Joanne Hershfield is Professor of Media Studies and Chair of the Curriculum in Women’s Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She is the author of The Invention of Dolores del Rio and Mexican Cinema/Mexican Woman, 1940–1950 and a coeditor of Mexico’s Cinema: A Century of Film and Filmmakers.

Imagining la Chica Moderna

WOMEN, NATION, AND VISUAL CULTURE IN MEXICO, 1917-1936By Joanne Hershfield

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2008 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4221-2

Contents

Illustrations………………………………………………………ixAcknowledgments…………………………………………………….xiiiIntroduction……………………………………………………….31 Visualizing the New Nation………………………………………..212 En Mxico como en Pars: Fashioning la Chica Moderna…………………443 Domesticating la Chica Moderna…………………………………….734 Picturing Working Women…………………………………………..1025 La Moda Mexicana: Exotic Women…………………………………….127Conclusion. Imagining “Real” Mexican Women…………………………….156Notes……………………………………………………………..163Bibliography……………………………………………………….173Index……………………………………………………………..195

Chapter One

Visualizing the New Nation

Santa (directed by Antonio Moreno, 1931), based on a novel published in 1903 by Federico Gamboa, and one of the first successful Mexican sound films, narrates the tragedy of a young peasant girl, abandoned by her lover, who escapes to Mexico City to avoid the wrath of her brothers. The transition from the film’s prologue, set in the rural village of Chimalistac, to Santa’s arrival in Mexico City illustrates her entrance into the space of modernity. The film’s, and Santa’s, introduction to the city presents the idea that urban modernity was “overstimulating” to millions of rural migrants who poured into Mexico City during the first few decades of the new century. The deliberate juxtaposition of the ordered, uncluttered, immobile “premodern” rural landscape with the scene of modern urban life marked by a visual and aural intensity, an overabundance of stimuli, and a formless and crowded discontinuity, is visualized through the female body: a fade-to-black from an image of Santa lying in the dust of Chimalistac as her lover rides off with his troops is followed by a fade-in to a montage of “technologies of amusement”-a spinning game wheel, a Ferris wheel, and a merry-go-round.

The optical effect itself serves as a metaphor for historical, social, and cinematic change. Through the technology of the modern cinema, Santa’s body is aligned with the mechanical body that is representative of modern life as both woman and the cinema become modern. The use of a static camera and immobile framing in the prologue is replaced by a moving camera and mobile composition while the melodramatic acting style of silent film gives way to a more realist technique. As the film fades up from black, a sequence of documentary-style footage shot with a hand-held, moving camera reveals the crowd of modern life moving as one body through a bustling urban marketplace, the symbol of commodified modern space.

We can begin to make out that this crowd is composed of individuals: some are clothed in modern dress, others wear the traditional clothing of their village; women with bobbed hair and cloche hats mingle with those adorned in long braids tied with ribbons, and men in suits rub shoulders with Indians in the peasant’s uniform of white pants and shirt. It is a stark image of the modern, postrevolutionary Mexican nation that is made up of new and old, middle class and working class, traditional and contemporary modes of being. This scene also emphasizes the “sensational” aspect of modern urban life, or, more precisely, the overload of sensory stimulus that modern citizens are exposed to. The camera’s point of view simulates what it is like to move through the multitude, a mass of bodies that moves as if it is a single giant organism. The camera glances here and there at the mix of social characters brought together in the modern city. Finally, it rests on Santa’s face and registers her expression of shock and wonder at her first encounter with the intensity and discontinuity of modernity.

At the end the nineteenth century, Mexico City enjoyed the reputation of a cosmopolitan, European-style urban center. Porfirio Daz, the army general who seized power in Mexico in 1876, was intent on the modernization of Mexico through the philosophy of liberal positivism, a Mexican version of the Enlightenment that promoted the logic of rationality and science as the motor of progress. The object of Daz and his supporters, los cientficos as they were called-a privileged group of businessmen and political intellectuals-was to modernize Mexico under a banner of “peace, order, and progress” through the mechanisms of capitalism and rational management. Their influences were the global discourses of social Darwinism and the neoliberal philosophies of the French sociologist Auguste Comte. Under Daz (1876-1910), Mexico enjoyed political and economic stability, rising wages, a booming population growth, and the ascendancy of an entrepreneurial middle class.

With a population in 1895 of approximately 330,000, Mexico City presented itself to the world as a vibrant cosmopolitan urban center. Stately historic government buildings that circled the Zcalo, or city center, celebrated the city’s colonial heritage; ornate mansions and modern colonias (residential housing developments), erected in the neighborhoods conjoining the Zcalo, housed the wealthy and the rising middle class; picturesque horse-drawn carriages shared the street with the occasional automobile; and fashionably dressed women spent their afternoons strolling the main artery, the Paseo de la Reforma, perusing the aisles of modern department stores, such as the Compaa Mercantil. This elegant facade, however, could not entirely cover up the underbelly of modernity. Millions of migrants from impoverished rural areas flooded city streets, selling food, crafts, and their labor. On the east side of the Zcalo, one would encounter overcrowded and unsanitary dwellings, disease, and unpaved streets covered in garbage and waste. If the wealthy landowning and bourgeois classes enjoyed the fruits of economic expansion, the lives of the majority of Mexicans stagnated as most were locked into a system of debt peonage or low industrial wages.

Most economic historians agree that structural changes that ensued during the reign of Daz were due primarily to economic and political policies that liberalized trade, redistributed property, and nationalized a number of industries. The policies of Daz’s administration favored the urban entrepreneurial class and the mining and manufacturing sectors, even though 80 percent of the population was rural and “seldom entered the market economy” (Hansen, 24). An unprecedented migration of rural peasants into industrializing urban centers led to an emerging low-wage proletariat class who worked in Mexican industry’s expanding production sectors, such as textiles, steel manufacturing, and mining. Between 1895 and 1910, Mexico City experienced a population increase of 50 percent.

One statistic often overlooked is that, according to census data, the majority of migrants to the capital-53 percent-were women (Lear, 52-54). The lives of all women, regardless of their social status, changed significantly during this period. For example, while married women remained under the control of their husbands, unmarried women gained new social civil rights. Additionally, the changes engendered by the industrial revolution and the increase in the mass production of goods once manufactured at home, meant that middle- and upper-class women no longer had to work alongside their husbands to maintain the hacienda. Domesticity and motherhood became full-time occupations. Women of the moneyed classes were able to take advantage of increased access to education through an expansion of public education, and they entered male-gendered fields of business, teaching, nursing, and politics (Soto, 5). A young woman named L. Josefina Reyes insisted in 1903 that “our period of progress and of struggle has opened a wide field where one can struggle for life, to improve her intellectual and moral power, which is not inferior to that of man” (quoted in Vallens, 20).

Lower-class women also experienced the effects of Daz’s social and economic policies, albeit in a very different way. Displaced from their work in the fields of the haciendas, many migrated to Mexico City and other urban centers looking for work. They found jobs in textile and cigar manufacturing; worked as domestics and as clerks in small shops and offices; and earned wages in clothing and textile factories as costureras, or seamstresses. Some industrious women became entrepreneurs in the “unofficial” market as street vendors and tortilla makers. Many turned to prostitution out of desperation or because they found that they could earn more money in that profession than in any other. Despite their more limited economic and social opportunities, working-class women were also exposed to the same modern ideas as their more affluent sisters, and, if they could not purchase the haute couture on display in the department store window, they could at least admire those fashions.

The history of twentieth-century modernity and the modern Mexican is unquestionably tied to the massive social, cultural, and economic upheaval brought about by the unrelenting seven-year span of hostilities known as the Mexican revolution (1911-17). This upheaval was largely a social and cultural rebellion that was responding to the Porfiriato’s suppression of local autonomy and labor organizing, and its refusal to take on the responsibility of social reform. While the middle and upper classes enjoyed a brief period of economic boom, the majority of Mexicans never realized monetary or lifestyle benefits. The national population doubled, real wages dropped, and the standard of living for Mexico’s poorest remained stagnant and impoverished. To make matters worse, a nationwide agriculture disaster precipitated by the collapse of the sugar industry, a famine in central and northern Mexico, and a severe drop in corn production initiated a severe economic crisis beginning in 1907 (Smith, 163-64).

Widespread economic problems, such as the rising cost of food and other necessities and the resulting increase in peasant and labor unrest, eventually led to the outbreak of armed conflict. In actuality, the hostilities cannot be viewed as a single, organized insurgency in the manner of the French or Soviet revolutions. Instead, Mexicanists have argued that the Mexican revolution was actually a “collection of intertwined revolutions” that included “the old regime … the liberal opposition, largely urban and heavily middle class … [and] the popular movement, essentially rural and peasant in composition” (Knight 1990, 227). Moreover, the conclusion of the armed conflict in 1917 did not bring about resolution among these factions. Instead, the following decade was disrupted by continuing political dissension that occasionally escalated into armed insurgency as in the case of the Cristero Revolt (1926-29), a Catholic rebellion fought at a cost of 80,000 lives.

Despite large-scale social and economic transformations, the shift from the prerevolutionary Porfirian regime to postrevolutionary nationalism cannot be categorized as a movement from tradition to modernity. Instead, this period may be understood as an accelerated shift from one kind of modernizing project to another. Because of the complexity of social and economic ideologies that instigate this civil strife, the group that emerged after 1915 to govern Mexico was an amalgamation made up of the three “major historical actors” of the revolution: the old Porfirian regime; the urban, middle-class liberal opposition; and the rural popular movement. More significantly, unlike the Soviet Revolution in which class conflict was central, the transformation wrought by the Mexican Revolution and its aftermath were, to a large degree, cultural. The seemingly contradictory nature of postrevolutionary national policies supported the rising middle class and capitalist development on one hand, and advocated a populist rhetoric that lobbied for agrarian reform and the rights of the campesino on the other.

A concerted political and cultural process that promoted an idealized revolutionary rhetoric, together with a shared mythologized history of conquest and colonization, molded a national sentiment that united a diverse and divided population. During these two decades, political and cultural nationalism was at the forefront of intellectual and cultural discourse. The central project of the nationalist campaign was the consolidation and amplification of a coherent national identity and the promotion of nationalistic sentiment. This project came up against a number of different historical practices, which included indigenous traditions and structures; religious Catholic traditions and structures; and modern, Western discourses and economic and social structures. The state was involved not merely in constructing a new political formation but also in instituting a new cultural ethos, new social relationships, and social practices that would support a modern citizen. The challenge faced by various postrevolutionary administrations was to unite a radically diverse population, divided by centuries of racial, ethnic, class, and regional allegiances (Knight 1990, 228). Additionally, Mexico faced critical problems of internal migration, labor unrest, unemployment, factional discord, as well as continuing regional revolts and religious conflicts. The state quickly understood that its goal would be achieved not through coercion and repression but through the establishment of a hegemonic populist consensus.

Despite the fact that the state-initiated national project was never totalizing, and that competing and resistant discourses emerged, people divided by regional affiliations, linguistic and ethnic differences, and religious and political beliefs came to identify themselves as Mexican. Although initialized through the will of a powerful political and intellectual elite, the myth of a historically shared understanding of what it meant to be Mexican could not have inserted itself so successfully in the national consciousness unless it somehow engaged the public in this process. Rural Indians and mestizos who migrated to the cities brought their tribal and familial religious and cultural traditions, social values, and familial and gender roles and relationships. They responded to and engaged with modernity differently than those who had been living urban lives for a few generations. Diverse groups mingled in public city spaces of the marketplace, cantinas, and churches, forming new kinds of political and social alliances. While directives on how to be a new Mexican issued from the requirements of the new social order, the eventual adoption or rejection of Mexican nationalism emanated from people’s responses to and experiences with profound transformations in their daily lives. Ultimately, the new citizen was an ambiguous figure who, on one hand, lived and worked in the countryside with family or with people he had known all his life. On the other hand, she was also urban and resided in crowded neighborhoods with unknown and unrelated people, worked in factories or public service, and was a consumer and a producer of goods and services. Regardless of where this new “ideal” citizen lived, however, the nationalist campaign identified the citizen with the nation, rather than with a village, a neighborhood, an extended family, an occupation, or a particular racial or ethnic heritage.

At a material level, the war and its effects (disease and migration, for example) decimated the population of Mexico as a whole. At the same time, the population of Mexico City doubled due primarily to the migration of inhabitants from other states into the city center (Piccato, 21). Piccato points to two interesting and overlooked factors: First, not all of the migrants were uneducated peasants; second, “migration to Mexico City also distinguished itself from that of other areas of the country in that the sex ratio favored women” so that by 1930 women made up more than 55 percent of the population. While the Mexican Constitution of 1917 institutionalized many traditional gendered practices, it did address the rights of women in a number of significant ways: it mandated public primary education for girls as well as boys, instituted protective legislation regarding women and child labor, authorized women the right to initiate divorce, and gave women a number of legal rights in the public sphere of commerce.

Additionally, the state implemented various social projects aimed at women in rural and urban areas that were concerned with transforming child rearing, as well as health and hygiene practices. Along with providing needed services such as postnatal health care and sending teachers to rural villages, social initiatives were also intent on revolutionizing social behavior in order to bring campesinos into the twentieth century. The ideology that informed these initiatives attests to the state’s paternalistic attitude toward its agrarian populations.

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