In the decades following the Mexican Revolution, nation builders, artists, and intellectuals were in search of a new national identity. They manufactured ideologies and visual economies that positioned indigeneity as an idealized relic of the past and mestizaje as the race of the future. Varner traces the visual evolution of these identity tropes through beauty pageants, films, photographs, art, and other aspects of popular culture. She illustrates how Indigenous women were, paradoxically, positioned as being both hypervisible and destined for disappearance- and highlights ways in which they contested and strategically engaged with these broader identity projects.

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