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Rick A. López is Associate Professor of History at Amherst College.

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"In recent decades, historians of twentieth-century Mexico have reshaped the way we understand state and nation formation--particularly popular constructions of the national--and the role that foreign actors have played in brokering Mexico's distinctive, transnational process of becoming modern. "Crafting Mexico" represents a culminating moment in these inquiries. Better than any study I know, it wrestles with the complex process whereby Mexico transformed itself from a fragmented society, driven by regional loyalties, linguistic and cultural particularism, and caudillo politics, into one of the hemisphere's most unified nations. Part of the answer, Rick A. Lopez argues masterfully, lies in a surprisingly contingent aesthetic and political process that embraced foreign and local actors, cosmopolitan intellectuals and indigenous crafts producers, and a panoply of state and private initiatives. Deftly integrating analytical and spatial dimensions, and bridging temporal boundaries, "Crafting Mexico" is a substantial achievement."--Gilbert M. Joseph, co-editor of "Fragments of a Golden Age: The Politics of Culture in Mexico since 1940"

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CRAFTING MEXICO

Duke University Press

Contents

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS..............................................................................................viiACKNOWLEDGMENTS....................................................................................................ixINTRODUCTION.......................................................................................................1Part I Indianness and the Postrevolutionary Mexican Nation.........................................................27ONE Ethnicizing the Nation: The India Bonita Contest of 1921.......................................................29TWO Popular Art and the Staging of Indianness......................................................................65THREE Foreign-Mexican Collaboration, 1920-1940.....................................................................95FOUR The Postrevolutionary Cultural Project, 1916-1938.............................................................127FIVE The Museum and the Market, 1929-1948..........................................................................151SIX Formulating a State Policy toward Popular Art, 1937-1974.......................................................175Part II Alternative Narratives of Metropolitan Intervention: The Artisans of Olinal, Guerrero.....................195SEVEN The "Unbroken Tradition" of Olinal from the Aztecs through the Revolution...................................201EIGHT Transnational Renaissance and Local Power Struggles, 1920s to 1940s..........................................229NINE The Road to Olinal, 1935-1972................................................................................263CONCLUSIONS........................................................................................................289NOTES..............................................................................................................299BIBLIOGRAPHY.......................................................................................................349INDEX..............................................................................................................381

Chapter One

The public cheered on 18 September 1921, as Mara Bibiana Uribe, a humble housecleaner from Necaxa, Puebla, paraded down the main avenue of Mexico City. The next day leading intellectuals, high society, and politicians-including the Mexican president, Alvaro Obregn-joined middle- and working-class spectators as they crowded into one of the capital's finest theaters for her coronation. A few months earlier no one predicted that the crowning of the India Bonita (Beautiful Indian) would become such a sensation. The contest leading up to Bibiana's election had confronted a reluctant public, such that the anthropologist Manuel Gamio, widely recognized as an expert on indigenous culture and a leading voice for nation-formation, felt the need to explain in a newspaper article how an indigenous woman possibly could be considered beautiful. Who was Bibiana, and why had this humble woman become the focus of so much public attention? And why had it been necessary to convince the reading public of Mexico, one of the most indigenous and mestizo countries in the Americas, that an indigenous woman could be considered beautiful? The answers begin to emerge if we look beyond the common assumption that Mexico's national identity has emerged from the gradual and seamless interweaving of Indians and Europeans into a mestizo, or racially and culturally mixed, society. This chapter focuses on the India Bonita Contest of 1921 as a lens for understanding early 1920s postrevolutionary nation-formation and gendered constructions of Indianness. It does not claim that the con test had a transformative impact on the course of Mexican history, only that it is particularly revealing about the goals, methods, and contradictions inherent in the broader movement to ethnicize national identity and to bring indigenous peoples into the national fold.

The projects of ethnicization and integration were responses to the recent revolution, which had revealed and even exacerbated the deep fragmentation of the population. In 1921 fighters at last began to lay down their arms and the new president, the northern general Alvaro Obregn, began to reestablish state authority. Intellectuals and politicians set out to unify Mexico's population as a nation so as to forestall a new cycle of social disintegration and to initiate an era of modernization. This was the period when the educator and soon-to-be minister of education Jos Vasconcelos, often hailed as a father of the Mexican renaissance, traveled to many of the federal states to convince legislators to ratify the creation of a federal education system (which would extend public education and the nationalist project into the rural corners of Mexico). Obregn announced the creation of the Escuela de Verano (Summer School for Foreigners) at the National University in Mexico City, which would soon become a launching ground for studies of popular culture and a key institution for better understanding "the Mexican people." The secretary of transportation and communications, after a drawn-out debate over whether Mexico needed roads, announced plans for new highways to tie together the regions of the country. 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. Such initiatives were very different from one another and of radically different scales, but they all were steps toward uniting the population around a common identity.

In their search for an authentic national culture around which to unite the population, so as to move the country toward its own distinctive form of modernity, nationalists looked to the grounded experiences and worldviews of the masses. They debated which aspects of popular and indigenous culture merited celebration and which should be extirpated due to their "backwardness." A growing number of nationalists focused overtly upon contemporary (as opposed to archaeological) Indianness as the thread that could unite the people and, at the same time, distinguish Mexico among a global family of nation-states. They chastised those who rejected the country's Indianness, charging them with "foreignness" and insufficient nationalist zeal.

This indigenous-oriented nationalism found expression in such events as the India Bonita Contest, but it was not the dominant discourse. In fact, many civic leaders refused to link the idea of national identity to living indigenous cultures, preferring a continued focus on Hispanic roots and the preconquest Maya and Aztec past. Others, such as Vasconcelos, advocated a form of mestizaje that evaded or minimized the need to validate the idea of "Indianness." It was not yet clear whether the pro-indigenous discourse would prove compelling. Moreover, even as the India Bonita Contest spoke to this emerging project of ethnicized cultural nation building, it was not an uncompromised nationalist act. As will become clear, part of the reason the former revolutionary Flix Palavicini initiated the contest was to draw public attention to his newspaper El Universal. Theater houses, artists, and intellectuals subsequently joined forces with the contest, blending cultural nationalism with commercial...