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

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.”1 Two 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 My research on Oaxacan photography was made possible by fellowships from the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and the American Council of Learned Societies. In Oaxaca, I benefited from the institutional and personal support provided by colleagues at the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (CIESAS–Istmo), where I was housed as a research affiliate from January 1998 to January 1999. I am also grateful to the Archivo Histórico de la Municipalidad de Oaxaca, the Archivo General del Estado de Oaxaca, Diego Rodríguez and Luz María López de Rodríguez of Foto Estudio Velásquez, Juan Ignacio Bustamante Vasconcelos of the Fundación Bustamante, and Irma Rivas of Foto Estudio Rivas for permission to publish the photographs included in this article. 1. El Oaxaqueño (Oaxaca), 2 Dec. 1933, p. 1. Hispanic American Historical Review 84:1 Copyright 2004 by Duke University Press

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HAHR / February / Poole

Figure 1. “The childhood of the peasantry is represented here in this Indian, who seems to look to the horizon waiting for the Revolution that will arrive to redeem his degraded race” (El Oaxaqueño, 2 Dec. 1933).

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 2. “La dignidad de Indio,” [unsigned editorial] El Oaxaqueño, 2 Apr. 1933.

An Image of “Our Indian”

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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 3. On photographic realism, see, among others, Roland Barthes, “Rhetoric of the Image,” in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath ( New York: Hill & Wang, 1977), 32 – 51; Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Illuminations ( New York: Schocken, 1969), 217 – 54; and Alan Sekula, Photography against the Grain (Halifax: Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1984). 4. On the history of racial thought in Latin America, see among others, Marisol de la Cadena, Indigenous Mestizos: The Politics of Race and Culture in Cuzco, Peru, 1919 –1991 (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2000); Jorge I. Dominguez, ed., Race and Ethnicity in Latin America ( New York: Garland, 1994); Jeffrey Gould, To Die in This Way: Nicaraguan Indians and the Myth of Mestizaje, 1880 –1965 (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1998); Greg Grandin, The Blood of Guatemala: A History of Race and Nation (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2000); Richard Graham, ed., The Idea of Race in Latin America (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1990); Nancy Stepan, The Hour of Eugenics: Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1991); Verena Stolcke, Marriage, Class, and Colour in NineteenthCentury Cuba (London: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1974); and Peter Wade, Race and Ethnicity in Latin America (London: Pluto, 1997). For Mexico, see especially Andrés Basave Benitez, México mestizo: Análisis del nacionalismo mexicano en torno a la mestizofilia de Andrés Molina

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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

Enríquez (Mexico City: FCE, 1992); Alexander S. Dawson, “From Models for the Nation to Model Citizens: Indigenismo and the Revindication of the Mexican Indian, 1920 –1940,” Journal of Latin American Studies 30 (1998): 279 – 308; Charles A. Hale, Mexican Liberalism in the Age of Mora, 1821– 53 ( New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1968), 215 – 47; Alan Knight, “Racism, Revolution, and Indigenismo: Mexico, 1910 –1940,” in The Idea of Race in Latin America, ed. R. Graham (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1990), 71–113; Moisés González Navarro, Población y sociedad en México (Mexico City: UNAM, 1974); and Gerardo Rénique, “Anti-Chinese Racism, Nationalism, and State Formation in Post-Revolutionary México, 1920s–1930s,” Political Power and Social Theory 14 (2000): 91–140. 5. On the ambiguity of the concept of race, see, among others, Robert Bernasconi, “Who Invented the Concept of Race? Kant’s Role in the Enlightenment Construction of Race,” in Race, ed. R. Bernasconi (London: Blackwell, 2000), 11– 36; Michel Foucault, Genealogía del racismo (Madrid: La Piqueta, 1992); David Theo Goldberg, Racist Culture (London: Blackwell, 1993); Nicholas Hudson, “From Nation to Race: The Origin of Racial Classification in Eighteenth-Century Thought,” Eighteenth Century Studies 29 (1996): 247 – 64; Walter Benn Michaels, “Race into Culture: A Critical Genealogy of Cultural Identity,” Critical Inquiry 18 (summer 1992): 655 – 85; Deborah Poole, Vision, Race, and Modernity: A Visual Economy of the Andean Image World (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1997); and Anne Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1995). 6. I use “common sense” in the Gramscian sense: a mode of explanation or understanding that stands “midway between folklore proper . . . and the philosophy, science, and economics of the scientists.” Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Cultural Writings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1985), 421; see also Kate Crehan, Gramsci, Culture, and Anthropology (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2002), 110 –15. For Gramsci, common sense was not a natural expression of either human reason or local culture, but


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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. the product of a continuously changing sorting of ideas, concepts, and representations that filtered down from the realm of literature, science, and philosophy into popular understandings of the world. As such, common sense, for Gramsci, is inherently “fragmentary [and] incoherent.” Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks ( New York: International, 1971), 419. In considering how images shape the visual imaginary and, through it, commonsense understandings of cultural and racial difference, it is precisely this quality of incoherence that interests me.

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Type and Typology in Porfirian Archives

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 nonEuropean 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.7 At 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 col7. On the class dynamics of nineteenth-century portraiture, see especially André Rouillé, L’empire de la photographie, 1839 –1870 (Paris: Le Sycomore, 1982); André Rouillé, La photographie en France: Textes et controverses, 1816 –1871 (Paris: Macula, 1989); Alan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” in The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography, ed. Ralph Bolton (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), 343 – 89; John Tagg, The Burden of Representation (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1988); and Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images As History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans ( New York: Noonday, 1989). On race and photography, see Deborah Poole, Vision; and Elizabeth Edwards, Raw Histories: Photographs, Anthropology, and Museums ( New York: Berg, 2001).


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lections 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.8 In 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 Ameri8. On the aesthetics and classificatory logic of type albums and collections, see Elizabeth Edwards, “Photographic Types: In Pursuit of Method,” Visual Anthropology 3 (2 – 3): 235 – 58; Edwards, Raw Histories, 131– 55; Michel Frizot et al., Identités: De Disdéri au photomaton (Paris: Centre National de la Photographie; Editions du Chene, 1985); Chris Pinney, “Colonial Anthropology and the Laboratory of Mankind,” in The Raj: India and the British, 1600 –1942, ed. C. Bayley (London: National Portrait Gallery, 1990); Poole, Vision, 107 –141; and David Prochaska, “The Archive of Algerie Imaginaire,” History and Anthropology 4 (1990): 373 – 420. On the aesthetic of collection in general, see Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects (London: Verso, 1996); Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book Collecting,” in Illuminations, 59 – 67; James Clifford, “On Collecting,” in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1998), 215 – 51; Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1999). 9. On Aubert, see Arturo Aguilar Ochoa, La fotografía durante el imperio de Maximiliano (Mexico City: UNAM; Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, 1996), 115 –127; and Olivier Debroise, Fuga mexicana: Un recorrido por la fotografía en México (Mexico City: Cultura Contemporánea de México, 1994), 107 – 8. 10. Studio backdrops and props were critical to the ways in which type photos were read. As a semiritualized space, the portrait studio formed part of an interpretive calculus

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can, 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

through which mid-nineteenth-century Europeans sought to decipher physical appearance as evidence for the moral character, social standing, and dignity of the “individual.” In the thousands of photos of occupational and racial types that began circulating in Europe during the 1860s and 1870s, this morally charged space of the studio marked the social and aesthetic distance separating type photographs from portraits. While portraits were read as evidence for the individual character and distinction of their bourgeois subjects, type photos’ incongruity between the subject and the studio space in which s/he stood served to mark their “native” or working class subjects as members of an inferior class of humans. See Poole, Vision; and Rouillé, L’empire. 11. For discussions of how Bertillon’s system of identifying individual traits differed from the classificatory impulse of racial photography, see Poole, Vision, 134 – 39; and Sekula, “Body and Archive.” On the adoption of Bertillon’s system in Mexico, see Ignacio Fernández Ortigosa, Identificación científica de los reos (Mexico City: Imprenta del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús, 1892). 12. Like the Mexican subjects photographed by Aubert and other French photographers of the time, the occupations represented in the European physiognomies were identified by their association with certain tools, gestures, and costumes. On the


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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 European physiognomies, see Jean-Jacques Courtine and Claudine Haroche, Histoire du visage (Paris: Rivages, 1989); and Judith Wechsler, A Human Comedy: Physiognomy and Caricature in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1982). On nineteenth-century Mexican type images, see Aguilar Ochoa, Fotografía durante el imperio, 115 – 27; Debroise, Fuga mexicana: Viajeros europeos del siglo XIX en México (Mexico City: Banamex, 1996), 159 –79; Patricia Massé Zendejas, Simulacro y elegancia en tarjetas de visita: Fotografías de cruces y campa (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropología y Historia; Colegio Alquimia, 1998); Maria Esther Pérez Salas C., “Genealogía de Los méxicanos pintados por si mismos,” Historia Mexicana 48, no. 2, (Oct.–Dec. 1998), 167 – 207; Cristina Barros and Marco Buenrostro, eds., Cruces y campa: Las once y todo sereno: Tipos mexicanos, siglo XIX (Mexico City: CONACULTA; Loteria Nacional; Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1994); México y sus alrededores: Colección de monumentos, trajes y paisajes (Mexico City: Decaen, 1855 – 56). On the construction of national types in Mexico, see Ricardo Pérez Montfort, Estampas de nacionalismo popular mexicano (Mexico City: CIESAS, 1994). In this literature, photographs, paintings, and lithographs of types tend to be treated as interchangeable forms of representation, whose historical importance has more to do with image content than with the semiotic, material, and sensuous qualities of particular representational technologies. 13. Registros Fotográficos, 1892 –1930. Archivo Histórico Municipal de Oaxaca “Manuel R. Palacios.” Of these, only the prostitute registries and photographs have received attention from historians. See especially Cuauhtémoc Medina, Vigilar y retratar: Dos momentos de la fotografía en Oaxaca (Oaxaca: Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca; Ediciones Toledo, 1992); Cuauhtémoc Medina, “Identidad o identificacion? La fotografía y la distinción de las personas. Un caso oaxaqueño,” in Arte, historia e identidad en América: Visiones comparativas, ed. Gustavo Curiel, Renato González Mello, and Juana Gutiérrez Haces (Mexico City: UNAM; Instituto de Invstigaciones Estéticas, 1994), 2:577 – 97; and Alejandro Castellanos, “Ojo de luz: La fotografía en Oaxaca,” in Historia del arte de Oaxaca

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that the state collected them—an administrative procedure introduced by Maximiliano 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 (Oaxaca: Gobierno del Estado de Oaxaca; Instituto Oaxaqueño de las Culturas, 1997), 45 –161. On prostitute registries and photographs elsewhere in nineteenth-century Mexico, see Aguilar Ochoa, La fotografía durante el imperio, 79 – 91; and Patricia Massé, “Photographs of Mexican Prostitutes in 1865,” History of Photography 20, no. 3: 231– 34. 14. Aguilar Ochoa, Fotografía durante el imperio; and Teresa Matabuena Pelaez, Algunos usos y conceptos de la fotografía durante el Porfiriato (Mexico City: Univ. Iberoamericana, 1991). 15. The Oaxaca City registry photographs do not show the name of the studio. The fact that so many of the photographs are shot against the same backdrop, however, suggests that they were all taken by a single photographer, probably the Oaxacan photographer Antonio Salazar. After the late 1920s, the city continued to maintain the photographic registries, replacing type photographs with small oval or square headshots, much like the kind used in modern-day identity cards. 16. Empirical documentation of statistical categories was particularly important for the positivist projects of scientific governance that were popular at this time in both Mexico and France. On Mexican positivism, see Charles Hale, The Transformation of

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Figure 2. Registro fotográfico. Shoe shine boy, 1917–20 (Archivo Histórico de la Municipal de Oaxaca “Manuel R. Palacios”).

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 Liberalism in Late-Nineteenth-Century Mexico (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1989); Mauricio Tenorio, Mexico at the World’s Fairs: Crafting a Modern Nation (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1996); and Leopoldo Zea, El positivismo en México: Nacimiento, apogeo y decadencia (Mexico City: FCE, 1973 [1943]). On population, governance, and documentation as defining features of liberal and colonial states, see, among others, Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley ( New York: Vintage, 1980); Michel Foucault, “Governmentality,” Ideology and Consciousness 6 (1979): 5 – 21; James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State ( New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1998); and Richard S. Smith, Rule by Records: Land Registration and Billage Custom in Early British Punjab (Delhi: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996).

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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. Tribus and Tehuanas

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 proj17. Mark Overmyer-Velasquez, “Images of Modernity: The Use of Photographs in Writing the Social and Cultural History of Porfirian Oaxaca” ( paper presented at the annual meetings of the American Historical Association, Boston, January 2001). 18. Indios y monumentos was never published. Martínez’s published studies of Oaxacan ethnology and history include Catálogo etimológico de los nombres de los pueblos (Oaxaca: Imprenta del Estado, 1883); Civilización chontal: Historia antigua de la chontalpa oaxaqueña (México City: Imp. del Gob. Federal, 1910); and Cuadra estadístico de la minería en el estado libre y soberano de Oaxaca (Mexico City: Secretaría de Fomento, 1884).


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ect 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.20 Before 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 har-

19. Antonio García Cubas, Cuadro geográfico, estadístico, descriptivo e histórico (Mexico City: Secretaría de Fomento, 1884). For examples of similar Porfirian projects involving visual inventories of types, see Georgina Rodríguez Hernández, “Miradas sin redención,” Luna Córnea (1997): 24 – 31; Georgina Rodríguez Hernández, “Recobrando la presencia: Fotografía indigenista mexicana en la Exposición Histórico Americana de 1892,” Cuicuilco, 5, no. 13 (May–Aug. 1998): 123 – 44; Tenorio, Mexico at the World’s Fairs; and Casey Walsh, “Statistical Knowledge of Mestizo Mexico, 1876 –1920” (Departamento de Antropología, Univ. Iberamericana, ms.). 20. Martínez Gracida’s manuscripts were acquired by Genaro V. Vásquez, the interim governor of Oaxaca who led the most important cultural initiative of the postrevolutionary period. It is therefore significant that the plates formed part of Vásquez’s personal library and that Vásquez himself used Martínez’s ethnological types to illustrate his own published work on Oaxacan ethnology. See Genaro V. Vásquez, Indios de México, Colaboración del Lic. Genaro V. Vásquez al Séptimo Congreso Científico Americano (Mexico City: Talleres Gráficos de la Nación, 1935). Today Los indios oaxaqueños forms part of the Colección Genaro V. Vásquez in the Sala de Asuntos Oaxaqueños “Genaro V. Vásquez,” in the Municipal Library of Oaxaca. A small selection of Martínez’s ethnological plates, including the ones reproduced here, have been published in Manuel Escarza, ed., Los indios oaxaquenõs y sus monumentos arqueológicos (Oaxaca: Gob. del Estado de Oaxaca, 1986).

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Figure 3. Indians from Cajones (watercolor, Manuel Martínez Gracida, Los indios oaxaqueños y sus monumentos, plate 73, Biblioteca Municipal de Oaxaca).

nessed 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 21. Martínez Gracida, Los indios oaxaqueños, vol. 4, plate 84. 22. “There is no lack of mustaches in men of this lineage. . . . The portrait of these Indians proves, thus, that Cosijoeza had a mustache.” Ibid. Although usually taken as a sign of mixed race, the issue of facial hair was hotly contested in contemporary debates about racial identity and origins of American Indians. Martínez Gracida may have been alluding

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An Image of “Our Indian” Figure 4. Indians from Zaachila (watercolor

from photograph, Manuel Martínez Gracida, Los Indios oaxaqueños y sus monumentos, Biblioteca Municipal de Oaxaca).

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

to these debates, although he does not refer directly to them. As the reputed last and greatest ruler of the Zapotec kingdom, Cosijoeza was the subject of numerous poems and literary pieces, including a history by Martínez Gracida, El Rey Cosijoeza y su familia (Mexico City: Secretaria de Fomento, 1888). 23. Martínez Gracida, Los indios oaxaqueños, vol. 4, plate 72. Mitla is a town and archaeological site outside of Oaxaca City. It was a favorite place of the Oaxacan elite for picnics and social retreats. Intellectuals and historians such as Martínez Gracida frequently wrote about it as a source of Oaxacan identity. Because Martínez believed that the Zapotecs were the only Oaxacan ethnic group with a true civilization, it was important that he counter any suggestions of Mixtec presence in Mitla. During the postrevolutionary period, Mitla was a favorite subject of poems celebrating the sentimental qualities of Oaxacan identity; see, for example, Guillermo Villa, “Ruinas de Mitla,” Libertad (Oaxaca), 10 Nov. 1931, p. 3; Teresa Luna Vargas, “El Fortín,” Esplendor, 16 July 1931, p. 5; and Francisco Leonardo Ramos, “Mitla,” Diario del Sur (Oaxaca), 26 Feb. 1928, Suplemento Literario-Musical, p. 1.

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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.”24 Martínez’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.26 In 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

24. Martínez Gracida, Los indios oaxaqueños, vol. 4, plate 70. 25. José Antonio Gay, Historia de Oaxaca (Mexico City: Porrúa, 1990 [1881]). 26. Martínez includes four Mazatecas, eight Mixtecas, and five Chinatecas. The remaining groups receive one plate each (Chatina, Mixe, Huave, Cuicateca, Zoque, Triqui, Contaltca, Chocho, and Amuzga).


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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

27. For an overview of this literature, see Rene Cabrera Palomec, “La Dispersión que produce la danza: El imaginario étnico sobre los zapotecos del Istmo de Tehuantepec” (Master’s thesis, Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Mexico City, 2001).

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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.30 For 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 adminis28. Frederick Starr, The Indians of Southern Mexico (Chicago: Field Museum, 1899). Lang was Starr’s photographer on both journeys to Oaxaca (1896 and 1899). 29. Starr, Indians, 10. 30. Starr, Indians, 25 – 26, plate 87.


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tered. In this sense, and by pushing its own grammar of intelligibility to a certain sort of limit, photography renders the very language of types curiously illegible. Martínez and his friend Starr provide fascinating examples of the ways in which photographs intervened in a broader nineteenth-century anxiety about surface appearances, categorization, and typology. Photographs were understood to be mechanically produced, and hence transparent, reproductions of reality. This understanding of photography as a realist technology transforms ancient philosophical understandings of natural and ideal types in two ways. First, by encoding the idea of type in a medium that was widely valued for its indexical and evidential qualities, the photograph lent a certain material or empirical fixity to the normative construct of type. For scientists such as Starr, this realistic quality of photography served to heighten the tension between the empirical or descriptive impulse of photography as documentation and the classificatory impulse of racial science as a search for ideal — and hence inherently undocumentable — types. For local intellectuals such as Martínez, this same tension would unfold as the precarious divide that separated the physiognomic calculus of “racial” type from the civilizational calculus of “culture” and civilization. Just as the human body provided the visual evidence through which Martínez could decipher and fix an individual’s racial identity and origin, clothes helped him to locate his ethnological subjects within an established map of linguistic, geographic, and regional identities.31 The language of race and racial distinction framed both notions, yet they followed distinct logics of exclusion and inclusion. The comforting topography of localized, ethnological types would become uprooted, however, in the postrevolutionary period. As we will see, this transition would take place through two highly feminine practices. The first was fashion, in which the visual concept of type became available as a form of assumed (rather than ascribed) identity. The second was the picture postcard, whose peak of popularity coincided with the decades preceding the Mexican Revolution.

31. In this respect, photographs of ethnic or ethnological types stood at an opposite extreme from their close cousins, the bourgeois studio portraits whose cultural referent was to a class, rather than to a specific region or even nation. As the mirror image of this increasingly transnational middle-class “type,” the proliferating images of ethnological types served to root the nonbourgeois classes and cultures of the world in a precise geography of subaltern diversity.

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Postcards and the Gendering of Type

In Mexico, as in most of the rest of the world, the early decades of the twentieth century witnessed a quantum leap in the circulation of images — photographic and others. The photographs of Martínez and Starr were known to only a very limited number of Oaxacan intellectuals. The type photographs of Waite and other foreign photographers were sold almost exclusively to foreign collectors and clients. The municipality’s registry photographs were hidden from view in the archives of the state. The new forms of photography that took hold in the final years of the Porfiriato, however, increased the public’s exposure to photography in general and type photographs in particular. Increasingly available and affordable portrait studios drew clients from a variety of social backgrounds. At the same time, studios began to explore different forms of marketing photographs, including the increasingly popular postcard. Although postcards were first available only through the post offices, after around 1900 commercial studios in Mexico City began to produce and sell their own picture postcards to local collectors, tourists, and curiosity seekers.32 The first evidence of postcard collections marketed to Oaxaqueños and containing images of Oaxaca and Oaxacan types is from 1910, when the postcard in figure 5, advertising a “complete collection of Oaxacan scenes,” was sent out as a New Year’s greeting by one of Oaxaca’s most fashionable stores. The front of the postcard shows a montage of 14 postcards offered for sale in the store. Of these, only one (showing a Tehuana) represents a human type; the others are all scenes of buildings, churches, and public spaces in the capital city of Oaxaca or in the nearby valley (Mitla and Tule). The back of the postcard, in small, elegant typeface, reads: “We hereby send you our warmest greetings for New Year 1912, L. Bustamante y Cia. The National Pavilion — It constantly receives the latest fashions from Europe and the United States. Specializing in silks, embroidery, whites, footwear for ladies and gentlemen, cashmere, collars, shirts, etc. etc. Postcards, more than one hundred different views forming exquisite collections of outings, buildings, Mitla, Santo Domingo, the different racial types of the State, etc. etc. All in the finest execution. All inex-

32. On the postcard, see, among others, Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1986). On Mexican postcards and postcard collecting, see La tarjeta postal, Artes de México, 48 (2000); Francisco Montellano, Charles B. Waite: La época de oro de las postales en México (Mexico City: Circulo de Arte, 1998); Paul J. Vanderwood and Frank N. Samponaro, Border Fury: A Picture Postcard History of the Mexican Revolution and U.S. War Preparedness, 1910 –1917 (Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1988).


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Figure 5. Sampler postcard, Oaxaca, 1910 (Fundación Bustamante, Oaxaca).

pensive and always high quality.”33 This postcard constitutes the earliest evidence that Oaxacans themselves had become interested in seeing — and collecting — visual images of their own reality. Where did this new interest in owning and collecting images of familiar scenes and settings come from? One answer lies in the political and economic situation in Oaxaca. As in other regions of Mexico, the first decades of the twentieth century brought a series of rapidly changing governments and local conflict to Oaxaca. In 1902, the old Porfirian military guard was replaced by a civilian governor, Emilio Pimentel, with close ties to the positivist political circle of “científicos” headed by national treasury minister José Yves Limantour. Pimentel’s government was strongly supported by foreign capital and the resident foreign community in the city of Oaxaca and strongly opposed by the city’s commercial and professional sectors.34 Following the fall first of Pimentel and then Díaz, the Oaxacan elite split into roughly three rather fragile political alliances: one situated in the traditionally secessionist Isthmus, another supporting Carranzas in the northern

33. Postcard from the collection of the Fundación Bustamante, Oaxaca. 34. On Pimentel, see Francie Chassen-López, From Liberal to Revolutionary Oaxaca: The View from the South, Mexico 1867 –1911 (University Park: Penn State Univ. Press, 2004); on the científicos, see Charles R. Hale, Transformation of Liberalism.

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part of the state, and finally a portion of the elite from the center of the state that broke entirely with the new revolutionary government. Caudillos from the Mixteca and the Sierra Juárez headed both the Sovereignty Movement and the state governments that preceded and followed it, and several of the movement’s leaders retained military strongholds in those regions well into the 1930s. Their attempts to dominate state politics, in turn, strengthened the historically separatist tendencies of the Isthmus de Tehuantepec, with its strategic ports and markets. Similar tendencies surfaced in the northern regions of the state, where both elites and peasants identified with the culture and commerce of the neighboring state of Veracruz.35 Internecine conflict, regional economic instability, and territorial fragmentation thus offer one explanation for why at least certain sectors of Oaxaca’s political and economic elite should become interested in preserving a visual inventory of their state. Indeed, it was during these same years that intellectuals in the city of Oaxaca first began to discuss “Oaxaquenismo”—a cultural essence or identity rooted in Oaxaca’s landscape, history, customs, and—above all, as we will see —women’s costumes. Whereas Martínez’s nineteenth-century text had rooted Oaxaca’s claim to civilization in the Isthmus Zapotec, this new vision tied Oaxacan cultural identity to the capital city, the prospective economic and political center of the state.36 Another, less local, impulse behind this sudden desire to collect visual images can be located in the availability of the novel and relatively inexpensive postcard, which in turn generated the newly fashionable pastime of postcard collecting. This passion was, of course, not unique to Oaxaca or Mexico, but rather formed part of an international boom. As in other parts of the world, in Oaxaca this hobby had a particular appeal for women.37 Women from the 35. On the final years of the Porfiriato and the Sovereignty Movement in Oaxaca, see Margarita Dalton, Oaxaca: Una historia compartida (Oaxaca: Gobierno del Estado de Oaxaca, 1997), 189 – 210; Francie Chassen, “Los precursores de la revolución en Oaxaca,” in La revolución en Oaxaca, 1900 –1930, ed. Víctor Raúl Martínez Vásquez (Mexico City: CONACULTA, 1993), 39 –104; Francisco José Ruíz Cervantes, La revolución en Oaxaca: El movimiento de la soberanía (1915 –1920) (Mexico City: FCE, 1986); and Carlos Sánchez Silva, “Crisis política y contrarrevolución en Oaxaca, 1912 –1914,” in Martínez Vásquez, La Revolución en Oaxaca, 194 – 275. 36. See Raúl Martínez Vásquez, De la milpa oaxaquena (Oaxaca: Colección Tintero Nocturno, 2000). 37. On women and postcard collecting, see Saloni Mathur, “Wanted: Native Views: Collecting Colonial Postcards in India,“ in Gender, Sexuality, and Colonial Modernities, ed. A. Burton (London: Routledge, 1999), 95 –115; and Naomi Schor, “Cartes Postales: Representing Paris 1900,” Critical Inquiry (winter 1992): 188 – 244.


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upper and middle sectors collected postcards sent to them by their aunts, sisters, mothers, nieces, and daughters, which they mounted in special albums. In many cases, the cards carried dedications, personal messages, or sentimental verses. Other cards, however, were blank — valued and collected only for their images. The Oaxacan postcard albums I have studied were assembled by several different women from the Vasconcelos family between 1902 and 1915.38 The albums are not accompanied by any texts or writings that might provide clues as to how these women viewed and valued their postcards. Nonetheless, a careful reading of the albums themselves suggests that postcards offered these women a means to strengthen sentimental ties with their family and localities and to reflect on their own identities as Mexicanas and Oaxaqueñas. Female relatives sent all of the cards with postmarks and messages. Many hailed from far-off cities—New York, Dallas, Cordoba, Mexico City. Others, however, seem to have been sent locally, as prizes meant to complete the other woman’s collection. Although these mailed postcards represent well over half of the postcards contained in the albums, a significant number bear no postmark or message, suggesting that the owner purchased them for her own collection. Postcards were apparently valued as much for their content and fit within a collection as for the sentimental ties between their owners and the women who had sent them. We can glean other hints of these women’s motives from the apparently careful ordering of images on the album pages. The postcards reveal images of cities, ports, and historical monuments from different states in Mexico, the United States, and Europe, portraits of European actresses or singers, paintings of historical scenes from Mexico and France, photographs of different events in the Mexican Revolution, watercolors of North American Indians, and hand-tinted photographs of Mexican peasants with their signature burros and conical sombreros (see figure 6). Postcards of Mexican women and Mexican types are routinely mounted next to postcards of European beauties. In one of the albums, postcards of Napoleon are inserted next to scenes from Mexican independence and the Mexican Revolution (see figures 7 and 8). Although it is impossible to know what, if any, significance the women might have wished to

38. Fundación Bustamante, Oaxaca. Two of the albums, belonging to María Vasconcelos (1908) and Rosa Vasconcelos (1912), are signed and dated. Other unsigned albums apparently belonged to other women from the same family. I am grateful to the late Juan Ignacio Bustamante Vasconcelos for permission to copy and reproduce these albums and other photographs from the Fundación’s collection.

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Figure 6. “Los Amigos” (Granat, ca. 1900, from postcard album belonging to Rosa Vasconcelos, Fundación Bustamante, Oaxaca).

Figure 7. Page from postcard album belonging to Rosa Vasconcelos showing postcards of Napoleon and Vicente Guerrero (Fundación Bustamante, Oaxaca).

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An Image of “Our Indian” Figure 8. Page from

postcard album belonging to Rosa Vasconcelos (Fundación Bustamante, Oaxaca).

convey through such juxtapositions, the fact that they repeatedly place Mexican views and types next to scenes and personalities from other countries suggests that they were no strangers to contemporary debates on the meaning of modernity, nation, and national identity in Mexico (see figure 9). But what place did Oaxaca have in these women’s understanding of nation, self, and modernity? Here the albums provide a fascinating series of leads. About half of the postcards are commercially produced sentimental cards showing children, flowers, and “white” European actresses. The remainder can be divided, more or less evenly, between general Mexican themes and specifically Oaxacan imagery. Of particular importance here are postcards of Tehuantepec and Salina Cruz, views of plazas and buildings from the capital city, and scenes from the nearby picnic spots of Tule and Mitla (see figure 10). Except for several images of Tehuanas, however, people are curiously absent

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Figure 9. Album page with postcards of a woman and Mexican peasants (Fundación Bustamante, Oaxaca).

Figure 10. Postcard of Tule (Fundación Bustamante, Oaxaca).

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An Image of “Our Indian” Figure 11. Postcard of Tehuana (Fundación Bustamente, Oaxaca).

from the Oaxacan images (see figure 11). For these early-twentieth-century women, the notion of colorful ethnic types had yet to take hold—except through the figure of the aristocratic Tehuana. The figure of the Tehuana, with her eye-catching jewels, skirts, and starched lace collar, emerged as a recognizable and increasingly popular icon in the latter half of the nineteenth century — about the same time that Martínez was beginning to commission his drawings of the aristocratic “Tehuantepecanas.” As was the case with so many of the other national Mexican types, the creation and dissemination of the Tehuana-as-type was the result of a complex dialogue between foreign and national artists and photographers. The first photographer to commercialize photographs of Isthmus women appears to have been Lorenzo Becerríl, a photographer from Puebla who sold a series of picturesque types, shot in natural outdoor scenes, in the 1860s.39 The most successful and widely circulated of this series were the photographs of women from Tehuantepec and Juchitán. 39. Debroise, Fuga mexicana, 118 –19.

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The Tehuana’s conversion into a national type, however, occurred in the early twentieth century, through the work of the Mexico City–based foreign photographers Charles Waite and Hugo Brehme. Both Waite and Brehme combined a successful commercial portrait business with the sale of photographs taken on their several journeys through Oaxaca and other Mexican states.40 By the early twentieth century, women in Mexico City had begun to pose for their portraits in the trademark dress of the Tehuana. Waite gave conscious impulse to this fashion by selling portraits of famous Mexican actresses and personalities dressed as Juchitecas.41 Such borrowings transformed the Tehuana from an ethnologically curious Oaxacan type to a symbol of the Mexican woman as both sexual being and bearer of the nation. Oaxacan women were not unaware of this fashion for posing as Tehuanas. During the early years of the century, the prestigious Oaxacan photographer Manuel Ramírez shot portraits of upperclass Oaxacan women dressed in Isthmus costume (see figure 12).42 When Oaxacan men wanted to pose as types, however, they chose the costume of the charro, which at this point was already emerging as the unchallenged icon of Mexican manhood (and the revolution) (see figure 13).43

40. On Waite, see Debroise, Fuga mexicana, 72 –74; and Francisco Montellano, C. B. Waite, fotógrafo: Una mirada diversa sobre el México de principios del siglo XX (Mexico City: Grijalbo; CNCA, 1999); and Charles B. Waite: La época de oro. 41. Debroise, Fuga mexicana, 119 – 20. 42. The clothes used in Ramírez’s portraits differ from contemporary Isthmus dress and fashion in several important points — the type of lace underskirt, the embroidery, the lace headdress, and so on (Alejandro de Avila, personal communication). These differences suggest that the clothes the women used were already costumes made in Oaxaca City, rather than authentic Isthmus articles. 43. On the Tehuana as symbol and type, see Ricardo Pérez Montfort, “Notas sobre el estereotipo de la Tehuana,” Acervos (Oaxaca) 19 (fall 2000): 45 – 52; Aída Sierrra, “La creación de un símbolo,” Artes de México 49, La Tehuana: 17 – 25. On the image of the Isthmus and Isthmus women as savage and rebellious, see Jeffrey W. Rubin, Decentering the Regime: Ethnicity, Radicalism, and Democracy in Juchitán, Mexico (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1997). On the charro as national type, see Ricardo Pérez Montfort, Estampas, 113 – 38; Pérez Montfort, “Charros y chinos poblanos,” Luna Cornea 13 (Sept.–Dec. 1997): 42 – 47. The gendered division of labor between women as representatives of locality and tradition and men as representation of an undivided nation is, of course, common to many modern states. The practice of posing for portraits in indigenous clothes became popular throughout Latin America during the 1920s and 1930s. This fashion speaks to a generalized anxiety about identity and nation building. This was especially marked in the case of regional intelligentsias and middle-class provincial elites, whose “national” and “mestizo” identities were threatened by their physical and social proximity to the rural indigenous peasants (Poole, Vision).


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Figure 12. Oaxacan women dressed as Tehuanas (Phot. Manuel Ramírez, ca. 1915, courtesy of Foto Estudio Velásquez, Oaxaca).

In Oaxaca itself, the symbolic weight of the Tehuana-as-type grew out of the tension between her new status as national symbol and a lingering regional anxiety about the relation of the Isthmus and the Isthmus Zapotecs to the rest of the state. As we will recall, the Tehuana was the most scrutinized — and

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Figure 13. Oaxacan man dressed as charro (Phot. Manuel Ramírez, ca. 1915, courtesy of Foto Estudio Velásquez, Oaxaca).

alluring — type for Porfirian intellectuals such as Martínez in their quest to trace a noble racial genealogy for Oaxaca’s ruling classes. Widely read French travel accounts, which described the arrogance of Isthmus women, their practice of bathing naked in the rivers, and their elaborate clothes, increased their allure.44 Local interest in the Tehuana resurfaced in the final years of the Porfiriato, when the Bank of Oaxaca printed bills showing a Tehuana.45 As we have seen, the Tehuana was the only example included by the Pabellón Nacional in its advertisement for the series of “racial types” offered in its unique postcard collection. In the Pabellón Nacional postcard, the model poses before a painted studio backdrop showing palm trees and part of a modern shipping port. While the woman herself no doubt evoked pride in the beauty of a Oaxacan type whose clothing had been elevated as a new national feminine ideal, this backdrop would just as certainly have reminded the commercially minded Oaxaqueños of their precarious hold over a region whose ports were controlled by

44. For example, Mathieu de Fossey, Viaje a México (Mexico City: CNCA, 1994 [1832]); and Charles Brasseur, Viaje por el Istmo de Tehuantepec (Mexico City: FCE, 1981 [1861]). 45. Francisco José Ruiz Cervantes, Oaxaca en la numismática y la filatelia (Oaxaca: Instituto de Artes Gráficos de Oaxaca, 1996).


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the unruly, and all-too-often secessionist, Isthmus elite. For early-twentiethcentury Oaxacans, then, the Tehuana spoke of the alluringly aristocratic genealogy of their state’s Isthmus Zapotecs and their own frustrated aspirations to achieve modernity. The Tehuana’s allure, however, also speaks to an important shift in the visual grammar and gendering of type in Oaxaca. This shift, I suggest, was marked by the disarticulation of type from the rootedness of genealogy and place. As we have seen, Martínez and other nineteenth-century intellectuals looked to the Tehuanas for evidence of the deep historical and genealogical bonds that rooted civilizations in particular places (in this case, the Isthmus de Tehuantepec). For these scholars, the Tehuana’s distinctive costume served to mark a racial and civilizational genealogy that was rooted in the Tehuana’s racialized, Zapotec body. If the Tehuana was viewed as a source of Oaxacan identity, it was in the sense of a historical or aristocratic essence, and not in the sense of being an “identity” that others were to emulate or assume. By the early twentieth century, however, a new circulatory idiom of type emerged, in which localized costumes — trajes — became accessible as mobile markers of place and belonging. In Mexico, two events were central to this shift. The first was the 1910 centenary celebration, with its nationalist emphasis on unity and displays of regional indigenous and cultural types.46 The second was the cultural debates that accompanied the construction of the new revolutionary state. Of particular importance in understanding the problem of trajes and types was the concept of the patrias chicas, or “small fatherlands,” where nationalist intellectuals envisioned the sort of integration of race and culture they considered necessary for consolidating a broader national identity.47 Within this logic of the patria chica as model for nationalist integration, the Tehuana assumed a renewed charge as a figure that could be uprooted from her patria chica and held up as an example for how other Mexicans should be. This shift was, in turn, made possible by the transformation of “costume” into “fashion,” in that fashion marks an identity that can be borrowed or assumed. In the Pabellón Nacional postcard, for example, we note the Tehuana bears a deceptively simple caption: “Tehuana, Street Clothes.” The simple comma suggests an equivalency or interchangeability 46. The centenary celebrations in Mexico City, for example, included exhibits and events displaying costumes and types from different states and regions. On the centenary celebrations, see Zarauz López, Mexico: Fiestas civicas, familiars, laborales y nuevos festejos (Mexico City: CONACULTA, 2000), 71–73. 47. On patrias chicas, see, especially, Manuel Gamio, Forjando patria (Mexico City: Porrúa, 1990 [1916]), 12 –14.

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between the woman and her clothes. The woman equals her clothes; the clothes equal the woman. Although the Tehuana retains her importance as a marker of place (the Isthmus), her fashionable traje becomes available for the selective assumption of at least two broader identities—Oaxacan and Mexican.48 The slippage between person, costume, and place is, of course, similar to — and derived from — Martínez’s nineteenth-century ethnological concern with the particularities of Oaxaca’s regional types. Two features, however, distinguish the early-twentieth-century rage for the Tehuana from these earlier ethnological understandings. The first is fashion; the second, gender. The Tehuana’s dress acquires a symbolic life of its own independent from the body of the woman who wears it: a “look” that is uprooted from place and, as such, accessible to women in many different places as an icon of a national identity. This separation of forms is not unlike the circulation that lends postcard their value. Like fashion, postcards are more about locating and connecting individuals in society than they are about any specific pictorial referent.49 Gender was not incidental to this process of building emotional connections across place. Postcard collecting was a feminine practice not only because it was, for the most part, a women’s pastime but also because the sentimental connection to place on which postcards traded was increasingly seen as part of women’s domain, in a society where men were supposedly engaged in the reasoned, nonemotional spheres of commerce and politics. The familiar bond between women, tradition, and place (in the form of home, region, community, or nation) is intimately related to a parallel division of labor between men as the reasoned associates of a universal modernity and women as embodiment of the particularist cultural and geographic allegiances that feed modern nation-

48. What is not clear is the extent to which the appropriation of the Tehuana as a national symbol carried with it an association with the state of Oaxaca. Although Oaxaqueños clearly identified the Tehuana with the whole of the region, Mexico City artists and intellectuals seemed to associate the Tehuana only with the Isthmus. 49. Like their nineteenth-century predecessors, the cartes de visite, postcards acquired value as objects that circulated through society, linking one place with another and one person with the next. In addition, individual postcards, like cartes de visite, were collected in albums and formed part of a series. They were valued less for the connection between their content and the particular places portrayed (what I have elsewhere called “use value”) than for their ability to circulate and connect (“exchange value”); Poole, Vision. Unlike cartes de visite, however, the postcard’s idiom of connection was intimately related to geography and ideas of place. As souvenirs, they were sent as testimony to the fact that the sender, while in one place, was thinking of family and friends in another place.


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alist and regionalist sentiments.50 In the Oaxacan case, women’s bodies grounded the abstractions of type in a landscape that, as in other nationalisms, was itself seen as a source of nostalgia and remembrance. Sentiments of Self and Other

In 1928 the Department of Public Education of the State of Oaxaca, together with the Cultural Missions from the national Secretary of Education, sponsored the Mixtec Social Institute. Its creator and director was the head of the Department of Public Education, Policarpo T. Sánchez, a schoolteacher from the Mixtec town of Teposcolula who self-identified as an “admirer of the indigenous race to which I belong.”51 The Institute’s stated goal was to modernize and unify pedagogy and curriculum in the Mixtec schools, in accordance with the new revolutionary philosophy of the Escuela de Acción.52 A second goal was to develop pride in Mixtec culture among the province’s teachers and thus improve relations between the Action School and the indigenous communities it served. To encourage greater identification with Mixtec culture, teachers at the Institute—the majority of whom were not themselves from the Mix-

50. See, for example, Jane Collier, From Duty to Desire: Remaking Families in a Spanish Village (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1997); Partha Chatterjee, “Colonialism, Nationalism, and Colonized Women,” American Ethnologist 16, no. 4 (1989): 622 – 33; de la Cadena, Indigenous Mestizos; Michael Herzfeld, Ours Once More: Folklore, Ideology, and the Making of Modern Culture (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1982); Lata Mani, “Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India,” in Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History, ed. K. Sangari and S. Vaid ( New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989), 88 –126. 51. Policarpo T. Sánchez, “Ligero Estudio acerca de la Raza Indígena del Estado,” Revista Pedagógica (Oaxaca) 1, no. 4 (1929): 7 –14. The Institutos Sociales were cultural and pedagogical training programs for teachers in the different regions of Oaxaca. Although jointly organized by the Oaxaca state Department of Public Education and the federal Ministry of Public Education, their principle focus in Oaxaca was on teaching of regional traditions and “ethnic aesthetics” to teachers from the different subregions of Oaxaca. 52. On the Escuela de Acción and postrevolutionary education policies, see, among others, Mary Kay Vaughan, Cultural Politics in Revolution: Teachers, Peasants, and Schools in Mexico, 1930 –1940 (Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press, 1997); Guillermo Palacios, “Post-Revolutionary Intellectuals, Rural Readings, and the Shaping of the Peasant Problem in Mexico: El Maestro Rural, 1932 – 34,” Journal of Latin American Studies, 30 (1998): 309 – 39; and Elsie Rockwell, “School of the Revolution: Enacting and Contesting State Forms in Tlaxcala, 1910 –1930,” in Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico, ed. Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniel Nugent (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1994), 170 – 208.

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teca — offered classes and organized contests on Mixtec crafts, agriculture, and history (see figure 18).53 They wrote poems, songs, and stories with Mixtec themes, dedicated to the improvement and strengthening of the patria chica.54 Alongside this cultural plan, however, all of the teachers, including Sánchez himself, saw the elimination of the Mixtec language through universal teaching of Spanish as one of the principal goals of the Institute.55 This apparently contradictory stance was, as we will see, inherent to a political program that sought to create a unified Oaxacan identity through the celebration of regional diversity. To understand how this new politics of unity-through-difference worked, and to understand the crucial role played by visual images in it, it is useful to begin with a look at the “Oaxaquenization” program of Genaro V. Vásquez, who served as interim governor from 1924 to 1929. Like other governors of the period, Vásquez was charged by the national government with bringing the rebellious liberals of Oaxaca into the revolutionary fold. His principal tool was a sort of soft-core socialism that he assiduously pursued through both anticlericalism and the cultural programs that would be the hallmark of his administration. He did not carry out any land reform during his governorship, and, other than educational programs and school building, he attempted few organizing activities among the peasant and indigenous sectors. Faced with a rather remarkable proliferation of local socialist and communist parties, his first step was to form the Socialist Party Central of Oaxaca. Beyond its obvious function of placing the centrifugal forces of popular and student socialism under state control, the Central also served as the principal site for the many cultural events, including “Cultural Saturdays”: poetry and song competitions, recitals, and exhibitions mounted by Vásquez’s industrious team of cultural engineers.

53. Archivo General del Estado de Oaxaca, Fondos Educativos (hereafter AGEO, FE), Sección Técnica, Caja 7, 1927 – 28. 54. See, for example, “Propaganda cultural,” no. 2, Instituto Educativo Social Mixteco, Tlaxiaco, 1928, AGEO, FE, Sección Técnica, Caja 7 (1927 – 28) and Caja 19 (1932); “Programa que seguirá la ‘Compañía Artística Infantil’ ” AGEO, FE, Sección Administrativa, Caja 69, 1930. In several regions of Oaxaca, the Social Institutes could draw on preexisting culturalist movements, some with their own publications; see, for example, El Aldeaño: Periódico mensual de propaganda cultural en los pueblos mixtecos (Chazumba, Oaxaca) no. 1 (1925). 55. Policarpo T. Sánchez, “Informe que Rinde al C. Lic. Genaro V. Vásquez, Gobernador Interino Constituciónal del Estado, el Jefe del Depart. de Educación Publica, sobre el Segundo Instituto Educativo Social Mixteco,” AGEO, FE, Sección Técnica, Caja 7, 1927 – 28.


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Vásquez’s principal objective was to create and disseminate a “cultural sentiment” that could overcome the political and economic differences that had prevented centralization of power in the state in the past. This regional project echoed Mexico’s challenge of uniting its different regions and states under a single revolutionary mantle. Indeed, Vásquez and Sánchez made use of the federally funded Cultural Missions that had been created for the specific purpose of championing mestizaje as the route to nation building. However, the goals of the federal Secretariat of Education (headed by Vasconcelos) and the local Department of Public Education (headed by Sánchez) did not always mesh. As in other regions of Mexico, local teachers and state officials were hostile to creeping federal control over Oaxaca’s rural schools. Moreover, in the Oaxacan case, Sánchez’s and Vásquez’s plan to solidify local cultural differences also seemed to fly in the face of the official revolutionary policy of mestizaje. Although the curriculum emphasized patriotic lessons and poems on the Mexican flag, concerns with national mestizaje took second place to Vásquez’s interest in harnessing Oaxaca’s many different local cultural affiliations. Programs for cultural events, circulars sent to teachers regarding pedagogy and curriculum, and internal correspondence within Sánchez’s Department of Public Education all emphasized the need to identify and disseminate the iconographic, artistic, and folkloric styles peculiar to Oaxaca’s different “racial regions.” Although I did not find documents that explicitly mentioned the issue of dress, photographs from the institutes suggest that women’s costumes were key symbols of these local identities (see figure 14).56 56. The chief architects of Vásquez’s cultural programs were the writers Alberto Vargas and Guillermo A. Esteva, the painter Alfredo Canseco Feraud, the musician Samuel Mondragon, and Policarpo T. Sánchez, whom Vásquez named director of the Oaxaca state Department of Public Education. In a move symbolic of the political force of culture at the time, Vásquez skillfully dismantled the leadership of the student organizations and unions who organized a major strike against his nationally backed administration in 1927 by offering the leaders positions in the Department of Public Education. Many of these same men (and they were all men) went on to work in the Cultural Missions, Social Institutes, and other cultural programs through which Vásquez and Sánchez would promote a unified Oaxacan cultural identity. For histories of this period, see Víctor Raúl Martínez Vásquez, Historia de la educación en Oaxaca, 1825 –1930 (Oaxaca: Instituto de Investigaciones Sociológicas, UABJO, 1994); Víctor Raúl Martínez Vásquez, La Revolución en Oaxaca (1900 –1930) (Mexico City: CONACULTA, 1993); Javier Sánchez Pereyra, Historia de la educación en Oaxaca (1926 –1936) (Oaxaca: Instituto Estatal de Educación Pública de Oaxaca, 1995); Anselmo Arellanes Meixueiro, Mutualismo y sindicalismo en Oaxaca, 1870 –1930 (Oaxaca: Instituto Tecnológico de Oaxaca, 1926); and Anselmo Arellanes Meixueiro, Víctor Raúl Martínez Vásquez, and Francisco José Ruiz Cervantes, Oaxaca en el

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Figure 14. “Miss Vesta surounded by Yalalteca girls,” Instituto Social Yalalag (Phot. Manuel Ramírez, 1929, courtesy of Foto Estudio Velásquez, Oaxaca).

The novelty of this cultural project to construct what Vásquez and his followers referred to as “the Oaxacan soul” was its anticipation of the need to construct unity by celebrating cultural and racial difference. The intellectuals surrounding Vásquez made use of different media, including music and theater, to celebrate the historic deeds of such regional heroes as nineteenth-century

siglo XX: Testimonios de historia oral (Oaxaca: Ediciones Meridiano, 1988). On the national context and for examples of how cultural and educational policies were played out in other states, see, among others, Alan Knight, The Mexican Revolution, vol. 2 (Lincoln: Univ. Nebraska Press, 1986); and Knight, “Popular Culture and the Revolutionary State in Mexico, 1910–1940,” Hispanic American Historical Review 74, no. 3: 393 – 444; Carlos Martínez Assad, El labororatorio de la Revolución: El Tabasco garridista (Mexico: Siglo XXI, 1979); and Vaughan, Cultural Politics in Revolution. 57. Vásquez had a particular interest in music, which he considered the expressive form closest to a “people’s soul.” In keeping with this view, winning entries in the music competitions were routinely printed and distributed to schoolteachers throughout Oaxaca, along with copies of Vásquez’s own article entitled “Oaxacan Sentiment and Art.” Many of the songs written for these competitions are the nostalgic staples of Oaxacan popular music today. On Vásquez’s understanding of regional cultura, see especially Música popular y costumbres regionales del Estado de Oaxaca (Mexico City: n.p., 1924); “Dos palabras,” in Música oaxaqueña: Recuerdo del banquete ofrecido por el ejército nacional al Gral. de División, Plutarco Elias Calles, en Balbuena el 8 de enero de 1930 (Mexico City: Det. del Distrito Federal, 1930); Indios de México, Séptimo Congreso Científico Americano, Sección 8: Indigenistas (Mexico


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Zapotec president Benito Juárez and the precolumbian Zapotec ruler Cosijoeza — but also with surprising frequency the reviled figure of deposed dictator and fellow Oaxaqueño Porfirio Díaz. They repackaged state history to emphasize the resistance of the Oaxaqueño tribes against Mexica and Aztec domination. Through the schools and federally funded programs, they encouraged the use of art, photography, and iconography as means to create and fortify ethnically specific aesthetic styles. They sponsored artistic competitions whose winners were those routinely judged to best represent both the specific spirit of their region and the general soul of all Oaxacan people.57 Finally, they worked to construct a visual inventory of the different cultural and racial types found in the territory. With this in mind, Governor Vásquez toured the state accompanied by a cameraman charged with filming the landscapes, costumes, and racial types found in the different regions. This filmic registry —which has unfortunately been lost — formed one of the key pieces in the “Oaxaquenization” of a territory that the governor repeatedly described as “fragmented by interests, languages, races, and regions.”58 For insight into the effects of Vásquez’s cultural program, at least on the minds of the Oaxacan elite, we can turn to the pages of the several newspapers printed in the capital city of Oaxaca. Nearly every issue features stories about regional culture and folklore, along with photographs of the distinctive racial types thought to be characteristic of the state’s different regions (figure 15). Even those papers that were most critical of Vásquez’s revolutionary politics participated in the new market for types. Evolución, for example, whose editorial line was otherwise dedicated to the memory of Díaz, featured a type photograph on either the front or back cover of each edition (figure 16).59 Whereas Vásquez’s celebration of diversity pointed towards the consolidation of a national revolutionary culture and state, Evolución deployed the language of types to support the Porfirista argument that distinctive regional races produced “diverse

City: Talleres Gráficos de la Nación, 1935); and “El aspecto pedagógico del folklore,” Revista Pedagógica 2, nos. 7 – 8 (Mar.–Apr. 1930): 27 – 40. On the cultural politics of the Vásquez administration, see Guillermo Rosas Solaegui, Un hombre en el tiempo (Mexico City: B. Costa y Amigos, 1971), 126 – 33. 58. El Mercurio, 20 Mar. 1926. 59. Not surprisingly, it was also during the 1920s and early 1930s that Oaxacan studio photographers began to produce photographs of racial types for sale. Many were produced in numbered series, suggesting that people bought them as part of collections. See Poole, “Raza y retrato: Hacia una antropología de la fotografía,” Cuicuilco 6, no. 16 (May–Aug. 1999): 225 – 52; and Poole, “Tipos raciales y proyectos culturales en Oaxaca, 1920 – 40,” Acervos 16 (Apr.–June 2000): 23 – 29.

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Figure 15. Mixtec type (Phot. Manuel Ramírez, ca. 1923, courtesy of Foto Estudio Velásquez, Oaxaca).

feelings about the national problem.”60 As in the Vasconcelos sisters’ postcard albums and the nineteenth-century type collections, Oaxacan periodicals from this period also routinely juxtaposed photographs of indigenous or “folkloric” types with photographs of distinguished Oaxacan women. Both El Oaxaqueño and Evolución (representing opposing sides in the revolutionary fray) routinely ran features such as “Oaxacan Beauty,” “Oaxacan Social Gallery,” and “Oaxacan High Society” (figure 17). These photographs of white or mestiza women stood as iconic symbols of a cultured, modern, white society. They functioned, in other words, as types that the reader could compare explicitly or implicitly with the always anonymous photographs of indigenous and regional/racial types that appeared alongside them. This iconographic alternation between white women and indigenous 60. “Para el viento,” unsigned editorial, Evolución (Oaxaca), 18 Feb. 1923, p. 2. Ironically, while Vásquez and Sánchez moved ever closer to a view of Oaxacan unity as a composite of many distinctive racial cultures, Evolución defended the inevitability of mestizaje as a sign of the impending doom that could be brought on by a government promoting class conflict and anticlericalism: “Economic and religious interests, which more than anything else are bound together and bound to us, are those that are now the most heavily at odds, and with their separation attempt to do something useful and healthy” (ibid.).

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Figure 16. “La Clásica Tehuana” (Evolución, 25 Feb. 1923).

Figure 17. “La Señorita Delia Sánchez” (Evolución, 6 Apr. 1925).

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Figure 18. Mixtec delegation to the Homenaje Racial, 1932 (phot. Juan Arriaga, 1932, Fundación Bustamante, Oaxaca).

types marked the emergence of a cultural discourse in which Oaxacan identity was debated and visualized through images of women’s clothing and bodies. This gendered calculus of type peaked in the “Homenaje Racial,” held in Oaxaca in 1932. Organized as part of the four-hundredth anniversary of the founding of the city of Oaxaca, this predecessor of today’s well-known Guelaguetza festival was sponsored by Vásquez’s successor, Governor López Cortez (1929 – 32). The organizing committee, however, was made up of the three leading architects of Vásquez’s Oaxaquenization programs.61 Described by its scenographer, Alberto Vargas, as a “great festival of the races to the Sultaness of the South,” the Homenaje was to consist of five delegations of “Racial Embassadoresses” and their indigenous entourages; each delegation, supposedly representing a discrete cultural territory within the state, would render homage to the city of Oaxaca (figure 18).62 The entourages were made up of, in

61. The Organizing Commission was made up of Policarpo T. Sánchez, Alberto Vargas, and Guillermo A. Esteva. 62. “Argumento escenificado del Homenaje Racial,” El Mercurio, 20 Apr. 1932, p. 3; and 21 Apr. 1932, p. 2.


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Figure 19. Embajadoras de Toxtepec, Juchitán y Sierra Juárez (phot. Juan Arriaga, 1932, Fundación Bustamante).

Vargas’s words, “men and women who still conserved the autochthonous garments of their race.” The embajadoras, however, were not what we (or they, for that matter) would consider “Indians.” Indeed, some (such as Rosa María Meixuiero de Hernández, embajadora from the Sierra Juárez and daughter of one of the caciques of the Sovereignty Movement) represented the most powerful, and whitest, families of their regions (figure 19).63 In photographs of the delegations, several of the embajadoras whitened their faces with flour (or powder), which produced a rather ghostly, even comical, effect and served to emphasize the distance separating the culture-bearing embajadora from her race-bearing entourage (figure 20). No amount of powder, however, could mask the symbolic role these women

63. The regional committees were expected first to receive nominations for candidates for the embassadoress from their region, and then to raise money by selling votes for different candidates. Not surprisingly, the winners were in all cases representatives of the wealthier — and, for the most part, whiter — families of their regions. Photograph from in Album Conmemorativo de Oaxaca en el IV Centenario de su exaltación a la categoría de ciudad, archives of the Fundación Bustamante.

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Figure 20. Delegación del Valle al Homenaje Racial (phot. Juan Arriaga, 1932, Fundación Bustamante, Oaxaca).

filled as representatives of racial regions that were in every way subordinate to the mestizo capital city. The representative of this center, Miss Oaxaca, was described as “a beautiful dark-haired woman, svelte in build, of solemn bearing, who diffuses happiness with her gaze.”64 This “Pearl of the South” was accompanied by “typical charros and chinas,” whom Vargas himself referred to as “national symbols” that would serve to mark the “fraternity” uniting the city of Oaxaca and her “sisters,” the “racial regions.”65 The visual logic of type animating the Homenaje Racial is all too clear: the regions were conceived of as “races” embodied in the traje of the embajadoras and the physical characteristics of their entourages, while the center represented the modern national identity or type — the mestizo. “Oaxaca” consisted, on the one hand, of many different regional races and, on the other, of “La Raza,” the national race that was both singular and mestiza. It is no exaggeration to say that the Homenaje Racial functioned as a visual technology for promoting an idea of a unified Oaxacan identity based on a sort of menu of femi-

64. “Programa Oficial del IV Centenario de la Ciudad de Oaxaca,” El Mercurio, 21 Apr. 1932, p. 2. 65. Ibid., p. 3.


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nine costumes and types. Each of these types, representing a particular place, was simultaneously made available as a symbol of the whole of Oaxaca.66 Having ungrounded this repertoire of types from the state’s fractious and far-flung regions, the newly consolidated revolutionary state wanted to maintain control over the circulation of types and their use in creating an identity for the whole. Interestingly, the state placed severe restrictions on the reproduction of photographs of the embajadoras and their delegations, granting permission to only one photographer, the Oaxacan Juan Arriaga, to produce portraits of the women and requiring that each copy sold be registered in the National Museum. Apparently, the Oaxacan state felt there were high stakes in controlling these images of types.67 Photography and the Commonsense Sentiments of Race

In Oaxaca, as elsewhere, photography played a decisive role in solidifying a racial common sense in which particular body types and clothing styles have come to be thought of as representative of particular regions, states, races, and cultures. In the nineteenth century, the practices associated with type photography reflected positivist concerns with ordering and administering society. Type photographs, however, did more than passively “reflect” other domains of discursive and artistic production. Rather, the mechanical quality and the cultural practices associated with them made type photographs a vehicle for grounding the abstract idealizations of types in the material languages of biology and geography. Type photographs traveled around the world, accumulated in private collections and state archives, and hung in state sponsored exhibitions and in private galleries in Latin America and abroad. This circulation contributed to the construction and consolidation of a visual culture in which material icons of types came to assume a life of their own. Moreover, unlike some other genres of

66. In those cases where delegations disagreed with the choice of costume or cultural affiliation for their region, the Central Organizing Committee moved to enforce their selection: if necessary, they instructed, costumes were to be borrowed from other places. See for example, “Carta de Leon Olvera del Comité Organizadora del IV Centenario a Alfonso Cuella del Comité Regional de Juchila,” 21 Mar. 1932, 1 f.; Archivo Histórico de la Municipalidad de Oaxaca. 67. El Mercurio, 22 Apr. 1932, p. 1. These measures were truly extraordinary at a moment when, with few exceptions, newspapers and books routinely published photographs without either citing credits or paying rights. Copies of the photographs were published and distributed through the official commemorative album (Oaxaca en e IV Centenario de su Exaltacion a la Categoria de Ciudad [Mexico City: Agustín Vega, 1932].

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photography (such as documentary or portraiture), the value and meaning assigned to type photographs were not necessarily derived by connecting to some reality “out there,” beyond the photographic frame. Indeed, as we have seen in the cases of Starr and the Porfirian archive, nineteenth-century collectors did not particularly care if a photograph accurately portrayed an actual individual. What interested them was its status as an object or icon that could be organized, administered, arranged, displayed, and compared. In short, the nineteenth-century type photograph was valued not for its authenticity but for its place in a series and for its role in completing a collection. In the early years of the twentieth century, the statistical discourse of type would colonize the visual spaces, political imaginations, and aesthetic horizons of Oaxacan society. Women from the newly emergent middle sectors collected postcards of types and scenes from their own state. In many ways, the comparative aesthetic animating these private collections mimicked the statistical rationality of the Porfirian archive. Early-twentieth-century fascination with types, however, was not simply a continuation or prolongation of the nineteenthcentury positivist passion for order. Rather, as the bureaucratic and scientific language of types entered the domain of daily life, the concepts of both race and type were reworked as elements of an emerging commonsense understanding of how race could (and could not) be seen. Thus, as elite and middleclass Mexican women began to incorporate indigenous costumes into their own photographs and lives, the iconic status of the type image underwent a dramatic change. Whereas Porfirian intellectuals such as Martínez or García Cubas used traje to fix cultural identity onto certain types of racialized bodies and geographic regions, by the time Martínez’s final work was done, white women from Oaxaca (and Mexico City) were using regional traje to fashion a new sense of self. As the practice of donning costume became more generalized, the idea of type itself became permanently uprooted from the indigenous, race-bearing body that had been the positivists’ principal concern and mapped onto a new modernist geography of universalized national identity. Race, in turn, came to be seen not in fixed physiognomy, but in the mobility of costumes that could now be worn as a means of expressing affiliation with a broader region (Oaxaca) or nation (Mexico). Finally, we saw how the cultural projects of the 1930s appropriated the concept of type as a means to promote a new, state-sponsored idea of Oaxacan identity as unified in its diversity. These projects speak, on the one hand, to the tension between the new revolutionary project of homogeneity through mestizaje and the Oaxacans’ lingering concern with documenting and administering the diversity of racial types in their state. These cultural projects of the


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Figure 21. Uniformed school children, Oaxaca, 1926 (AGEO, FE, Caja 7).

1920s and 1930s attempted to resolve this dilemma by creating an identity that was at once singular/mestiza and plural/indigenous.68 In their debates about Oaxacan identity and the relationship of Oaxaca to the new revolutionary state, both sides spoke through the visual grammar of type. It was Vásquez and Sánchez’s project, however, that emerged from the 1930s as the new paradigm for Oaxacan identity. The genius of this project was that it effectively exploited the autonomy of types as signs whose meanings were not necessarily tied to their referents. Once separated conceptually — and visually — from the racialized bodies and places with which they had been identified, the types embodied in traje could be used to create what Policarpo T. Sánchez, in discussing the array of trajes and types in the 1932 Homenaje Racial, described as “an agreeable impression of the whole.”69 Sánchez used a language of indigenous types to promote a collective identity that celebrated cultural and racial plurality at the same time that it worked to devalue the languages, clothing, and cultures of the state’s many indigenous groups. Thus, while traje was used to construct a panorama of types in the Homenaje Racial (and its descendent, the Gue68. Deborah Poole, “Cultural Diversity and Racial Unity in Oaxaca: Rethinking Hybridity and the State in Post-Revolutionary México” (ms., Dept. of Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University). 69. “Carta Circular de Policarpo T. Sánchez,” 10 Dec. 1931, Archivo Histórico de la Municipal de Oaxaca “Manuel R. Palacios”

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laguetza), indigenous schoolchildren were taught Spanish and given uniforms that emphasized their distance, as modern rural Oaxaqueños, from the “antiquated racial customs” of their regions (figure 21). This surprising inversion in the language of type and race helps to explain how photographs, such as the one with which I introduced this discussion, could be used to support opposite political positions. Where Martínez would have attempted to read the photograph for clues that would locate the boy in the state’s ethnological map, by the early 1930s, when this photograph was published, the category of “Indian” had become conceptually divorced from the region’s distinct types, who would emerge over the next years as fodder for Oaxaca’s new “pluricultural” identity. In this story of shifting racial referents and diverging cultural identities, the medium — photography —was, in a very real way, the message. Photographs do not simply provide a record of cultural and ideological changes that took place in separate discursive registers; they themselves constituted the vehicle through which types and trajes became portable signifiers, separate from the racialized bodies that bore them.