Imagining la Chica Moderna: Women, Nation, and Visual Culture in Mexico, 1917–1936 (review)

This interesting volume approaches a very important topic: the changes in visual culture relating to middle- and upper-class women in Mexico during the years immediately following the violence of the Mexican revolution. Hershfield correctly indicates that the post-revolutionary shift was not one from tradition to modernity but rather from “one kind of modernizing project to another,” which involved far more changes for women than that of the pre-revolutionary Porfirian period (p. 25). She further argues that rather than a class-based set of changes, the transition was a cultural one that could encompass two sorts of nationalist projects: on the one hand, capitalist development and a rising middle class, and on the other, rural land reform and some improvement in the status of rural workers.

She sees the major changes for women occurring among the unmarried, while the older values of devotion to home and family continued to dominate the lives of many others. Nevertheless, the new images were available to all, even the illiterate, as many of them, literally, spoke for themselves. Visual culture became more and more widespread throughout the country. At the same time, numbers of people were forced into Mexico City and other urban spaces by the revolution itself, and, in the case Mexico City, more of these were women than men. In addition, the revolutionary state itself sought the development of a national—rather than local—sense of identity. As the author points out, “the nationalist campaign identified the citizen with the nation, rather than with the village, a neighborhood, an extended family, an occupation, or a particular racial or ethnic heritage” (p. 27). Popular images, widely disseminated, helped that process.

All of these changes affected and were affected by the rise of advertising, which had been introduced into magazines in the 1890s. Despite the revolution, advertising revenue quadrupled between 1910 and 1922, and no doubt accelerated thereafter. Women’s magazines included not only editorial material recommending fashion choices, much of which overlapped with merchandise being offered in the advertisements, but also linked these choices to international trends. Moreover, advertisers used visual materials and text to urge behaviors and material goods on their readers, projecting a kind of “ideal of middle-class domesticity” (p. 76). In these advertisements, new products were combined with new appearances and new self-presentations.

Newspapers in particular, and sometimes films, featured images of working women, not only in older industries like tobacco and textile factories, but also in telephone exchanges, where long rows of women sat directing calls, and in offices, where the modern fashions discussed above were on display. In a rather brief detour toward lower-class working women, Hershfield discusses street vendors, dancehall girls, and prostitutes, all of whom were photographed. In an interesting discussion, she shows how the 1931 film Santa, based on Federico Gamboa’s novel, emphasized the economic aspects of the protagonist’s move from rural Mexico into prostitution in the capital. Further, she discusses the ways in which that film shows the brothel as a new kind of home, complete with family, in the city.

In the concluding chapter in the book, Hershfield shows the ways that Mexican women, including celebrities and beauty contestants, developed a kind of “domestic exoticism” by adopting various indigenous styles, particularly those of the china poblana and the Tehuana. As Manuel Gamio and others in the Mexican political and intellectual elite argued for a glorified indigenous past, Mexican women began to adopt an aestheticized version of “native” dress to identify with those “native” roots. Among the intellectual class, Frida Kahlo, Rosa Covarrubias, and, though she does not mention it here, even film star Dolores del Río (the latter somewhat more ludicrously than the others), occasionally or frequently adopted such costumes. At the same time, she shows that those same styles and images were used to appeal to persons from other...