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

2004; Duke University Press; Volume: 84; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-84-1-37

1527-1900

Deborah Poole,

Latin American and Latino Studies

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.”1Two 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 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.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 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 and servile, and, importantly, as at once incommensurably “other” and sentimentally “ours.” Indians were both the past that hindered progress and the original Oaxaqueños. This inconsistency is not, however, particular to Mexican racial thought; this fluid relation between apparently contradictory positions is inherent to European racial discourse in general, as well as to the various Latin American racial understandings that have descended from it. As historians of the concept have noted, Latin American social thought is marked by ongoing, contentious, and unresolved debates over definitions and understandings of race: as biological essence, historical genealogy, cultural identity, and national foundation.4 In fact, we might argue that this ambiguity distinguishes the concept of race and lends it its singular power to mobilize older social prejudices and modes of understanding difference, reworking them to fit the exigencies of changing social and political landscapes—always present but never quite the same. This fluidity, or “adaptability,” of racial discourse precludes a singular meaning or signification for the term.5 Indeed, we might say that race, like a photograph, bases its authority on science and the supposedly transparent or “empirical” evidence of appearances, while at the same time its actual meaning shifts, sometimes dramatically and at other times with great subtlety, from one person to the next.In this article, I explore the place of photography in the formation of a racial imaginary in which it was possible to conceive of the Indian as at once distant and inferior, degenerate and noble, viscerally “other” and sentimentally “ours.” I suggest that photographic images, such as the anonymous indigenous child, played a double role in the historical formation of a “racial common sense” that was shifting and ambiguous.6 On the one hand, as a representational technology prized for its realism and association with both science and technology, photography contributed to the widely shared popular understanding of race as an empirically measurable, materially tangible, and, above all, visible reality. On the other hand, the multiple readings generated by photographs such as this one reinforced the ambiguity or imprecision inherent in the concept of race. In this respect we might say that race is a sort of “slippery signifier” whose referent changes much as does the meaning of a photograph as it moves between contexts, viewers, places, and, most important, historical periods.It is, however, important to locate this natural synergy between unanchored photographic signs and slippery racial referents within specific historical and social contexts. In Oaxaca, this ambiguous racial discourse took shape in conversation with a series of cultural and political projects, in which Oaxacan artists and intellectuals set out to articulate a distinctive regional identity that could accommodate—or at least acknowledge—the undeniable fact of ethnic diversity in Oaxaca. Photographic images of ethnic, racial, and regional types played a crucial role in these projects, forming icons or images around which Oaxacans could begin to imagine their politically fragmented state as the sum total of its several, regionalized, parts. In addition to this classificatory, or “mapping,” role, the wider circulation of type photos in the early twentieth century provided an imaginative conceptual framework for an emergent, shared sentiment of “Oaxacanness” (Oaxaquenidad). Following the revolution, this sense of a shared identity came to be grounded in the multiple nostalgias associated with a new—and quite deliberately constructed—pantheon of indigenous female types, each representing a distinct region within the state. This new cultural geography gained purchase in the popular imagination through the intimate association of both race and region with women’s clothes and the female body.I begin with a brief look at type photographs in the late Porfiriato, focusing on the ways they played into—and to a certain extent, enabled—the classificatory and comparative projects of the Porfirian state and local intellectuals. I next consider the gendered dynamics of the postcards and type series that Oaxacan photographers produced and sold in the early twentieth century. Finally, I consider the role of the visual discourse of type in several cultural projects promoted by the Oaxacan state in the 1920s and 1930s.During the latter half of the nineteenth century, type photographs were one of the most popular and widely disseminated visual genres in the European world. In cities such as Paris, London, and Berlin, commercial photography studios catered to European curiosity about the physical appearance of Africans, South Americans, Asians, and Polynesians, as well as the more familiar, but equally “exotic,” peasants of rural France, Russia, and Spain. Although some of these type photographs were sold in large format, photographers and collectors alike preferred the smaller and less expensive cartes de visite. As pocket-sized icons of persons whose bodies, customs, and clothes often differed substantially from the European norm, these calling-card portraits of non-European types held tremendous appeal for a European audience intrigued by (and concerned about) their countries’ colonial adventures. This fascination for the non-European other was related to, on the one hand, the calculus of class distinction at the heart of an emerging bourgeois culture and, on the other, the scientific debates regarding the nature and future of the earth’s supposedly distinct races.7At first, the greatest demand for type photographs came from colonial states, which required information on the natives that they hoped to civilize. With the consolidation and expansion of the colonial empires in the 1880s, however, type photographs quickly became fashionable commodities. Many photographers sold type images as part of sets, series, or mounted albums organized according to the origins and supposed racial affiliation of the photographs’ subjects. Most type photos, however, circulated as individual pictures, which collectors prized either as curiosities or as the ellusive pieces they needed to complete their own albums or series of types. The titles given to photographs and collections suggest that many—if not most—collectors had no personal knowledge of the places and peoples whose images they so avidly collected. Far from recreating the intimacy of the traveler’s souvenir, these collections instead seem to echo the rather different aesthetic drive for order that animated both the colonial bureaucrats in their archives and the racial “scientists” in their laboratories.8In Mexico, type photographs first arrived in the 1860s with the French photographers who accompanied Emperor Maximiliano. These early images of Mexican types and occupations served to define and register the resistant, and none-too-familiar, population that the French aspired to govern. The most famous of these imperial photographers was François Aubert, a French photographer who worked directly under the orders of Maximiliano.9 Aubert made portraits of popular types in his Mexico City studio between 1865 and 1866. As in the thousands of other images of peasant, native, and indigenous types taken by European photographers in other parts of the globe, Aubert posed his subjects inside his studio, although usually without the addition of the painted backdrops and furniture that would have served to frame the respectability of his other “white” or criollo subjects.10 Their occupational identities were marked by the various tools and objects placed in the studio space along with the human subject—candle vendors with candles, market women with fruit, water carriers with jugs, coal sellers with their coal.Aubert sold some of these photographs from his studio in Mexico City. The majority, however, ended up in France, where they no doubt circulated as curiosities—collected and admired alongside the many other series of American, Asian, and African types displayed in the drawing rooms of Paris and other European cities. As one piece of this larger body of colonial images, Aubert’s photographs can thus be said to have served to bolster public interest in the colonial projects of the French state. While copies of Aubert’s photos circulated through the hands and minds of individual collectors, his negatives— now archived in the Royal Army and Military History Museum in Brussels— were considered the property of Maximiliano’s colonial state. This fate suggests that Aubert’s photos may also have served as intelligence—as a means of familiarizing officers of the French imperial forces with the range of types and occupations that comprised the Mexican population.But what “knowledge” or “intelligence” did the French state and its citizens acquire from such photographs? Aubert’s images did not pretend to give a global view of Mexico, nor did they provide the sort of anthropometric information that served to identify individuals in Alphonse Bertillon’s criminal, or signaletic, photography.11 Moreover, Aubert photographed not the liberal elites or criollo middle classes who might have been expected to pose a political challenge to the self-styled emperor, but rather the tradesmen and vendors who moved through the streets and markets of Mexico City. The two contemporary references for European viewers would have been the widely read scientific and travel accounts of Mexican types and the equally popular physiognomies (books or catalogs containing descriptions and images of the physical, social, and occupational types found in contemporary European cities).12 Of course, viewers may also have compared the images with those of natives from other parts of the world. The fascination or pleasure that drove people to search for similarities among such series of photographic types was not unlike the administrative and statistical practices through which state bureaucracies projected a notion of population as the subject of modern, scientific governance. Rather than documenting or providing intelligence on the identities of particular individuals, type photographs made individuals “knowable” as an orderly sequence of types and categories that constituted a population or nation. What made people want to look at these subjects—and “know” them—however, was an aesthetic curiosity for the inherently opaque, and hence unknowable, referent of the photographs themselves.The oldest type photographs from Oaxaca are also found in the archives of the Porfirian state. These identification photos form part of the registries of prisoners, prostitutes, shoe shine boys, cargadores, and water carriers maintained by the Oaxacan state from the early 1890s to approximately 1940 (see figure 2).13 What interests me about these photographs is not so much the fact that the state collected them—an administrative procedure introduced by Maxi-miliano and maintained as more or less standard practice in Mexico ever since.14 Instead, it is the way that they—like the photos of Aubert—conform rigorously to the prevailing style or genre of type: water carriers pose with their water jars against painted backdrops, shoe shine boys pose with their boxes and brushes, many subjects pose with the same hat (which, in all likelihood, belonged to the photographer). The repetitiveness of form and gesture stands out, rather than the singularity of individuals or personalities. The fact that subjects were posed in front of the same painted backdrop heightens this effect of regularity.15 Apparently, these photographs (as with Aubert’s) served not so much to record information about the individuals shown as to establish and stabilize the statistical and classificatory categories that constituted the population itself. The entries for prostitutes, for example, provide minutely detailed records of their careers, including their ages, addresses where they had practiced their trade, encounters with police, and medical histories. The registry provides no details—date, place, cause—on the women’s deaths, however. The registrar simply scrawled “dead” (muerta) in large, handwritten letters at an angle across the page: the brute fact of the woman’s nonexistence as a relevant social statistic.We can thus identify a first—and perhaps even primary—use for the registry photographs in the desire of nineteenth-century liberal states and governing elites to envision and control the populations that formed the objects of “positive” or scientific governance.16 The portraits conformed to a visual canon of types that allowed them to be identified—and registered—according to trade. While the state-driven logic behind registry photographs no doubt inflected how contemporaries read them, it is important to remember that neither the visual images, nor the written documents through which states attempted to govern their populations, had singular meanings. This is particularly true if we focus on the circulation of documents and images in society— not just their origins in particular ideological projects but also their afterlife as images that both shape and interact with the inherently incoherent and shifting set of ideas that constitute commonsense understandings of race. Here we might want to think, for example, of the different ways in which desire and fantasy may have disrupted the tidy statistical order of the prostitutes’ registry. Thus, for some of women in the registry, we might imagine ways in which their portraits allowed them to imagine—or even to project—distinctive or alternative class positions and modes of being.17 Similarly, for the men who organized the registries and who had a somewhat privileged—and often solitary—access to them, the photos might also have offered sites for projecting either sexual or moral fantasies about propriety, deviancy, and transgression.The archive, of course, only rarely offers us direct insight into how historical subjects valued and interpreted specific photographs. A more credible route for contemplating—or speculating—about the multiplicity of meanings that could become attached to a single photograph is to consider how the discursive and technological qualities of photography itself sometimes work against the very forms of legibility and empirical documentation that photographs were intended to provide as part of official registries and statistical projects. Here it is useful to turn to a different sort of collection that offers more information on how photographs were interpreted.The first such project I want to consider here is the comprehensive visual and descriptive inventory of archaeological sites and ethnological regions put together by the liberal Oaxacan intellectual Manuel Martínez Gracida. Compiled during the final years of his life as a reprise of his accumulated studies on Oaxacan history and ethnology, the eight handwritten and artisanally bound volumes of Martínez’s Los indios oaxaqueños y sus monumentos arqueológicos present a synthesis of his theories on Zapotec civilization, Oaxacan exceptionalism, and the ethnological diversity of his native state.18 While it is possible that Martínez, who was a member of the National Statistical Society, modeled Los indios oaxaqueños on the more ambitious compilations of types that had been previously published by Antonio García Cubas and other statisticians, his project is unique for its focus on the cultural unity of a specific region (as opposed to nation).19 As we will see, this regional focus made Los indios oaxaqueños of particular interest for the generation of Oaxacan intellectuals who would shape the revolutionary state in the 1920s.20Before moving on to consider the afterlife of Martínez’s images in these postrevolutionary regionalist projects, however, it is helpful to ask what Martínez’s own pictorial strategies can tell us about the complexities of “race” in Porfirian Oaxaca. For his final project, he commissioned close to 150 watercolors of Oaxacan “ethnological types” from artists in Oaxaca and Mexico City. Of these, 142 appear in volume 5, Ethnological Types. These watercolors are in two basic styles. In the first, the artist provides a detailed rendering of clothing, jewelry, landscape, and crafts, and leaves the physical (or phenotypic) features and skin color of the subjects undefined (see figure 3). In the second, the artists make direct reference to the photographs on which the paintings are based. Not only do they reproduce the details of costumes, facial expression, and phenotype in “photographic detail,” they also include the columns and other studio props in a way that anchors these handwrought representations in the documentary and mechanical authority of photographic realism (see figure 4). Elements suggestive of a photographic studio setting were even included in many of the paintings of precolumbian Oaxacan rulers. In this way, Martínez harnessed his portrayals of discrete ethnological classifications (and imaginative precolumbian rulers) to the indexical authority of the photographic image.Martínez’s comments on the first type of illustration are concerned almost exclusively with details of costume, custom, and language. In the photographically based plates, however, his eye clearly focuses on the details of skin color, physiognomy, and general physical appearance that, in the positivist scientific theories of the time, constituted race. The only actual photograph included in the manuscript presents a formal studio portrait of six elderly Zapotec as “descendents of Cosijoeza.” This group “marks the direct and transverse descent of that King. The generic type has not changed other than in the majesty of its countenance and some small physiognomic detail.”21 Martínez’s particular interest in these men’s portrait, however, had to do with his claim that “the mustache has not been absent in men of this lineage.” Indeed, he concluded, as examples of “pure ancient types,” their facial hair constituted “proof that the ancient King Cosijoeza also had a mustache.”22 His comments on another plate of “Mitla Indians” again point to the men’s physical appearance (this time, their noses) to establish proof both that they were Zapotec and that Mixtecs had never had a significant presence in the ancient town of Mitla.23 He again uses the language of physiognomy when commenting on another plate of “Zaachila Indians,” whom he describes as having “rigid and unattractive physiognomic features [recios y de poca belleza].” The man, he continues, “has a rounded head and lacks grooming that would reveal cleanliness; his face is oval and with a high forehead, the eyebrows arched, small eyes, straight nose, a normal mouth with scant mustache, [and] an oval and thin beard.” As in his analysis of the Zapotec photograph, Martínez here cites physiognomy as evidence for his historical conclusion that “these descendants of King Cosijoeza do not reveal the fine type of the Mixtec-Zapotec race and their ancestors.”24Martínez’s interest in documenting the physical evidence of these men’s racial heritage was tied to his other, related project—to prove the historical origins of Oaxacan culture and “identity” (although this was not a term he would have used) in the precolumbian civilization of the Isthmus Zapotec. In the texts that accompany the plates—and in his other published writings—Martínez staunchly defends the theory (first put forward in Father José Antonio Gay’s influential History of Oaxaca) that the Zapotec were the sole autochthonous race to be found in modern Oaxaca.25 In this version of Oaxacan history, the state’s many other ethnic groups were believed to have migrated to Oaxaca from Central America, China, or even (in the case of the Mixes) from Central Europe. They thus lived in, but were not racially autochthonous to, Oaxaca. To defend his argument, Martínez makes use of distinctive visual regimes to distinguish the cultural or ethnological status of the non-Oaxacan tribus, or tribes, from the racial claim for Zapotec civilizational ascendancy. Thus, as we have seen, he used picturesque watercolors to index the material culture and clothes through which “tribes” could be identified and photography as evidence for the genealogical primacy of the Zapotec race.26In his use of visual images, Martínez thus effectively separates cultural concerns from the more rigorous material and scientific calculus of race. Whereas he saw “tribes,” such as the Chinatecas or Mazateca, as the bearers of distinctive costumes and customs (what we would today gloss as “culture”), he conjugated the notion of race through a genealogical language in which purity of blood was tied to both place of origin and civilizational achievement. Women—the seemingly universal markers of locality and place—played a particularly important role in this genealogical vision of Zapotec civilization. Thus, while Martínez’s speculations on the physiognomic calculus of racial purity focus on the photographs and (photographically based) portraits of Zapotec men, he outlines his genealogical theory of Zapotec civilization through a series of comments on portraits of upper-class Zapotec women. Of the 49 type portraits included in Ethnological Types, 5 are portraits of precolumbian Zapotec rulers and 16 are of contemporary Zapotec types from Zaachila, Mitla, and Tehuantepec. Of these 16, half are portraits of Zapotec women from Tehuantepec. Although Martínez includes two Tehuanas from what he calls the “clase popular” and one from the “clase media,” he was most interested in the “Tehuantepecanas de clase superior.” Martínez comments on the tremendous wealth in jewels, land, and money these women had supposedly accumulated and describes in detail their elegant lace headdresses, embroidered skirts, and gold jewelry, which had already become their trademark in Mexican society. Clearly, Martínez saw their wealth and beauty as evidence for the survival of the aristocratic civilization that he had praised in his other published works. Martínez was, of course, in good company in his admiration for the women of Juchitán and Tehuantepec. Several generations of French, American, and British travelers had singled out the Isthmus Zapotec as living examples of what an indigenous modernity might mean.27 For Martínez, however, the Tehuana held out a different sort of hope for defining a Oaxacan identity that was neither (in the language of the day) racially degenerate nor lacking in the all-important civilizational attributes of class stratification, sumptuary display, and wealth. The Tehuana thus offered Martínez a means to imagine an indigenous, Oaxacan culture that was simultaneously autochthonous and aristocratic, while banishing the messy realities of the surrounding indigenous population to the realm of ethnological curiosities.Martínez’s visual vocabulary of race and tribe was no doubt influenced by the work of his friend Frederick Starr, a North American scientist who passed through Oaxaca in 1896 and 1899 as part of a large expedition to study “the physical types of the native tribes” of southern Mexico. In keeping with his scientific mission, Starr used photography as an instrument that would permit him to perceive the racial order that lay hidden beneath the apparently confusing variety of phenotypes and cultures he encountered in Oaxaca. This diversity— which seemed to contradict Starr’s own scientific assumptions and understandings of races as easily perceivable and isolatable phenotypes—served as inspiration for a second expedition in 1899, in which he hoped to put some order to the racial disorder of Oaxaca. Following the by-then well-established formulas of anthropometric photography, Starr ordered his photographer, Charles Lang, to make a front and profile shot of each indigenous subject.28 In addition to these individual portraits (or mug shots), Starr also requested that Lang “photograph groups showing full-length figures and costumes,” as well as “daily and life industries” and general views of houses, towns, and landscapes.29 The vast majority of Starr’s photographs, however, consisted of the classic front and profile portraits.Starr’s comments on these photographs reveal the cultural logic of type at work. Starr comments, for example, that a certain Triqui man from Chicahuaxtla represents a “fine type.” Another Mixe-speaking man from Ayutla, however, was judged only a “good type.” Others were qualified as “fair type,” “good subject,” “characteristic subject,” and so on. In Tlacolula (in Oaxaca’s Central Valley), Starr arranged for one man, Onofre Hernández, to be sent to the Congress of Americanists in Lima, as a near perfect example of an “ancient type.” The curious thing about Mr. Hernández, however, is that, although considered sufficiently representative of an ancient racial type to be shipped off to Peru, Starr nonetheless describes Hernández as “Mixteco-Zapoteco,” a hyphenated category that Starr elsewhere dismisses as a mixed (and hence impure) race.30For the modern-day reader of Starr’s notes, what is most striking is his tenacious defense of the idea of type as a readily visible physiognomy or phenotype, against the evidence of his own photographs, which suggest just the opposite: that Oaxacan society was made up of infinitely varying human countenances. Below photographs that he presents as empirical evidence of the existence and visibility of discrete “racial types,” Starr laments the scarcity of “good types” in the Oaxacan population. For this North American scientist, photography was not just a means to document the bodies and faces of the Oaxacan Indians he encountered. It was a visual technology for imposing statistical regularities (in the form of phenotypes) on a society where such regularities were, by his own admission, not readily observable—even in the photographs he had taken to document them. As in the registries maintained by different agencies of the Porfirian state, Starr’s goal was not to acquire knowledge of the individuals who made up society but rather to establish the presence of the material, empirical and, above all, observable categories or types through which a population—in this case a racial population—could be both imagined and administered. In this sense, and by push