Southwestern Historical Quarterly

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...