“Perhaps the most articulate critique of the revolutionary identity project I have ever encountered.”

—Prof. Stephanie Mitchell, Carthage College

In the decades following the Mexican Revolution, nation builders, artists, and intellectuals manufactured ideologies that continue to give shape to popular understandings of indigeneity and mestizaje today.

Through a complex alchemy of appropriation and erasure, indigeneity was idealized as a relic of the past while mestizaje was positioned as the race of the future. This period of identity formation coincided with a boom in technology. La Raza Cosmética traces postrevolutionary identity ideals and debates as they were dispersed to the greater public through emerging visual culture.

This interdisciplinary study weaves together cultural history, Indigenous and settler colonial studies, film and popular culture analysis, and environmental and urban history. It also traces a range of Indigenous interventions in order to disrupt top-down understandings of national identity construction and to “people” this history with voices that have all too often been entirely ignored.

Details

Published in October 2020 by the University of Arizona Press through their Critical Issues in Indigenous Studies series; 200 pages; $32 paperback; history/Indigenous studies/cultural studies. Purchase here.

Awards & Press

Recipient of the Conference on Latin American History’s Lewis Hanke Award (2017) and finalist for NAISA’s 2021 Best First Book in Native American and Indigenous Studies Prize. Read more. 

Praise

“Drawing together subtle cultural interpretation, rich historical context, and deft theoretical insight, Natasha Varner has crafted a powerful and compelling narrative, one not to be missed.”
—Philip J. Deloria, Harvard University (see more below).

  • "An astute analysis of popular media and cinematic treatments of the intersection of indigeneity, femininity, and the cultural politics of place."

    —Elena Jackson Albarran
    Miami University

  • "An important, original study on the intricacies of white supremacist ideology articulated through mestizaje in Mexico from the 1920s through the 1940s."

    —Emil Keme
    University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  • "Insightfully traces how nationalists used the female Indigenous body to construct settler colonialism in postrevolutionary Mexico. In the process, it creatively bridges Indigenous studies in the United States and Latin America."

    —Rick A. López
    Amherst College

  • "La Raza Cosmética reminds us that the racial politics and modernist designs of settler colonial nationalism depend on the presence of Indigenous women—and, in Mexico, of their simultaneous displacement by the logic of mestizaje."

    —Philip J. Deloria
    Harvard University

  • “By highlighting Indigenous women’s active participation in the beauty pageants, films, and tourism campaigns that formed part of this racial project, Varner illuminates these women’s efforts to contest the idealized narratives of indigenismo and mestizaje.”

    —Bianet Castellanos
    University of Minnesota

Current book project: White Plague

My current book project, White Plague: Tuberculosis and the Settlement of the Haunted American West is about the great American migration that most people have never heard of. During the 19th and early 20th centuries, tuberculosis was the leading cause of death in America. Before a vaccine became widely available, many turned to the “climate cure.” Hoping that sunshine and clean air might heal them, massive waves of so-called “lungers”– including members of my own family – chased the cure out West. This will be the first book-length exploration of the impact this health-seeking migration played in furthering Indigenous dispossession in the American West. Each chapter of the book centers around stories of the otherworldly that still circulate in the sites I write about. I didn’t set out to write a haunted history, but stories of ghosts and hauntings kept showing up in my research. I realized that these specters could serve as more than just a narrative device. Following the work of Eve Tuck and C. Ree, White Plague summons the otherworldly as a metaphor for settler colonialism and structural racism, offering a vernacular for non-academic readers to engage with complex social theories about the ways the past continues to trouble the present.