Reviewed by:

• La Raza Cosmética: Beauty, Identity and Settler Colonialism in Postrevolutionary Mexico by Natasha Varner
• Alison Fraunhar

Throughout the Americas, place names, foods, and images drawn from Indigenous cultures abound. Yet over the centuries since the European conquest and colonization of the hemisphere, Indigenous populations from whom these signs originate have been decimated by disease and colonial violence, enslaved, marginalized, and silenced. Recent scholarship has foregrounded this dichotomy of erasure and inscription, and La Raza Cosmética: Beauty, Identity and Settler Colonialism in Postrevolutionary Mexico by Natasha Varner makes a timely contribution to this body of scholarly recuperation by situating the histories of individual women at the intersection of national identity, race, gender, and modernity. This is a terrain previously explored by Joanne Hershfeld in Imagining La Chica Moderna (Duke University Press, 2009) and Adriana Zavala in Becoming Modern, Becoming Tradition: Women, Gender, and Representation in Mexican Art (Penn State University Press, 2010). Varner reinstates the ghostly presence of Indigenous lives into the histories and processes in which they participated.

Beauty pageants, festivals, newspaper competitions, film, sculpture, and [End Page 96] painting are the symbolic spaces of imagery and performance in which Mexican Indian women were (and continue to be) re-fashioned to comply with European and national models for Native subjects. Raza Cosmética is primarily concerned with cultural production of the first half of the twentieth century, and Varner correctly links debates taking place then about the so-called "Indian Question" with discourses of identity and belonging. These stakes were by no means unique to Mexico; they were being contested throughout Latin America. Placing Mexico's struggle to account for its history, identity, and population in the larger hemispheric context would have contextualized Varner's argument for what was uniquely Mexican about the stakes of indigeneity and its representation in Mexico.

In addition to her discussion of symbolic spaces of representation, Varner tracks the representation of Indigenous femininity to relations of land, place, and water. In Chapters 1 and 2, she links indigeneity, spectacle, and land in her discussion of several iterations of the India Bonita contest and Flor Mas Bella pageants. Indigenous women competed in these national contests in which they represented not only themselves, but their communities, which were also being refashioned into sites of tourism and leisure production. Varner thoroughly parses symbolic associations of identity construction and the invention of supposedly Indigenous traditions, resurrecting the identities of actual contestants and pageant queens, thereby re-situating the lives of Indigenous people. Emphasizing the mestizo nationalizing project, Varner analyzes the work of Indigenous women alongside non-Indigenous, European, and mestiza women performing indigeneity in Mexican popular culture.

Chapter 3 builds on questions of iconicity and identity, examining the representation of unidentified Indigenous women in mid-century pornographic films, further reinforcing the connection between Indigenous femininity and the land. This is a less-well analyzed example of media as a site of racialized identity formation than that of the iconic 1943 film María Candelaria, which is taken up in chapter 4, in which Varner analyzes links between Indigenous women, land, and water in the rapidly developing hub of Mexico City. While symbolic associations between women and land have been widely theorized, Varner's discussion of water—its purity, its iconicity, and even its disappearance—is original and well framed. Dolores del Río, the internationally famous Mexican actress who played María Candelaria, reinforced the image of the idealized Indigenous woman as a light skinned, European-featured mestiza.

In chapter 5, Varner's discussion of the invented Indigenous woman portrayed by Del Río segues into an extended, fully fleshed life of the hyper-visualized artist's model Luz Jiménez, whose iconic face and body are familiar from well-known artworks created by some of the most important artists of twentieth-century Mexico—Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siquieros, and Tina Modotti, to name a few. Varner [End Page 97] recuperates Jiménez's subjectivity, exploring her rich, complex life as an activist, teacher, mother...

审核人：

• La Raza Cosmética： Natasha Varner 的后革命墨西哥的美丽、身份和定居者殖民主义
• 艾莉森·弗劳恩哈尔

在整个美洲，从土著文化中提取的地名、食物和图像比比皆是。然而，自欧洲征服和殖民该半球以来的几个世纪以来，这些迹象的起源地土著人口已因疾病和殖民暴力而大量减少，被奴役、边缘化和沉默。最近的奖学金突出了这种擦除和铭文的二分法，而La Raza Cosmética： Natasha Varner 的La Raza Cosmética: Beauty, Identity and Settleler Colonialism in Postrevolutionary Mexico通过将个别女性的历史置于国家的交叉点，为这一学术康复机构做出了及时的贡献。身份、种族、性别和现代性。这是 Joanne Hershfeld 之前在想象 La Chica Moderna 中探索过的地形（杜克大学出版社，2009 年）和 Adriana Zavala 在成为现代，成为传统：墨西哥艺术中的女性、性别和表现（宾夕法尼亚州立大学出版社，2010 年）。瓦尔纳将原住民生活的幽灵般的存在恢复到他们参与的历史和过程中。

选美、节日、报纸比赛、电影、雕塑和[End Page 96]绘画是意象和表演的象征性空间，墨西哥印度妇女在这些空间中（并将继续）被重新塑造，以符合欧洲和国家的模式母语科目。拉莎化妆品主要关注 20 世纪上半叶的文化生产，瓦尔纳正确地将当时发生的关于所谓“印度问题”的辩论与身份和归属的话语联系起来。这些赌注绝不是墨西哥独有的。他们正在整个拉丁美洲竞争。将墨西哥在更大的半球背景下解释其历史、身份和人口的斗争置于语境中，这将使瓦尔纳关于墨西哥独特的关于土著性的利害关系及其在墨西哥的代表性的论点进行背景化。

除了她对表征的象征空间的讨论之外，瓦尔纳还追踪了土著女性气质与土地、地方和水的关系的表征。在第 1 章和第 2 章中，她在讨论印度 Bonita 比赛和 Flor Mas Bella 选美大赛的几次迭代时，将土著、奇观和土地联系起来。土著妇女参加这些全国性比赛，她们不仅代表她们自己，还代表她们的社区，这些社区也被改造成旅游和休闲生产场所。瓦纳彻底解析了身份建构的象征性关联和所谓的土著传统的发明，复活了实际参赛者和选美皇后的身份，从而重新定位了土著人民的生活。强调混血民族化项目，

第 3 章以象似性和身份问题为基础，考察了本世纪中叶色情电影中身份不明的土著女性的表现，进一步加强了土著女性气质与土地之间的联系。与 1943 年标志性电影《玛丽亚·坎德拉里亚》相比，这是一个分析较少的媒体作为种族身份形成场所的例子，这在第 4 章中进行，其中 Varner 分析了快速发展的墨西哥城中心的土著妇女、土地和水之间的联系。虽然妇女与土地之间的象征性联系已被广泛地理论化，但瓦尔纳对水的讨论——它的纯度、它的标志性，甚至它的消失——是原创的，而且结构合理。扮演玛丽亚·坎德拉里亚的国际著名墨西哥女演员多洛雷斯·德尔·里奥 (Dolores del Río) 强化了理想化的土著女性形象，即浅肤色、具有欧洲特色的混血儿。

在第 5 章中，Varner 对 Del Río 所描绘的发明土著女性的讨论将超可视化艺术家的模特 Luz Jiménez 推向了一个延伸的、完整的生活，其标志性的面孔和身体与一些艺术家创作的著名艺术品很相似。二十世纪墨西哥最重要的艺术家——迭戈·里维拉、何塞·克莱门特·奥罗斯科、大卫·阿尔法罗·西奎罗斯和蒂娜·莫多蒂，仅举几例。Varner [End Page 97]恢复了 Jiménez 的主观性，探索她作为活动家、教师、母亲的丰富而复杂的生活......