ABSTRACT
In his essay “The Nation and Its Women”, Partha Chatterjee discusses the ties between nationalist discourse and a patriarchy that, in his words, “combined coercive authority with the subtle force of persuasion” (1993: 130). While his discussion focuses on the rise of Indian nationalism vis-á-vis the colonial State, Chatterjee’s insights adequately illuminate the way in which Mexican post-Revolutionary culture used gender and the representation of women in order to construct a “cultural essence” that defined the nation in relation to both foreign culture and the life of subaltern subjects. Being mindful of the differences between India and Mexico, one can nonetheless draw the important departing points for my discussion from Chatterjee’s conclusions. First, Chatterjee points towards the construction of “woman” as part of a recourse of essentialism that distances her and the nation from both the threat of cosmopolitanism and the understanding of the economic differences of the lower class (134). In other words, it is part of a set of cultural devices that have enabled the hegemonic rule of the elite by constructing identities and social behaviors that put social difference under erasure. Second, in Chatterjee’s assessment, this culture exists and reproduces because of the willing participation of the middle classes in it, using even forms of apparently progressive cultural production to preserve hierarchies of race and gender within the social contract of the nation (134). If we focus for a moment on the way in which two great icons, Dolores del Río and María Félix, were shown in the cinema of Emilio Fernández, we can see some of the same patterns, including the presence of a national essence that is predicated on either traditional or community values embodied in woman. But an equally important point for my purposes is that these two icons match Chatterjee’s insight about the middle classes more clearly: we see these two bodies, whiter than the average mestizo or indigenous citizen they were claiming to represent, as an elite constructed stand-in for the people that nonetheless exists at a distance from both cosmopolitan culture (as we see, for instance, in the erasure of Dolores del Río’s Hollywood persona through Mexicanization) and from the lives and cultures of subaltern classes. In their foundational books on women in Golden Age Mexican cinema, Joanne Hershfield and Julia Tuñón have insightfully shown the disruptive nature of some of the images and figures of women in the context of the social modernization of the 1940s, which also, and paradoxically, were part of a normalization of cultural hegemony that appeared equally in the films of Fernández or Ismael Rodríguez, as it did in late muralism, literature and other cultural genres. 1 170
