The India Bonita Contest of 1921 and the Ethnicization of Mexican National Culture
2002; Duke University Press; Volume: 82; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1215/00182168-82-2-291
ISSN1527-1900
Autores Tópico(s)Asian American and Pacific Histories
ResumoIn 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."3Both 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 to as "the browning of the nation").5The early 1920s was an era of guarded optimism that followed the violence and destruction of the Mexican Revolution (1910–20). Urban cultural elites began exploring the Mexican countryside to learn who the Mexican people were, what values they held, and what patterns of thought, religion, and aesthetics they followed. In their search for a uniquely Mexican identity, elites inspired by the social reforms growing out of the Mexican Revolution turned their attention to Mexico's rural populations, whom they recast as fragmented, unintegrated, and culturally Indian.These urban elites interpreted Mexico as falling horribly short of new ideas of what it meant to be a modern nation. They felt that to be modern a nation had to be a culturally, economically, and politically distinct and unified people with deep historical roots, for which France (and less frequently, Germany, the United States, or Japan) was seen as the archetype.6 Cultural and political elites were motivated by a desire to transform Mexico's culturally, economically, and racially disparate peoples into a culturally cohesive, politically stable postrevolutionary nation. Indianness, they argued, was the thread that would unite the diverse populations living within the territory of the Mexican Republic and distinguish Mexico among a global family of other nation-states. To be truly Mexican one was expected to be part Indian or to demonstrate a concern for the valorization and redemption of the Mexican Indian as part of the nation. Those who rejected the country's Indianness were publicly chastised for their foreignness and lack of nationalist zeal.7The India Bonita Contest was one among a number of parallel projects. At the same time that it was occurring, José Vasconcelos was traveling to each of the federal states to convince state legislators to ratify the creation of a federal education system, which for the first time would extend public education and the nationalist project into the rural corners of Mexico.8 President Alvaro Obregón announced the creation of the famous summer school for foreigners at the Universidad Nacional in Mexico City that would soon become a launching ground for studies of popular culture and a key institution for better understanding "the Mexican people."9 The Secretary of Transportation and Communications, after a drawn-out debate over whether Mexico needed roads, announced plans to link together the country with new highways.10 This was also the time when an effort to name a national tree led to public debate about whether the ahuehuete or the ceiba was more distinctly Mexican.11 These initiatives and others like them were very different from one another, and of radically different scales, but they were all early efforts toward the common goal of creating a culturally cohesive Mexican population with a shared identity and some level of solidarity. Together, they highlight the interrelationship between cultural assumptions and political policy at the closing of the Mexican Revolution.12Though the Indian-oriented nationalism promoted through the India Bonita Contest became important in the early 1920s, it was not yet a dominant discourse. In fact, many civic leaders rejected altogether this new project of linking Mexican national identity to living Indian cultures, preferring a continued focus on more entrenched discourses that looked to Mexico's Spanish roots and its preconquest Maya and Aztec past.13 And some advocated a focus on a form of mestizaje that evaded or minimized the need to validate the idea of Indianness.14Nor was the India Bonita Contest an uncompromised nationalist act. As will become clear, part of the reason Félix Palavicini, ex-revolutionary and owner of El Universal, initiated the contest was to draw public attention to his newspaper.15Excélsior, his newspaper's rival, bitterly criticized the contest, going so far as to accuse El Universal of drawing attention to itself by dishonestly promoting a mestiza of the rural elite as a humble Indian; María Bibiana Uribe, it falsely charged, did not even speak an indigenous language. Hoping to discredit its competitor, Excélsior exploited people's fears of being played for fools by Bibiana, who supposedly was sitting in her hometown of San Andrés Tenango laughing at the catrínes (toffs or dandies) whom she had successful hoodwinked.16El Universal's promotion of the contest, along with Excélsior's denigration of it, reveal the role of nonstate organization in linking ideological with commercial interests.17During the early 1920s, then, the project to promote living Indian culture as central to Mexican national identity was not the dominant discourse, nor was it promoted out of selfless nationalism; neither was it simply a "state project." It was initiated by independent intellectuals and commercial enterprises and only later did it win state sponsorship. Yet, it was certainly a new discourse, and it did sell newspapers, and the India Bonita Contest did capture the public imagination as few other events of the time could.18 Most importantly, it was a discourse that received the support of the new coterie of post-revolutionary intellectuals who during the 1920s came to dominate most government departments, and many of whom later spearheaded postrevolutionary political and cultural government initiatives.This article attempts to convey the messy, experimental, and contested nature of early postrevolutionary efforts to promote Indian cultures and to link them with Mexican national identity. The analysis denaturalizes common assumptions about the relationship between Mexican national identity and ideas of Indianness, which have become central to popular memory and collective identity in modern Mexico. It also examines some of the implications of the discourses that emerged in Mexico during the early 1920s.The India Bonita Contest began in January 1921, when Félix Palavicini, founder and director of the prominent periodical El Universal, told his staff that he wanted to celebrate the Mexican Centennial by sponsoring a contest that would bring greater attention and sympathy toward Indians as part of Mexico, and to make them an important concern for cultural and political leaders.19 Palavicini informed his staff that he wanted the contest to rival the recent success of the newspaper's Concurso de la Obrera Simpática (Most Likable Woman Factory Worker Contest).20 The public announcement for the India Bonita Contest stated that it had long been the custom to award prizes for the beauty of a woman or for the inspiration of a poet, but no periodical or magazine had ever thought to adorn its pages with the "strong and beautiful faces" of the indigenous women of the Mexican "lower class."This was not Palavicini's first attempt to link nationalist aesthetics with the popular classes. Seven years earlier, in October of 1914, as minister of education, his plans for the federal Dirección General de las Bellas Artes (Department of Fine Arts) called for "democratizing art without watering it down, so as to make it useful for the popular classes."21 But the India Bonita Contest was the first time he focused specifically on Indian culture as a way to promote his populist politics. El Universal's sponsorship of the contest, then, was novel in its effort to link aesthetics, pro-Indian nationalism, and the growing influence of mass media.The newspaper made plans to send photographers in search of indias bonitas, whose portraits would appear in the newspaper along with brief personal profiles. After giving the readers some idea of what the contest was trying to accomplish, the newspaper would solicit outside entries. The contest would run from January through August 1921, and the winner would receive a prosperous and respectable padrino (godfather) selected by El Universal along with a 3,000 peso prize (which was 15 times larger than the normal prize for public competitions, and eventually grew to over 10,000 pesos worth of cash and prizes).Rafael Pérez Taylor and Hipólito Seijas, the chief architects of the contest, expressed concern about the distrust they would encounter on the part of Indians, whom they claimed were separated by rigid social barriers from urban white and mestizo society.22 They became further disheartened when their efforts to recruit contestants in the regions surrounding Mexico City were met with evasion, and even hostility. Distrust was exacerbated by language barriers, since neither the writers nor the photographers spoke any indigenous languages, and few of the women they approached spoke Spanish. Despite Taylor and Seijas's efforts, after several days the newspaper still lacked a single contestant.23Finally, Seijas decided on a change of strategy. He gave up on the outlying communities, and instead turned to marketplaces within the city's Indian barrios to search for gatitas.24 (In the parlance of the time, the depreciative term gatita was often used by white middle- and upper-class urbanites to refer to young indigenous girls, especially migrants who came from rural areas to the city, where they developed ties with wealthy whites through some form of menial employment whether working a market stall, grinding corn into nixtamal, or cleaning houses. The term also carried a licentious connotation, since it often suggested a certain kind of sexual allure.) Since gatitas had experience with urban whites, Seijas reasoned they would be more likely to have at least some working knowledge of Spanish and perhaps be more willing to talk to the organizers. These gatitas, then, would be sufficiently exotic for the purposes of the contest, but not so "Other" as to be inaccessible.Seijas began combing the vending stalls and the rows of women hunched over metates in the market section of the neighborhood of San Antonio Abad, and within the first hour he identified a potential candidate. With some effort, he convinced her to be photographed and entered in the contest.25 This first selection made a clear statement about what organizers were looking for: a young pleasant-looking girl of humble position, with dark skin, rounded facial features, heavy eye-lids, and with little or no formal education. This and other early successes were followed by a broader recruitment campaign that extended beyond the capital into provincial centers like Oaxaca, Guanajuato, and Jalapa. Nevertheless, the contest advanced at a halting pace.One of the main problems was that the public simply did not understand what El Universal meant when it advertised that it was searching for "indias" who were "bonitas." Readers submitted photo entries of white women in folkloric garb (a form of costuming that had already become a cherished tradition among urban Mexican elites). Some entries even included signed testimonies attesting to the contestants' distant Indian heritage. Other readers simply mocked the very idea of the contest by submitting joke entries showing coarse men disguised as indigenous girls. Clearly, integrating notions of Indianness and what I would term "public beauty" did not come easily to many readers.26White and mestizo contestants disguised in folkloric outfits generally conformed to the established regional Mexican types known as the china poblana and the tehuana. The china poblana was a regional style of dress from the State of Puebla. Its popularity had been firmly established by the late nineteenth century, and it was frequently paired with the charro (a male characterized by a broad hat and tight pants, the charro-type was rooted in the rural landowning elite, though in some circumstances it denoted the revolucionario, and is now most often associated with Mexican mariachis). (See figure 1.) The tehuana was a female type distinguished by regional dress from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in Southern Mexico, characterized by a large pleated headpiece circling the face. These types were generally denoted by style of dress, with little connection to race or ethnicity. Before the china poblana and tehuana vogue reached new heights in the 1920s, they were already ubiquitous in festivals, revue theater, film, and public cultural events. Mexico's white elite often adopted these outfits to celebrate national holidays.27 Even members of the United States colony, with a reputation for being insulated from Mexican culture, adopted the china poblana outfit for their celebrations of the Fourth of July.28Tehuana and china poblana outfits were culturally and politically safe and racially neutral. They provided a nonthreatening way of celebrating Mexican popular culture, aided by their similarity to European peasant outfits. (It was also common to modify the costumes to exaggerate their resemblance to French, Spanish, Portuguese or Dutch peasant vestures.)29 They promoted Mexican culture while inviting comparisons to European folk traditions, and they celebrated regional traditions while deflecting attention from the country's cultural fragmentation, rural exploitation, and the gulf that separated existing aesthetic canons from the reality of Mexico.The type promoted by the India Bonita Contest, in contrast, drew greater attention to Mexico's racial diversity, its cultural fragmentation, and the aesthetic gulf dividing urban Whites from rural Indians. The India Bonita Contest did not explicitly critique Mexican contemporary society. Instead, contest organizers focused on marginalized rural Mexico in the name of the new pop ulist national politics promoted by the Obregonista state, and with the declared goal of creating a more inclusive definition of what it meant to be Mexican.Hoping to reorient public opinion about the place of indigenous peoples within the Mexican nation, coordinators conducted the India Bonita Contest much like an education campaign, periodically providing the public with examples, practice, and reenforcement. They began by declaring that they were searching for indias legítimas who were "bonitas." As El Universal identified suitable examples, it published portraits along with short explanations of how the depicted subjects related to the promoted ideals. Articles were at times explicit about some of the characteristics that organizers sought, such as an oval face, dark skin, braids, perfect teeth, and a "serene" expression. For the promoters these were not just signs of Indianness, but specifically features they wanted to mark as positive Indian characteristics. This becomes clear if we compare these idealized characteristics to the way indígenas were typically caricatured in the popular press: hunched, blank-eyed, disheveled, graceless, filthy, and with thick red drooping lips.30 The published photos and written profiles not only demonstrated what the organizers considered indígena, but what they thought beauty might mean in relation to indigenous peoples, who had been excluded from established canons of Western beauty.Readers were then invited to submit entries of their own. Initially, outside entries conformed to established criteria. But with time they tended toward whiter women disguised in folkloric dress, or indias whom the sponsors did not consider bonitas.31 Seijas then put the process back on track by publishing more of his own "discoveries." By the later months of the contest, entries strayed less from the organizers' expectations, and fewer lessons in Indianness and nonwhite public beauty were necessary.32 (See figure 2. Note the aesthetic consistency that has developed by this late stage of the contest.) For the India Bonita Contest, publication of photos and repeated training of the audience were vital. Without them there could be no consensus building about the subject. After a winner was selected, the contest even published an article by anthropologist Manuel Gamio explaining how an Indian could be considered beautiful.33The peculiar way the India Bonita Contest was promoted becomes clearer when we compare it to the Concurso Universal de Belleza. Both contests objectified women and feminine beauty, yet we find important differences between the two events. Parisian planners of the French-based Concurso Universal de Belleza invited different countries of the world to send national representatives, and El Universal took charge of organizing the search for Miss Mexico.34 Since it was based upon a relatively agreed-upon canon of beauty, the organizers of the Mexican branch of the competition (some of whom were also involved in the India Bonita Contest) issued a simple call for photos of Mexican beauties. No training of the audience was necessary, nor did the newspaper publish any photos until after the finalists were selected (see figure 3; compare with figures 2 and 4.) Organizers and participants relied on a shared knowledge about what constituted "universal beauty," and no one found it necessary to explain why only white women were included among the finalists.35Despite an interest in promoting a positive valuation of Indianness, the organizers of the India Bonita Contest were themselves ambivalent about things Indian. In the regular beauty contest they praised the elegance of a pose or the impression of a smile. But in the India Bonita Contest they talked about braids, pure race, passive attitudes, mispronounced Spanish, typical Indian clothes, innocence and awkwardness, prayers to the virgin, grinding of corn, and humble social stations. Despite its positive valuation of Indianness, the newspaper remained unwilling to publicly promote Indian beauty as on the same level, or even of the same type, as white beauty. Their ambivalence about Indian beauty became even clearer when the ten finalists were announced (see figure 4) Doubting their own claims that these "indias" were indeed "bonitas," the organizers back-tracked by announcing that in selecting these finalists, "the judges considered only the Indian features of the contestants, and in no way were they guided by ideas of beauty or personality."36Contest organizers were also ambivalent about acknowledging any agency on the part of their female indígena subjects. In none of the many articles discussing whether particular girls were really Indian did the contest organizers think to ask the girls how they defined themselves.37 Nor did organizers encourage girls to take the initiative to enroll themselves in the contest. Instead they urged employers to send in a photo if they had an india bonita in their hire. Accordingly, published profiles consistently listed the name of the discoverer before the name of the girl herself (which was occasionally omitted altogether).38El Universal even tried to convince photographers to "go out to the picturesque populations within their state to search the peasant huts and the cane fields for candidates."39 By the very way they managed the contest, organizers cast non-Indians as the protagonists who delved into the dark corners of Mexico to discover and publicize its passive indigenous wonders. And so, while the contest advocated the inclusion of Indianness as part of the Mexican national identity, it relegated the subjects to a subservient role in the construction of a new relationship between indigenous peoples and the nation.Shortly before the newspaper selected the contest judges, a reporter expressed concern that Mexican judges would choose the whitest, least indigenous of the contestants, the one who most approximated the Western ideal of beauty. This, he feared, would undermine the very intent of the contest. He felt that only foreign judges were free of the anti-indígena prejudices that the Mexican middle and upper classes were supposedly taught since childhood, and hence, foreigners might be more open to Mexican indigenous culture, the "real" Mexico.40 Though the contest organizers decided not to follow the reporter's suggestion regarding foreigners, they seem to have shared some of his concerns, as shown by their decision to include as judges Jorge Enciso (a nativist artist who avidly promoted things Mexican and valorized Indian culture), Manuel Gamio (an anthropologist committed to incorporating Mexico's Indian populations), and Rafael Pérez Taylor (one of the organizers of the contest and future head of the Federal Department of Fine Arts). The other two judges, Carlos Ortega and Aurelio González Carrasco, were recognized authorities in dance and theater.The panel of five judges met near the end of July 1921 to look through hundreds of photographs, from which they selected ten finalists whom they invited to Mexico City at the newspaper's expense.41 A group photo of the finalists reveals ten young women seated in two rows, all dressed in regional clothing (see figure 4). The physical similarity among the contestants is striking, suggesting that the judges shared a fairly narrow definition of what Indian looked like. In addition to physical criteria, the judges were clearly guided by social criteria: the majority of submissions had been of girls working in urban markets, yet most of the finalists were servants from rural regions, suggesting that indias legítimas were supposed to be rural and subservient.When the judges reunited at the beginning of August to evaluate the finalists in person, they quickly narrowed their selection to María Bibiana Uribe and Ignacia Guerrero. Some favored the green-eyed Ignacia Guerrero, but Gamio insisted that no one with light-colored eyes could be considered a real indígena.42 Earlier that year, Gamio had written an article arguing for the need to break down European canons of beauty:Intent on valorizing noncanonical Indian beauty, Gamio stood firm. Finally, the panel settled the matter with a vote, which María Bibiana won, three to two.44Several days after the decision, all the judges voiced sentiments similar to Carlos Ortega's statement that to crown and fete a queen of aboriginal beauty was a meritorious act that vindicated a "repressed, despised, and forgotten caste that has been ignored by Mexican artists, musicians and writers." Jorge Enciso added that until now Mexicans had never recognized the worth of the Indian. This contest, he said, was a nationalist act that reminded everyone that even though they had been oppressed and kept down, Indians remained a vital part of Mexico. Gamio stressed that the contest marked an important first step toward culturally integrating the populations of Mexico because it helped bring Indians into the national fold and drew attention to the need for their economic advancement and redemption. He insisted that it was crucial that the winner be an authentic Indian, and he guaranteed us that María Bibiana Uribe was the real thing. Should anyone doubt his judgment, he was prepared to compare her physical measurements to Jenk's Anthropomorphic Index, a table of the ideal bodily measurement of each race.45Heartened by the judges' comments, the newspaper expressed satisfaction with the attention the India Bonita Contest had received up to that point, and with the way it had infused the 1921 Centennial celebrations with a new kind of nationalist fervor based on an association with the indigenous masses. This competition, the newspaper claimed, was "as much a realization of beauty as an example of civic education, because it contributed to the current movement to affirm national unity by identifying … with all the components of the Mexican races."46The India Bonita Contest became an inspiration for Mexican artists seeking to tap into the nation's cultural uniqueness. The day after the judges selected María Bibiana Uribe as the winner, El Universal ran on its front page a large photo of the 15-year-old from the Sierra de Puebla.47 One of the accompanying articles paid particular attention to her exotic, but distinctive rural experience, her homemade indigenous-style costume (her tixtle, her quixquematle), her language ("Mexicano" [Náhuatl]), and the specifics of her racial lineage ("Aztec").48The articles continued with another full page that included a three-quarter plane, full-length image of a barefoot María Bibiana (see figure 4). In her hands she held a lacquered bowl made from a gourd and decorated in the style of Olinalá, Guerrero (which was beginning to gain popularity as an authentically Mexican style of artisanship). Though the bowl had been handed to her in the photography studio as a prop (no doubt to highlight her aesthetic authenticity), one of the reporters suggested that it belonged to her. He encouraged readers to picture her wearing the bowl on her head to protect her from the sun (a common practice among indigenous peasants in Central Mexico at the time), and using it to scoop drinking water from mountain springs during her long walks in the woods.49 He concluded that María Bibiana was a shy rural Indian girl about to receive public fame beyond her provincial imagination, a "fortunate Cinderella who brings with her all the grace of our lakes, our sky, our countryside, our forests… . [T]his pretty and fortunate little Indian girl brings with her all the good of the nation."50 Published photos of Bibiana further emphasized her indigenousness, along with her simplicity and purity (see figures 5 and 6).Just hours after the judges' vote, journalist Jacobo Dalevuelta interviewed María Bibiana in the offices of the newspaper.51 Dalevuelta recounted that when he asked for her age, she responded, "I don't know, Sir, I have no idea." At first, this gave him pause, he claimed, but upon further reflection he realized that there was no reason she should know her age:Dalevuelta further exoticized her by rendering her speech in an exaggerated Indian dialect, making her seem exotic, rustic, and uneducated. He concluded the Spanish-language interview with María Bibiana (who spoke very little Spanish at the time, though Dalevuelta never informs the reader of this) by asking if she was happy:The popularity of the India Bonita Contest catapulted María Bibiana Uribe into the center of Mexico City social circles, and she began receiving invitations to numerous theat
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