The White Indians of Mexican Cinema
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3

Revolutionary Politics, Colonized Aesthetics

The films discussed in the previous two chapters relate to indigenismo thematically in the broad sense that they feature Indigenous characters and their respective scenery, therefore aligning with postrevolutionary nationalism’s symbolic celebration of the nation’s native roots and identity. Those explored here, La india bonita (dir. Antonio Helú, 1938), El indio (dir. Armando de la Maza, 1939), María Candelaria and Maclovia (dir. Emilio Fernández 1944 and 1948, respectively), as well as Janitzio (dir. Carlos Navarro, 1935), and Raíces (dir. Benito Alazraki, 1955), are more closely tied to the political dimension of the indigenismo and mestizaje discourses in that they convey the plight of Indigenous people within an oppressive social structure. In doing so, these films either implicitly or explicitly infer the necessity of the Mexican Revolution of 1910 and the need to overturn a racially stratified social order. To create these critiques, the films use whiteness-as-whiteness to represent criollo or European men from a privileged class who either wittingly or unwittingly abuse their position to the detriment of Indigenous communities (adversely affecting the Indigenous female protagonists specifically). By calling attention to the coloniality of power as wielded by White men in Mexico, the films are, to varying degrees, invested in revolutionary politics.

However, through the aesthetic choice of whiteness-as-indigeneity for representing virtuous and beautiful (diegetically) Indigenous women, the four melodramas listed above betray an adherence to both the colonization of subjectivity and the colonization of desire, which establish Whiteness as the preferred device for inciting identification and conveying physical appeal. Therefore, while this corpus of films discursively rejects the political manifestations of coloniality, it upholds coloniality’s gendered aesthetic implications, according to which female desirability is measured by its approximation to Whiteness. By highlighting the limits of revolutionary indigenismo and mestizaje discourses in these melodramatic, Indigenous-themed films, this chapter ultimately points to the way in which discursively decolonial cultural artifacts can, in effect, reify deeply rooted, racist ways of valuing bodies in Mexico. Furthermore, the chapter explores Janiztio and Redes as significant counterexamples that do not follow the trend of whiteness-as-indigeneity because (among other reasons) they do not adhere to the same conventions of melodrama, which, as I suggest in the introduction, favor Whiteness to signal desirability and identification in Mexican cinema.

The six films are grouped based on their production contexts, which inform their aesthetic tendencies. La india bonita and El indio were made in the initial stage of industrial filmmaking in Mexico when the privileging of nationally oriented themes was an evident trend, limited technological possibilities resulted in simple camerawork, and a robust star system was not yet in place. The second group of films, María Candelaria and Maclovia, represent a peak in the aestheticization of rural Mexico on film during the industrial and commercial heyday of the Golden Age and feature the most significant female figures of the Mexican star system, Dolores del Río and María Félix. Finally, even though Janitzio was made in the preindustrial period and Raíces’s production coincided with the decline of the Golden Age, both films coincide in their rejection of studio-era norms and commercial aspirations. Thus, despite the more than twenty years that separate the two films, they employ similar strategies for rendering Indigeneity, in part because of both films’ marginal status with respect to industrial filmmaking.

La india bonita (1938)

Antonio Helú’s La india bonita closely adheres to the conventions of the comedia ranchera genre in that it is a comedic film set in rural Mexico containing musical numbers and humorous interludes.1 As Natasha Varner observes, the film’s title comes directly from the beauty pageant held in Mexico City in 19212 organized by leading cultural figures, including Manuel Gamio, with the aim of promoting the desirability of Indigenous women to White Mexican men to bolster mestizaje.3 For several scholars, this pageant captures the racial and gendered dynamics at work in postrevolutionary Mexican popular nationalism.4 Helú’s film builds its plot around the pageant, which it thoroughly reimagines and showcases in line with “a growing indigenist ethos of the late 1930s that celebrated select aspects of many different Indigenous cultures.”5

In the film, Joaquín (played by Carlos López Moctezuma) is the son of a ranch owner, but lives in Mexico City. He and his friend Luis (played by Julián Soler) take a break from city life to visit Joaquín’s family ranch in an unidentified rural area of Mexico. They concoct a plan to seduce two of the Indigenous girls from the ranch, Lupe (played by Anita Campillo) and Ana María, by entering them into the india bonita contest, which is taking place in the capital. In the city, they hope to bed the women away from the watchful eyes of their boyfriends and community. The women’s boyfriends, Manuel (played by Emilio Tuero) and Jacinto, suspect the privileged men’s ignoble intentions and oppose the trip, but cannot prevent it from going forward. While on the trip as Lupe’s chaperone, her mother, Gertrudis, finds out about Joaquín’s intentions with her daughter. Gertrudis returns to the ranch to alert Joaquín’s father, Gonzalo, because Lupe and Joaquín are in fact brother and sister. Gertrudis and Gonzalo travel to the city along with Manuel and Jacinto to stop the bachelors from pursuing Lupe and Ana María. Lupe wins the india bonita contest, and Lupe and Ana María are happily reunited with their boyfriends, whom they marry shortly after.

Helú’s film has been criticized for being “excessively conventional” and narratively negligible.6 Here I explore how, on the one hand, this seemingly innocuous film registers the idea of a raced abuse of power on behalf of elite males and, on the other, it implements whiteness-as-indigeneity as a visual strategy for presenting a version of Mexican femininity as both authentically national and desirable.

La india bonita does not explicitly mention the Revolution as armed conflict, and as a film with clear ties to the comedia ranchera genre, it largely represents the hacienda as a place characterized by jovial social harmony.7 However, the film differs with respect to widely known examples of the genre, such as Allá en el Rancho Grande (dir. Fernando de Fuentes, 1936), in which the possibility of transgression on the part of the landowner is only hinted at, and the dangers of the city are entirely out of the frame.8 La india bonita blends a moral anxiety about the effects of urban culture with a revolutionary subtext through its reference to White male power that has the ability to exert itself through private injustices along racial, gendered, and class lines. In the following dialogue in which Luis (Julián Soler) and Joaquín (Carlos López Moctezuma) concoct their plan, the film exposes how men who enjoy advantages because of their class and race abuse their position for the sexual exploitation of Indigenous women:

LUIS. ¡Hombre! Supongo que no querrás casarte con ella. (Come on! I don’t suppose you’d want to marry her.)

JOAQUIN. Claro que no. (Of course not.)

LUIS. Pues ahí tienes. Lo que no puedes hacer aquí, lo podrás hacer en México … en México podemos hacer con ellas lo que nos dé la gana. Las muchachas se pierden de todos modos, aquí o en la ciudad, con la diferencia de que aquí caerán en manos de algún indio y se pasarán toda la vida encerradas en la hacienda … (Well there you have it. What you cannot do here, you can do in Mexico City … there we can do with them what we want. Young women lose their way anyhow, here or in the city, with the difference that here they will end up in the hands of some Indian and will spend their entire lives shut away on the ranch).

By showing that White members of the upper urban and landowning class consider pretty Indigenous girls to be beneath marrying, while at the same time staking strong claims of sexual entitlement over them, La india bonita evidences the abuse of power on the part of members of the elite, albeit within a larger comedic framework. Set in the postrevolutionary period, La india bonita translates the idea of a political conflict between men of distinct racial and class positions into an analogous rivalry over the love and honor of the Indigenous woman. The film’s revolutionary resonance consists of its insistence on portraying the diegetically Indigenous man as the worthy and moral romantic subject.9

Because of their intentions to seduce and abandon, which the film presents as a dishonorable course of action,10 the film casts Luis and Joaquín as the film’s antagonistic force threatening the genuine affection shared by the primary Indigenous couple, Lupe and Miguel. La india bonita uses whiteness-as-whiteness to signal the morally dubious and high-handed male, while whiteness-as-indigeneity is used to present the characters who occupy the moral and diegetic center of the film. Beyond this point, in La india bonita the white-as-indigenous Lupe and Miguel also represent Mexican authenticity. The film presents this genuine national quality as being tied to the idealized countryside—or “camposcape”11—through an explicit contrast between the countryside and the city. Prior to leaving for Mexico City to take part in the contest, for instance, Lupe’s uncle makes a brief speech in which he extols the virtues of Indigenous women from the countryside in a way that associates them with Mexican authenticity: “Allá tendrán muchas catrinas guapas, pero inditas, mexicanas puras como las que aquí tenemos, no las tienen allá” (Over there they may have many fancy ladies, but inditas, pure Mexican women like the ones we have here, they don’t have there). Through this speech, the film suggests that Lupe is representative of the Mexican essence because of her Indigenous background and rural upbringing.

Similarly, the film presents Miguel as Lupe’s true equal because he is tied to the land, unlike the patrón’s son, who over the course of multiple years has only spent a few days on the hacienda, or his friend, who initially can only stomach the thought of spending a couple of days in the rural environment. The film associates Joaquín and Luis’s lack of experience in the countryside with their shady moral character (the supposed evidence of the city’s corrupting influence) and their incapacity to impress through musical ability. For example, when Joaquín and Luis try to serenade Lupe and Ana María as a part of their plot to coax them, they are upstaged by Miguel’s impressive singing and forced to leave without being noticed by the women, which suggests the superiority of Miguel’s rustic manhood and romantic prowess. Later, when Miguel interrupts the india bonita contest to reclaim his beloved, he takes the attention away from Luis (who is serving as the contest’s master of ceremonies) by belting out a love song as he makes his grand entrance. The film suggests that Miguel’s singing is far more impressive than Luis’s hosting through the crosscut editing of the scene, which presents the musical number as undermining Luis’s orchestration of the event. Furthermore, as Miguel sings, he hands flowers to members of the audience, further reinforcing his association with the countryside. Miguel is therefore the embodiment of authentic Mexican masculinity who is deserving of Lupe, which the film establishes through his tie to the camposcape, his moral integrity, and his musical ability.

Regarding diegetically Indigenous womanhood, La india bonita uses whiteness-as-indigeneity as a strategy to present desirable and compassion-worthy female Indigeneity through Anita Campillo’s embodiment of Lupe. The character’s on-screen appearance is characterized by the following attributes read as White in the local racial formation: a tall and slender body, light skin complexion, fine facial features, large eyes, full lashes, and thin, manicured eyebrows. The film further underscores Lupe’s Whiteness through her graceful movement and gesticulation, especially in contrast with the other inhabitants of her rancho whose characters fulfill a purely comedic function in the tradition of the popular theater. While, for example, the unnamed quarrelling husband and wife characters beat each other, producing slapstick humor and displaying rude facial gestures, because Lupe’s plotline is a melodramatic one (complete with the surprise revelation of her true parentage), her gestures and movements are contained, graceful, and noncomedic. Last, Lupe’s sweet tone of voice and clear articulation of dominant Mexican Spanish contrasts with the class and racialized speech patterns of her comedic male counterparts, such as her uncle, Panteleón, whose speech is full of colloquialisms. La india bonita therefore crafts Lupe as white-as-Indigenous for melodramatic purposes through corporeal, kinetic, and linguistic markers.

The fact that the film’s “india bonita” (pretty Indian girl) is a woman without embodied or aural markers associated with Indigeneity within the Mexican racial formation and who is made up according to cosmetic trends of the day speaks to the “problem” that the concept of Indigenous beauty posed in the cinematic realm. The salience of the colonization of desire in this film’s portrayal of appealing Indigenous femininity is evident in the contrast between the india bonita’s appearance in this film and the appearance of the woman who won the actual india bonita contest in Mexico City in 1921, María Bibiana Uribe. In real life, somatic Indigenous markers were admissible in the contest, if not expected characteristics of the contestants,12 while in cinema, they are categorically absent in the character whose central role engages melodramatic conventions.

Furthermore, of the two potential candidates for representing the hacienda in the film’s contest (Lupe and Ana María), the woman with a physical appearance that most closely aligns with parameters for female Whiteness is selected to take part in the competition (Lupe is taller and slenderer than Ana María, her face is less round, and her facial features are finer). A glimpse at Anita Campillo’s career trajectory, which included a variety of non-Indigenous leading roles in both Mexican and US productions, further suggests that the actress embodied cosmopolitan bodily ideals. In addition to appearing alongside John Wayne in The Man from Utah (dir. Robert N. Bradbury, 1934),13 Anita Campillo was featured in at least two of the (now infamous) Spanish-language sound films made in Hollywood in the 1930s, La cruz y la espada (dir. Frank Strayer, 1934) and La Buenaventura (dir. William C. McGann, 1934). Campillo’s acting career illustrates that she enjoyed “white people’s right to be various.”14 By Whitening “la india bonita” in the body of Anita Campillo, Helú’s film uses whiteness-as-indigeneity to present the embodiment of a genuine feminine Mexican essence that could also be read as desirable according to a colonially inflected hierarchization of female bodies.

As in other Indigenous-themed films, La india bonita’s “solution” for representing appealing Indigenous womanhood requires the layering of folkloric garb on the White Mexican female body.15 This aesthetic choice in the film is particularly salient and problematic because La india bonita repeatedly marks a sharp contrast between the countryside and the city in part by calling attention to the differences in the physical appearances of women from both areas. For example, early in the film, Joaquín’s father makes a point of telling Lupe that she is “monísima” (really beautiful) and that women like her can’t be found easily in the city: “¿A poco crees que en la ciudad hay muchas como tú? ¡Qué más quisieran!” (Do you think that in the city there many like you? They wish!). The contrast is repeated later when Lupe’s uncle sends her off with the speech mentioned above, in which he marks a distinction between “catrinas guapas” (fancy ladies) and “inditas, mexicanas puras” (inditas, pure Mexicans). The irony of the film’s association of Lupe with Indigenous beauty—including Miguel’s referring to her as “prieta mia” (my darkie) in one of his ballads—is that while Lupe is wearing garments and accessories that mark her as a rural woman of Indigenous extraction, she otherwise physically embodies the cosmopolitan beauty standards of her day. In La india bonita, Lupe’s whiteness-as-indigeneity muddles the visual distinction between “catrinas” and “inditas.”16 The negation of this visual contrast in cinema, which did exist in the Mexican press,17 points to how cinema in Mexico has functioned as a peculiar space where an insistence on the aesthetic superiority of White Mexican femininity has persisted with remarkable (and colonially determined) tenacity.

El indio (1939)

Armando Vargas de la Maza directed El indio in 1938, an adaptation of Gregorio López y Fuentes’s 1935 novel by the same title. El indio echoes the privileging of national themes and rural settings that became popular in the wake of Allá en el Rancho Grande;18 however, like Tierra de pasiones (discussed in chapter 2), the film departs markedly from the lighthearted genre through its dramatic tone and focus on caudillo-orchestrated injustice. We might refer to both films as dramas rancheros.

While El indio has been criticized for its “touristic and melodramatic vocation” and for helping to pave the way for an acritical indigenist cinema,19 unlike La india bonita, the film explicitly situates itself within a militant and political framework. From the opening expository text, El indio contextualizes the events it recounts in relation to the Mexican Revolution: “la revolución ha logrado la redención del indio … estos hechos se desarrollaron en una época que precedió al periodo revolucionario actual” (the Revolution has achieved the Indian’s liberation … these events took place in a period previous to the contemporary revolutionary moment). With this text, the film signals that it will address racialized injustice, but, in a manner similar to the expository text in María Candelaria, de la Maza’s film carefully locates this dynamic as a reality of the prerevolutionary period that has been eradicated at the time of the film’s production.20

The plot in El indio centers the politics of the Revolution by highlighting the White landowning class’ greed and exploitation of Indigenous labor. The story follows a group of Indigenous people who toil endlessly for a criollo landowner, Gonzalo, and receive scarce compensation. In addition to enforcing unjust working conditions for the Indigenous laborers, the landowner becomes convinced that their tribe possesses ancient treasures long buried for safekeeping. He tortures one of the community’s members, Julián, because he denies knowing the treasure’s location. The Indigenous people kill one of Gonzalo’s men in retribution for Julián’s torture, to which Gonzalo responds by burning down their town. The landowner also attempts to access the treasure by taking advantage of the rivalry between two Indigenous men, Julián and Felipe (played by Pedro Armendáriz), who are both in love with the same Indigenous woman, María (played by Consuelo Frank). When Gonzalo attempts to rape María, Felipe rallies Indigenous peoples from different areas in an uprising that the film presents as part of the Mexican Revolution.21

A significant part of the revolutionary critique in El indio occurs through its condemnation of Gonzalo as the personification of the prerevolutionary landed elite who exerts power through economic, physical, and structural oppression. The film emphasizes that brutality and injustice characterize the labor arrangement on Gonzalo’s estate. The film opens with a shot of three diegetically Indigenous men toiling to the point of exhaustion. When one of them falls to the ground, he is immediately lashed by an overseer. Later, when the Indigenous laborers collect their weekly payment, they receive only meager sums or a ration of corn in exchange for their hard work because they are indebted to the estate. By explicitly depicting the unjust labor arrangement on Gonzalo’s estate, the film aligns the circumstances of the fictional Indigenous group with the well-known grievances raised during the Mexican Revolution.

El indio further casts Gonzalo as a tyrannical figure by highlighting his use of both violence and influence. In the aftermath of Julian’s punishment and the burning of the town, the film suggests that, in addition to deploying excessive force, Gonzalo’s class exerts power through shady political relationships. In a hearing in which Gonzalo and several Indigenous peasants present their case before the governor, the law sides with Gonzalo, and afterward the landowner offers to pay the governor for his “assistance.” The governor’s response, as well as the knowing handshake and smiles they exchange, suggests an entrenched level of corruption in the governing structures run by White men: “cuando sea usted diputado, podrá ayudarme en otros negocios” (when you will hold office, you can help me with other matters). By indicating Gonzalo’s economic exploitation of Indigenous laborers, his use of unwarranted force toward them, and his nefarious arrangements with political figures, El indio positions him at the center of its revolutionary critique and suggests that violent revolt is the only recourse available to the Indigenous peasants.

Visually, the film uses distinct strategies for presenting Whiteness to mark the landed elite and the righteous Indigenous rebels. On the one hand, El indio uses whiteness-as-whiteness to mark the oppressive landowning class. The film signals Gonzalo’s Whiteness through his dress, Spanish accent, and phenotypical markers that are read as White in the Mexican racial formation. On the other hand, the film uses whiteness-as-indigeneity to distinguish the main Indigenous characters in the diegesis (María and Felipe) from both their elite oppressors and the secondary Indigenous characters. In line with the explanation of the colonization of subjectivity and its predominance in melodrama outlined in the introduction, in El indio, whiteness-as-indigeneity signals the film’s protagonists and primary points of identification. In addition to exhibiting the gendered virtues of traditional twentieth-century Mexican society (forthrightness, honor, and bravery in the case of Felipe; and modesty, beauty, and chastity in María’s case), Felipe and María’s love story is the plot’s sentimental center. El indio’s use of whiteness-as-indigeneity marks the diegetically Indigenous Mexicans who overthrow the unjust criollo order as the new protagonists of the emerging postrevolutionary nation.22

Beyond María’s role within the film’s central couple, in El indio she is the object of desire for several men across racial and class lines. The film’s strategy for presenting her as both desirable and Indigenous employs the then in vogue “deco-body,” which features slender shapes, long lines, an androgynous body shape, fashionable late 1930s makeup, thin eyebrows, full lashes, and a light completion.23 Here the Indigenous woman is coded as desirable for a Mexican audience through her aesthetic refashioning according to the cosmopolitan beauty standards of the day.

Even though a robust star system was not yet in place at the time El indio was made, press coverage of the actress, Consuelo Frank, just a few years later confirms that she embodied normative ideals of female beauty in Mexico at the time. A feature in Cinema Reporter from 1945 asserts that “durante toda una etapa fue la mujer más hermosa de nuestro cine, y su atractivo en el público fue siempre indiscutible. Es toda una figura con señorío, gracia y múltiples capacidades” (during an entire period she was the most beautiful woman of our cinema, and among the public her appeal was always undeniable. She is a leading figure with dignity, grace, and multiple abilities).24 The article even suggests that Consuelo Frank’s beauty and talent were underserved in the types of roles she took in films like El indio: “no había temas para ella, como no fueran los peligrosos y deleznables temas rurales …” (there were no subject matters for her that went beyond the dangerous and poorly made rural themes …). In suggesting that Frank’s cosmopolitan appearance and air were an awkward fit for films set in provincial areas, the article hints that these films put forth disingenuous representations of rural Mexicans.

Close-ups of Frank playing María throughout El indio function as part of the cinematic conventions of melodrama because they highlight the character’s emotional states, but at the same time, this cinematic device features María’s whiteness-as-indigeneity as desirable on an aesthetic level. More importantly, however, her whiteness-as-indigeneity is also the means through which the film presents María as the corrupt criollo order’s most helpless and compassion-worthy victim. The fact that the film assigns her this status is apparent in that Gonzalo’s attempt to rape María is the last indignation that finally instigates her community’s armed rebellion. This point is remarkable considering that prolonged economic exploitation, Julián’s unjust punishment, and even the razing of their town previously had not been enough to spur them into action. María’s Whiteness helps to transmit the urgency of the revolutionary cause by visually instrumentalizing the long-standing privileged treatment of White bodies in Mexico according to which their violation or suffering is perceived as egregious and “grievable,” while the violation of non-White bodies is deemed tolerable or is ignored altogether.25

In this sense El indio functions analogously to the examples of melodrama described by Linda Williams, which “stag[e] a recognition of virtue through the visible suffering of the endangered white woman.”26 As Williams explains, in Hollywood “[i]nter-racial (non-white on white) rape is represented as bestiality storming the citadel of civilization.”27 This Mexican film with a revolutionary message adapts the Hollywood trope. El indio uses the white-as-Indigenous woman, alongside dramatic music during the attempted rape scene, to represent unchecked criollo control as horrific and to interpellate28 the Mexican spectator toward an ideological position that affirms the necessity of the Revolution. In this way, María’s whiteness-as-indigeneity serves the purpose of bolstering the film’s revolutionary message, while at the same time reinforcing the raced privilege of White bodies on a semiotic level.

María Candelaria (1944)

Emilio Fernández’s 1944 film, María Candelaria, is among the most widely studied and commented-on in Mexican film history because, at least in part, of its iteration of the indigenismo and mestizaje discourse and its visual genealogy.29 In this bona fide Golden Age melodrama, it is the incongruity among different sectors of the population in prerevolutionary Mexico that leads to a tragic outcome. The film tells the story of María Candelaria (Dolores del Río), an Indigenous woman from Xochimilco who is ostracized from her community because of her mother’s reputation for transgressing its sexual norms. By selling flowers, she hopes to repay her debt to a mestizo strongman, Don Damián, and marry her beloved, Lorenzo Rafael (Pedro Armendáriz). However, the community does not allow her to sell flowers, and later María contracts malaria after Don Damián refuses to distribute quinine to the Indigenous people. In a moment of desperation, Lorenzo Rafael steals the medicine for María as well as a dress for her to wear on their wedding day—an act that eventually lands him jail. In exchange for helping María negotiate Lorenzo Rafael’s release, a criollo artist asks to paint María. After painting her face, the artists requests to paint her nude body, to which María reacts by running away in distress. Even though he completes the painting using the nude body of another Indigenous woman as his model, María’s community interprets the resulting image as evidence of her sexual immorality, for which they stone her to death.

Regarding the film’s connection to the politics of the Revolution and the postrevolutionary era, scholars have concluded that María Candelaria suggests isolation as the only viable path to protecting Indigenous people30 and opts to praise a dead Indigenous person rather than contend with the social and economic struggles of Indigenous communities in 1940s Mexico.31 However, if we foreground the fact that, in the diegesis, the Revolution has not yet occurred, one can also conclude that María Candelaria presents its tragedies as a result of a faulty prerevolutionary governing structure that does not effectively rule or integrate different social sectors. In other words, the Mexico of María Candelaria lacks a competent corporatist government. In this prerevolutionary nightmare, Indigenous people take justice into their own hands, freely victimizing exceptional, innocent natives such as María Candelaria and Lorenzo Rafael, and dubious subjects such as Don Damián are able to exercise authority arbitrarily. Furthermore, criollos know so little about their Indigenous co-nationals that they unintentionally violate them. Given that the local priest and the painter prove incompetent for protecting María and José Rafael, instead of embodying the future, an ideal modernity, or European values worthy of imitation,32 I suggest that they can be read as part of a defective social order that is also responsible for María’s death alongside what the film presents as Indigenous barbarity. The painter and the priest indeed embody a project of modernity,33 but it is the first project of Western modernity introduced through Iberian colonialism,34 which, as presented in María Candelaria, has survived throughout the long nineteenth century and continues to wreak havoc in a prerevolutionary early twentieth-century Mexico. These oblivious criollos must therefore also be reformed, and their attempts at mediation on behalf of Indigenous Mexicans must be supplanted through the Revolution for the good of the nation.

By featuring, although in a highly romanticized vein, the plight of Indigenous people and attributing that suffering to a lack of competent mediation among the various sectors of the population, María Candelaria—not unlike El indio—points to the necessity of the Revolution and justifies the governing order that resulted from it—one distinct from the criollo patriarchy represented by the priest and artist.35 In making corporatist government the film’s structuring absence, María Candelaria—like many other Latin American studio-era films—promotes it as an alternative order for modernizing society.36 In sum, the modernity María Candelaria advocates for is that of postrevolutionary corporativism, and a central way the film advances this proposal is by characterizing the preexisting project of criollo modernity as fatally inadequate.

Scholars have skillfully pointed to the ways in which María Candelaria separates the female protagonist and Lorenzo Rafael as exceptionally virtuous Indians vis-à-vis the other members of their community, whom the film portrays as backwards and savage.37 In particular, Dolores Tierney has pointed to the film’s use of lighting and White somatic markers to argue that the film associates María and Lorenzo Rafael with virtue and the criollo characters (the painter and priest), who for her represent modernity.38 The contrast between the film’s indigenist impulse and the alignment of the film’s protagonists with criollo characters results, for Tierney, in a representation of Indigenous Mexicans that is “incoherent” and “schizophrenic.”39

While the argument presented here is indebted to Tierney’s perceptive observations of how the film constructs the characters’ Whiteness in multifaceted ways, I propose an alternative understanding of how the film’s racial masquerade operates and what it accomplishes. In light of the ways in which the colonization of subjectivity primes postcolonial subjects to identify with Whiteness,40 White epidermal schemas (blancura) operate in María Candelaria as a semiotic device to visually render the unique social and moral identity of María and Lorenzo Rafael as separate from the well-meaning but dangerously oblivious criollos, the Indigenous people presented as backwards, and unenlightened mestizos (Don Damián). In this way, María and Lorenzo Rafael’s whiteness-as-indigeneity marks them as the authentically Mexican couple according to a coherent pattern of racialized representation of cinematic Indigeneity, as also evidenced in La india bonita and El indio. Furthermore, because in this reading the criollos represent a defective social order—not the future or the project of postrevolutionary modernity, but an expiring criollo patriarchy—the protagonists’ affinity with them is in fact the source of their tragedy. If María Candelaria and Lorenzo Rafael are “antithetical to the modern Mexican state,”41 it is only because—in contrast to their counterparts in El indio—they are too compliant with the existing criollo order and no alternative project is yet underway. María Candelaria and Lorenzo Rafael are in fact such a modern Mexican state’s ideal candidates,42 but their embeddedness within criollo patriarchy obstructs their ability to envision or bring about such a project. The racialized semiotic dynamic of whiteness-as-indigeneity serves to anchor the spectator’s identification with María and Lorenzo Rafael as the melodrama’s tragic characters—quintessential Mexicans who are orphans of a competent, modern state—with whom the spectator is meant to identify.

One of the clearest scenes in which somatic difference, underscored by the film’s editing, highlights the difference between the film’s noble Indians and the unredeemable natives is when María Candelaria rows toward the market place to sell flowers, and the community forms a barrier, impeding her from doing so. There are many aspects of these shots that firmly establish María as the primary point of identification. Andrea Noble has already suggested that in this film “collective cinematic identity by definition functions … to prevent close spectatorial identification” with the large Indigenous group.43 In addition, the way in which this confrontation between the María and the group is rendered visually promotes the spectator’s association with María when the extreme long shot of her being thwarted by the community position her as its defenseless and isolated victim. As Claudia Arroyo Quiroz has observed, the series of short medium close-ups, which switch from showing María to showing different members of the community and then María again, emphasizes the Indigenous community’s unified opposition to her (see figures 3.6 and 3.7),44 prefiguring the dynamics of her lapidation later on. The fact that the editing keeps returning to shots of María indicates that the film privileges her experience of the event, and the spectator is therefore meant to identify with her. In addition, the medium close-ups of María are taken from a high angle, emphasizing her vulnerability, while several shots of those in the Indigenous community are taken from a low angle, which may mimic María’s point of view but also imbue her adversaries with a menacing quality.

Furthermore, as Jacqueline Avila has illustrated, the use of sound in the scene is crucial to privileging María’s subjectivity.45 The nondiegetic music builds up dramatically at the point of confrontation when it is clear to María that she will not pass. After she understands this, the “music reinforces María Candelaria’s emotions and functions not only as a marker of oppression but also as a physical indication of her desperation and loss,”46 further underscored through the medium close-up. Alongside these aural and editing effects, Dolores del Ríos’s somatic Whiteness within the Mexican racial formation (which operates alongside her White star text)47 also contributes to the way in which the film promotes the spectator’s identification with her character in this scene. In juxtaposing medium close-ups of the Indigenous people in her community with those of María, the film showcases their phenotypical difference, which serves as a visual tool of moral differentiation. The members of the community who are presented through indigeneity-as-indigeneity48 here are precisely those whom the film casts as vindictive, unreasonable, unjust, and predatory, while the white-as-indigenous María incarnates the characteristics that are represented as exemplary: piety, selflessness, and chastity.49 While I agree with Claudia Arroyo Quiroz that this differentiated approach to Indigenous representation within the same film in part constitutes an effort to infuse the melodrama with “autenticidad antropológica” (anthropological authenticity),50 I suggest that, via the colonization of subjectivity, Whiteness functions to locate María as the film’s privileged point of identification and as a device to convey “the nobility of María Candelaria’s Indianess”51 to Mexican audiences.

Of course, the fact that María Candelaria is an object of desire for men across race and class lines within the diegesis is a crucial factor that must be taken into consideration when understanding the weight of whiteness-as-indigeneity in cinematic representation as a vestige of the coloniality of power. The film calls attention to María’s appeal because the development of the plot depends directly on Don Damián, the painter, and Lorenzo Rafael’s struggle to possess her.52 Visually, as Dolores Tierney has perceptively explained, the film’s use of lighting brightens Maria’s appearance in a manner that is consistent with Western visual conventions according to which a woman’s appeal is rendered through luminosity.53 In addition to the film’s lighting, María Candelaria also uses whiteness-as-indigeneity in the somatic sense to convey diegetic Indigenous feminine desirability, thereby also reinscribing a colonized hierarchy of female bodies, even as the film advocates for the dismantling of internal colonial social relations in Mexico.54 While La india bonita and El indio also portray Indigenous beauty through whiteness-as-indigeneity, Fernández’s films take full advantage of the more advanced technology available in Mexico by the mid-1940s to aestheticize the racial masquerade through elaborate filmic techniques. In María Candelaria, these techniques put forth clearer differentiations between the desirability of whiteness-as-indigeneity and that of other diegetically Indigenous females throughout the film.

The opening images in María Candelaria consist of an Eisenstein-influenced montage of pre-Columbian stone figures and a final mask, which dissolves into a shot of a diegetically Indigenous woman that has the same facial structure as the mask.55 As Joanne Hershfield has noted, through these images, Fernández “specifically links that past through his presentation of Mexico’s ‘eternal’ Indianness.”56 While Andrea Noble has suggested that María too “is linked to the imagistic dialogue between pre-Columbian past and post-Columbian present,” which is made explicit when the painter refers to her as “una india de pura raza mexicana” (an Indian of pure Mexican race),57 María Candelaria in not presented on-screen in a comparable way to the woman who personifies eternal Indianness in the beginning of the film and with whom María is supposed to share this enduring essence. María’s complexion is lighter and is brightened repeatedly through illumination, and she also has finer facial features.58 Although, according to Hershfield and Noble, both women are meant to personify pre-Columbian authenticity, within the film there is an important distinction between the two that explains why they appear through such different embodiments: while the function of the model within the film is merely ornamental, María’s diegetic function requires that she be presented as an object of romantic and sexual desire, and melodramatic identification, which, because of how the coloniality of power has impacted cultural production in Mexico, has historically required Whiteness in its national cinema.

Furthermore, the fact that the film never shows the artist’s infamous painting on-screen betrays a self-consciousness regarding the difference between the visibly ethnic femininity featured in twentieth-century pictorial indigenismo (à la Diego Rivera), of which the painting is supposed to be an example,59 and the White requirement of female Indigeneity in Mexican (melodramatic) cinema. The fact that the painting is supposed to simultaneously capture two different and contradictory approaches to rendering Indigenous female beauty—pictorial indigenismo that exalts Indigenous bodies and Dolores del Río as diegetically Indigenous protagonist—results in the impossibility of the painting’s representation on film.60 In other words, the film can display pictorial indigenismo in the making (as the model sits for the painter) and whiteness-as-indigeneity (in the fashioning of María Candelaria), but no single image can do both simultaneously.61

The tension surrounding the painting’s impossibility is also the result of the racialized sensibilities surrounding female nudity in different visual mediums. Because of the influence of classical art, the painting of nude women came to constitute a long-accepted genre in that medium, while female nudity in publicly visible photography and film, because of those mediums’ association with indexicality, has historically provoked a distinct set of attitudes and anxieties. Race is a significant factor in the constitution of these attitudes and anxieties. Insofar as the cinematic representation of nonWhite people was informed by a Eurocentric demarcation between “historifiable” and “ethnographiable” people62 and operated “on a continuum with zoology, anthropology, botany, entomology, biology and medicine,”63 nonWhite nakedness on film had a distinct status from that of White nakedness. While filmic nudity of nonWhite women presented through the ethnographic gaze was not typically considered obscene, White female nudity—rarely subjected to the same ethnographic visual representation—would have been considered scandalous in the Mexican mid-twentieth century. We can appreciate this difference in the pseudo-anthropological “Sandunga” segment of Sergei Eisenstein’s 1932 film, ¡Qué Viva México!, which features a dark-skinned Indigenous woman, Consuelo, appearing undressed from the waist up. Another example can be found in the photography of popular mid-twentieth-century magazines, such as Hoy, whose cover on August 6, 1938, featured a photograph titled “Indígena in Cosoleacaque” by Rafael Carrillo in which an Indigenous woman appears unclothed from the waist up.64 However, equivalently public displays of White Mexican women’s nakedness in photography and film would have been considered worthy of censorship. Indeed, the first Mexican film to display a nonethnographic or intentionally pornographic shot of a nude woman, La mancha de sangre (dir. Adolfo Best-Maugard), was censored in part for its nudity.65 Thus, the irrepresentability of the nude portrait in María Candelaria also stems from the fact that presenting a nude Dolores del Río on film, even if only in painting form, would likely still have been considered pornographic66—or at the very least, it would have been highly incompatible with her star text as an elegant and well-mannered aristocrat.

While avoiding the display of María Candelaria’s nudity, the film does establish her desirability by presenting her to the spectator through the desirous gaze of male characters, thus cementing her to-be-looked-at-ness from their perspective.67 This occurs, for example, when the painter first sees María as she approaches the market—an encounter that prompts “his sexual desire for María Candelaria, masked behind his artistic desire to paint her.”68 When the artist first sees María, an eyeline match from his perspective displays her as an object of wonder and captures his reaction as he gasps in astonishment (figures 3.9 and 3.10). As Laura Mulvey has illustrated, camera language of this kind places the spectator into the position of desire for the fetishized woman, inciting the viewer to do the same.69 Only María, the white-as-Indigenous woman, provokes this kind of reaction or is presented through editing in a manner that suggests her appeal for men in the diegesis.70

Furthermore, other women in the community, whom the film presents as having closer cultural ties to Indigeneity, are either cast as possessing undesirable, antagonistic characteristics or as being utterly ridiculous. For example, María’s rival for the affection of Lorenzo Rafael, Lupe (played by Margarita Cortés),71 is not desired by Lorenzo Rafael (whom she fancies) or any other male in the story. Visually, she is not consistently presented through close-ups or bright lighting, as María is. Additionally, the film more closely associates Lupe with Indigeneity both because of her superstitious beliefs and because she is the only character to speak in Nahuatl, which she does in moments of anger.72 In visual terms, the film clearly places the women in opposition to each other, most notably when María directly confronts Lupe. Much like the confrontation between María and the entire pueblo, the alternation of medium close-ups of María and Lupe with dramatic nondiegetic music in the background suggests that they embody opposing values. These close-ups also highlight the extent to which María’s physical presence on-screen adheres to the physical criteria for Whiteness for women in Mexico,73 while Lupe’s does not. Specifically, María’s eyes are rounder and larger, while Lupe’s are more slanted, and María’s nose is finer than that of Lupe. In this way, the film emphasizes María’s on-screen presence as an instance of whiteness-as-indigeneity vis-à-vis her rival, Lupe, who is comparatively racialized to emphasize her negative character traits.

In addition to Lupe, the other Indigenous woman who receives a notable amount of screen time is the huesera (bone doctor) who visits María Candelaria when she is on the verge of dying from malaria. Beyond being presented as very old and past the age when she could be physically appealing, the huesera functions as the ignorant foil to the doctor who is an expert in Western medicine.74 The scene is meant to be humorous, and its comedy depends on highlighting the huesera’s mispronunciation of words in Spanish and the implied baselessness of her healing practices. By presenting the huesera as unattractive, foolish, and more closely tied with Indigenous culture, the film suggests that the white-as-indigenous María is the only possible version of native womanhood that can be simultaneously all of the following: a paragon of Indigenous authenticity (as the painter mentions at the beginning of the film), ornamental (fit for pictorial representation), and desirable (sought after by multiple men in the diegesis for sexual and/or romantic satisfaction).

While the breach of indexicality in the casting of María Candelaria is remarked on by nearly every scholar and critic who has written about the film in the past thirty years, at the time the film was released, some Mexican press coverage both made it clear that Dolores del Río was not herself an Indigenous woman, but also foregrounded nationalism to praise del Río’s appropriateness for the role. The title of an article that appeared in Cinema Reporter in February 1945 hints at the complex logic behind this view of del Río’s performance: “De Ramona a María Candelaria. Lolita ama a las indias mexicanas. Lolita ya es nuestra” (From Ramona to María Candelaria. Lolita loves Indigenous Mexican women. Lolita is now ours).

On the one hand, this article (complete with glamourous photographs of the interview on which it is based) reifies the distance between Dolores del Río’s star persona and Indigenous Mexican women.75 It casts del Río as a highly refined and delicate woman, even to the point of suggesting that the filming requirements for María Candelaria were challenging because her “constitución física no está hecha para las rudezas” (physical constitution is not made for roughness).76 On the other hand, the article crafts a celebratory narrative in which María Candelaria constitutes del Río’s inhabiting mexicanidad.

In this narrative, during del Río’s time in Hollywood, “estaba perdida para el pueblo mexicano” (she was lost to the Mexican people).77 This alienation from her home country is paralleled in her interpretation of the leading role in Ramona (dir. Edwin Carewe, 1928) in which she played a half-Indigenous woman just after the United States’ incursion into Mexican California. The article presents del Río’s Ramona as removed from Mexican authenticity by referring to the character as “auqella otra indita fabricada en Hollywood” (that other little Indian woman fabricated in Hollywood).78

The article’s narrative turns when it presents del Río’s absence from her homeland as the impetus for her love of Indigenous Mexican women. In del Río’s words, “ ‘… los problemas indios siempre me han interesado; siento gran cariño hacia las inditas de México; me preocupan sus pequeñas grandes tragedias … Todo eso he aprendido a apreciar, gracias a los años que estuve ausente’ ” (Indian problems have always interested me; I feel a great affection for the little Indian women of Mexico; their great little tragedies matter to me … I learned to appreciate all of that thanks to the years I was away).79 As a promotional piece for María Candelaria, this article casts del Río’s interpretation of the leading role in Fernández’s Mexican production as the embodiment of her newfound esteem for Indigenous Mexican women and the inhabiting of her authentic Mexicanness in contrast to her period of alienation in Hollywood.80 Through this logic, the text elevates the repatriated del Río into “propiamente la intérprete ideal de la india mexicana” (truly the ideal interpreter of the Indigenous Mexican woman). In other words, the article focuses on Hollywood as a categorically un-Mexican environment to collapse the chasmic differences among Mexican women and praise del Río as the quintessential embodiment of Mexican female Indigeneity.

Maclovia (1948)

Emilio Fernández’s 1948 film, Maclovia, has received relatively little attention within Mexican film scholarship because it is considered to be repetitive of both his earlier film, María Candelaria, and of Carlos Navarro’s 1935 film, Janitzio.81 Even a cursory review of Maclovia’s plot reveals some redundancies. The film takes place on the island of Janitzio, where the title character (played by María Félix) is the most beautiful Tarascan82 woman who lives there. Because she is so beautiful, Maclovia’s father refuses to allow her to marry her beloved José María (played by Pedro Armendáriz) because of his humble status and even forbids them from seeing one another. In light of this rejection, José María resolves to better himself by attending school. Sara (played by Columba Domínguez) is another Indigenous woman who is in love with José María. She takes advantage of the imposed separation to declare her love to him, but José María rejects her. Dissatisfied with this outcome, Sara tries to use to her advantage the arrival of a sergeant (played by Carlos López Moctezuma) who desires Maclovia. When the sergeant unfairly imprisons José María to try to bed Maclovia, Sara offers to have sex with the officer to negotiate José María’s release, but the sergeant also rejects her. Finally, the doubly rebuffed Sara spreads the false rumor that Maclovia has slept with the officer in order to incite the community to put her to death, as is their custom when Tarascan women have sex with outsiders. Instead, military officers intervene to prevent the unjust punishment, and Maclovia and José María escape the island safely.

While Maclovia clearly shares many elements with Navarro and Fernandez’s earlier films, it also diverges in significant ways.83 Among these differences is that the film comments on political injustice in more explicitly racial terms84 and is more heavily invested in the politics of the Revolution that exhorts Indigenous and mestizo men to become participatory national subjects. At the same time, the film more intensely defines a moral and aesthetic dichotomy in its representation of diegetic Indigenous womanhood. The key to understanding how the film bolsters the revolutionary message that it applies to men and reinforces the racialized hierarchy rooted in coloniality for the valuing of women lies in the way it uses three categories of characters according to the local racial formation: the white-as-white (the sergeant and the schoolteacher), the white-as-indigenous (Maclovia and José María), and the indigenous-as-indigenous (the other members of the native community who are portrayed as morally and/or ethically deficient).

In Maclovia, the ideological condemnation of the prerevolutionary racialized political hierarchy occurs through the presentation of the film’s villain, Sargento Genovevo de la Garza, through whiteness-as-whiteness in the Mexican context.85 Within the plot, de la Garza is the instigator of injustices toward Indigenous peoples. When he first sees the beautiful Maclovia in a local bar, his zeal results in a physical confrontation with her father. As a result, they end up before a local commissioner of Páztcuaro along with most of the Indigenous community. During the hearing, the sergeant claims that the civil authority should side with him because of his rank. Crucially, he also cites his Whiteness (blancura) as a factor that should bolster his credibility: “¿Vale más la palabra de una punta de indios muertos de hambre que la mía que soy hombre decente? Soy sargento, mire, y de ojos claros, ¿qué no ve?” (Is the word of a bunch of starving Indians worth more than mine, that of a decent person? I’m a sergeant, look, and with light-colored eyes. Can’t you see?). This scene is significant because in it, the contrast between the coloniality of power and the Mexican postrevolutionary national ideology is made clear. In referring to his “light-colored eyes” (the ultimate proof of European heritage within the Mexican racial formation), the sergeant invokes the authority of coloniality according to which his proximity to Europeanness should entitle him to the favor of the law, a position that the film clearly rejects. When the sergeant offers to pay a fine instead of making peace with Maclovia’s father and the community, the commissioner gives voice to the postrevolutionary national ideology that the film upholds:86 “No Señor Sargento, no se trata de dinero. Se trata del respeto que nos merecemos todos los mexicanos” (No Sargeant, this isn’t about money. This is about the respect that we Mexicans all deserve). The message of the scene is clear: in the ideal modern Mexican nation under construction (the film’s plot takes place in 1914, during the Revolution),87 no longer will certain Mexicans be privileged for their racial identity, but all will be respected equally as co-citizens. The scene transmits this message on a discursive level through dialogue, and does so visually by presenting male whiteness-as-whiteness that has not been transformed through cultural mestizaje (as, for example, the White male schoolteacher has) as the locus of abuses of power rooted in coloniality in Mexico.

The film further bolsters revolutionary politics in the male sphere through its celebratory representation of José María’s entrance into national subjectivity via exposure to Mexican history. In a crucial scene, the schoolteacher delivers a history lecture about José María Morelos,88 emphasizing both his Indigenous identity and the services he rendered to the nation in hyperbolic fashion, prompting José María to understand his commonality with the hero of Mexican independence:

Ese indio … no fue solamente glorioso por las batallas que peleó, sino porque dio a México su primer congreso y su primera constitución. Fue el primer indígena que se atrevió a desafiar a Europa, y el primero también que sintió el dolor de México … Ese indio, ese arriero surgido de una recua de mulas, y que con el andar del tiempo habría de dar su nombre a la ciudad donde nació, y que constituye uno de los más puros arquetipos de México y de América, se llamó José María, como tú, José María Morelos y Pavón.

(That Indian … was not only glorious because of the battles he fought, but because he gave Mexico its first congress and its first constitution. He was the first Indian who dared to challenged Europe, and also the first who felt the pain of Mexico … That Indian, that mule driver who emerged from the herd, and who with the passing of time would give his name to the city where he was born, and who constitutes one of the purest archetypes of Mexico and of America, was named José María, like you, José María Morelos y Pavón.)

The schoolteacher’s praise for Morelos is consistent with the postrevolutionary political and cultural discourse, which sought to afford greater prominence to Indigenous and mestizo peoples within the Mexican republic. The speech demonstrates this affinity by suggesting that if an Indigenous person of the past was capable of participating in the national project, so are the Indigenous people of the present. The clearest way in which the film promotes this idea is through the name of its male protagonist and the technical devices used during the scene, which dramatize José María’s coming into national consciousness as a glorious transition. During the schoolteacher’s speech, he is presented from a low angle, amplifying his representation as a legitimate source of authority, and his increased use of emphatic gestures bestows greater gravitas to his message. Furthermore, as his gestures and tone grow more animated, triumphant nondiegetic music builds up slowly, culminating at the end. At this precise moment, the teacher interpellates José María by pointing directly at him and indicating that his name is the same as that of Morelos. An eyeline match occurs after he points to José María, emphasizing the exchange between the two and José María’s reception of the interpellation in a state of quasi-disbelief. The implication of the scene is clear: Morelos and José María share an Indigenous origin, a name, and also can come to share a love for the Mexican nation. In this way, the film promotes the idea that Indigenous men have important political potential as citizens of the Mexican nation, a position that echoes postrevolutionary cultural discourses and imagery.

In line with the films discussed above, Maclovia marks the Indigenous characters who are poised to assume Mexican subjectivity by presenting them visually through whiteness-as-indigeneity. In this case, the white-as-indigenous José María and Maclovia escape from the island, which the film represents in a celebratory tone, signaling their future assimilation.89 However, in contrast with the scenario analyzed in María Candelaria, in Maclovia there is a functional modern Mexican state that can step in and rescue these Mexican citizens in the making from both savage Indians and deleterious criollos. The film represents this functional state through the magistrate, the schoolteacher, and the military that shields the couple from lapidation. In this sense, Maclovia is fundamentally optimistic with regard to the viability of a mestizo nation-state in that its effective representatives reflect a range of biological and cultural mestizaje.

Beyond signaling the ideal candidacy of Indigenous characters for full citizenship within the Mexican nation, with respect to female characters specifically, Maclovia mobilizes whiteness-as-indigeneity to represent various positive characteristics in the protagonist. On-screen, Maclovia’s whiteness-as-indigeneity is transmitted through her large, round, light-brown eyes; light skin complexion; and fine facial features, while Sara’s indigeneity-as-indigeneity is suggested through her comparatively darker skin color, eye shape and dark brown eye color, dark black hair, thick hair texture, and broader facial features.90 As we will see, these embodied markers of Whiteness and Indigeneity function according to a racially determined visual logic to create a sharp contrast between the protagonist and Sara, the woman who schemes to separate her from her beloved.

Maclovia clearly establishes a difference in the desirability and physical appeal of Maclovia and Sara. In the film, various characters repeatedly describe Maclovia as being very beautiful. Sara, on the other hand, is marked as being thoroughly undesirable within the diegesis as both José María and the sergeant decline her propositions. When she confesses her love to José María, she explicitly acknowledges the limits of her physical appeal: “Yo no soy bonita José María, pero te quiero como eres” (I am not pretty, José María, but I love you as you are). Later, when she offers herself sexually to de la Garza in exchange for the release of José María, the sergeant’s response shows a level of admiration for her commitment to the prisoner but makes it clear that she does not compare physically to the woman he truly desires: “Yo respeto el sentimiento pero no, a mí la que me gusta es la otra, Maclovia … ya ve lo que dice el dicho, que a cada quien su gusto lo engorde …” (I respect your feelings, but no, the one I like is the other one, Maclovia. Like the saying says: to each his own …). Through these rebuffs, the film establishes that Sara is not an equally desirable counterpart to Maclovia, as she experiences rejection from Mexican men across racial and socioeconomic lines. Here the film instantiates the dynamics of the coloniality of desire to cement Sara as the diegetically undesirable by presenting her as a Mexican female body that bears the marks of Indigeneity in the local racial formation.

Furthermore, the film’s editing reinforces this racialized aesthetic hierarchy by indicating on a visual level which of the two women is the recipient of the desirous male gaze. When the Sergeant first sees Maclovia in a tavern, he devours her with his gaze before attempting to approach her. Two eyeline matches occur, indicating the direction of the Sergeant’s insistent gaze toward Maclovia and the pleasure it produces for him as his scowl turns slowly into a grin and his eyes move up and down slowly to admire her (figures 3.12 and 3.13). The film’s presentation of Maclovia as the pleasure-producing object of the male gaze firmly establishes her as the desirable woman within the diegesis on a technical level. In contrast, Sara is never visualized through this editing device, which reinforces that the film does not portray her as equally alluring. In this way, the film’s technical devices operate to uphold the White Mexican woman as the most desirable female and to locate the spectator within this optical relationship with both women.

In addition to casting the women as aesthetic counterpoints, the film also establishes Sara and Maclovia as moral opposites. Maclovia is the innocent victim of Sergeant de la Garza and Sara’s malicious intentions through no fault of her own. In addition, she has an intense commitment to chastity by shielding herself continuously from the Sergeant and by refusing to have sexual relations with him to liberate José María from jail. By contrast, Sara uses her sexuality for negotiation and spreads a false rumor in the hope that the Tarascan community will put Maclovia to death. While Sara’s is a morally debased character, Maclovia is (in the words of José María) “la más buena y la más pura de todas las mujeres” (the best and purest of all women). This melodrama uses racialized codes put in place through the colonization of subjectivity in that it promotes identification with the benevolent female protagonist and enforces a disassociation with the antagonist by employing whiteness-as-indigeneity to represent the former and indigeneity-as-indigeneity to represent the latter.

Beyond each character’s physicality, the film emphasizes the contrast between the two women through mise-en-scène, which places the women on opposing sides of the frame along the vertical or horizontal axis.91 This visual juxtaposition is used precisely in the moments when Sara confronts Maclovia aggressively regarding their shared affection for José María and when Maclovia is in a dejected state, therefore emphasizing Sara’s cruelty and Maclovia’s victimhood. In the first example, Sara warns Maclovia to stay away from José María. Their visual juxtaposition on opposite sides of the frame visually translates the way in which the film’s plot locates them as aesthetic and moral opposites. Later on, after having been propositioned by de la Garza, Maclovia runs to a nearby chapel to pray and weep, where Sara confronts her again. In this scene, the positioning of Sara in the upper right-hand corner highlights the way in which she preys on Maclovia’s suffering as she ridicules her prayers and sobs, affirming that she is, in fact, the one who truly loves José María. Conversely, the positioning of Maclovia in the bottom left corner emphasizes her suffering, amplified by Sara’s callousness. Through the asymmetrical arrangement of the women’s bodies at this moment, the film visibly presents them as occupying antithetical positions aesthetically and morally.

As in the case of Dolores del Río’s interpretation of María Candelaria, María Félix’s star text is a significant extradiegetic factor that contributes to the desirability of the female protagonist because Félix’s star text presented her as the embodiment of Mexican beauty standards of her day.92 There is, therefore, a conflation of María Félix’s association with feminine Mexican beauty in, for example, the advertisements for the beauty products she endorsed93 and the way in which the film casts her as a woman of great beauty. Both María Félix and Dolores del Río had star texts that firmly established their star personas as far removed from the humble inditas they portray in Fernández’s films.94

By contrast, Columba Domínguez never garnered comparable accolades with those of María Félix in relation to her physical appearance, nor was she featured as an aspirational model of Mexican beauty or consumption in advertisements. While press coverage of María Félix and Dolores del Río depicted them as categorically beautiful women, mentions of Columba Domínguez’s appearance frequently contained qualifiers to her physical appeal that functioned as veiled racial references (to signal her lack of blancura). In film magazines of the Golden Age, Domínguez’s appearance was described as “mexicanísima”95 (very Mexican), as having “rasgos autóctonos” (Indigenous features),96 and as possessing a “belleza netamente mexicana” (distinctly Mexican beauty).97 In these ways, the print culture of the period signaled the status of Columba Domínguez’s body as one that was not-quite-White according to local standards.

Furthermore, even though Domínguez won the Ariel for her role in Maclovia, beating out María Félix, who was nominated for the same film, this one award did not remotely position the two actresses on equal footing, as Félix went on to become “la estrella más importante surgida en América Latina y el principal mito creado por el cine mexicano” (the most important star to emerge from Latin America and the primary myth created by Mexican cinema).98 Félix’s loss was most likely related to the fact that in Maclovia she was cast against type as a humble and submissive woman while her star text was that of a strong-willed woman who dominates men.99 In total, Félix won five Arieles during the Golden Age—a testament to her dominant status within the Mexican industry and star power, rivaled only by Dolores del Río (who also won five Arieles in the period). Furthermore, I suspect that Domínguez’s one win was granted to her for Maclovia because in playing the indigenous-as-indigenous villain and scorned woman, Domínguez’s performance—while skillful—also supported race- and gender-based biases.100

It is also worth noting that even in the melodramatic films directed by Emilio Fernández in which Columba Domínguez (to whom he was married from 1947 to 1952) did star, she did not function as the universal object of desire as Dolores del Río did in María Candelaria or María Félix did in Maclovia. For example, in Pueblerina (1949),101 the male protagonist, Aurelio, returns to his hometown after having served a prison sentence for shooting a man, Rómulo, in retribution for kidnapping and raping his girlfriend, Paloma (played by Domínguez). However, rather than placing Paloma at the center of the men’s rivalry and dramatizing it (as occurs in María Candelaria and Maclovia), the point of contention between the two men is not Paloma, but rather Aurelio’s right to be in his native town (a point that is made evident through the personification of the hometown through a maternal voice-over that calls out to Aurelio tenderly throughout the film). When the spectator encounters Paloma, far from being presented as an imposing beauty and a valuable conquest for multiple men, she is a dejected recluse. Whereas in Maclovia the title character is repeatedly referred to as a great beauty, in Pueblerina, Paloma is compared to a “cabra bizca” (cross-eyed goat), and Rómulo and his brother conclude that she is worth less than a mare. Furthermore, although the raping of Paloma in the past does suggest that Rómulo may have desired her, the film does not focus on the men’s desire for her as a function of her beauty, nor do the film’s technical devices fetishize her as the object of the male gaze. Instead, Paloma is presented as a valuable woman for Aurelio to marry because of the suffering she has undergone and her enduring goodness despite her tribulations.

In another Fernández film in which Columba Domínguez starred, La malquerida (1949), she plays Acacia, the daughter of Raimunda (played by Dolores del Río) and stepdaughter to Esteban (played by Pedro Armendáriz). In this film, she is the object of desire for Esteban; however, she becomes her mother’s rival for the love of her stepfather and is portrayed as the film’s wicked antagonist in the melodramatic plot. Unlike in María Candelaria and Maclovia, in which the narrative and stylistic devices of the film encourage the alignment of the spectator with the admiration for the female characters presented as beautiful and good through Whiteness, in La malquerida the opposite occurs because the attraction between stepfather and stepdaughter is conveyed as immoral and as the source of torture for the melodramatic film’s victim, Raimunda. In this way, La malquerida presents Acacia as desirable but discourages the spectator from aligning with the desire for the character. Finally, in Fernández’s Un día de vida, the male characters do repeat that Domínguez’s character, Belén Martí, is “muy guapa” (very beautiful) throughout the film. However, in this film, Domínguez is not playing a Mexican woman, but a Cuban one, a narrative caveat that provides an exoticizing justification for her body’s distance from Mexican Whiteness (blancura). Therefore, although Columba Domínguez was occasionally a leading lady in Fernández’s melodramas, her not-quite-White body within the Mexican racial formation was not used to interpret Mexican characters who were upheld as universally desirable, beautiful, and good and with whom spectators were encouraged to identify, as did occur with her Whiter and more successful counterparts, del Río and Félix.

The inability (or refusal) to represent indigeneity-as-indigeneity as beautiful or desirable in María Candelaria and Maclovia, as well as in earlier Indigenous-themed films analyzed here such as El indio and La india bonita, betrays this corpus’ investment in coloniality by measuring female beauty in terms of its approximation to Whiteness. In light of Carlos Monsiváis and Jesús Martín-Barbero’s observations about the role of Mexican Golden Age cinema in educating Mexicans on how to be Mexican,102 these narrative films about Indigeneity instructed the public to assess the female Mexican body through a colonial lens, even when these same films articulated a break with the multifaceted injustices of internal colonialism by bolstering revolutionary discourses. In this way, filmic indigenista melodramas from the postrevolutionary twentieth century carried with them clearly gendered vestiges of coloniality.

Looking Beyond Industrial Representation: Janitzio (1935) and “La potranca” (Raíces, 1955) as Counterexamples

In contrast with the industrial Mexican films discussed above in which whiteness-as-indigeneity idealizes the Indigenous Mexican characters whose lives justify the need for a revolutionary check on criollo power, two important indigenista films from the period made outside Mexican cinema’s industrial structure take an alternative approach to treating similar themes: Carlos Navarro’s Janitzio (1935) and the segment titled “La potranca” in Benito Alazraki’s 1955 film, Raíces. Even though twenty years separate the two films, their avoidance of studio-era conventions results in parallel approaches to representing White male abuse of power among Indigenous Mexicans. I illustrate how specific aspects of these films, including their lack of adherence to the same melodramatic norms, help explain why they use a different strategy for representing diegetically Indigenous women who elicit male desire.

Janitzio is widely recognized as one of the most significant indigenista films for two reasons.103 First, it is among the first Mexican films to articulate the injustices faced by the Indigenous communities—a stance universally attributed to cardenismo. Second, Janitzio constitutes an important link in the often-cited visual genealogy between the influence of Sergei Eisenstein in Mexico and the Indigenous-themed Fernández-Figueroa films. Janitzio takes place among the Tarascan people on the island of Janitzio, where the film’s protagonist, Sirahuén104 (played by Emilio Fernández), enjoys a budding romance with his beloved, Eréndira (María Teresa Orozco). Their union provokes the jealousy of another woman who is in love with Sirahuén, Tacha. When a new representative of the company that buys fish from the local fishermen, Manuel Moreno, arrives on the island from Mexico City, he oppresses the fishermen by arbitrarily reducing the price of their fish, eventually causing a violent confrontation between himself and Sirahuén, which lands the latter in jail. To liberate Sirahuén from prison, Eréndira agrees to have sexual relations with Manuel, knowing that the perceived transgression is punishable by death in her community. Although Sirahuén attempts to shield Eréndira from the enforcement of their people’s law, Tacha alerts the community to Eréndira’s transgression, prompting them to stone her to death. Upon Eréndira’s death, Sirahuén drowns himself in Lake Pátzcuaro with her lifeless body.

The film’s approach to conveying the oppression of the Indigenous community, like other indigenista films that foreground social, economic, and/or political injustice, is to present the white-as-white male as a predatory person who is removed from Indigeneity. As in La india bonita, Janitzio emphasizes the white-as-white male antagonist’s ties to the city and disdain for rural areas. Manuel’s foreignness to the Mexican camposcape surfaces when he first approaches the island and meets with Don Pablo, a local authority. In this exchange, Manuel explicitly regrets that his company has assigned him to the location in the following negative terms: “ha sido mi mala suerte que me hayan aventado hasta por acá” (it’s bad luck for me that they flung me all the way out here). Beyond suggesting his lack of familiarity, Manuel’s association with the city, as in La india bonita, carries with it a clear association with immorality. The connection between the city and wantonness occurs when Manuel suggests that he will immediately find an Indigenous woman to alleviate his loneliness. His choice of words here, “una prietita” (a little darkie), confirms his White self-image. To this, Don Pablo responds by conveying the behavior that is expected of Manuel during his stay, citing the visitor’s urban provenance as a factor that may impede his proper conduct: “Hay una palabra que muy pocos hombres de la ciudad recuerdan. Se llama moralidad” (There is a word that very few men from the city remember. It is called morality). By presenting Manuel as being hostile to the Indigenous environment, morally suspect from the outset, as well as ignorant and dismissive of local customs, Janitzio establishes the white-as-white male as the violator of Indigenous Mexico.105

The most poignant way in which Janitzio participates in revolutionary politics is by illustrating the white-as-white male’s abuse of power and the damage it causes to the Indigenous community. Once Manuel assumes his duties, he drops the price of fish arbitrarily, putting the fishermen’s livelihoods at stake. When one of them complains, Manuel uses excessive force (like Gonzalo in El indio) by whipping him vigorously and later does the same to Sirahuén when he steps in to defend his fellow fisherman. Furthermore, Manuel uses his status to have Sirahuén incarcerated despite the fact that he was not the instigator of the confrontation. Finally, Manuel manipulates Eréndira into having sexual relations with him, which eventually causes her death. By highlighting the unchecked power of the white-as-white male as the cause of misery and death among the Indigenous community, the film constitutes a denunciation of social and political injustice in racially inflected terms.

While Janitzio was clearly the inspiration for both María Candelaria and Maclovia, as all three films follow similar stories, Janitzio employs melodramatic conventions differently, and visually favors a kind of aestheticized social realism that also characterizes Emilio Gómez Muriel and Fred Zinnemann’s 1936 film, Redes. Unlike in the later Fernández-Figueroa films, Janitzio does not employ whiteness-as-indigeneity to aesthetically or narratively privilege the leading Indigenous female character in the diegesis over the others. This is the case for several reasons. First, unlike the other films, Eréndira is not the film’s true protagonist. Rather than focusing on the dilemma of whether or not to acquiesce to Manuel’s sexual demands, in narrative terms, the film privileges Sirahuén’s decision of what to do with Eréndira once the transgression has taken place, making him the film’s emotional center and primary point of identification.106

Additionally, the film does not comment in any explicit way on Eréndira’s appearance as being exceptional or particularly beautiful (as occurs in María Candelaria and Maclovia). While she is desired by Manuel and Sirahuén, Manuel is not particularly out to conquer her (in the way that Sergeant de la Garza is fixated on Maclovia or that the artist is taken with María Candelaria). Manuel simply seeks sexual gratification from any Indigenous woman he can manage to get it from, a point that is made clear when he gazes desirously at another woman in their community in Don Pablo’s office and when he expresses indifference toward Eréndira. This disregard is evident, for example, when, prior to running off with Sirahuén’s girlfriend for a week, he tells his assistant that he will return to Mexico City as soon as he is done with her.107 Later, after Manuel has exploited Eréndira sexually, he conveys his indifference to Sirahuén, saying flatly, “para mí no significa nada” (for me, she means nothing). Therefore, while the film demonstrates that Eréndira receives attention from both men, she is not upheld as an object of wonder, nor is she singled out as particularly beautiful or appealing among other women as occurs with the title characters in María Candelaria and Maclovia.

Furthermore, Janitzio does not create moral distinctions among women, as occurs in the Fernández-Figueroa films. While María Candelaria and Maclovia are always virginal and good, and this difference is portrayed through their somatic Whiteness in comparison with other scheming, diegetically Indigenous women, Janitzio does not idealize Eréndira on moral grounds because she uses her sexuality to negotiate Sirahuén’s release (which is ethically problematic within the diegesis). Tacha, Eréndira’s rival for Sirahuén’s love, is responsible for spreading the news of Eréndira’s transgression; therefore, both are presented as being morally imperfect. This moral equivalency corresponds to the fact that neither is privileged over the other aesthetically through a Whiter on-screen presence, costume, or makeup or through filmic devices (such as lighting, editing, or mise-en-scène). Unlike the industrial films from the 1930s discussed in this chapter, El indio and La india bonita, Eréndira’s appearance in Janitzio is not curated as a glamorous “deco body” or as white-as-indigenous for the screen, meaning that the studio conventions for displaying female attractiveness, such as manicured eyebrows, full lashes, and glamorous makeup, are absent; nor is she presented through sustained and frequent close-ups that showcase her anguish and display her face, as occurs in those melodramas. Furthermore, Janitzio does not use stardom as a tool for conveying Indigenous womanhood. The woman who plays the leading female role, María Teresa Orozco, has no substantial star text and was not distinguished from the rest of the film’s actors in the opening or closing credits (as occurred with leading ladies in the Fernández-Figueroa films). Therefore, no efforts were made to present her on- or off-screen as a White Mexican woman, and instead she is simply presented in a matter-of-fact fashion, neither fetishizing her appearance as admirable or commenting negatively on it. In this way, Janitzio presents Eréndira and Tacha as moral and aesthetic equivalents without appealing to Whiteness to convey superiority in terms of character or appearance.

Benito Alazraki’s directorial debut, Raíces, can also be understood as a cultural artifact that is entirely ensconced within the cultural politics of the postrevolutionary period. The film’s introductory sequence establishes this fact through voice-over that articulates the narrative of mestizaje as the essence of Mexico, and highlights that Indigenous people are “verdaderamente las raíces del México que germina” (truly the roots of the Mexico that grows). More specifically, the film’s four segments focus on the marginality, suffering, and injustice endured by Indigenous populations in Mexico. In this way, Raíces is part of the genealogy of politically oriented indigenista films.

In the film’s final segment, “La potranca,” a European archaeologist, Eric, becomes obsessed with Xanath, a local Indigenous girl whose family is assisting him and his wife during their stay in southern Mexico. Eric chases Xanath desperately day after day hoping to rape her but does not succeed. In a last attempt to sexually impose himself on Xanath, Eric offers to buy her from her father, Teódalo, but is intimidated by his response, which prompts Eric and his wife’s departure from the area.

“La potranca” explicitly engages with and criticizes the dynamics of the coloniality of power according to which Whiter social actors are inherently more powerful and more valuable. This occurs when Eric attempts to entice Teódalo to sell Xanath using a racist logic according to which her father would only stand to gain from Whitening his family, “En la costa algunos indios regalan a sus hijas a los hombres blancos como yo para mejorar su raza … ganarás un nieto mestizo que valdrá mucho más que este dinero; nieto, hijo de blanco, que será mucho más inteligente que tú” (Along the coast some Indians give their daughters away to White men like me in order to improve their race … you will gain a mestizo grandchild who will be worth much more than this money; a grandchild, the child of a White man, who will be much smarter than you). Eric’s proposal is in line with the logic of the coloniality of power because it equates Whitening with improvement and superior intelligence. The very notion of purchasing Xanath is predicated on the idea that Indigenous people are inferior to White people and can be bought and sold like cattle. The film makes this point explicit when Eric refers to Xanath as an “animalito” (little animal) that he wants to buy. Furthermore, Eric’s attempt to “catch” Xanath throughout the segment, which receives a significant amount of screen time, also supports the fact that he relates to her as if she were an animal and not human.

The film challenges Eric’s appeal to the coloniality of power through Teódalo’s response, which initially appears to coincide with the idea that Whiteness is superior, but ultimately subverts the notion of Indigenous inferiority: “Tienes razón. Las cruzas son buenas y me conviene mejorar mi raza … ¡Te doy el doble por tu mujer!” (You are right. Cross-breeds are good and it’s in my interest to improve my race … I’ll give you double for your wife!). The film’s rejection of the coloniality of power is poignant because initially Teódalo repeats and appears to have internalized the widely circulated notion that mestizaje was an improvement of Indigeneity. He then directly contradicts this ideological position by offering to purchase the archeologist’s wife. This reversal of the archaeologist’s initial offer establishes parallels between Xanath and Eric’s wife as purchasable commodities and between Teódalo and Eric as both consumers and sexual agents, suggesting that neither group is superior or inferior to the other. By juxtaposing an apparent acceptance of racist logic with its outright rejection, Teódalo’s response constitutes both an awareness of the way in which Whiteness offers social and economic advantages and an assertion of equality and personal dignity that rejects the dominant racist ideology.

While “La potranca” uses whiteness-as-whiteness to denounce the behavior of White men toward Indigenous people, it does not use whiteness-as-indigeneity to represent virtuous and attractive Indigenous femininity. This is the case for two central reasons. The first is that Raíces explicitly aims to distinguish itself from other cinematic renderings of Indigeneity. In its introductory sequence, prior to any of the film’s four segments, an expository text asserts the various measures that have been taken to offer a faithful portrayal of Indigenous Mexico: “Los interiores y exteriores de esta película son auténticos. Ninguna escena ha sido filmada en estudios cinematográficos. Los actores no son profesionales, son parte del pueblo mexicano” (The interiors and exteriors of this film are authentic. No scene has been filmed in film studios. The actors are not professionals, they are part of the Mexican people). I believe that these disclaimers constitute an attempt to differentiate Raíces from the well-known, Indigenous-themed Fernández-Figueroa melodramas, among others. Because Raíces’s strategy for conveying authenticity depended on rejecting the use of stars, Alicia del Lago, who did not have a robust star text that established her as a glamorous White Mexican actress, was cast in the role of Xanath.

Regarding the segment’s textual aspects, Xanath’s on-screen presence is not crafted as whiteness-as-indigeneity because the film’s aesthetic language is that of social realism and because the film is not a melodrama. Xanath’s on-screen presence is conveyed as an instance of indigeneity-as-indigeneity in the context of the local racial formation through the rich tone of her complexion, simple hairstyles, and almost complete lack of verbal articulation in any language. While her dilemma is the central concern of the segment’s narrative, it is not presented through the externalization of extreme emotional states visualized in close-ups, as occurs in the Fernández-Figueroa melodramas.108 Instead of privileging the protagonist visually and verbally to incite the spectator’s identification with her in this way, the film relies on the spectator’s condemnation of the archaeologist’s unsolicited and obsessive behavior to suggest Xanath’s vulnerability.

The second reason why “La potranca” does not use Whiteness for the representation of female Indigeneity is that, although it clearly illustrates that the White archaeologist desires Xanath, the film casts the archaeologist’s desire as categorically morbid and works to disassociate the spectator from his perspective. Throughout the segment, the film clearly portrays Xanath as being closer to childhood than to womanhood: the archaeologist’s wife brushes her hair as if she were a surrogate daughter; Xanath jumps and climbs up trees nimbly; quick-paced nondiegetic music plays as she repeatedly outpaces the archaeologist; and, finally, the very name of the segment, “La potranca,” clearly associates her with a filly, or mare, under the age of four (see figure 3.19). Additionally, the fact that the archaeologist is nearing old age and that Xanath has an adolescent Indigenous male suitor points to the inappropriateness of Eric’s repeated and even violent advances. Furthermore, the scenes in which he chases after Xanath portray the pursuit in a negative light. As Eric chases Xanath up ancient monuments, potentially putting both of them in danger, intense nondiegetic music presents the event as suspenseful and fear inducing, while the frenetic movement of Xanath and Eric in and out of the frame conveys Eric’s desire as a threatening force. While Fernández’s films seek to make the spectator complicit in desiring the diegetically Indigenous woman as beautiful (through the gazes of both villains and heroes), Raíces highlights the pure beauty of the Indigenous girl (through close-ups featuring her face), but at the same time the film denounces the archaeologist’s inappropriate sexualization of the Indigenous girl as a degenerate tendency. Because of Raíces’s claims to authenticity, its social realist aesthetic, and its denunciation of the eroticization of Indigenous girlhood, whiteness-as-indigeneity is not a device used to represent Xanath.

Conclusion

This chapter has focused on films that qualify as indigenista in the sense that they denounce social, political, and/or economic abuses endured by the Indigenous people of Mexico on some level. These films coincide with a general postrevolutionary political and cultural discourse that articulated a need to alter the preexisting social and political racialized hierarchy and its vestiges. While the Indigenous-themed films of the early and high Golden Age (La india bonita, El indio, María Candelaria, and Maclovia) denounce racialized power structures, their approach to visualizing race does not align with their discursive celebration of Indigeneity. In all of these films, whiteness-as-indigeneity is the visual device used to distinguish the primary Indigenous couple that represents national authenticity and/or ideal Mexican proto-citizenship. Furthermore, there is a significant gendered dimension in how these films deploy Whiteness. On the one hand, these melodramas use whiteness-as-whiteness to denounce White males who (wittingly or unwittingly) exercise the coloniality of power. On the other hand, these films appeal to the colonization of subjectivity and desire, employing whiteness-as-indigeneity to solicit compassion for virtuous, diegetically Indigenous women and corroborate their diegetic attractiveness according to a Eurocentric standard. In sum, these films, whose discourses bolster Indigenous rights and whose visual strategies marginalize Indigenous bodies, are the limit-case of an industry in which the nexus of melodramatic centrality and diegetic desirability has required Whiteness.109