La Reina de la Raza: Articulating the Indigenous Ideal in Revolutionary Mexico

In January of 1921, the Mexico City newspaper El Universal announced a national contest to find the “most beautiful Indian woman” in the nation. Over the next seven months, the paper featured photographs of over 200 contestants alongside explanations of why their physical features, dress, and demeanor made them “legitimate” Indians. The paper conceived of the pageant as a civic education opportunity that would, ostensibly, teach the nation about indigenous beauty and generate sympathy for what editorialists called the destitute half of the population.

In the aftermath of the event, interviews and news coverage of the India Bonita drew attention to winner María Bibiana Uribe’s Aztec features, virginity, and romantic availability. She was also adopted by an upper class family and inspired theater and film productions in which non-indigenous actors donned traje and played Indian. While at first glance these responses might seem contradictory, my paper illustrates how they legitimated national dialogues of both inclusion and erasure of indigenous peoples in the public imaginary.

Building upon existing scholarship on the pageant, I will shed light on the social performance of Revolutionary issues of race, indigeneity, and gender. The India Bonita pageant was emblematic of efforts to fashion ideal indigenous citizens and define the acceptable parameters of indigeneity in modern Mexico. While the pageant did educate the paper’s broad readership about the ideals of indigeneity, it also revealed how the Revolutionary elite thought about and attempted to deal with the nation’s so-called Indian problem. The India Bonita pageant illustrates the Revolutionary hope that, by integrating Indians both culturally and biologically, the nation could embrace select aspects of indigeneity, solve its “Indian problem,” and forge a new national identity that would serve to unify the masses.