This article has benefitted from comments and suggestions by a number of generous readers. Specifically, I would like to thank Elise Edwards, Anne Rubenstein, Eric Zolov, and the anonymous reviewers of The Americas.

1. Johns, Micheal, The City of Mexico in the Age of Diaz (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997), p. 38.Google Scholar For a discussion on the India bonita beauty contests, see López, Rick A., “The India Bonita Contest of 1921 and the Ethniciza-tion of Mexican National Culture,” Hispanic American Historical Review 82:2 (2002), pp. 291–328.CrossRefGoogle Scholar López traces the first India Bonita contest to 1921 and argues that these pageants in which an “Indian girl” was elected, sought to inculcate a national identity based on the idea that all Mexicans shared as well as should honor their indigenous past.

2. Manuel Ramirez, Cárdenas, “Santa Anita; colores y flores, El modernismo impera ya en la tradicional fiesta, Hubo Rataplan en pleno canal de la Viga,” El Globo, April 4, 1925, p. 1.Google Scholar

3. Elizabeth, Grosz, “City-Bodies” in Space, Time, Perversions: Essays on Politics of the Body (London: Routledge, 1995);Google Scholar Doreen, Massey, Place, Space and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), p. 179.Google Scholar

4. See Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York City: Routledge, 1990)Google Scholar, and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York City: Routledge, 1993).

5. I borrow the term from Hedrick, Tace, Mestizo Modernism: Race, Nation and Identity in Latin American Culture, 1900–1940 (Newark: Rutgers University Press, 2004).Google Scholar

6. Bliss, Katherine E., Compromised Positions: Prostitution, Public Health, and Gender Politics in Revolutionary Mexico City (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), p. 73.Google Scholar For recent reassessment of the demographic collapse due to the Revolution, see McCaa, Robert, “Missing Millions: The Demographic Costs of the Mexican Revolution,” Mexican Studies/EstudiosMexicanos 19:2 (2003), pp. 367–400.CrossRefGoogle Scholar While McCaa’s main argument centers on the demographic toll due to the so-called multiplier factor where potential reproduction rates based on pre-rcvolution-ary population figures and birthrates is taken into account, he also notes that the actual death toll during the revolution is estimated to be 1.9 to 3.5 million. See also Robert, McCaa, “Missing Millions: the Human Cost of the Mexican Revolution,” , accessed January 10, 2010.Google Scholar

7. Jonathan, Kandell, La Capital: The Biography of Mexico City (New York City: Random House, 1988), p. 448;Google Scholar Porter, Susie P., “‘And That Is Custom Makes It Law’: Class Conflict and Gender Ideology in the Public Sphere, 1880–1910,” Social Science History 24:1 (2000), p. 129.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Porter states that during the years spanning from 1880–1921, the majority of migrants to Mexico City were women. Pablo Piccato estimates that women made up more than 55 percent of all the inhabitants of Mexico City by 1930. Piccato, Pablo, City of Suspects: Crime in Mexico City, 1900–1931 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), p. 22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8. Fischer, Lucy, Designing Women: Cinema, Art Deco and the Female Form (New York City: Columbia University Press, 2003), p. 32.Google Scholar

9. Araceli, Rico, El Teatro Esperanza Iris: La pasión por las tablas (Mexico City: Plaza y Valdés, 1999), p. 66.Google Scholar

10. Travassos, Elizabeth and do Lago, Manocl Aranha Correa, “Darius Milhaud e os compositores de tangos, max-ìxes, sambas e cateretês,” Repista Brasileira 11:43 (April-May-Junc, 2005), cited by , accessed February 3, 2010.Google Scholar

11. While earlier theater productions, especially revistas, had merely alluded to female nudity with actresses dressed in body stockings, the bataclanas performed “sans mallots,” i.e., without the flesh-colored body stockings usually worn.

12. Passage cited in Zedillo Castillo, Antonio, El Teatro de la Ciudad de Mexico Esperanza Iris: Lustros, lustres, experiencias y esperanzas (Mexico City: Socioculture D.D.F., 1989), p. 93.Google Scholar

13. Ibid.

14. Revista theater was related to U.S. revues and French vaudeville, yet differed from these in its use of political satire. Attended mostly by a middle-class audience in more upscale theaters, the revista style was also favored in working-class theaters and carpas, i.e., itinerant tent theaters. See Ageeth, Sluis, “City of Spectacles: Gender Performance, Revolutionary Reform and the Creation of Public Space in Mexico City, 1915–1939” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Arizona, 2006).Google Scholar

15. This is loosely translatable as Here is Mexico: The Rat Manifesto, as “plan” was frequently used in Mexico to outline political programs, especially during the revolution, i.e., Emiliano Zapata’s Plan de Ayala.

16. Dueñas, Pablo, Las divas en el teatro de revista mexicano (Mexico City: Asociación Mexicana de Estudios Fonográficos: Dirección General de Culturas Populares, 1994), p. 25.Google Scholar

17. Ariceli Rico suggests that bataclanismo fit the age’s changing social climate of “indiscrete looks, parody, temptation between the stage and the public, the vacilón as life style, strong and seductive perfume, flight of husbands, red plumage and the cabaret as place of refuge.” Rico, El Teatro Esperanza Iris, pp. 101–2.

18. For instance, the popular men’s magazine Mujeres y Deportes reported that María Rivera, a one-time star of adult entertainment clubs in Plaza Garibaldi, “undressed her life” in her 1938 autobiography Frine criolla as she had her body on the stage. “Una tiple cuenta su vida!,” Mujeres y Deportes, February 12, 1938, p. 22.

19. McCleary, Kristen L., “Culture and Commerce: An Urban History of Theater in Buenos Aires, 1880–1920” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California at Los Angeles, 2002), p. 209.Google Scholar

20. Rodolfo, Usigli, Mexico in the Theater (University: Romance Monographs, 1975), p. 123.Google Scholar

21. Rico finds that the incongruities between the stock revista types and the imported chorus girls reflected the general contradictions in Mexican society. Rico, El Teatro Esperanza Iris, p. 106.

22. Zedillo Castillo, El Teatro de la Ciudad, p. 95.

23. Dueñas, Las divas, pp. 25–6.

24. While Cabrai is a well-known caricaturist in Mexico, whose career spanned many decades, little about him has been published in English-language publications. For a biographical article and analysis of his work, see Joanne, and Barrow, Randy and Katz, Fred, “Ernesto Cabrai: Mexican Poster Artist and Caricaturist,” Comic Art 4 (2003), pp. 1431.Google Scholar For references to Cabral’s later works, see Eric, Zolov, “Jorge Carreño’s Graphic Satire and the Politics of‘Presiden-tialism’ in Mexico during the 1960s,” Estudios Interdìsciplinarios de America Latina y el Caribe 17:1 (2006), pp. 13–38.Google Scholar

25. For a detailed discussion of the many guises of the modern woman in Mexico, see Hcrshfield, Joanne, Imagining the Chica Moderna: Women, Nation, and Visual Culture in Mexico, 1917–1936 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

26. Barrow and Katz, “Ernesto Cabrai,” p. 17.

27. Ibid., p. 18.

28. Ibid., p. 20.

29. Barrow and Katz note that during the lengthy time Cabrai worked for Excelsior with accent over the second e Excelsior, he masterfully wove all he had absorbed into a signature style. Yet, they do not seem to recognize the progression in CabraPs work from Art Nouveau (the early period of his covers for Revista de Revistas) to the later Art Deco of the mid-20s.

30. Hcrshfield, Imagining the Chica Moderna, p. 12. See also Gallo, Rubén, Mexican Modernity: Tlie Avant-Garde and the Technological Revolution (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005), Chapter 1.Google Scholar

31. Peiss, Kathy, Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture (New York City: Henry Holt and Company, Inc., 1998), pp. 152–4.Google Scholar See also Hershficld, Imagining the Chica Moderna, p. 67. Hershfield notes that Hollywood and the garment industry established links between cinema and new fashion, with department stores in major U.S. cities copying styles worn by popular actresses in major feature films.

32. Universal Ilustrado, May 3, 1934, p. 69.

33. Hcrshfield, Imagining the Chica Moderna, pp. 51–52. Hershfield agrees that it was not merely the clothes, but also the body type of the models that taught Mexican women how to be modern.

34. Zeitz, Joshua, Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity and the Women Who Made America Modem (New York City: Three Rivers Press, 2006), pp. 153–154.Google Scholar

35. Ibid., p. 158.

36. Hershfield, Imagining the Chica Moderna, pp. 33 and 59.

37. Enstad, Nan, Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working Women, Popular Culture, and Labor Politics at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (New York City: Columbia University Press, 1999).Google Scholar

38. Ibid.

39. Hershfield, Imagining the Chica Moderna, p. 59.

40. Lee Peiss, Kathy, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New Tork City (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986).Google Scholar

41. Enstad, Ladies of Labor, pp. 52, 161, 181. Hershfield, Imagining the Chica Moderna, p. 41. Hershfield agrees that even if the lower class was not able to afford most foreign fashion and luxuries advertised in magazines, or displayed at Palacio de Hierro, they understood “the freedom to window-shop.”

42. “Nuevo Mundo: La Señora Gana Mas,” El Nacional, December 21, 1941, p. 8. Mexican women learned about successful businesswomen such as Helena Rubinstein, who by the late 1930s headed a cosmetics empire. Hershfield also remarks that most of the merchandise on display in large department stores in Mexico City were of U.S. or European origin.

43. Mary Kay Vaughan, “Pancho Villa, the Daughters of Mary, and the Modern Woman: Gender in the Long Mexican Revolution,” in Ollcott, Jocelyn, Kay Vaughan, Mary, and Gabriella, Cano, eds., Sex in Revolution: Gender, Politics, and Power in Modern Mexico (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), p. 23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also Gallo, Mexican Modernity, pp. 201–226.

44. Salvador, Novo, “Los feos concursos de belleza,” México al Día, December 1, 1935, pp. 36–37.Google Scholar

45. Carmina, , “Para Ellas,” Mujeres y Deportes, August 11, 1934.Google Scholar

46. “Circular 550,” November 14, 1927, in Archivo Histórico de Secretaría de Salubridad Pública y Asistencia, Mexico City (AHSSA), Salubridad Pública (SP), Servicio Jurídico (SJ), box 8, file 1. Transactions in beauty products were not restricted to pharmacies. Roberto Medellin, secretary of Department of Health, allowed for the sale of beauty products in clothing stores on the condition that the store employed a designated person—with or without a pharmacy credentials—to handle the sales of beauty products.

47. Carmina, , “Cómo reducir las caderas y el abdomen,” Mujeres y Deportes, November 3, 1934, p. 5;Google Scholar “Las reglas de salud a que se sujeta para no perder la linea,” Mttjcresy Deportes, December 8, 1934, p. 21.

48. “Reglamento para el registro y certificación de medicinas de patente, especialidades, y productos de tocador, higiénicos de belleza, y demás similares,” in AHSSA-SP-SJ, box 11, file 7.

49. “Circular 550,” November 14, 1927 in AHSSA-SP-SJ, box 8, file 1.

50. “Norma Shearer: A los 30 años comienza la vida de la mujer,” Mujeres y Deportes, July 7, 1934.

51. “En los templos de la belleza,” Mujeres y Deportes, January 1, 1938, pp. 66–73.

52. While “camposcape” is the terminology I use to describe the feminization of rural landscapes in the service of constructing an authentic Mexican national identity, I refer the reader to Widdifield, Stacie G., The Embodiment of the National in Late Nineteenth-Century Mexican Painting (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996)Google Scholar for a detailed discussion of the role of feminine bodies as allegories for the nation in nineteenth-century landscape painting, and to Debra Poole, “An Image of Our Indian’: Type Photographs and Racial Sentiments in Oaxaca, 1920–1940,” Hispanic American Historical Review 84:1 (2004), pp. 37–82, for a treatment of visual Indigenismo in photography.

53. “Asi las miran in Yanquilandia: ¿Este usted de acuerdo?,” Mujeres y Deportes, January 8, 1934, p. 94.

54. “De donde es la mujer mas bonita de la república,” Mujeres y Deportes, August 25, 1934, p. 7. For examples of sexualized and feminized landscape in early modern European depictions of the Americas, see the image, “America,” ca. 1575 by Jan van der Straet cited in Ann McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York City: Roudlege, 1995), p. 25. For discourses on rituals of possession in European colonization of the Americas, see Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

55. Salvador, Novo, Revista de Revistas, September 8, 1929, p. 5.Google Scholar

56. Ibid.

57. Grosz, “City-Bodies,” p. 104.

58. Male stars in Mexico of the period were typically comedians (Leopoldo Beristain, Roberto Soto, Cantinflas) and it would take until the advent of Mexico’s Golden Age of cinema—starting in the late 1930s—before male stars would be billed and sold as full-fledged sex symbols.

59. Brenner, Anita, The Wind Tliat Swept Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1973), p. 80.Google Scholar

60. Rubenstein, Anne, “Mass Media and Popular Culture in the Postrevolutionary Era,” in Oxford History of Mexico, Beezley, William H. and Michael, Meyer, eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 639, 641.Google Scholar

61. Secretaría de Educación Pública (Mexico City), Boletín de Instrucción Pública, 1:5 (May 10, 1903), p. 345. The Plan de Estudios de la Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes that outlined the study of architecture at the prestigious school of Fine Arts, ensured that aspiring architects—the majority of whom were men—spent most of their time in the classroom engaged in drawing. Secretaría de Educación Pública (Mexico City), Boletín de Instrucción Pública, 22: 1, 2, 3 (July, August, September 1913), pp. 306–307.

62. Ibid., pp. 95, 97.

63. Ibid., pp. 92–93.

64. Ibid., p. 342.

65. Art Deco inspired Mexican architects such as Antonio Muñoz García, who used the concept of nudity in describing his work. See notes 58 and 59.

66. Fischer, Designing Women, pp. 26, 32.

67. Ibid., pp. 13, 16, 18.

68. Greenhalgh, Paul, “A Strange Death,” in Greenhalgh, Paul , ed., Art Nouveau, 1890–1914 (London: Victory and Albert Museum Publications, 2000), pp. 431–2,Google Scholar 436; Fischer, Designing Women, pp. 11–12.

69. Dirección de Arquitectura y Conservación del Patrimonio Artistico Inmueble, Pláticas sobre arquitectura, 1933. Cuadernos de Arquitectura, no 1. (Mexico City: Conacuita, 2001), p. 41.

70. Ibid., pp. 50, 53.

71. Ibid., p. x.

72. Ibid., p. vii.

73. Ibid., p. 60.

74. Ibid., pp. 59–60.

75. Fischer, Designing Women, p. 27.

76. Pláticas sobre arquitectura, p. 60.

77. Winokur, Mark, American Laughter: Immigrants, Ethnicity and the 1930s Hollywood Film Comedy (New York City: St. Martin’s Press, 1996)Google Scholar quoted in Fischer, Designing Women, p. 25.

78. Pláticas sobre arquitectura, p. 82.

79. Ibid., p. 83.

80. Rubenstein, Anne, “The War on ‘Las Pelonas’: Modern Women and Their Enemies, Mexico City, 1924,” in Ollcott, Jocelyn, Kay Vaughan, Mary, and Gabriella, Cano, eds., Sex in Revolution: Gender, Politics, and Power in Modern Mexico (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), pp. 57–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Pelonas literally meant bald women, but was used in reference to any women who decided to get short haircuts.

81. Braids were considered a crucial element in the construction of traditional Mexican femininity.

82. Lower-class women historically had enjoyed a much greater physical mobility and access to the street than middle-class and upper class women, for which they were often condemned.

83. Salvador, Novo, Revista de Revistas, September 8, 1929, p. 5.Google Scholar

84. Pilcher, Jeffrey M., Cantinflas and the Chaos of Mexican Modernity (Wilmington: SR Books, 2001), p. 22.Google Scholar For prostitution zones in Mexico City, see Bliss, Compromised Positions.

85. Diversiones, August 13, 1932, p. 15. In 1932, the attraction of outdoor street theater spoke to the imagination of capitalinas as the “Jaime Nunó alley” became the epicenter of spectacles en vogue. A dancer who once had celebrated legendary successes in the cabaret Molino Verde on Plaza Garibaldi now made a greater spectacle of herself passing through the neighboring streets with great fanfare and performing in alleyways.

86. Salvador, Novo, “Que hacer Los Domigos,” Nuestra Ciudad, August 1930, pp. 6–7.Google Scholar

87. Pilcher, Cantinflas, p. 20.

88. Hershfield, Imagining the Chica Moderna, p. 5.

89. Ibid., p. 6.

90. See Delpar, Helen, The Enormous Vogue of Things Mexican: Cultural Relations between the United States and Mexico, 1920–1935 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1992).Google Scholar

91. “Para ellas, sección a cargo de Carmina, la amiga sincera de la mujer,” Mujeres y Deportes, July 7, 1934, pp. 10–11.

92. “Hay demasiadas tentaciones,” Mujeres y Deportes, August 18, 1934.

93. Halberstam, Judith, Female Masculinity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998).Google Scholar

94. “Marlene sin pantalones,” Mujeres y Deportes, July 7, 1934, p. 22.

95. Mujeres y Deportes, August 25, 1934.

96. “Mas deportes, menos vicios,” Mujeres y Deportes, August 18, 1934, pp. 3–4.

97. “La mujer mexicana ha entrado de lleno por la senda del deporte,” El Universal, December 7, 1931, p. 9.

98. Carmina, , “Para Ellas,” Mujeres y Deportes, August 18, 1934, p. 9.Google Scholar

99. Ibid., p. 13; “Norma Shearer: A los 30 años comienza la vida de la mujer,” Mujeres y Deportes, July 7, 1934, p. 5.

100. Carmina, , “Para Ellas,” Mujeres y Deportes, August 18, 1934, p. 10.Google Scholar

101. “Motivos de divorcio en yanquilandia,” Mujeres y Deportes, January 22, 1938, p. 93.

102. “El problema biológico y social de la mujer mexicana en nuestros días,” La Prensa, November 1, 1941, p. 12.

103. “Would You Like to Be Perfect?,” La Prensa, 1939.

104. Mujeres y Deportes, January 1, 1938.

105. Mujeres y Deportes, August 24, 1934.

106. Efraín, Huerta, “Las mujeres asnas,” El Nacional, February 21, 1939, p. 8.Google Scholar

107. This loosely translates as “The Most Beautiful Farm Flower.” Ejidos, however, were rural communal land-holdings associated with pre-Columbian notions of land ownership that featured heavily in revolutionary reform.

108. DDF, Memoria presentada al H. Congreso de la Union, September 1935-August 1936, p. 247.

109. Stallybras, Peter and White, Alon, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London: Methuen, 1986), p. 25.Google Scholar

110. While not engaged in warfare of the global kind, Mexican society experienced a social revolution with a reformist agenda that created some new spaces in which women could exercise agency. By the mid-1930s, however, this window of opportunity gradually closed; despite large cross-class alliances, mobilization, and activism, women did not achieve either gender parity or the right to vote.

111. Hershfield, Imagining the Chica Moderna, p. 14.

112. On the performance of Indigenismo in portraiture, see Poole, “An Image of ‘Our Indian.’”

113. McClintock, Anne, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York City: Routledge, 1995).Google Scholar