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

Joanne Hershfield's intriguing monograph, Imagining la Chica Moderna: Women, Nation and Visual Culture in Mexico, 1917-1936 reminds readers of an era following the 1910-1920 Mexican revolution in which multiple cultural experiments emerged. It was a period in which elite Mexican intellectuals considered both pre-Conquest Aztec and contemporary Communist Party forms of land tenure, in which Mexican school teachers wandered the countryside, seeking what they hoped would be remnants of pre-conquest indigenous artistry to be used to transform contemporary indigenous peoples. It was, Hershfield reminds us, a period in which many foreign and domestic capitalists created visual images of women promoting new forms of dress, housework, work and leisure activities previously little practiced in Mexico. Hershfield's thoughtful approach allows readers to remember and ponder ways image makers developed a form of communication which sought voicelessly to speak, bloodlessly to enact, and while itself immobile, to nonetheless travel into Mexico's large, universe of women. Once inside women's vast, complex, largely unknown worlds of consciousness, the image makers attempted to prompt activity.

Hershfield's keenest recognitions and contributions are contextual. That is, she is deeply aware of the roles to which women were assigned, how their relative lack of power enabled more powerful members of Mexico's divided society to force them to work in largely unrecognized, unpaid fashions, even harder than Mexico's exceedingly hardworking men. At the same time, combining both a sociological and a spatial expertise, Hershfield reminds us that during this historical period, Mexican women were told that the spaces where they lived revealed who they were. It was to follow, then, that by purchasing and using particular cleaning agents, by creating homes that "reveal(ed) a cleanliness according to the most up to date methods," women themselves would be transformed. (180.)

Perhaps most impressive here is the array of disparate images of women emerging simultaneously in this period. Outsiders used images to engage female consumers to modernize their appearances by wearing "blouses that drape over the skirt and carefully crafted skirts made of distinctive materials," along with the "ribbons" which were the "obligatory companions for women who wished to dress elegantly and economically;" (52,) by installing electricity and running water, despite the fact that few Mexican homes possessed separate kitchens, (78,) and to transform their work lives by learning how to use the adding machine, and most especially, to type. (115.) In other words, Hershfield suggests that capitalists drew on mainly foreign imagery in efforts to create a particular series of connections with Mexican women. As thoughtful as Imagining La Chica Moderna is, it would have been even more compelling had the numerous ways Mexican women not only participated in the Mexican-post-revolutionary period but in important ways shaped that period been considered. Nonetheless, Imaging La Chica Moderna is as insightful as it is suggestive.