La Raza Cosmética: Beauty, Identity, and Settler Colonialism in Postrevolutionary Mexico

Critical Issues in Indigenous Studies

by Natasha Varner

In the decades following the Mexican Revolution, nation builders, artists, and intellectuals manufactured ideologies that continue to give shape to popular understandings of indigeneity and mestizaje today. Postrevolutionary identity tropes emerged as part of broader efforts to reunify the nation and solve pressing social concerns, including what was posited in the racist rhetoric of the time as the “Indian problem.” Through a complex alchemy of appropriation and erasure, indigeneity was idealized as a relic of the past while mestizaje was positioned as the race of the future. This period of identity formation coincided with a boom in technology that introduced a sudden proliferation of images on the streets and in there were more photographs in newspapers, movie houses cropped up across the country, and printing houses mass-produced calendar art and postcards. La Raza Cosmética traces postrevolutionary identity ideals and debates as they were dispersed to the greater public through emerging visual culture.

Critically examining beauty pageants, cinema, tourism propaganda, photography, murals, and more, Natasha Varner shows how postrevolutionary understandings of mexicanidad were fundamentally structured by legacies of colonialism, as well as shifting ideas about race, place, and gender. This interdisciplinary study smartly weaves together cultural history, Indigenous and settler colonial studies, film and popular culture analysis, and environmental and urban history. It also traces a range of Indigenous interventions in order to disrupt top-down understandings of national identity construction and to “people” this history with voices that have all too often been entirely ignored.

Genres: Nonfiction, History

200 pages, Paperback

First published October 6, 2020

Reviews

[Geoffrey King]

Varner’s interpretation of Indigenous experiences in post-revolutionary Mexico is fascinating. The book focuses on a few key examples to emphasize the impact of settler colonialism in a nation that was shaping a new cultural identity. Most of these concepts are related to fashion, media, tourism, and of course, ethnicity.

The central argument is quite clear, and it is referenced many times throughout the text. The narrative, however, never seems to get stale, as the writing is high quality.

Informative, insightful, and provides attention to people and communities that have historically been overlooked.

4/5

[Izzy Wilson]

I read this book for my JSIS 325 course at the University of Washington.

While I enjoyed this book and found it very informative, I also found it somewhat repetitive. Of course, this is partly necessary in any academic text to ensure hypothesis' made are not based on singular evidence but patterns.

I particularly enjoyed Chapter 3 about the way Indigenous women were viewed in film and Chapter 5 about Luz Jimenez's life. If you are looking to advance your knowledge about how systems of oppression are reproduced through media, this is a great book. However, I recommend a background knowledge of Mexican history, particularly the Revolution, before starting this book.