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© 2008 Taylor & Francis

ISSN 0141-9870 printI1466-4:
Ethnic and Racial Studies Vol. 31 No. 3 March 2008 pp. 524-542
Symbolic violence and sexualities in
the myth making of Mexican national
identity
• combinations, have institutionalized several types of exclusion towards
Natividad Gutiérrez Chong
Abstraet
Symbolic violence has the capability to transform aspects of gender, race,
ethnicity and sexuality and it is portrayed in a vast iconography, from
myth, historie documents, prints and drawings. In this artic1e I focus on
two constructions of national identity that are entwined with gender and
sexual roles: first, the mestizo myth, or the narrative of the common
ethnic origins of the Mexican nation, and, second, the popular
consumption of this national myth in the form of pictures and drawings
depicting mestizo couples, the progenitors of idealized Mexican families
conforming an integrative nation. To illustrate my argument I have used
newspaper artic1es written by nineteenth-century women and picture
cards of calendars and almanacs (mid-twentieth century) which give
account of roles of sexuality and gender in shaping the nationalist
mythology of common origino
Keywords: National identity; symbolicviolence;ethnic origin; gender and sexual
roles; discrimination;racismo
Introduetion
The study of national identity has been gaining from new theoretical
perspectives and from the creative use of multiple sources of cultural
history, including the sexuality of women and men serving as icons and
boundary markers of concepts of nations and nationalisms. In this
article 1 shall explore two constructions of Mexican national identity
that are entwined with gender and sexual roles: first, the mestizo myth
embodied in Malinche (the Indian woman who helped the Spanish
conqueror H Cortés)! and, second, the popular consumption of this
imp.or~ant national myth in the form of pictures and drawings
depicting mestizo couples, the progenitors of idealized Mexican
© 2008Taylor & Francis
ISSN 0141-9870print/1466-4356online
DO!: 10.1080/01419870701568809
The myth making o/ Mexican national identity 525
families conforming an integrative nation. The mestizo myth origi-
nated in the Colony, as we shall see, has been legitimized throughout
the Independence (1810) and Revolution (1910) movements as an
authentic and exclusive outcome of Mexico's national identity.
The re1evance of this article is in offering a different reading from
the mestizo myth of national identity (I refer to the mestizo story
interchangeably as a national myth or an official narrative), in order to
reveal its strong racial and sexual politics which, in their different
Indigenous peoples and immigrants. One of the main purposes of
national identity is to develop a sense of self-identification and
belonging which will eventually foster people's capacity to recognize
themselves vis-a-vis others. Mexican national identity has be en
imposed on a heterogeneous and socially diverse society and, in order
to do this, is based on a powerful nationalist symbology fostering
unification. One important reason for spreading the concept of
nationalist unification is to attenuate the contradictory outcome of
nation-formation: people's selection and exclusion. Narrowing down
this argument to a certain specificity, it refers to the construction of a
symbology encouraging social unification and communality embodied
in the concept of common ethnic origins. Our purpose in this article is
to highlight the early nationalist symbolic fabrication of communality
in ethnic origin dated in Hispanic Colonial times (the sixteenth
century), which has proved its potent capacity to survive in the
multicultural nation of our present times. Our argument then focuses !MIl
on the main symbolic artefacts that can represent communality by :IIUI
demonstrating that Mexican people have a shared ethnic origin as a 10TI
result of a racial and cultural mixture with unavoidable sexual and
gender overtones. As a result Mexicans are ideally defined as the
mestizo people, meaning the conciliatory result of an everlasting
encounter produced in Colonial times between female Indigenous
settlers and mal e European conquerors. It is true that every national
identity is always based upon 'powerful symbols' as well as in
principles of inclusion and exclusion and gender relations. Moreover,
all types of nationalism have used gender and the iconography of
women and female attributes as boundary markers to include and
exclude individuals from national membership. However, research on
nationalism in Latin America has said almost nothing about gender
roles (Mallon 1995). Therefore, our goal in this article is to add to the
specificity of Mexican national identity by taking into account
sexuality's roles in shaping the nationalist mythology of a common
ongm.
The symbology of achieving common ethnic origin is by no means
ideologically neutral; on the contrary, it often appears in derogatory
and discriminatory views and attitudes and thus 1 term it, as Bourdieu
:J¿O iv attvtaaa inaterrez Cnong
(1991) explains, 'symbolic violence' which also equates with the 'racist
elite discourse' proposed by Teun A. van Dijk (2003). Another
theoretical resource that has enlighten this article is the seminal text
of Anthias and Yuval-Davis (1989) addressing the various intersec-
tions of women and nationalisms which have influenced most research
in several parts of the globe, including Mexico and Latin America
(Gutiérrez 2004, 2006). Nationalism as a political construct of the
mode n era is closely tied in with sexuality defined as a set of practices
that encompass pleasures, desires, feelings, attitudes, behaviours,
norms and taboos that are related to sexual activity (Puri 2004).
Sexual practices influence and shape people's attitudes to morality,
respectability, sexual normality or abnormality. Moss (1985) pioneered
this enriching discussion in modern Europe followed by Radhakrish-
nan (1995), Jones and Stallybrass (1985) and Sedgwick (1991), among
others, adding more case stories and sources of information, and so
expanding the recognition of the powerful influence of sexuality and
gender roles in controlling identity and nationalism. The intersection
of these theoretical angles will arise throughout the various sections of
this artic1e.
As has been widely documented, the mestizo myth or the official
narrative of Mexican national integration has its recorded origin in the
colonial chronic1e of Díaz del Castillo (1974). To demonstrate its
survival as a potent archetype of nation formation I shall concentrate
on two sets of original documentary data which show how symbo1ic
vio1ence has the capability to transform aspects of gender, race,
ethnicity and sexuality and portrayed them in a vast iconography, from
myth, historie documents, prints and drawings. In this research I have
used newspaper artic1es written by women and picture cards of
calendar s and almanacs which exemplify selective patterns of nation-
hood.
The first set of documents refers to an unusual narrative on the
Malinche written by a nineteenth-century Spanish woman writer.
Malinche, Marina and Malintzin are the various names of one single
woman, which gives substance to the racialized and sexualized
background of the mestizo myth. The second set of documentary
data presents some examples of how modern Mexican people
experience the myth through the reproduction and socialization of
popular pictures and drawings of daily life that depict genderized roles
of nation construction.
National identity
In the following two sections, I shall delimit the theoretical argument
of this artic1e. I will first refer to definitions of national identity and
wou1d question the sense of commonality as a given feature of social
The mytn matang OJ 1VleXlcanflarronUll:aenm:y J¿ I
identity. I then move on to address the powerfu1 symbolism of this
'form of political discourse', 'social cement' or 'system of cultural
information'. Such symbols may portray an ideal nation, but behind
them a rich array of cultural products gives way to other possibi1ities
of interpreting national identity, that is, narratives or visual1anguages
which demonstrate what is desirable in a nation, in racial and ethnic
terms, through the control of sexuality.
National identity is often defined by listing its most prominent
features:
1. an historie territory, or homeland,
2. common myths and historical memories,
3. a common, mass public culture,
4. common legal rights and duties for all members,
5. a common economy with territorial mobility for members. (Smith
1991)
Other definitions of national identity involve the existence of 'beliefs,
convictions, sentiments, and attitudes of individual people' (Norman
2004). If national identity is not something given by birth, but is a
mass product that has to be disseminated and incu1cated, two aspects
remained to be identified: what makes people share something in
common and what are the vehic1es for its socialization.
The engineering of a national identity out of a colonial background
requires the intervention of a state, because the creation and
strengthening of institutions build up frames of legality, citizenship
and social cohesion from which are derived collective purposes or
ideas of communality on a large scale. For example, territory,
language, common myths or historical memories, values and senti-
ments are found either in nations or ethnic groups, but what
distinguishes them is the possession of a state.
National identity here is defined as a 'cultural system of information
which injects historical meaning and social cohesion into modern
nations' (Gutiérrez 2001:3). National identity does not arise sponta-
neously, nor it is exc1usive to a specific group or generation, nor does it
rema in in the possession of intellectuals or politicalleaders. It has to
be transmitted on a large scale and assimilated by large numbers of
people within a sovereignty. Thus it establishes precise and defined
limits according to culture, language or history. The social meanings of
national identity allow the development of archetypes and stereotypes
which may be helpful to enhance people's dignity or to act as markers
of derogatory practices exc1usionary of others. The goals of national
identity inc1ude the attainment of several levels of assimilation and
socialization, which allow citizens to experience a common culture and
~1TIUIO DE ~GAClOtmi
sociass
BIBLIOTBCA
528 Natividad Gutiérrez Chong
thus express a shared identity. Citizens see themselves reflected in each
other and are able to create their own image of a collective 'I'.
National identity can thus help to make people aware of themselves as
a unique collectivity and a defender of their possessions or historie
patrimony, such as territory and culture (Gutiérrez 1998, p. 87). If
national identity is the information by which the members of
the nation-state reproduce themselves, then it has three objectives:
1) the standardization of practices (social mobility and labour
market),
2) communications and norms and
3) the construction of homogeneity to meet the state's idea of
people's unity and the delimitation of cultural originality
(Gutiérrez 1998, pp. 87-90).
National identity as a modern phenomenon depends on the state
and its institutions in sponsoring and promoting a shared culture.
Nations are achieved through complex mechanisms of social cohesion
and socialization; it is even possible to stretch this argument by adding
the propagation of gender and sexual roles in shaping suitable morality
and values. It is common currency that in the world system of nation-
states, the educationally standardized school and all types of media are
universal vehicles of inner socialization and very often these are state
monopolies according to the Gellnerian tradition (Gellner 1983).
One important difficulty remains to be explained at some length,
and this is how to make culturally diverse people within a territory
share beliefs, language or culture. Exceptions to the rule are those
nations which already share something in common (e.g. language in
Catalonia) without the aid of a state; such is the case of nations
without states (Guibernau 2004, p. 131). However, ethnically diverse
nation-states formed by indigenous, immigrants and mestizos have
different ideas of origin or foundation or even conflictive layers of
history, for which a long-term project of socialization or 'mass culture'
has been a state investment. And the state controls the resources to
achieve supra-ethnic results in a large population: mas s literacy, civic
culture and officiallanguage.
Treating national identity as a 'system of cultural information', as
said earlier, leads me to develop further some of its subjective contents.
First, let me briefly refer to the importance of myths in the making of
identity widely argued by Anthony D. Smith since his early writings on
the topic from 1986. The array of ancient Mesoamerican mythology
was overlooked by Smith, but that is not a barrier to recognizing that
Mexican national identity is supported by two important narratives:
the myth offoundation (Aztec settlement) and the myth of origin (the
ethno-racial fabrication of the mestizo people), which have been
The myth making of Mexican national identity 529
analysed elsewhere in depth and detail (Gutiérrez 1999). Without
myths, symbols or legends, Smith argues, no nation is able to legitimize
a claim for political power.
For these, often elaborate, mythologies are reconstructions of the
communal past, which mix genuine scholarship with fantasy, and
legend with objectively recorded data, in the service of an ethic of
regeneration. This is what is understood here by "national
mythologies" and "myths of ethnic origins and descent" (Smith
1986).
The myth of origin of the Mexican nation, the mestizo, conveying
the idea that Mexicans have a common descent as a result of the
miscegenation of Spanish males and Indian females, is a combination
of fact and fantasy and as such has already, as we shall see, been
delimited by a dominant elite in the late nineteenth century. From the
twentieth century, the standardized education of the national state has
imposed such a story on an ethnically diverse society as part of their
collective imagination. If, as in this article, myth is treated as a
particular type of information serving the interests of a structure of
domination; then the adjective 'national' becomes equated with
'fraternity' or 'solidarity' and achieves a popular sense of union and
cohesion. Other singular agents also perform a full-bodied function, in
Bourdieu's (1999) term; these are the family, church, school and state
which reproduce different discourses of symbolic violence.
Symbolic violence and women
In Bordieu's framework, symbolic violence is a helpful resource for
identifying gender roles and their levels of subordination in nationalist
mythology. Symbolic violence is to be found in the multiple
representations of people's thoughts, actions and bodies that are
legitimated culturally. 'For symbolic power is that invisible power
which can be exercised only with the complicity of those who do not
want to know that they are subject to it or even that they themselves
exercise it' (Bordieu 1999, p. 49). Symbolic violence is a cultural
construct but invisible (as opposed to physical violence). Such qualities
of invisibility and legitimacy in myth making and its propagation have
rendered it uncontested or unchallenged, and women are not alien to
that process. Women in Latin America are often treated as a subclass,
their subjugation, discrimination and marginalization reinforced
through popular and national myths that serve the interests of the
dominant group and sex, according to Bourdieu, as we shall see be1ow.
Anthias and Yuval-Davis proposed a typology of intersections
resulting from the different social roles of women and nationalisms.
530 Natividad Gutiérrez Chong
For the purposes of this artic1e one of these intersections stands out:
the role of 'women as symbols of national differences and active
transmitters and creators of national culture' (Anthias and Yuval-
Davis 1989). Bourdieu (1999, p. 50) also regards women as symbols
whose meanings are repraduced at the margin of themselves and
whose function is to contribute to perpetuating or increasing the
symbolic capital already possessed by men.
In short, national identity is based on mythology engineered or
reshaped by the state, the school or church and by their intellectual
apologists, and such mythology often contains disparate ethnic and
racial elements which need to be reorganized thraugh the control of
sexuality in order to facilitate a common sense of belonging and self-
collective identification.
The founding couple: Hernán Cortés and la Malinche2
Women born in Spain during the colonial centuries carne to be
regarded as synonymous with 'high c1ass'. Thus, the bias of birth
established a barrier between the Creo le and an individual from
mainland Spain, and this became the grand scenario for the emergence
of other castes, all of which were determined by the sexual role played
by women (Stern 1995, p. 15). In New Spain, women were transmitters
of a specific social condition; for instance, the offspring of a Spanish
father and an Indian mother was epitomized in the figure of the
mestizo (or bastard), whi1e neither history nor 'caste painting' has
registered an Hispanic mother and a native father. Honour and status
were provided by Hispanic women for whom marriage to someone
inferior in socio-economic terms would be extremely unlikely. It is not
surprising, therefore, that the disdain in which Hispanic women held
men from the New World helped to forge the very Mexican concept of
malinchismo (Lafaye 1985, p. 45). And the 'naturalist' French school of
the eighteenth century French school advocating 'naturalism', with G.
Lec1erc and C de Pauw at its head, reinforced the fabricated
inevitability of geographical determinism which, in turn, despised the
supposed geographica1 underdevelopment, fauna and c1imate of the
New World (Gerbi 1946, p. 393).
The commentary by Archbishop Don Juan de Mañozca in the
seventeenth century illustrates the constructed combination of deter-
minism and sexism in the pre-nationalist world: 'although the Creoles
do not have Indian blood in them, they have been weaned on the milk
of Indian women, and are therefore, like the Indians, children of fear'
(cited in Israel 1975, p. 116). Thus the maternal basis upon which the
Mexican nation rests has its origin in the different castes (Lomnitz-
Adler 1992, p. 227), from which powerful myths of national unifica-
tion, the Malinche and the mestizo, arise, as well as the degrading Use
The myth making o/ Mexican national identity 531
of stereotypes such as 'the black woman for c1eaning, the mulatto
woman for bedding and the white woman for marrying', which are still
prevalent today in relations between the sexes. A significant absence,
however, within this stereotypical segmentation, is that of the Indian
woman, a c1ear indication that she was not a viable option for
matrimony or exogenous contact.
Racism as a set of beliefs and practices refers to various forms of
violence, one being symbolical. In what follows I will demonstrate how
racism of an early national period was reproduced by elite women
giving credit to mal e superiority in the construction of the mestizo
myth.
La Malinche by Concepción Gimeno de Flaquer
Concepción Gimeno de Flaquer was the founder of the first periodical
publication written by women between 1883 and 1890 (Gutiérrez 2004,
p. 33). After settling in Mexico she was an active writer on themes
which were uncommon for Mexican women of the periodo Some of
these themes touched upon a central concept of the late nineteenth
century, the patria or homeland, and they appeared in periodicals
addressed to women. As such, they are c1ear examples of historie
documents, because the epoch and context in which they were written
provides enriching angles from which one can argue the symbolic
violence of myth making. In historie documents or prints of yester-
year, myth making may be seen as something 'ordinary' or 'over-
looked' or as cultural assumptions taken for granted, when, in fact,
such praductions aimed at repraducing the male dominance accepted
by elite women.
'La inspiradora de Cortés' (1884) is the original title of Concepcións
narrative on la Malinche. It is derived from the chronic1e of Bernal
Díaz and the story as it is widely known is a simple one. What is
interesting to note is how Concepción reconstructs the story to
highlight the superiority of Spanish women over their indigenous
counterparts and the use of masculinity as a form of symbolic power,
aspects that would have implications for the future construction of the
nation.
Before going into the story, let me briefly note that Concepción was
a woman in a privileged position: writer and editor of publications
signed and read by women. Her social situation was uncommon for a
woman writer in Mexico in the nineteenth century when the illiteracy
of women was widespread. 'Despite the gradual increase of literacy
among the women who made wills, fully 13 percent of that privileged
graup could not even sign their names as late as 1853-55' (Arrom
1985, p. 23). This specific condition highlights what modern studies on
elite women reveal about male domination (García de León n.d.). For
532 Natividad Gutiérrez Chong
example, Concepción's access to this unusual profession implies she
got there by her own merit, but, unable to contest or question existing
structures of symbolic violence, she goes on reproducing the structures
of power and mental schemes in which she is trapped, such as
masculine superiority and stereotypes, resulting in the glorification of
her own race and ethnic background, its superior cultural values and
morality (Bordieu 1999, p. 49).
The Story
In this section I will se1ect those paragraphs from the narrative under
study ' which, in my view, reflect implicit stereotypes and prejudices
concerning sex and ethnic background.
Es preciso que enmudezcan por unos momentos, mis sentimientos de
española para que pueda hablar alto mi corazón de mujer en pro de la
famosa hija del Anáhuac. [It is necessary momentarily to silence my
sentiments as a Spanish woman so that my woman's heart can speak
out in favor of this famous daughter of Anáhuac.]
As we can see, for the Spanish woman writer it was not an easy task to
accept and add value to Indian women in general; she had to be
unique and outstanding.
The writer then refers to when Marina was handed to Cortés along
with another twenty young Indian women.
Destacándose sobre ellas por su inteligencia, su hermosura, por la
suavidad de sus modales, Marina era de pura raza india, perteneciendo
a muy alta clase, porque su padre fue un poderoso cacique. [She stood
out from all the other Indian women, for her intelligence, her beauty
and her quiet manners, Marina was of pure Indian race, belonging
to a very high c1ass, because her father was a powerful cacique.]
Marina becomes socially acceptable, for her qualities and despite her
race. The paragraph reflects a combination of European racial and
cultural criteria as positive values; namely, beauty, intelligence and
kindness (van Dijk 2003, p. 10). That she was the daughter of a
powerful man (cacique) also helps to dignify her roleo Marina's
devotion to masculine behaviour is also emphasized when she discovers
Indian plots against Cortés, protects him in dangerous situations and,
in return, her own Indian folk despise her and call her a traitor (La
Malinche). As noted at the beginning of this section, Malinchismo was
the name given to women's preference to marry men from Spain, and
today it remains a popular adjective to qualify any preference for
foreign consumption.
Colonial Mexican women from different castes were stereotyped as
racially inferior and thus un de sirabie, unsuitable for marriage and
poor, all of which became generally accepted and was influential in
further generations. This symbolic violence constructed around Mal-
inche as an Indian woman was demonstrated in the writing of
Concepción; however, the fact that Marina is associated with the
patriarchal domain helps her to overcome her racialized status. The
role of men in this narrative, as we shall see, is a determining factor in
adding social recognition to women but also reflects a strong control
of female sexuality. This was an unmistakable part of the coercion to
adopt Christianity and Hispanic culture, a significant task carried out
by immigrant Spanish women through principles of chastity and
sexual honesty to their partners.
Let me briefly point out that the Spanish crown issued two decrees
to regulate and control sexual unions between Spanish and African
males and Indian women. The first decree accepted the unions
between Spaniards and aristocratic Indian women, the second was
addressed to encomenderos: if these were married in Spain they were
bidden to send for their wives and family; if not they would lose their
lands. So, the practice of marriage between aristocratic Indian women
and Spanish males dec1ined (Morner 1967).
Concepción Gimeno, as shown in the following paragraphs,
eloquently elaborates on the church constraints in Marina's fate:
En el curso de la expedición a Honduras, agobiado como estaba Cortés
por las frecuentes amonestaciones que le dirigía el sabio y virtuoso 11
misionero Bartolomé Olmedo para que rompiera unas relaciones que le O~
hacían vivir en el pecado resolvió separarse de Marina. [During the
expedition to Honduras, Cortés was under pressure by the wise and
virtuous missionary Bartolomé Olmedo to break that relationship
that made him live in sin, so he resolved to detach himself from
Marina.]
La amada del conquistador vertió copioso llanto por saber por su
mismo amante una resolución que llenaba su vida de dolor. Cortés la
tranquilizó diciéndole que no quería cayesen sobre ella las maldiciones
de su esposa e hija. [The Conqueror's loved one burst into tears when
she learned from him himself such resolutions that filled his life with
sorrow. Cortés calmed her saying that hedid not want her to be
cursed by his wife and daughter.]
Marina did not have the opportunity to choose, was rejected by the
famous conqueror and subject to church control. Finally, she was
given in marriage to another Spaniard but of an inferior rank.
534 Natividad Gutiérrez Chong
Cortés casó a Marina con un caballero castellano llamado Juan
Jaramillo. Marina fue dócil a la voluntad del que ejercía sobre ella
irresistible fascinación. [Cortés married Marina to a Castilian
gentleman called Juan Jaramillo. Marina was obedient to the will
of Cortés who exerted upon her an irresistible attraction.]
This narrative written by the late nineteenth-century Spanish woman
was .flready expressing the construction of a powerful myth and
symbol to weld an ethnically divided society into social cohesion. A
nation was in the making and the story sets the scenario for further
generations: an Indian woman of noble rank, with acceptable qualities,
marries a Christian man of low social status yet of Spanish breed.
Race and status were saved through sexual honour, while cultural
inheritance was passed on from parents to children."
The myth, then, started as a racialized and sexualized construction
under the domain of Catholicism. On the one hand, it gave weight
and substance to a discourse to legitimate the racial superiority
of Spaniards vis-a-vis Indian inferiority, while, as far as morality
was concerned, the church was extremely harsh in suppressing
and administering the sexual roles of men and women (van Dijk
2003, p. 84).
Concepción's con tribu tion to the yet underdeveloped 'imagined
community' of literate Mexican women, obviously belonging to the
elite and upper c1ass as they were a tiny minority capable of reading
and writing, was to disseminate her own view on the origins of a patria
in formation. The massive socialization of mestizaje, nevertheless, was
a twentieth-century outcome with the standardization of public
education and the three collections of uniform textbooks containing
precise images and narratives of this fundamental theme of Mexican
national identity (Gutiérrez 1999).
George Moss in his Nationalism and Sexuality portrays the
'Marianne' of Eugene Delacroix (the picture of a woman with her
breast exposed while flying the French flag) 'as a national revolu-
tionary symbol and no longer as a passionate young woman but the
mother of her people' (1985, p. 93). Malinche or Marina, like
Marianne, was to subdue her sexual passion to preserve the established
order and, thus, embody the ideal of Mexican womanhood. Her
obedience and passivity became legitimized. Her attributed virtues
modelled a strong idealization of motherhood: Catholic, self-sacrifi-
cing and chaste.
No le menciones a la mexicana las virtudes cívicas de las mujeres de
Esparta, heriríais su ternura. La mujer mexicana nunca sacrificará a
sus hijos en aras de la Patria, porque para ella la Patria es la familia
[Do not mention to Mexican women the civic virtues of Sparta's
The myth making o/ Mexican national identity 535
women, you could hurt their tenderness. The Mexican woman will
never sacrifice her children for the homeland, because for her the
homeland is the family.] (Vestina 1884, author's translation)
Malinche, the idealized Prehispanic woman was converted into the
prototypical mestiza and the custodian of rural tradition. The new
rural mestiza, like Malinche, was usually portrayed in the company of
aman, first Cortés and, later, a mestizo maleo In other words, socially
accepted couples in ethnic and racial terms were now to symbolize a
nation in formation. McClintock's (1995, p. 357) observes, of Franz
Fanon's criticism of the Western metaphor of the nation as a family,
natural and normative, that this metaphor provided a framework of
nationhood where only archetypal people could be admitted. The
extrapolation of the narrative of Malinche as the progenitor of a
unifying myth in the national period as both identity and boundary
maker became the solid ground for the emergence of the mestizo
nation.
Mestizo couples and the Mexican nation
I
From the colonial story of Marina and Cortés we have witnessed the
emergence of a narrative of identity to exert cohesion in the national
periodo The narrative also went through several stages of adaptation
and fabrication, resulting in stereotypes and archetypical inventions of
II!
what may define male and female as substantive aspects of national
IU
identity from the twentieth century onwards. Moss (1985, p. 93) ~T
informs us that the history of nationalism has the function of
controlling the role of the sexes within society, thus the importance
of imposing images and concepts of feminine morality and virility in a
regular and persistent manner. Or, as Puri has recently argued, 'the
sexualization of nationalisms is no aberration but is the way we ascribe
characteristics to nations and imagine nationalisms' (2004, p. 143).
To illustrate the nationalist use of women and men, let me refer to
the idea that couples would in their turn elicit the idea that the family
is a nation and vice versa. In doing so, 1 will have to recourse to images
portrayed in the simple and popular example of the calendar or
almanac.
Since the ear1y decades of the twentieth century, Mexicans have
learnt to identify the images of the almanacs, very Mexican expres-
sions of daily life, colourful pictures, accessible, popular, attractive,
decorating the walls of households and shops throughout the country:
images drawn to the 'maximum extremes of idealization', voluptuous
bodies in the style of Hollywood adapted to dark-skinned mestizo
women or rehashed productions of Aztec monumentality depicting
536 Natividad Gutiérrez Chong
architecture adorned with mystery-charged goddesses and priestesses
(Gutiérrez 1999, p. 44).
Numerous symbolic associations between the female body and
nationalism are drawn in the craft of illustration or in the plastic arts
(Fox 1987, pp. 563-72). The object and context of these illustrations
involve artificial and exaggerated scenarios as well as characters such
as 'impossible beauties' or 'fantasy landscapes'. Such images offer
representations of idealized patterns of Mexican-ness so archetypical
that, in contemplating them, the beholder immediately assimilates
nationalist information.
Romanticized Mexican couples that became socialized by popular
mass consumption through the calendars are clear examples of
symbolizing the national male and female. Thus, while the female,
representing the mestiza, is a smiling woman of soft face and manners
and dressed in rural or folk custom, mal e figures contribute to the
construction and diffusion of certain cultural ideal types about the
characteristics of truly national men: physical strength, virility and
heroism matching ideals of protectors or patriarchs. A typical drawing
enhancing such characteristics is 'Mexico lindo' (Darling Mexico) by
José Bribiesca (1954).
The mestizo was turned into a subject of popular consumption with
the aim of spreading Mexican manliness symbolically representing the
values and attitudes of patriarchal figures. Stern (1995, p. 29) has
right1y pointed out male fascination with procreative sexual practice,
self-control and chivalry towards girls which, along with the code
honour/shame observed by women, have shaped histories and lives of
Latin Americans. To illustrate this point, Jesús de la Helguera in his
painting Poco a poquito (1939) (Little by little) (1939) depicts a woman
slowly being entranced by her singing partner who is pursuing a
chivalrous seduction. Helguera also became prominent for his still
famous drawings of mal e and female vo1canoes, the latter always
representing an inactive woman lying outstretched, while her partner, a
virile warrior, laments her death La Leyenda de los volcanes (The
legend of the vo1canoes) (1941) or El flechador del sol (The archer's
sun) (1945).
As in the construction of other national masculinities (the German
cult of the young body, the Greek revival of the body), heterosexuality
has been emphasized, mainly to avoid, as Moss (1985, pp. 26-27) has
argued, confusion between sexes, which could inhibit the biological
reproduction of a nation. Female and male symbols of national
identity relate to people's self-images and their socially constructed
roles of gender. In this terrain, the sexualization of nature and
landscape is also included as the drawings of active mal e and dormant
female vo1canoes demonstrate. Thus, female figures look sedate and
serene in opposition to their mal e companions who display dynamism
The myth making o/ Mexican national identity 537
and energy. N o wonder these sexualized and genderized icons of
national identity are reflected in the criticism in recent feminist
research of nationalism which conventionally has given men the role
of 'constructors and promoters of the state' in contrast with the
passivity of women as 'guardians of traditional values' (Cusack 2000,
p. 546).
Politics of exclusion: indigenous peoples and immigrants
The visual language portraying the national male and female, the
mestizo couple, denotes selective criteria for prototypical individuals in
forming the idealized nation, hence validating exclusion and judge-
ments of a racial and ethnic nature against indigenous or immigrant
peoples. Such symbolic violence is exerted upon racial, sexual and
ethnic individuals, over couples, families and nation, representing a
social system with a patriarchal logic and structure.
Mexican national identity and nationalism, and the arguments can
be extended to other nations, have their own and precise limits, as
Anderson has put it: 'N o nation imagines itself coterminous with
mankind' (1990, p.l6). In this logic, it is necessarily exclusionary and
selective towards non-archetypical peoples, the cases of Amerindians
and immigrants, as subaltern actors, being cases in point.
The history of indigenous people's exclusion from the mainstream of
the nation has been widely documented (Urban and Sherzer 1992;
Maybury-Lewis 2002). What matters in this discussion is to emphasize '1
the long-term project of assimilation (indigenismo), guided by the Al
official government, aiming to promote their acculturation in order to Y
transcend their indigenousness and enable Indians to become mestizos.
Indigenousness has be en perceived as an obstacle to nationhood, as it
presumably continues reproducing cultures and loyalties towards a
community, a territory or a region, while embracing mestizaje as a way .
of life signifies social mobility, access to a labour market and the
adoption of the Spanish language, a new set of values and the central
concept of patria Mestizaje has also been related to the evolving
'cosmic race', which was popularized in the decade of the 1920s by
Mexican intellectuals and apologists of the idea that race mixing was
becoming widespread and the outcome of one race out of the several
races inhabiting the American continent would serve as a balance
against the indigenous population growing once official attempts to
encourage white immigration and settlement failed (Vasconcelos
1986). While racial discrimination has imprinted most colonial and
post-colonial societies, the concept of the 'cosmic race' as part and
parcel of a racialized policy was a discourse of reconciliation seeking
to achieve unity among present Indigenous societies and past colonial
caste divisions.
538 Natividad Gutiérrez Chong
Today it is known that mestizaje, or the 'forging of the cosmic race',
was incomplete because not all Indians were easily turned into
mestizos and there is a growing consciousness that rejects mestizaje
as a unique and uncontested pattern of identity interacting in the
diverse Mexican society, as expressed by Indigenous intellectuals,
professionals and graduated students since the last decades of the
twentieth century (Gutiérrez 1999, p. 139).
The overwhelming emphasis on encouraging the settlement of white
populations has been a notorious characteristic of the Latin American
nation-state, although, as Schneider (2000, p. 146) has explained for
Argentina, differences do arise within the white groups according to
different ethnic origins. The complexity of foreign immigration in
Mexico, in terms of its historical interaction and the extent to which
immigrants have been incorporated into the identity of the host nation,
has not be en fully researched. The mestizo myth, with its separateness
of gender, race and ethnicity, is imposed equally on Asians, Africans or
other Latin Americans, and it has been expected that they will, in their
turn, embrace mestizoism or mexicanization. Immigrants as marginal
peoples also create a complex diversity of their own, which has largely
remained ignored and undefined, both in official terms and in
academia, with the singular exception of Lesser's (1999) study of
Asian ethnic minorities and national identity in Brazil. Stasiulius and
Yuval-Davis (1995) edited a collection of essays aimed at overcoming
the vacuum in research on the density of interrelations of settler and
indigenous women in settler societies. In that volume the chapters on
both Peruvian (Radcliffe 1995) and Mexican (Gutiérrez 1995) societies
referred to the long-term incorporation of immigrants and the creation
of different patterns of articulation of race, ethnicity and gen der.
Marre (2001, p. 33) has also made a point of studying the relevance of
marginal women and their stereotyping in the construction of the
Argentinean nation, particularly, the name china (from the quichua
c'ina¡ meaning 'hembra de los animals', servant or Indian or mestizo
woman as opposed to Creole people.
While indigenous peoples are gaining constitutional recognition as
peoples (pueblos) and the state is redefining its public policy towards
the administration of new constitutional rights, official interest and
academic research have failed to address the articulation of immi-
grants' diversity and their coexistence with indigenousness in the new
definition of the Mexican multicultural nation. 'The nation is one and
indivisible and it has a multicultural composition originally based on
its indigenous people' (Article 21, Constitución 2004).
While the Mexican nation and its official nationalism continue
glorifying mestizoism as a privileged identity, there is líttle hope of
including Indigenous peoples and immigrants comprehensively in the
national mainstream despite their historical presence. 'National
The myth making of Mexican national identity 539
allegories' can be exercised for or against the construction of
democracy, for or against the recognition, representation and en-
franchisement of all as citizens (Yúdice 1993, p. 24). If national
identity and nationalism are constructs of domination designed to
exert territorial unity and political legitimacy, then they tend
necessarily to suppress 'politics of subalternity' (Radhakrishnan
1995, p. 88) or contestation.
Conclusion
In this article my intention was to stress the uses of sexuality and
gender in excluding ethnicity and creating racisms, with the subse-
quent control of collective identity. National identity here is under-
stood as a 'cultural system of information', and, as a constitutive part
of it, I looked at the myth of national integration, the mestiza Two sets
of unusual documentary material depicting the myth helped the
analysis: periodicals and calendars. And such documents have
demonstrated the recurrent inculcation of the myth of the emergence
of a new people throughout the modern history of Mexico.
In the analysis of this material aimed at widespread public
consumption it is possible to appreciate how the myth was gaining
appeal in nineteenth-century writings and by the 1920s was fully
portrayed and reinvented in those drawings of couples adorning
calendar s and almanacs. Thus, the myth of the mestizo was consumed
by society decades before its massive implementation in standardized 11II
education and the official collection of textbooks in 1960. 4UI
Symbolic violence in explaining the components of the official m
narrative of national integration was a useful resource for analytical
exploration. Domination of women's sexuality in the myth under study
is symbolically violent because it goes unnoticed, it is accepted and
unchallenged and, at the same time, it is recognized as a legitimate
product.
The construction of the symbolic power of the mestizo myth had its
origin in thesubjugation and control of indigenous females by the
Catholic Church and by elite women, and their deep influence in
moulding morality, values and stereotypes. The Church, through its
symbology, paved the initial way for the redemption of the various
peoples through the fictitious mixing of the mestizo nation. Racism
was structurally combined with sexism and masculine domination
affecting women. And women became multidimensional symbols of
national identity and nationalism.
The most influential and pervasive myth of Mexican national
identity, with which presumably the mestizo majority identify, draws
a subtle line, despite its aggression whereby Indigenous peoples and
immigrants are excluded, precisely because it serves as a marker to
540 Natividad Gutiérrez Chong
segregate other races or ethnic origins. As the myth is a creation of a
structure of domination, the excluded groups have not had yet
instruments of their own to contest such symbolic violence or produce
a discourse that counteracts their segregation.
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank PAPIlT - UNAM and CONACYT for
funding the projects from which this article is derived.
Notes
1. Mestizaje is also related to derogatory attitudes and physical violence towards women,
such as rape and subjugation. For the writer, Octavio Paz (1985) the evolution of female
subjugation and violent unions gave room for illegitimate offspring usually regarded as
bastards or mestizos. See also, Glantz (1994).
2. The first mestizo family originated among the Yucatán Mayas, when two survivors of an
early expedition reached shore. Jerónimo de Aguilar and Gonzálo Guerrero were married to
so-called Maya princesses and remained faithful to the Maya people (Díaz del Castillo 1974).
3. Further quotations in this section are taken from Concepción Gimeno de Flaquer
(1884). Translations are mine.
4. Not only have further generations ensured control of female sexuality but, also and
importantly, national honour. Witness, as an example of this, the beheading of Catherine
Howard after cornmitting adultery: 'the great crime of which she had been guilty against the
most high God and a kind prince and lastly the whole English nation' (Weir 2000, p. 479).
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Dr Natividad Gutiérrez Chong is a senior lecturer and researcher at the

Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales UNAM, Circuito Mario de la
Cueva s/n, Ciudad Universitaria, Mexico DF 04510. Email: nativid@
servidor. unam.mx