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

In today’s multimedia world, we are bombarded with images that seek to sell us products, lifestyles, and aspirations. Those images, known as visual culture, are both reflective and instructive: they are products of a particular historical moment and they convey a message about cultural expectations and norms. Thus, visual culture matters. In Imagining la Chica Moderna, Joanne Hershfield advances our knowledge about popular culture, markets, and women’s history by examining the construction of the modern woman, la chica moderna, in Mexico during the post-revolutionary era. Rather than focus on laws or public policy, Hershfield examines images in the media addressed to and about women through a close reading of advertisements, magazine pictorials, film, photography, and postcards. She argues that these were public sites geared largely toward the middle-class female consumer, which reflected and helped to shape tastes of the modern Mexican woman while also acting as sites in which debates about femininity and modernity took place. These images, she contends, “evidence Mexico’s attempt to deal with the challenges and uncertainty of profound social and cultural changes in the decades following the Mexican [R]evolution” (161). In doing so, image makers sent a message to female audiences about a modernity that was at once universally cosmopolitan (meaning modern as embodied in the flapper or flapperista) and uniquely Mexican (meaning traditional as embodied in the china poblana and tehuana). This message accurately reflected a much larger post-revolutionary state project that sought to embrace capitalism and all its trappings while also staying true to a unique brand of revolutionary nationalism; evidence of this is found in the state’s cultural programs and development projects like tourism.

Using rich imagery and engaging analysis, Hershfield’s Imagining la Chica Moderna contributes to some of the strongest fields in Mexican history, namely women’s history and cultural history. The author is adept in drawing from historiography and theory all the while building multiple narratives around the lives of women in Mexico, the social, economic, and political reality of post-revolutionary Mexico, and its reflection in visual culture. In other words, the author takes on and delivers an ambitious project with clarity, pizzazz, and a kind of straightforwardness, which encourages those of us who teach Mexican history, women’s history, and popular culture to adopt her book for our courses.

Some of Hershfield’s most interesting findings on the modern Mexican woman in visual culture can be found in her chapters on fashion and work. In her chapter on fashion, for example, we learn about the image of la flapperista in 1920s pictorials, film, and advertisements and how she, like her American counterpart, connoted freedom and independence from traditional conventions. Meanwhile, the author shows how Hollywood and Mexican actresses sold modern femininity through their endorsement of cosmetics and household products: by purchasing Hedy Lamarr’s Max Factor lipstick, one could attain star quality beauty (70). This chapter reminds us how enduring is the beauty and celebrity industries for women consumers across time and place. Another fascinating finding is in her chapter on work. In it, she analyzes the depiction of urban, cosmopolitan women at work in the office versus rural, Indian women at work in the marketplace or factory. Her adept choice of images juxtapose lower versus middle-class female labor illustrating how labor markets post-revolution were defined by gender but divided by class and place (urban versus rural). Women with modern characteristics—non-Indians with smart clothing and hairstyles—were typists, whereas Indian women with braided hair in traditional clothing sorted coffee beans and sold street food.

Overall, Imagining la Chica Moderna is a fun read and makes a good addition to courses, especially undergraduate ones. Students will find the writing style devoid of jargon, the argument, and the analysis easy to follow. Moreover, as a media studies specialist, Hershfield provides a good methodological model...