La Raza Cosmética

In 2001, Mexico's Ministry of Tourism designated a handful of towns as “Pueblos Mágicos,” in a bid to bolster cultural tourism premised on nostalgia for the beauty of timeless folkloric villages. The reader fortunate enough to take up Natasha Varner's La Raza Cosmética: Beauty, Identity, and Settler Colonialism in Postrevolutionary Mexico will appreciate that state agencies and officials have long established the parameters of Mexican beauty, whether applied to women or places. The author conducts an astute analysis of popular media and cinematic treatments of the intersection of indigeneity, femininity, and the cultural politics of place. She argues that the official construction of an increasingly narrow definition of Indigenous beauty contributed to the revolutionary project of “settler colonial nationalism.”The first two chapters explore the phenomenon of beauty pageant traditions that, in the postrevolutionary period, sought to claim female indigeneity as national patrimony for cultural capital. Through her close reading of press coverage of the India Bonita and La Flor Más Bella del Ejido competitions, Varner sheds critical light on the contests' discomfiting racialized parameters that more recent cultural histories of the period have characterized as mildly appropriative cultural nationalism; by emphasizing the stilted measures put in place to assess female Indigenous authenticity and demonstrating the clear Indigenous geographies of these events, Varner nudges the analysis of such pageants rightfully into the domain of empire.The third and fourth chapters make a foray into the well-studied territory of Mexican folkloric cinema, covering some canonic classics and a few surprises. Here the contributors to the visual lexicon of postrevolutionary Mexico are reviewed: Manuel Gamio, Sergei Eisenstein, María Candelaria (1944), and Diego Rivera all make valued, if expected, appearances. The films and culture makers covered here reaffirm the cultural ambivalence toward Indigenous female beauty as a commodity to be consumed and strongly associated with an also-desirable landscape. The tensions between a modernizing Mexico and nostalgia for a timeless Indigenous past come together nicely in the book's treatment of Xochimilco, where the fraught land tenure and environmental preservation efforts were obscured from the general public by romantic golden age film sets that drew the audience instead to the glossy braids and pure white muslin dresses of the female leads performing against the backdrop of “Mexico's Venice.”The final chapter is perhaps the most innovative, a case study of doña Luz Jiménez, a fascinating Nahua muse for Mexico's modern school of art and a perfect embodiment of the constraints and opportunities afforded Indigenous women in a cultural milieu dominated by mestizo male artists and intellectuals. The author, taking a biographical turn, draws from the underutilized archive of Jean Charlot and incorporates insightful testimonies from Jiménez's descendants to showcase a remarkable woman's experience navigating a very narrow channel, in which contemporary culture makers celebrated, fetishized, exoticized, and appreciated her perceived authenticity. By shedding light on the personal life of this unsung cultural translator for globally recognized creative greats, through a story that is blessedly light on Frida Kahlo, Varner cracks open a completely new dimension of Mexico's cultural renaissance.With the exception of the final chapter, La Raza Cosmética covers some familiar subjects in postrevolutionary cultural history, leaning heavily on the work of Rick López, Ageeth Sluis, and Joanne Hershfield. For a subject as rich and varied as the cultural politics of beauty in the postrevolutionary period, the archival base of research is perhaps on the slim side, with occasional (and welcome) claims about Indigenous resistance to or agency within the settler-colonial framework perhaps being overstated when premised on a single letter or a cameo appearance in a home movie. A deeper look into the archive would no doubt turn up more such instances that would help to substantiate this very important part of the book's thesis: that the patterns of Indigenous erasure in the postrevolutionary regime did not go forward uncontested.This book shines, though, in its clarity of writing and depth of critical analysis of visual culture. An extended discussion of a rare pornographic film from the era features some of Varner's most creative thinking about the semiotics of race, patriarchy, and landscape. Another strength is the very sensitive treatment of the tricky issue on which the entire book is premised: the subjectivity of beauty in social, political, and cultural contexts. The author's ethos is clear in how she encourages the reader to look at the beauty pageant contestants, by foregrounding not their phenotypical characteristics but rather the standards, norms, and expectations established in the contest guidelines that would have shaped contemporaries' perceptions of beauty. The author frequently and refreshingly interrupts her analysis with her own voice, recognizing the limits of what we can reasonably assess regarding a person's race, ethnicity, or other identity if not publicly claimed. Overall, scholars of Mexican cultural history will find this an accessible history of the postrevolutionary period that makes a new and, after all, beautiful contribution

Aesthetics · Art · Beauty · Colonialism · Ethnology · Femininity · Indigenous · Nationalism · Political science · Politics · Sociology · State (computer science) · Gender Studies · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law · Media, Gender, and Advertising · Politics and Society in Latin America