorporacion-into the
body of the unified Mexican polity. This is a process difficult to document, but it
was hinted at in the lascivious tone of the newspaper accounts. One source, however,
articulated this specifically in 1926. In a lecture at the University of Chicago, Jose
Vasconcelos stated, "The powerful of any group always enrich their [racial] experience
by marrying some of the prettiest or more attractive women of the neighboring tribe
[my emphasis.]"'
4
' When weighed against that statement, the ideologically suspect use
to which the "India Bonita" contest was put becomes clear.
Indios Bonitos and Synecdoche: Doiia luz Jimenez
The discourse on incorporating the best and "prettiest" and therefore improving the
race is further reinforced by the fact that Marfa Bibiana was not the only celebrated
india bonita of her day. There was yet another well-known exemplar. Her name was
Julia Jimenez, but she was widely known as Dona Luz, Luz, or Luciana (meaning
"light"), and she was from the village of Milpa Alta, just south of Mexico City (fig.
57). Located on a mountain ridge bordering the state ofMorelos, the villagers ofMilpa
Alta also belonged to the Nahua culture group. From 1920 to the 1950s, Luz Jimenez
was considered by artists, linguists, and anthropologists to be an ideal representative of
her race, first for her physical appearance and later as a teacher of Nahuatl.
Dona Luz was singled out by artists such as Fernando Leal, Diego Rivera, Edward
Weston, and Tina Modotti as an exemplar of female Indianness, yet the events of her
life stand in contrast to the postrevolutionary political and social rhetoric that Indians
need only be acculturated in order to assume a fair place within Mexican society.
Although Dona Luz eventually taught Nahuatl in the 1960s to anthropologists and
linguists at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, she continued to support
her family by working as a domestic servant.'
42
In her biography, narrated to Fernando Horcasitas in Nahuatl in the 1950s, Dona
Luz remembered Porfirio Dfaz affectionately as Mexico's "little father. "'
43
She described
favorably the educational programs of the Dfaz years that sought to transform Indian
villages like Milpa Alta into modern towns populated by a de-Indianized peasantry.
FIGURE 57
Julia "Luz" Jimenez, c. 1930.
Collection of Luis Villanueva.
According to Dona Luz, she benefited from the new Porfirian school in Milpa Alta,
where girls were educated alongside boys. She remembered with pride the poems she
recited as a schoolgirl for the centennial celebration of 1910, and she recalled that she
dreamed of becoming a teacher. That dream, however, was never completely realized
because her village was decimated during the Revolution. Milpa Alta was destroyed in
1916 first by the occupying Zapatista troops and then again by the retaliating forces of
Yenustiano Carranza, who massacred most of the male residents of the village. Dona
Luz and her mother fled to southern Mexico City, to the canal zone of Santa Anita,
where they survived by working and living at the market there.
It was at Santa Anita that the painter Fernando Leal discovered Luz. In his well-
known painting Zapatista Encampment of 1921 (private collection), Luz Jimenez ap-
pears with a group ofZapatistas to whom she offers a beverage in a lacquerware bowl. '
44
In the photographer Tina Modotti's portraits of her, she embodies indigenous mater-
nity, and in one of them her face was cropped to show only her daughter, Conchita,
nursing at her breast (fig. 58). Indeed this particular photograph illustrated an article,
published in 1928 in the bilingual journal Mexican Folkways, by the American anthro-
pologist Margaret Park Redfield praising and promoting the continued practice of

195
FIGURE 58
nna Modotti, "Mother and
Daughter [Julia "Luz" Jimenez
and Conchita]," 1926,
Mexican Folkways 4, no. 2
(April-June 1928). Collection
of the author.
196
breastfeeding among Mexico's indigenous women.'
45
In Edward Weston's 1926 portrait
"Luz Jimenez, Standing" (fi g. 59), the photographer characteristically abstracts his model
by t urning her recognizable face away from the viewer. She is thus objectified, reduced
to significant form, shape, and texture. Her soft, fleshy back and waist contrast with the
vertical lines of her long braids and the geometric pattern of the woven mat.'
46
Like Maria Bibiana, Dona Luz was petite, with an oval face and fine features
similar to those of the women whose portraits illustrated Gamio's article "The Indian
Venus." According to her grandson, Jesus Villanueva, Luz Jimenez had once, like
Marfa Bibiana, participated in a beaury contest of sorts. In 1919 or 1920, she was
selected as lzcalichpotzintli, "maiden of the springtime," a contest held annually in
Santa Anita. In contrast to the "India Bonita" contest, the Izcalichpotzintli had pre-
Conquest Nahua origins.'
47
Celebrated in Santa Anita in conjunction wi th the spring
harvest, each year a beautiful young local woman was deemed princess of the harvest.
The canal zones of La Viga, Santa Anita, and Xochimilco, all located in southern
Mexico Ciry, were among the last surviving "floating gardens" of pre-Conquest Mexico
Ciry. The agricultural markets there evolved from the chinampas, the floating gardens
of the Aztecs. Located in the still-rural periphery of Mexico Ciry, in the 1920s the canals
were favorite sites for Sunday visits by the middle class, and they were romanticized as
remnants of the ancient past in prints and by countless writers ranging from Alexander
FIGURE 59
Edward Weston, " Luz
Jimenez, Standing," 1926,
photograph. Collection Center
for Creative Photography.
Arizona Board of Regents.
von Humboldt, Frances Calderon de la Barca, to Ignacio Manuel Altamirano. In his
Libro de mis recuerdos, published in 1904, the geographer Antonio Garda Cubas re-
called a memorable visit to Santa Anita on the first Sunday of Lent.'
48
He described
middle-class families from Mexico Ciry descending on the "Aoaring gardens," where
they would hire special boars, called trajineras, to tour rhe canals. A picnic could be pur-
chased from women who, in their own canoes, would pull up to rhe boars and sell food
and beverages. In his description, Garda Cubas paid particular attention to the various
popular types rhar could be seen in Santa Anita, including the ubiquitous china pob-
lana and charro, the fepero or common beggar, the nodriza or Indian wer nurse, and the
aguador or water carrier. In particular, he described ar length the prerry indias of Santa
Anita, who wore skirrs of striped wool wrapped around the waist and a "quixquemerl,"
which he identified as rhe square woven runic that covered their upper body.'
49
The canal cal led "La Viga" was drained in 1921. However, the following year an
effort was made to revive the springtime festivals.'
10
Given that it was conceived in
January, it seems plausible rhar rhe "India Bonita" contest of 1921 was a co-optation
by the elite of the festival of the lzcalichpotzintli, even if no such correlation was ever
established in the press. If so, it would have served as a temporary replacement for that
event, but it would also have constituted the appropriation by the intelligentsia of a
festival normally celebrated by a segment of Mexico's rural population. In 1936, the

197
198
lzcalichpotzintli was officially revived by the municipality of Irzracalco and renamed
La jlor mds bella del ejido (prettiest Rower of the ejido).'
5
'
Whether or not the "India Bonita" contest was a reinvention of the lzcalichpotzintli,
the physical resemblance between Dona Luz and Maria Bibiana is remarkable. Leal's
Zapatista Encampment is nearly a template for rhe colorized photograph of Marfa
Bibiana that appeared on the cover El Universal Ilustrado on August 17, I9ZI. Their
costumes are nearly identical, and both hold lacquerware bowls. Among a group of
Zaparisras, Luz offers them a bowl of pulque; rhus, she operates as a sign for abundance
or fecundity. This is the case as well in another image by Rivera.
Between 1924 and 1927, Rivera completed a cycle of murals at the agricultural
college in Chapingo. The college was established at a former hacienda and Rivera was
commissioned to paint murals in the administrative building and in the former chapel
of the estate. In the chapel, he completed the cycle known as 1he Liberated Earth with
Natural Forces Controlled by Man (La tierra fecunda; color plate 16). While I will shorr-
ly examine the monumental figure of Liberated Earth who occupies the high-altar wall
and was modeled by Rivera's wife, Lupe Marin, in the lower portion of the wall Rivera
employed Luz Jimenez as the model of the feminine half of the "human family," an
image that may have been inspired by Edward Weston's numerous photographs of her.
In Rivera's mural, the male half of rhe human family stands in the center of the com-
position. His embrace of modernity is signaled by his acceptance of fire from a monu-
mental blond male figure to the far right. Though arguably the standing male figure can
also be read as indigenous, there is a notable difference between his color, his action, his
embrace of progress, and Luz's color and recumbent inaction. She lies nestled, literally,
in a basket offruit; at her feet lies an apple. Like Herran's Shawl, this is yet another refer-
ence to the biblical creation story and the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, though
here a promethean figure transforms the outcome of mankind's expulsion from paradise.
Here, moreover, Luz represents maternal fecundity rather than sexually awakened wom-
anhood. Between Luz and her standing male counterpart, their male offspring reaches
up, his body serving as a conduit between two electrical charges, which he catalyzes, thus
liberating the earth, Marin, who symbolizes the postrevolutionary nation.
Metaphorically, Rivera's "human family" reinscribes the gender politics I have
traced, and here both Dona Luz and Lupe Marin signifY fertility, and thus Mexican
motherhood. On some levels his interpretation in Liberated Earth shares a great deal
with that of his nineteenth-century forebearers. Like them, Rivera invokes the notion of
woman as maternal, domestic, and reproductive and rhus as an allegory for rhe nation.
Maternity
In this chapter, I have focused on "pretty Indians" like Marfa Bibiana Uribe and
Luz Jimenez in order to consider how as raced exemplars of the archetype of "pure"
MODERN I BECOMING TRADITION
womanhood they facilitated, in the postrevolutionary period, the transformation of
"woman" as desire into the trope of the desirable Indian woman. I now consider how
as "rypes" they were steps in a process whereby the late nineteenth-century bourgeois
maternal archerype was transformed into a raced maternal archerype, which in turn
was deployed in underwriting a new racial-ethnic identiry for the nation. I rurn again
to Frida Kahlo, who in the early 1930s began styling herself as an india bonita. First,
it is useful to examine one of Kahlo's interpretations of motherhood against Rivera's
interpretation of Mexican motherhood.
In 1932, three years after marrying Rivera, Kahlo completed a tiny painting in
oil on tin, known today as Henry Ford Hospital (color plate 17). The painting was
completed in Detroit following a miscarriage in July 1932 and was first exhibited in
New York in 1938 under the tide The Lost Desire. When considered alongside Rivera's
monumental nude at Chapingo, in which he portrayed his second wife, Lupe Marin,
as the Liberated Earth, we can see that Kahlo, as a woman, had a very different experi-
ence of maternity. I deploy these rwo images together to make rhe following point:
despite emanciparory revolutionary discourse, by the 1920s and 1930s the simple fact
remained that rhe role of women in postrevolutionary Mexican sociery was maternal.
Although rhe singularity of motherhood as woman's role was debated throughout the
revolutionary decade and into the 1920s, by the end of rhe decade motherhood had
become, as Mary K. Coffey observes, "the only acknowledged form of female citizen-
ship [my If women could not yet vote, they could at least keep a clean
house and nurture the future (male) citizens of the nation.
In addition to the personal and broadly allegorical and political meanings the
paintings hold, they both employ maternity as a sign. Kahlo's Henry Ford Hospital is
a graphic expression not just of her personal anguish over her loss bur also a poignant
statement about the stigma associated with failing to bring woman's maternal role to
fruition. A reconsideration of the original ride The Lost Desire is instructive.
Much has been written about Kahlo's "neurosis," inspired allegedly by her numer-
ous failed attempts to bear Rivera a child, particularly a son.B While this might be the
case, my interest is nor in speculating over Kahlo's psychological or emotional state;
rather, it bears noting that the title of her painting suggests ambivalence at childbear-
ing. Whether ambivalence may have coexisted along with a deep maternal desire is
also speculative, bur the fact remains that Kahlo expressed both in letters she wrote
to her primary physician, Dr. Leo Eloesser, at the time of her pregnancy.'
54
Before her
miscarriage, Kahlo had attempted tO abort the fetus by following her Detroit doctor's
prescription for an oral purgative. The attempt fai led and the doctor persuaded her
that she could still carry the fetus to term and del iver by caesarean section. Kahlo then
wrote to Eloesser to seek his advice: "I doubt that Diego has much interest in having a
child, after all what matters most ro him is his work and he has every right. Children
would come in third or fourrh place. In terms of myself, I don't know if ir would be
199
200
good or not to have a child, because Diego travels constantly and under no circum-
stances would I wish to leave him alone and stay in Mexico, that would only cause
problems and difficulties for us both, don't you agree?"
Following a miscarriage on July 2, Kahlo wrote again to Eloesser. This time she
thanked him for encouraging her to follow through with the pregnancy, adding that
she had begun to feel well and confident in her ability to carry the pregnancy to term.
She added, however, that she miscarried in "the blink of an eye" because the fetus
had not been developing properly. She adds that she cried a great deal, having been
enthusiastic over the idea of having a "little Diego."ss No doubt the full complexity
of Kahlo's feelings will remain a mystery. Nevertheless, given her vacillation, it seems
important to consider that at least at the moment she painted her tiny interpretation
of the event, she expressed the "loss" of some "desire." Here, though, showing herself
recumbent and bleeding, Kahlo uses a complex system of symbols to sign for different
aspects of her experience as a woman. The flower and the snail suggest fertility, the
manikin, pelvic bone, and autoclave medicalize it, and the infant is her lost desire. Set
against the industrial landscape of Detroit, she creates a bizarre tension between her
nakedness and the masculine Anglo-Saxon realm occupied, if only temporarily, by
Rivera. She thus deconstructs her experience of maternity and femininity for us.
Much of the recenr scholarship on Kahlo has employed a psychoanalytic approach
in an effort to understand how her paintings reveal her own process of subject forma-
tion, as well as her personal pathologies. Her political context also informed her work
and bears examination as well. As a resolutely political person living in nationalist post-
revolutionary Mexico, Kahlo would surely have been aware of her subject position not
just as a woman but as a perceived "foreigner" in a nation that was, in the aftermath of
the Porfirian regime, the Revolution, and between the two world wars, considerably xe-
nophobic. The popular (gendered) adage that un mexicano se nace, nose hace (a Mexican
is born, not made) imaginatively excludes foreign-born Mexicans from full participa-
tion in the national imaginary. As the daughter of a German national, Kahlo's cultural
allegiance to Mexicanness would have been suspect, despite her native birth, especially
after 1942, when Mexico declared its allegiance to the Allied forces. That status, along
with her inability to fulfill her maternal role, only made her position more precarious
vis-a-vis the reforming national body. That Kahlo flouted the gender conventions of her
day is without question; thus it seems productive to examine how paintings like Henry
Ford Hospital and others, such as Me and My Doll of 1937 (fig. 6o), in which she sits
dressed in the guise of a Tehuana, smoking a cigarette, alongside a naked white baby
doll, engage with the vexed relationship between Mexican nationalist discourse, race,
ethnicity, and the equation of woman with maternity.'
56
In comparison to Kahlo's miniature meditation on her miscarriage, Rivera's
Liberated Earth is one of Western art's most emphatic expressions of woman universal-
ized to sign for nature and maternity. Not only does "mother earth" hold a budding
FIGURE 60
Frida Kahlo, Self-Portrait
with Bed (Me and My DolO
(,Autorretrato con coma I Yo y mi
muiieca), 1937, oil on metal, 30
x 40 em. Jacques and Natasha
Gelman Collection of Modern and
Contemporary Mexican Art; The
Vergel Foundation; Fundaci6n
Cultural Parque Morelos,
Cuernavaca; Costco/Comercial
Mexicana. 2007 Banco de
Mexico Diego Rivera & Frida
Kahlo Museums Trust.
seed in her right hand, bur her rounded belly reinforces her life-giving role. Rivera
painted at Chapingo from early 1924 to 1927, during which time Marin was pregnant
twice with the couple's daughters, Guadalupe, born in 1924, and Ruth, born in 1927-'s-
Ultimately, both Henry Ford Hospital and Rivera's Liberated Earth engage, if variously
so, the assumption that woman's accepted role was primarily maternal: procreative
and self-sacrificing.
Although Lupe is resplendent and reigns supreme from her position on the altar
wall and in her role as Mother Earth, she is nevertheless dependent on "man" to im-
pregnate her, and in the context of the Chapingo chapel cycle, she is dependent on
man to catalf2e her earthy fertility in a productive manner. Rivera deploys maternal
woman, specifically his pregnant wife, as the universal symbol of the earth and, more
specifically, as Mexico's potential. Karen Cordero Reiman has cogently analY2ed the
gendered logic of Rivera's chapel cycle-in painting the fertile earth, he literally as-
signs Marin to her proper place in the social order. Examining how the spectator
experiences the images spatially, moving through the chapel as a ritual liturgical , albeit
by 1926-27 secularized, space, Cordero Reiman argues that Rivera's imagery reinforces
a conceptual sense of"penetration."'
58
She writes that upon passing through the doors

201
202
of the chapel, the spectator enters a long, narrow, dark space. That spatial character in
combination with Rivera's careful use of perspective reinforces the privileged viewing
position of the (male) spectator, who, moving through the space physically and visual-
ly enacts "a penetration of the female body and of the earth." From this vantage point,
the cycle works as a "projection of masculi ne desire, the [perceived) destiny of which
is to dominate woman." She adds, "In this space . .. replete with sensorial stimuli,
the implicitly masculine spectator penetrates a symbolic vagina, uniting his masculine
(active) sign to the feminine (passive) sign." Finally, the spectator's "active" movement
through the space is rewarded with the culminating image of the "receptive" recum-
bent pregnant body of Lupe Marfn and, I would add, that of Luz Jimenez. Cordero
Reiman notes that what is established is not just a normative active/passive binary but,
more specifically, a symbolically complex "complementarity of the sexes."'
59
Kahlo and Rivera undoubtedly shared some views on maternity; perhaps they
even talked about their respective interpretations as a result of their shared experience.
We will never know for sure. Independently and together, these two images reinforce
the fact that "information about women is necessarily information about men" and
"that one implies the study of the other."6o In other words, both Rivera's and Kahlo's
images codify woman as a sign of the maternal, but in doing so they tell us much
about masculinist assumptions and the feminist deconstruction of the gendered social
order. Rivera masterfully conveyed the binary logic within society that equates male-
ness with action and femaleness with passivity. Meanwhile, Kahlo complicated that
equation. With that in place, I turn now to a consideration of how the Mexican de-
piction of this logic played our in the art world during the 1930s by examining works
by women artists that meditated on the social location assigned to them within the
revolutionary nation.
Alcantara, Anthropological Perspectives on Rural Mexico
{New York: Roudedge, 1984), ro-rJ.
125. Quoted in Comas, Ensayos sobre indigenismo,
93
126. Ibid.
127. Gamio, Forjando patria, 6.
128. Buffingron, Criminial and Citizen in
Modern Mexico, 151.
129. See Gamio, Forjando patria, 167-68.
130. Ibid. , 167.
131. Ibid. , 93-94
132. Garnio, "Nuesrras mujeres," in ibid., 119-32.
133 Ibid., 129-32.
134. Tablada confided in Alma Reed that this
was how Orozco undersrood Mexico's underworld so
acutely; see Reed, Orozco, 66.
135. Dr. Ad in the journal Accion Mundia/., June
3, 1916; cited in Orozco V. . Orozco, verdad crono/Ogica,
76.
136. On his acdvides in the United Stares, see
Orozco, Autobiography, 59-77
137. See "Sainete, drama y barbarie. "
138. Walter Pach, "lmpresiones sobre el arre actu-
al en Mexico," Mexico Moderno, Ocrober 1922, 135.
139. Tablada, "Mexican Painting Today,"
International Studio, January 1923, 267-76.
{ CHAPTER FOUR }
r. Gamio, Forjando patria, II9, 129.
2. Ibid.
3 On inventions of tradition, see E. J .
Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention
ofTradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1983).
4 See Carrera, 'Mecdons of the Heart," 62.
5 Castillo, Easy WtJmen, Sex, and Gender in
Modern Mexican Fiction, 40.
6. For a hisrorical interpretation of Malinrzfn's
life, see Margo Glantz, La Malinche, sus padres y sus
hijos {Mexico City: Taurus, 2001); Cristina Gonzalez
Hernandez, Dona Marina (La Malinche) y Ia formaci-
on de Ia identidad mexicana {Mexico City: Ediciones
Encuentro, 2002); Frances Karttunen, "To the Valley
of Mexico: Dona Marina, 'La Malinche' {ca. 1500-
1527)," in Between WtJrlds: Interpreters, Guides, and
Survivors {New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press,
1994), 1-22. For a derailed overview of the various
literary and hisrorical interpretations of the legend
of Ia Malinche, see Sandra Messinger Cypress, La
Malinche in Mexican Literature: From Hisrory to Myth
(Austin: University ofTexas Press, 1991); and Marfa
Herrera-Sobek, The Mexican Corrido: A Feminist
Analysis {Bloomingron: Indiana University Press,
1990), 54, 67-68. When referring ro the historical
person I use the proper name Malinrzfn. When refer-
ring to the myth/archetype, Ia Malinche.
7 "Bases del concurso de Ia India Bonita," El
Universal, January 16, 1921, sec. 2, p. 9
8. The Concurso de Ia Obrera Simpdtica is men-
tioned in "La Aporeosis de Ia India Bonita: Breve
Hisroria del concurso en que rriunfo Marfa Bibiana
Uribe," El Universal, September 25, 1921, 7-9.
9 "<Cual es Ia india mas bonita?" El Universal,
January 16, 1921, sec. 2, p. 9; and
"Bases del concurso," 9
10. See, for example, Knight, "Racism,
Revolution, and Indigenismo, 71- n4; and Brading,
"Manuel Gamio and Official Indigenismo in Mexico,"
75-89.
11. For a focused examination of eugenic move-
ments in Latin America, which includes a discussion
of Mexican eugenic programs, see Stepan, "The
Hour of Eugenics. " See also Stern, "Mestizophilia,
Biotypology, and Eugenics in Post-Revolutionary
Mexico."
12. An expanded version of the exhibition was
published as a catalogue in 1922. There Dr. Arl explai-
ned the selection criteria he employed, the provenan-
ce of the objects, the techniques for their manufactu-
re, and their aesthetic origins and value. See Dr. Ad,
Las artes populares en Mexico [1922] (Mexico City:
Secretarfa de Educacion Publica; reprint, lnsriruro
Nacional lndigenista!Museo Nacional de Artes e
lndustrias Populaces, 1980). On the Noche Mexicana,
see Rick A. LOpez, "Two Ways of Exalting lndianness
in 1921: The Noche Mexicana and the Exposition of
Popular Art," in The Eagle and the Virgin: National
Identity, Memory, and Utopia in Mexico, 192Q-1940,
ed. Mary Kay Vaughan and Steven Lewis (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2006), 23-42.
13. Karen Cordero Reiman, "Para devolver su
inocencia a la nacion: Orfgen y desarollo del Merodo
Best Maugard," in Abraham Angel y su tiempo, ed.
Sylvia Pandolfi {Mexico City: INBA, 1985), 8-21. See
Adolfo Best Maugard, Mitodo de dibujo: Tradicion,
NOTES TO PAGES 149-156 301
resurgimiento y evo!ucion del arte mexicano (Mexico
City: SEP, 1923).
14. The virtues are identified in Charlot, The
Mexican Mural Renaissance, 141.
15. Xavier Villaurrutia identified the figures as
Adam and Eve. See Villaurrutia, "Historia de Diego
Rivera," Forma 5 (February 1927): 31.
16. Rivera described and defended the mural in
"Las pinturas decorativas de Ia Preparatoria," Boletin
de 14 Secretaria de Educacion Publica 1, no. 3 Qanuary
18, 1923): 363-65.
17. See, for example, "Decoracion cubista en Ia
Preparatoria," El Universal March 10, 1923. Among
the most critical descriptions was Jose Clemente
Oro2eo's, which, however, remained unpublished.
According to Jean Charlot, the text was prepared
for the journal La Faidnge in 1923. See "Triumph,"
reprinted in Orozco, The Artist in New York: Letters to
jean Charlot and Unpublished Writings, 91-93.
18. Rivera, "Las pinturas decorativas de Ia
Preparatoria," 364.
19. These are the concepts Vasconcelos employs
in The Cosmic Race (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1997 [1925]).
20. "El Concurso de Ia India Bonita abarcara
toda Ia Republica," El Universal January 25, 1921, 1.
21. See Rick A. Lopez, "The India Bonita Contest
and the Ethnicization of Mexican National Culture,"
Hispanic American Historical Review 82, no. 2 (2002):
291-328. LOpez examines the India Bonita contest in
relation to the development of indigenismo and what
he calls the "ethnicization" of Mexican culture. For
another analysis of the contest from the perspective
of nationalism and gender, see Apen Ruiz Martinez,
"Nacion y genero en el Mexico revolucionario: La
India Bonita y Manuel Gamio," in Signos historicos,
no. 5 (February-June 2001): 55-86.
22. Ricardo Perez Montfort, Estampas de nacio-
nalismo popuidr mexicano (Mexico City: Ciesas, 1994);
and "Indigenismo, Hispanismo y Panarnericanismo
en Ia Culrura Popular Mexicana de 1920 a 1940," in
Cultura e !dentidad Nacional ed. Roberto Blancarte
(Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1994),
343-83.
23. Mary Kay Vaughan, Cultural Politics in
Revolution: Teachers, Peasants, and Schools in Mexico,
193o-I940 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press,
1997), 197
302 NOTES TO PAGES 156-160
25. Ibid.
26. Manuel Garnio, La pobidcion del VaLLe de
Teotihuacdn, 2 vols. (Mexico City: Talleres Graficos
de Ia Nacion, 1922).
27. "Introduccion," Ethnos I , no. I (April 1920):
r. The introduction is signed "La Redaccion," com-
prised of Manuel Garnio, Ignacio B. del Castillo, and
P. Gonzalez Casanova. Ethnos was published from
1920 to 1925.
28. Vasconcelos, The Cosmic Race.
29. See Ana Maria Alonso, "Conforming
Oisconformity: 'Mestizaje,' Hybridity, and the
Aesthetics of Mexican Nationalism," CuLturaL
Anthropology 19, no. 4 (2004): 463; see also Alonso,
"Territorializing the Nation and 'Integrating the
Indian': ' Mestizaje' in Mexican Official Discourses
and Public Culrure," in Sovereign Bodies: Citizens,
Migrants, and States in the PostcoloniaL World,
ed. Thomas BJorn Hanson and Finn Stepputat
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 39-60.
30. Alonso, "Conforming Oisconformity,'' 465.
31. Vasconcelos, The Cosmic Race, 66.
32. For a critique of recent celebrations of
mestizaje as intrinsically egalitarian, see George J.
Sanchez, " Y tu, ~ q u e ? " (Y2K) Latino History in the
New Millennium," in Latinos Remaking America, ed.
Marcelo M. Suarez-Orozco and Marisela M. Paez,
45-58.
33 For a discussion on how such "common-sense
racism" is ultimately as violent as oven racism, see
Ian Haney Lopez, Racism on Trial: The Chicano Fight
for justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 2003).
34 Vasconcelos, The Cosmic Race, 55-67.
35 Ibid. , 73-
36. Ibid., 69.
37 According to Nancy Leys Stepan, eugenics,
meaning "well-born," was a term and a "science" in-
vented in 1883 by the British scientist Francis Galton.
It dovetailed with related theories originating in
Western Europe that the knowledge of heredity could
serve to "improve" the human race by preventing the
reproduction of the "unfit." It was also based on the
belief that the so-called white race was superior and
that improper racial mixing resulted in degeneration.
Today, this is often called "negative eugenics"; Stepan,
"The Hour of Eugenics, "1-4, 30ff. For a useful analysis
of the various fears around degeneration in different
national contexts, see also J. Edward Chamberlin and
Sander L. Gilman, eds., Degeneration: The Dark Side
of Progress (New York: Columbia University Press,
1985).
38. For a derailed analysis of how and why
Larin American eugenicists preferred Lamarcldan
to Mendelian generics, see Stepan, "The Hour of
Eugenics," 67-72.
39 Ibid., 73- See also Marrin S. Srabb,
"Indigenism and Racism in Mexican Thought:
1857-19II," journal of Inter-American Studies 1
(October 1959): 405-23; and T. G. Powell, "Mexican
Intellectuals and the Indian Question, I876-19II,"
Hispanic American Historical Review (February 1968):
19-36.
40. Francisco Bulnes, El porvenir de las na-
ciones hispano americanas (Mexico City: lmprenta
de M. Nava, 1899), 1-12, 273-274, and 281-82; see
also Powell, "Mexican Imellectuals and the Indian
Question," 28-29.
41 Racialist debates on how to "whiten" Indians
were continuous throughout Larin America and in
Mexico especially at rhe end of the Porfirian era;
see Knight, "Racism, Revolution, and lndigenismo,"
and Srabb, "Indigenism and Racism in Mexican
Thought."
42. "Bases del concurso," 9
43 "El Segundo Congreso lnternacional de
Eugenesia," Ethnos 1, nos. 6-7 (September-October
1920): 140-42. Gamic's interest in the eugenic
sciences is formally articulated in his journal Etlmos
(1920-25), for which he served as general editor and
principal contributor.
44 Gamio argued that only through mixing
with Indians would Europeans in Mexico gain the
advantages that Indians had acquired over centuries
of natural selection in their adaptation to the climate
and geography. See his "Algunas consideraciones
sobre Ia salubridad y Ia demograffa en Mexico,"
Eugenesia, n.s. 3 (February 28, 1942): 3-8.
45 The term "raza doliente," or "suffering race,"
as a description of indigenous Mexicans was used
frequently. See, for example, "Homenaje a Ia raza
doliente," El Universalllustrado, August q, 1921, 30.
46. "(Cual es Ia india mas bonita?"
47 See Knight, "Racism, Revolution, and
lndigenismo," 92.
48. "Emma Garduno," El Universal, January 25,
1921, 9
49 "Teodomira Esquivel," El Universal, March
17, 1921, 9
50. "Un gran concurso internacional de belleza,"
El Universal, March 1, 1921, cover.
51. "La mujer mas bella de Mexico," El Universal,
Secci6n de Arre, July q, 1921, 1.
52. See L6pe2, "The India Bonita Contest,"
303-4
53 On the "Juegos Florales," see "Grandes con-
cursos de El Universal," El Universal March 5, 1921,
II.
54 "Justine Johnson: La mujer mas bella de
los Esrados Unidos," and "Francisca Marrin," El
Universal, February 24, 1921, 9
55 In Mexican Spanish, the term escuincle!a,
referring to a miscreant child, also derives from the
Nahuatl word for a hairless dog.
57 Rubenstein, "The War on las pelonas," 58.
58. Quoted in ibid., 62.
59 Salvador Novo, Las Locas, el sexo y Los burdeles
(Mexico City: Editorial Diana, 1972), 31; cited in
ibid., 6!-62.
6o. Rubenstein, "The War on las pelonas," 62.
61. Revista de Revistas, May 25, 1924.
62. "La Revancha de Sanson," Revista de Revistas,
May 25, 1924, 12.
63. Ernesto Garda Cabral, "Criterio Femenino,"
Excelsior, July 22, 1924, editorial page. The caption
reads: "Father: No, you shall nor cur your hair!" and
daughter: "Yes, what you want is that I continue to
look ridiculous with these thick braids."
64. Jose Clemente Oro2eo, "La moda del pelo
corto," L'ABC, September 27, 1925, reproduced in
"Sainete, drama y barbarie, "71.
65. Jacobo Dalevuelra [pseud. Fernando Ramire2
de Aguilar], "Las Pelonas dispuesras a defenderse con
energia," El Universal July 22, 1924, sec. 2, p. 1.
66. The abduction was reported in "Los ene-
migos de las pelonas hacen su victima," El Universal
Grdfico, July 22, 1924, 7, cited in Rubenstein, "The
War on las pelonas," 68. Jacobo Dalevuelra also re-
counted this incident (see note 65).
67. "Esrudiantes en grupo y usando de La fuerza,
prerendieron rapar a varias senoritas de pelo corto,"
Excelsior, July 23, 1924, sec. 2, p. 1.
NOTES TO PAGES 16o-171
303
68. "Por cada pelona que sea rapada, se cortara el
pelo una trenzuda," El Universal, July 23, 1924, sec. 2,
p. 7
69. See Bliss and Blum, "Dangerous Driving."
70. Carlos Serrano, "El reinado de las pelonas,"
Revista de Revistas, May 25, 1924, 9-10.
71. "Maria Bibiana Uribe," El Universal, March
25, 1921, 9
72. Bliss, Compromised Positions, 73
73 Gamboa, Santa, 43
74 Ibid., 74-75
75 See Ramos Escandon, "Del cuerpo social al
cuerpo carnal." Castillo examines these juxtapositions
in her analysis as well, hence the tide of her chapter
on Santa, "Mear Shop Memories: Gamboa."
76. Luis Lara y Pardo, La prostitucion en
Mexico. See also Bliss, Compromised Positions; and
Marcela Suare2 and Guadalupe Rios de Ia Torre,
''Aculturacion, mujer y el discurso sobre Ia prostitu-
cion," in Espacios de mestizaje cultural (Mexico City:
Universidad Auronoma Merropolitana-Azapotzalco,
1991), II?-34 For an analysis of elite and middle-
class concerns over transient populations, see French,
"Prostitutes and Guardian Angels." On urban
vagrancy, see Piccato, "Urbanistas, Ambulantes, and
Mendigos."
77 See Lara y Pardo, La prostitucion en Mexico,
35-40; and Bliss, Compromised Positions.
78. "Maria Bibiana Uribe de Ia Sierra de Puebla,
proclamada Ia India Bonita de Mexico," El Universal,
August 2, 1921, cover and sec. 2, p. 9
79 "La Representante de Ia Raza," "La
Vencedora, Marfa Bibiana Uribe," "Se reune el jurado
las die2 lndias bonitas," "2Quien es Maria Bibiana
Uribe?" and Jacobo Dalevuelta [pseud. Fernando
Ramire2 de Aguilar), "Mi emrevista con Ia India
Bonita," El Universal, August 2, 1921, from page and
9-15. On the constitution of the panel of judges, see
El Universal, June 12, 1921, sec. 2, p. 9
8o. "La Vencedora, Maria Bibiana Uribe."
8r. Ibid.
82. Ibid.
83. "Se reune el jurado las die2 indias bonitas."
84. Gamio, quoted in J. Sorel, "Porque triunfo
en Ia lid Maria Bibiana Uribe," El Universal, August
?, 1921, 9- 10.
85. Ibid.
86. Contrary to popular belief, Gamio did not
reject "biological race" outright. This is evident in
the publication of his research on the population of
the villages surrounding the archaeological site of
Teotihuacan. See Gamio et al., La poblacion del valle
de Teotihuacdn, 2 vols. (Mexico City: Talleres Graficos
de Ia Nadon, 1922).
87. Enciso, in Sorel, "Porque triunfo," 9-10.
88. See Nochlin, Representing WOmen, 88.
89. Manuel Gamio, "La Venus India," El
Universal Ilustrado, August 12, 1921, 19.
90. Ibid.
91. Ibid.
92. On the importance of the Virgin of
Guadalupe in the nationalist imaginary, see Jacques
Lafaye, Quetzalcoatl and Guadalupe: The Formation
of Mexican National Consciousness, 152I-18J3, trans.
Benjamin Keen (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1976); and David Brading, Our Lady of
Guadalupe: Image and Tradition Across Five Centuries
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
93 Reina M.A.B. [pseud.), "Lo eterno feminino:
Maria Bibiana opina ... ," El Universal Ilustrado,
August q, 1921, 27.
94 The photographs are of Maria Castillo and
Loreto Quintero, identified in a group photograph of
the India Bonita finalists, published in El Universal,
July 23, 1921, sec. 2, p. r.
95 On Margarita "Pepita" Neri, see Herrera-
Sobek, The Mexican Corrido: A Feminist Analysis,
92-93; see also So to, Emergence of the Modern
Mexican WOman, 43-46. On Zavala, see Pablo Ortiz
Monasterio, "Marfa Zavala 'La destroyer,' ayudo a
bien morir a los soldados," Alquimia 3, no. 9 (May-
August 2000): 24-25.
96. On soldaderas, see Cano, "Unconcealable
Realities of Desire: Amelio Robles's (Transgender)
Masculinity in the Mexican Revolution," in Olcott,
Vaughan, and Cano, Sex in Revolution, 36- 56;
Elizabeth Salas, Soldaderas in the Mexican Military:
Myth and History (Austin: University ofTexas Press,
1990); Macias, Against All Odds; and So to, Emergence
of the Modern Mexican WOman.
97 Rubenstein, The War on las pelonas, 72- 75;
Macias-Gonzalez, "El caso de una beldad asesina:
La construccion narrativa, los concursos de belleza
y el mito nacional posrevolucionario (1921- 1931),"
Historia y Grafia 13, no. 7 (1999): 112-54. Macias-
Gonzalez described the case of Miss Mexico of 1928,
who confessed to murdering her adulterous husband
but was acquitted on all charges. He noted that
she was crowned "Miss Mexico," despite expressing
unusually strong feminist ideas about education and
autonomy, because she came from the highest social
class. See also Joanne Hershfield, Imagining La Chica
Moderna: WOmen, Nation, and Visual Culture in
Mexico, 1917-1936 (Durham: Duke University Press,
2008).
98. Gabriela Mistral, ed., Lecturas para mujeres
(Mexico City: Secretaria de Educacion Departamento
Editorial, 1923).
99 Mistral, "Silhueta de Ia India Mexicana,"
129-30, and "A Ia mujer mexicana," 161-62.
100. Mistral, "A Ia mujer mexicana," 161-63.
101. Ibid., 162.
102. Manuel Gamio, "Esteril," Nove/a Semanal
del Universalllustrado, aiio I, no. 19, March 8, 1923.
The novelette was reissued with several of his other
short stories in De vidas dolientes (Mexico City:
Ediciones Botas, 1937).
103. For a similar argument, see Ruiz Martinez,
"Nacion y genero en el Mexico revolucionario," 72.
104. "El Segundo Congreso lmernacional de
Eugenesia," Ethnos 1, nos. 6-7 (September-October
1920): 14o-42.
105. On "economies of desire," see Bernheimer,
"Degas's Brothels," '59
106. Dalevuelta [pseud. Fernando Ramirez de
Aguilar], "Mi entrevista con Ia India Bonita." Similar
analogies were made in Bachiller Alonso, "Las lndias
Bonitas en Nuestra Historia," El Universal!lustrado,
August 17, 1921, 22-23.
107. Ibid.
108. Castillo, Easy WOmen, 40.
109. Dalevuelta [pseud. Fernando Ramirez de
Aguilar], "Las Pelonas dispuestas a defenderse con
energia."
IIO. Gonzalez Carrasco, in Sorel, "Porque rriun-
fo," 9-10.
m . Ibid. Gonzalez Carrasco states that he wishes
to "chuparle Ia hie!."
II2. For an analysis of this language, see Ramos
Escandon, "Del cuerpo social al cuerpo carnal ,"
21o-15; and Castillo, Easy WOmen, 53- 57.
IIJ. Photo caption in El Universal Ilustrado,
August II , 1921, 2.
II4. "Homenaje a Ia India Bonita," El Universal,
August 17, 1921, 6; and "La Gran Fiesta de Ia India
Bonita en el Colon," El Universal, August 25, 1921, 9
115. "Esra noche se repite en el Colonel homena-
je a Ia India Bonita," El Universal, August 26, 1921, 9
116. "Estrenado con gran exito en el Teatro
Urico: Lupe Rivas Cacho y el actor Otero en 'El
Indio Bonito,"' El Universal Ilustrado, August 4, 1921,
29.
117. "El Homenaje a Ia India Bonita en el
Teatro Principal," El Universal, August q, 1921, 6;
and "La Apoteosis de Ia India Bonita," El Universal,
September 29, 1921, 13.
118. " Don Andres Fernandez y su distinguida es-
posa ... ofrecieron ayer una fiesta a Ia India Bonita,"
El Universal, August 24, 1921, 9
119. "Don Andres Fernandez educara a Ia India
Bonita en un buen colegio: Es el mismo en que se
educa en Puebla una hijita de aquel prominente
espaflol," El Universal, August 23, 1921, 9
no. Ibid. , 9
121. Both the parade float and the masthead re-
semble other engraved images allegorizing the nation.
See Carrera, "Affections of the Heart."
122. Cube Bonifant, "Una reina joven y serena
... con Ia senorita Consuelo Lujan y Asunsolo," El
Universal, August 14, 1921, sec. 2, p. 13; and "Hoy
es Ia inauguraci6n de las fiestas del Centenario con
los juegos Aorales de El Universal," El Univeral,
September 10, 1921, 1.
123. See Miguel Bueno, "El arte de Diego Rivera
atacado por el genial anista Clemente Orozco," El
Imparcial, November 23, 1926, reprinted in Orozco
Valladares, Orozco, verdad crono!Ogica, 165-70.
124. See Cypress, La Malinche in Mexican
Literature.
125. See Bueno, in Orozco V, Orozco, verdad
crono/Ogica, 166. Bueno calls the swimming figure "el
vencido," the vanquished.
126. Frances Toor, "Frescoes de Jose Clemente
Orozco," Mexican Folkways 4, no. 4 (October-
December 1928): 194-98. Orozco objected to the tide
of the panel, "Cortes y Malinrzin: La raza indigena a
sus pies" (Cortes and Malinrzfn: The indigenous race
at their feet), and the journal published a "correction"
in the next issue; see Frances Toor, "Jose Clemente
Orozco: A Correction," Mexican Folkways 5, no. I
Oanuary-March 1929): 8-9.
NOTES TO PAGES r8o-187 305
127. Toor, "Jose Clemente Orozco," 8-9.
128. Ibid., 9
129. Orozco, in Bueno, in Orozco V., Orozco,
verdad cronowgica, 168.
130. For derailed analysis of muralism as a
vehicle of the Mexican stare, see Mary K. Coffey,
Mexican Muralism and the Philanthropic Ogre:
How a Revolutzonary Art Became Official Culture
(Durham: Duke University Press, forthcoming).
For various other interpretations, see Leonard
Folgarair, Mural Painting and Social Revolution in
Mexico, 1920-1940: Art of the New Order (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998); Memoria.
Congreso fnternacional de Muralismo. San Ildefonso,
cuna del Muralismo Mexicano: Reflexiones historio-
grdficas J artistas (Mexico City: CONACULTA, 1999);
Mari-Carmen Ramirez Garcia, "The Ideology and
Politics of rhe Mexican Mural Movement, 1920-1925"
(Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1989);
Rita Eder, "El Muralismo Mexicano: Modernismo
y Modernidad," in Modernidad y Modernizacion en
el Arte Mexicano, 192o-1960, ed. Olivier Debroise
(Mexico City: Museo Nacional de Arre, 1991), 67-81;
Renaro Gonzalez Mello, "La UNAM y Ia Escuela
Central de Arres Plasticas durante Ia direcci6n de
Diego Rivera," Anales delfnstituto de Investigaciones
Estiticas 17 no. 67 (1995): 21-68, and Charlot, The
Mexican Mural Renaissance.
131. See Olcott, Revolutionary Women; Porrer,
Working Women in Mexico City; Bliss, Compromised
Positions; and essays in Olcott, Vaughan, and Cano,
Sex in Revolution.
132. Augusto Conde, "Filmando: Bibiana,"
Excelsior, August 4, 1921, 3
133. Ibid.
134. "La India Bonita es una abnegada madre de
familia," Excelsior, April 10, 1922, n.p.
135. Rick A. L6pez, who interviewed Marfa
Bibiana Uribe's daughter in 1999, confirmed the vera-
city of these derails. Personal e-mail communication
with L6pez, January Io-I6, 2000. See also L6pez,
"The India Bonita Contest."
136. Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991).
137. See Anthony Pagden, "Fabricating Identity
in Spanish America," History Today (May 1992):
44-49
138. For a more elaborate discussion, see Hewitt
de Alcantara's study of Mexican anthropology; and
Lomnitz, Exits from the Labyrinth and Deep Mexico,
Silent Mexico.
139 For an analysis of self-actualization of
Indians, see Guillermo Bonfil Baralla, Utopia y
Revolucion: El pensamiento politico contempordneo de
los indios en America Latina (Mexico City: Nueva
Imagen, 1981); see also Knight, "Racism, Revolution,
and Indigenismo," 75
140. Guillermo Palacios, La pluma y el arado: Los
intelectuales pedagogos y fa construccion sociocultural del
"problema campesino" en Mexico, 1932-1934 (Mexico
City: Colegio de Mexico, 1999), 29-35 and passim.
See also Cecilia Greaves Laine, "El debate sobre
una amigua polemica: La integraci6n indfgena," in
His to ria de fa Educacion y Ensenanza de fa Historia,
ed. Pilar Gonzalbo Aizpuru, Historia y Naci6n
(Aetas del Congreso en homenage a Josefina Zoraida
Vazquez) 1 (Mexico City: El Colegio de Mexico,
1998), 137-54
141. Vasconcelos, "The Race Problem in Larin
America," in Aspects of Mexican Civilization: Lectures
of the Harris Foundation, ed. Jose Vasconcelos and
Manuel Gamio, (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1926), 86.
142. Jesus Villanueva, Dofia Luz's grandson.
Personal communication with the author, Mexico
City, December 1998. For the most extensive biogra-
phical treatment ofDofia Luz, see Luzjimenez, sim-
bolo de un pueblo milenario, 1897-1965 (Mexico City:
INBA/Museo Casa Estudio Diego Rivera y Frida
Kahlo, 2000). See also Jesus Villanueva, "Dofia Luz:
Inspiration and Image of a National Culture," voices
of Mexico 41 (October 1997): 19-24. In addition ro
modeling for artists, in 1920s and 1930s she worked as
an adviser to anthropologists and folklorists who were
interested in compiling indigenous folktales. Anita
Brenner, Frances Toor, Benjamin Lee Whorf, and
others published her folktales; see also Kamunen,
Between Worlds, 203-8.
143. Luz Jimenez, De Porfirio Diaz a Zapata:
Memoria ndhuatl de Milpa Alta, ed. Fernando
Horcasiras (Mexico City: UNAM, 1968), 15-25. See
also Kanrunen, Between Worlds, 193-94
144. Zapatista Encampmmt is reproduced in
Folgarair, Mural Painting and Social Revolution in
Mexico, 43
145. Margaret Park Redfield, "Nace un nino en
Teporzlan (A Child Is Born in Teporzlan)," Mexican
Folkways 4, no. 2 (April-June 1928): 102-5.
146. A compendium of artists' portraits is avai-
lable in Luz Jimenez, simbolo de un pueblo milenario,
I897-1965. On Luz as a favorite model for Rivera, see
Alma Lilia Roura, "Aguas Diego, jAhf viene Lupe!
Las modelos de Diego en San Ildefonso," Memoria.
Congreso Inttrnacional del Muralismo (Mexico Ciry:
Antigua Colegio de San Ildefonso, 1999), 128-32.
147. Personal interview with Jesus Villanueva;
see also Villanueva, "Dona Luz, Inspiration, and
Image of a National Culrure," and Fernandez Poncela
and Venegas Aguilera, La j/or mds bella del ejido:
Invenci6n, tradici6n, tramformaci6n (Mexico Ciry:
CONACULTAfiNAH, 2002).
148. Antonio Garcia Cubas, Ellibro de mis
recuerdos (Mexico Ciry: lmprenta de Arturo Garda
Cubas, 1904), reprinted in Remembranzas del canal
de Ia viga, Iztacalco y Santa Anita (Mexico Ciry:
Delegaci6n del Departamento del Distrito Federal,
1993), 55-58.
149. Ibid., 57
150. On the revival of the springtime festivals,
see Remembranzas del canal de Ia viga, xii. Anna M.
Fernandez Poncela and Lilia Venegas Aguilera suggest
that the India Bonita contest appropriated certain
elements of the pre-Hispanic festival dedicated to
the goddess Xochiquerzal, celebrated in preconquest
Xochimilco during the spring harvests. They suggest
that the contest set the precedent for the contest that
was revived in Xochimilco in 1936 under the tide La
flor mds bella del ejido. See Fernandez Poncela and
Venegas Aguilera, La f/or mds bella del ejido. These
authors fail to note the temporal specificities of the
contest; in fact, it was part of the Centennial and
thus was held in August, not in the spring.
151. "Ejido" was the communal land-holding
system of the colonial period, which was revived in
the postrevolutionary period. During the "Flor mas
bella del ejido" contest, ejido communities within
the Federal District (Mexico Ciry and its environs)
compete for one of their young women to be named
queen of the spring fair; personal interview with Jesus
Villanueva; since 1955, the contest has been held in
Xochimilco. See Sergio Cordero Espinoza, La Flor
mds bella del ejido (1989), photocopy in the collection
of]esus Villanueva.
152. Mary K. Coffey, "Angels and Prostitutes:
Jose Clemente Orozco's Catharsis and the Politics
of Female Allegory in 1930s Mexico," CR: The New
Centennial Review 4, no. 2 (Fall 2004): 185-217.
153. For a psychoanalytical approach to Kahlo's
work and her neurosis, see Teresa del Conde, Frida
Kahlo: La pintora y el mito (Mexico Ciry: Plaza Janes,
2001), 47 See also Gannit Ankori, Imaging Herselves:
Frida Ka.hlo's Poetics of Identity and Fragmentation
(Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002).
154. See Kahlo's letters to Eloesser written from
Detroit and dated May 26, 1932, and July 29, 1932,
in other words, before and after her miscarriage, in
Frida Kahlo, Escrituras: Selecci6n, proemio y notas by
Raquel Tibol (Mexico Ciry: UNAMICONACULTA,
2001), 103-6 and 107-8.
155. Kahlo to Eloesser, July 29, 1932, in Escrituras,
10?-8.
156. See also Mary K. Coffey's interpretation
of Kahlo's engagement with materniry and with
the archerypal figure of Ia chingada; Coffey, ''Angels
and Prostitutes," 207. Coffey offers one of the most
nuanced and sophisticated interpretations of the play
of nationalist gender politics in her comparison of
Kahlo's iconography to Orozco's mural Catharsis; see
also Coffey, "'Without Any of the Seductiom of Art. "'
I offer an extended analysis of Me and My Doll in
Frida Ka.hlo: Homenaje Nacional, 1907-2007 (Mexico
Ciry: CONACULTAIINBA and Editorial RM, 2007),
172-77.
157. For the most detailed study of Rivera's
murals at Chapingo, see Jennifer K. Younger, "Utopia
Mexicana: Diego Rivera's Program for Chapingo
Chapel, 1924-1927" (Ph.D. dissertation, Universiry of
Maryland, 1999). See also Antonio Rodriguez, Canto
a Ia tierra: Los murales de Diego Rivera en Ia Cap ilia
de Chapingo (Chapin go: Universidad Aut6noma de
Chapingo, 1986); Raquel Tibol, Los murales de Diego
Rivera: Universidad Auto noma Chapingo (Mexico
Ciry: Editorial RM, 2002), 19, 61ff.; and also Diego
Rivera: A Retrospective (Detroit: Founders Sociery
Detroit Institute of Arts and W W. Norton, 1986),
59 253-59
158. Karen Cordero Reiman, "Los espacios de
Chapingo: Apuntes hacia una relecrura," in Arte y
Espacio, ed. Oscar Olea (Mexico Ciry: UNAMIIIE,
1995), 209-15, esp. 21o-r2.
NOTES TO PAGES 196-201
307
159. Cordero Reiman speculates on the pos-
sible inclusion of Masonic symbols and refers to
an unpublished essay by Fausto Ramirez. On this
topic in relation to Rivera's murals at the Ministry
of Public Education, see ibid. , 209 n. L Rena to
Gonzalez Mello undertook the most extensive study
of Rivera's Masonic iconography in "La maquina de
pin car: Rivera, Orozco y Ia invenci6n de un lenguaje"
(Ph.D. dissertation, UNAM-Faculcad de Filosofia y
Letras, 1998}; for an abbreviated text with some of his
findings, see "Manuel Gamio, Diego Rivera, and the
Policies of Mexican Anthropology," Res: Anthropology
and Aesthetics 45 (Spring 2004}: 161-85.
I6o. Score, "Gender: A Useful Category of
Historical Analysis," 1056.
{ CHAPTER FIVE }
1. See, for example, Diego Velazquez, \lenus at
Her Mirror (1648; National Gallery, London}.
2. On Kahlo's Mexican exhibitions, see Helga
Prignicz-Poda, ed., Frida Kahlo: Das Gesamtwerk
(Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Neue Kririk, 1988),
29Q-92.
3 See Frida Kahlo: &posicion Nacional de
Homenaje, September-November 1977, Palacio
de Bellas Artes (Mexico City: 1NBA/Secretaria de
Educacion Publica, 1977). The Museum of Arts and
Sciences (Mexico City} in collaboration with the
National Universiry (UNAM) held an "homenaje" in
1964, a decade after her death; the twentieth anniver-
sary of her death was recognized at rhe Museum of
Modern Art (Mexico City} in I973 This lack of offi-
cial recognition in the form of state-sponsored "ho-
menaje" might also be because rhe Kahlo Museum,
founded privately by Rivera and his patron, Dolores
Olmedo Patino, in 1958, held regular commemorative
exhibitions.
4 For example, Izquierdo's first retrospective
was held ar the Palace of Fine Arcs in 1943. Her first
posthumous retrospective was held ar the Museum of
Modern Art (Mexico City) in 1971, and her national
"homenaje" was in 1979. For an incomplete lise of
Izquierdo's solo exhibitions, see Marfa Izquiertk,
exh. cat. (Mexico City: Centro Cultural/Acre
Contempocaneo, 1988), 406-8.
5 Izquierdo's essays are reprinted in Maria
lzquiertk, ed. Miguel Cervantes, with essays by
308 NOTES TO PAGES 1 59-206
Carlos Monsivafs and Luis Mario Schneider (Mexico
City: Casa de Bolsa Cremi, 1986}, 128-45.
6. Since at least 1960, there has been an effort to
exhibit their work side by side and to cultivate simila-
rities in their arc. See, for example, Homenaje a Frida
Kahlo y Maria Izquierdo, exh. cat., Galeria Romano,
Mexico City, August 1960, cited in Prignirz-Poda,
ed., Frida Kah/o, 291. See also Erika Billeter, "Frida
and Marfa," Images of Mexico, exh. cat. (Dallas: Dallas
Museum of Arc; Frankfurt: Schirn Kunsthalle, 1987},
129-36.
7 Rafael Solana, "Marla Izquierdo," Taller,
Revisca Mensual I, December 1938, 65-80.
8. For example, Occavio Paz, "Marfa Izquierdo
sitiada y situada," Vuelta, November 1988, 21-27;
see also Pa2, Essays on Mexican Art, trans. Helen
Lane (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company,
1993), 247-65; Margarita Nelken, "Marfa Izquierdo,
su exposicion en Mexico," Norte, December 1943,
42-44; and more recently, Elena Poniacowska, "Marfa
Izquierdo, a caballo," in The True Poetry: The Art
of Maria Izquiertk (New York: Americas Society
Art Gallery, 1997), II7-21; Raquel Tibol, "Marfa
Izquierdo," Latin American Art I (Spring 1989): 23-25.
9 Robin Adele Greeley also examines Izquierdo's
relationship to the Contemporaneos group and irs
alternative definition of Mexicanness, but she focuses
on Izquierdo's painting of the 1940s. See Greeley,
"Painting Mexican Identities: Nationalism and
Gender in the Work of Marfa Izquierdo," Oxford
Art journal23, no. 2 (2000): 51-71. My analysis
differs on several counts, beginning with my focus
on Izquierdo's painting in the 1930s, the period
in which she was most closely associated with the
Contemporaneos group, as well as my analysis of
Izquierdo's arc in relation co the discourse on "pure"
rather than nationalist or folkloric painting.
10. Solana, "Marfa Izquierdo," 72.
II. These terms were used by the critic Gustavo
Ortiz Hernan, "Cronicas de Arce: La Galeria de
Arte Moderno," unidentified newspaper clipping,
Archivo Marfa Izquierdo, Collection Aurora Posadas
Izquierdo; although che source is not known, Ortiz
Hernan wrote a column for El Nacional.
12. Olivier Oebroise, "Mexican Art on Display,"
in The Effects of the Nation: Mexican Art in an Age of
Globalization, ed. Carl Good and John V. Waldron
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001),

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