Picturing Indigenismo: Isabel T. Kelly's Photograph Collection of Totonac Indians, c. 1947–48

In the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), intellectuals, social reformers, and state officials set out to formulate a new set of cultural ideas that could facilitate the inclusion of the living indigenous populations as a key component of national identity. Although these efforts attempted to move away from earlier racist and biologically determinist ideas, problematic notions of social improvement remained. This paper looks at this troubling quality of post-revolutionary indigenismo by examining a collection of ethnic photographs produced during Isabel Kelly’s state-sponsored study in the community of Tajín in the 1940s. The paper begins by discussing how notions around mestizaje, miscegenation, and social improvement became intertwined with popular indigenista notions such as acculturation during the post-revolutionary period. Next, I use a series of portraits to draw attention to the “mediality” of indigenista discourse, that is, to the ways in which, through the medium of photography, the Totonac region became visible, apprehensible, and graspable—as an ethnic region in need of assimilation—to urban and rural populations in the second half of the twentieth-century. The medium of photography, I suggest, allowed the displacement of old racial notions and rendered them visible in what, ironically, was considered a new discourse and a new visual aesthetic in Mexico.