Forging a Nation: Blackness in Visual Culture during Mexico's "Golden Age"

• In Event: 566 - Section on Latino/a Sociology Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 04. Latina/os in Latin America

Abstract

Following the Revolution of 1910 in Mexico, the social, economic, and political divisions left the country in a state of fragmentation. Emphasizing a common cultural and ethno-racial history was framed as a strategic and necessary tool in fastening together the different fragments of Mexico’s populace and delineating the boundaries of belonging after the Revolution. Specifically, the creation of the mestizo nation in addition to the nationalization, institutionalization and museumification of shared Mexican culture and history, assisted in the creation, framing, and empowerment of national narratives that served as foundational threads in weaving a more unified social fabric. As a result, popular culture became the space necessary for these unifying and homogenizing state and intellectual projects. This paper seeks to explain how blackness, viewed as a cultural relic not worth rediscovering, modernizing, and reintegrating into the Mexican nation, was to be framed in order to address the social tensions of the incorporation of blackness into the Mexican efforts of nation-building following the Revolution of 1910. Specifically, I examine how blackness was performed, visualized, and imagined and how this group was to be treated and united with regards to building a larger national family. To address these issues, I examine three specific examples of “Golden Age” cultural production. While these present differing and shared frameworks in which blackness is performed and represented, they also introduce questions of the integration of blackness into post-Revolutionary Mexico’s mosaic of the modern mestizo.

Author

• Jennifer Guillen, Texas A&M University