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Hispanic American Historical Review 84.1 (2004) 37-82



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An Image of "Our Indian":
Type Photographs and Racial Sentiments in Oaxaca, 1920-1940

Deborah Poole


On February 12, 1933, the front cover of the popular Sunday magazine El Oaxaqueño featured a photograph of a boy perched atop a rustic, and presumably rural, wall. The boy looks neither into the camera nor in front of him, but rather gazes back over his shoulder at some distant, unseen place. Both his foot, which rests on top of the wall, and his serape, which he carries draped over his shoulder, suggest that he is on the verge of departure, perhaps even starting a journey. The magazine's editors urged their readers to understand the hesitancy of this pose as an allegory for the condition of their state's rural peoples. "Here we see," the caption informs us, "the peasant children represented by this Indian, who seems to gaze off into the horizon as he awaits the Revolution that will come to redeem his degraded Race." 1

Two months later, the magazine again published the same photograph, this time illustrating an editorial entitled "Dignity of the Indian." Whereas before the boy's far-off gaze had been taken as evidence that only a revolution made by others could improve his race's degenerate condition, this article argued that exposure to a nonindigenous world was, in fact, corrupting the Indians' natural purity. "Pride," the editors argue, "is a characteristic of those [End Page 37] Indians who live outside the cities, speaking their own language and preserving the traditions of their ancestors." Among these Indians, who "walk with more ease and grace than the European aristocrats, begging does not exist. . . . All are owners of their fields and they jealously look after their wives and children." For the anonymous author, these distant and hence uncorrupted Indians, who neither needed nor asked for government assistance, defined the essence of Oaxaca as "a state where, more than anywhere else in Mexico, the indigenous race knows how to preserve their pride [altivez]." 2 While in February the magazine had presented the boy's photograph as proof of the degenerate condition of an indigenous race that both stands apart from and depends on the rest of Oaxaca and Mexico, in April it held up the same photograph as evidence for the moral fiber of the indigenous race whose independent spirit exemplifies the nobility of all Oaxaqueños.


El Oaxaqueño, 2 Dec. 1933)." width="72" height="79" />
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Figure 1
"The childhood of the peasantry is represented here in this Indian, who seems to look to the horizon waiting for the Revolution that will arrive to redeem his degraded race" (El Oaxaqueño, 2 Dec. 1933).


How are we to understand these two quite different readings of a single photograph by the same magazine within a very short period? On the one hand, the apparently contradictory readings assigned to this image reveal a crucial fact: far from being transparent documents (or "a universal language"), photographs are instead susceptible to as wide a range of interpretation as there are people to view them. Roland Barthes and others have theorized this open-ended quality as a defining characteristic of the photograph as a semiotic sign. These theorists remind us that photography is "magic" precisely because [End Page 38] its supposed transparency (or realism) as a mechanically produced image lends each person's interpretation the authority of the real. 3 This unanchored quality inherent in the photographic message enables the same photograph to serve as visual evidence for two very different interpretations of the moral character of Oaxaca's indigenous population.

On the other hand, these contradictory meanings also reveal something about the variety of positions from which Mexican urban intellectuals (and politicians) looked at "their" Indians. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century Oaxacan writers moved with surprising ease from one position to the other—sometimes within the space of a single article or text. The Indian was marked simultaneously as both pure and degenerate, noble...

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