Alternative Visions: Official Masculine Mexicanidad vs. Unofficial Feminine Ambiente in Mexican Nation-Building, 1925–45

This paper looks at both the ways in which Mexican authorities and cultural authors imagined nationalism through a blend of international physical culture and indigenista rhetoric and in which local afeminados fashioned alternative, international, feminine personas as a form of self-definition. In 1920s and 1930s, numerous Mexican publications, such as Educación Física, as well as reform organizations like the YMCA and various artists, merged muscular Mexican male bodies with indigenista nationalism to posit the Mexican “new man” (and a version of Jose Vasconcelos’s cosmic race). These images challenged earlier, “queer” versions of Mexican masculinity—such as found in the indigenist paintings of Saturnino Herran—as well as the perceived threat from effeminate homosexuals, who were criticized openly as anti-Mexican. They also renovated indigenous iconography—such as calendar stones and the efforts of Aztec warriors—away from previous understandings of them as decadent, effeminate, and weak. This strong, indigenista, masculine Mexico was then promoted nationally and internationally by scholars, pundits, and businessmen who imagined “authentic” Mexico to be found in the stylized working-class laborer, farmer, and pelado. Yet, at the same time, working-class afeminados—effeminate homosexuals—challenged these norms by fashioning a social world that drew on long-term working-class openmindedness towards male effeminacy in certain forms and that enjoyed public status in working-class barrios. These afeminados too merged international imagery—such as taking the name of a Hollywood starlet—with local iconography like ballads and indigenous clothing, and they claimed to represent Mexico as well. This alternative “Mexicanidad”, distinct from that expressed by elite homosexuals like the Contemporaneos, has largely gone unexplored, but shows the limits of the working-class as truly “authentic” or masculine in the vision official mythologizers wanted to present of Mexico, as well as the ways in which international connections mattered to forging different forms of Mexican identity