Anyone familiar with Mexican art will recognize Frida Kahlo and the images of noble indigenous women that proliferate in the murals of Diego Rivera. This book goes further, examining a wider range of artists and works to show that the image of the woman in Mexican art and visual culture was more varied and complex. Both before and after the Mexican Revolution, the woman signified a variety of concepts, from modernity to authenticity and revolutionary social transformation.

Becoming Modern, Becoming Tradition examines the relationships among women, nationalism, racial identity, and modernity before, during, and after the Mexican Revolution. In this innovative study, Adriana Zavala demonstrates that the image of Mexican womanhood, whether stereotyped as Indian, urban, modern, sexually “degenerate,” or otherwise, was symbolically charged in complex ways both before and after the so-called postrevolutionary cultural renaissance, and that crucial aspects of postrevolutionary culture remained rooted in nineteenth-century conceptions of woman as the bearer of cultural and social tradition. Focusing on images of women in a variety of contexts—including works by such artists as Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, María Izquierdo, and Frida Kahlo, as well as films, pornographic photos, and beauty pageant advertisements—this book explores the complex and often fraught role played by visual culture in the social and political debates that raged over the concept of womanhood and the transformation of Mexican identity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.