JOHANNE HERSHFIELD: Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008.

Imagining la Chica Moderna. Women, Nation, and Visual Culture in Mexico, 1917-1936 is a study of the popular images that were addressed to female middle-class consumers during the years following the Mexican Revolution. The study questions one-sided historical approaches on state formation and official nationalism by dealing with "popular" forms of female representation in the public domain; hence, "popular culture" and "gender" are key methodological tools for this study. By highlighting the importance of consumer culture addressed to women, the author attempts to expose the interaction between heterogeneous identities and official nationalism, between state formation and market forces, between discourses on mexicanidad and transnational gendered commercial ones.

The book is divided into five chapters. The first chapter offers an historical overview of the period in order to contextualize the emergence of popular visual culture, particularly images of "chicas modernas," within the background of post-revolutionary nationalism and global consumerism. By documenting the appearance of illustrated magazines, advertising, and the motion picture in Mexico, this chapter claims that the construction of post-revolutionary nationality was inseparable from the idea of modernization. The second chapter centers on fashion and the depiction of fashionable women in popular culture. It takes on the hypothesis that fashion is a way to unveil processes of identity-construction in modern times. It examines the relationship between style and female identity, and understands fashion as a visual discourse of social communication and self-representation. The third chapter analyzes changing views on domesticity. Women came to be portrayed as widely cosmopolitan and, at the same time, specifically Mexican. According to the author, such bi-faceted images reveal in which way the global imagery of domesticity contributed to the construction of "chicas modernas" within the context of Mexican nationalism. Chapter four looks at images of working women and connects these images to larger considerations of womanhood and to specific public spaces, such as the office, the factory, the shop, and the streets. Finally, chapter five addresses the depiction of folkloric female types, particularly la china poblana and la tehuana. According to the author these images were disseminated under the spell of exotic imagery, thus they also contributed to the dream of modernity in Mexico.

The book ends with a brief conclusion on the interactivities between official nationalism, modernity, and diverse local senses of belonging. By describing pictures of women in the public sphere, the author speculates on the way in which "real" women were internalizing images of "la chica moderna" in order to fashion their own identities.   Nonetheless the study does not constitute a social history of women during the period; it does not give an account of audience reception nor does it document petite histoires in depth. This book discusses the connections between nationalism and consumer capitalism in post-revolutionary Mexico from a gender perspective; it reads popular imagery of "la chica moderna" as a consequence of transnational capitalism and as an alternative discourse to state-nationalism. However, it does not give a full critical account of this intricate relationship. The author repeatedly asserts that commercial visual culture provided modern women with a basis for the reconfiguration of social identity; however, the author makes these assertions without a discussion of the fetishization of woman as commodity. It is somewhat imprecise what political or critical advantage should be derived from popular imagery of the "chica moderna" in post revolutionary Mexico.

Adela Pineda Franco                                                          Boston University