The India Bonita Contest of 1921 and the Ethnicization of Mexican National Culture

In a 1987 filming of Televisa's Nuestro Mundo Guillermo Ochoa introduced his guest as La India Bonita María Bibiana Uribe, winner of the first Miss Mexico competition. He drew attention to her colorfully ribboned braids, indigenous-style outfit, and bare feet, explaining that she chose to come on the show this way so as to appear before the Mexican public just as she had 66 years earlier when she became the first Miss Mexico. But according to the historical record, María Bibiana Uribe never even participated in the Concurso Universal de Belleza of 1921, which crowned the first "Miss Mexico." ¹ In fact, the Miss Mexico contest was based on an entrenched canon of classical beauty that precluded consideration of nonwhite contestants. Televisa's Nuestro Mundo unintentionally conflated the Miss Mexico pageant with the India Bonita Contest, which focused on indigenous contestants and was billed as the "first entirely racial contest."

The two racially exclusive beauty pageants have even been conflated in María Bibiana's hometown Necaxa, Puebla, where since the 1920s citizens have celebrated an India Bonita festival each May in which they crown two beauty queens, one from the indigenous countryside and one from the mestizo town. ² Bibiana's 1987 appearance on Nuestro Mundo stirred local pride when it revealed to Necaxans that their own hija del pueblo had been crowned "La Primera Miss Mexico." After that, she was regularly invited to the yearly crowning of Necaxa's Indias Bonitas in a ceremony staged before a three-foot-tall 1921 photograph of a young María Bibiana Uribe dressed in local indigenous clothes and holding a lacquered gourd. Local and regional radio stations and newspapers likewise merged the two competitions, referring to María Bibiana interchangeably as the "First Miss Mexico" and the "First India Bonita." ³

Both locally and nationally, the public considers it unremarkable that an Indian girl from the Sierra de Puebla outside of Necaxa would have been crowned the first Mexican beauty queen. María Bibiana Uribe is accepted as both the first Miss Mexico and as the first "India Bonita" without any hint that the two categories might have been considered incompatible in 1920s Mexico. Nor has anyone questioned María Bibiana's statement that all of the Miss Mexico finalists were Indians. Instead, the public assumes that Mexico has long been a racially mixed nation where Indian culture has woven seamlessly into the national fiber. And, since the country was even more Indian in the past, audiences have had no trouble accepting Bibiana's claim that all the finalists in the first competition for a Mexican beauty queen would have been indigenous women.

The incongruence between memory and the documented past prompts us to ask the following questions: How did María Bibiana Uribe, winner of an indigenous beauty contest, become transformed by popular memory into the first Miss Mexico? Why has the all-white Miss Mexico contest, whose winner continued on to the worldwide competition in France, been all but forgotten? What does this process of remembering and forgetting reveal about the historically changing place of Indianness in Mexican national identity?

This article focuses on the India Bonita Contest in an effort to understand nation-formation and constructions of Indianness during the early 1920s in Mexico. ⁴ It does not claim that the contest was the most important part of the movement, only that it is particularly revealing about the goals, methods, and contradictions inherent in the efforts to identify Indian culture as characteristically Mexican and to bring Indians into the national fold. These, in turn, were part of the dual process of "creating" the Mexican Indian, and of "ethnicizing" the nation (or what Manuel Gamio and Moisés Sáenz at the time termed "Indianizing" Mexico, and which historian Mary Kay Vaughan has more recently referred...