La Raza Cosmética: Beauty, Identity, and Settler Colonialism in Postrevolutionary Mexico by Natasha Varner

Author:Natasha Varner [Varner, Natasha]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS025000 History / Latin America / Mexico, SOC062000 Social Science / Indigenous Studies
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Published: 2020-10-06T00:00:00+00:00

“Calladita te ves más bonita”

Not all on-screen representations of Indigenous women were performed by mestiza actresses. In addition to appearances in documentaries, a rare pornography from the silent film era provides a glimpse into another way Indigenous women engaged with the film industry. The film La campesina is a complex and challenging piece of popular culture. It’s the only film I’ve encountered from the era that casts a woman with darker skin and clearly Indigenous features in a leading role, and it includes much richer depictions of Indigenous love, joy, and pleasure than other Mexican-produced films from the era. But these nods toward humanizing and empowering Indigenous women are framed by the most graphic scenes of violence and pain seen in any of the sampling of silent pornographic films held at UNAM’s Filmoteca. The men in the film display a vexing combination of violence and tenderness, alternately doting on, attempting to pleasure, and abusing the female lead. And the male characters themselves are filmic aberrations, as it was rare to see rural-dwelling Indigenous men depicted as virile in postrevolutionary pop culture—they were more often shown to be either cartoonishly effeminate or drunken buffoons. Untangling the threads of each of these paradoxes lays bare some of the deeply contradictory—and harmful—themes inherent in Mexican identity politics of the day.

La campesina runs just under eight minutes long, and though there are no credits indicating who produced it or when, it can most likely be dated to the 1920s or early 1930s.57 Shot in grainy 16 mm film on location in what appears to be the rolling hills of the altiplano, perhaps just outside of Mexico City, the film was made hastily with a lot of choppy cuts and seemingly little attention paid to shot construction. The director instead opted to “edit in camera” by trying many different shots and angles in short succession and applied relatively little postproduction refinement. Even so, the film’s three unnamed actors are clearly skilled in silent film techniques, and it pays remarkable attention to narrative and character development for a pornographic film of that era.58 Given the quality of the production and complexity of the on-location set, it is possible it was an outtake from a longer commercial film or a side project made in haste after the feature production had wrapped.59 While these circumstances will probably never be fully known, what is clear is that this film was made quickly and crudely but that some planning and deliberation clearly went into its production.

In the opening scene of the film, the audience sees two lovers, Pancha and Prudencio, serenade one another amid the rolling hills of the campo. Their love seems innocent enough—she sings and he plays the flute and tenderly places his sombrero on her head in order to shield her from the sun. The scene is periodically interrupted with quick cuts to shots of another campesino, Gregorio, taking an ax to a tree. After the two lovers part, Pancha is taken by surprise by Gregorio, who has finished his day’s work and apparently needs to immediately sate his manly desires.

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