Facial Uplift: Plastic Surgery, Cosmetics and the Retailing of Whiteness in the Work of María Cristina Mena

Abstract

Heavy promotion for beauty products and services first appeared in North America during the first two decades of the twentieth century. While the vast majority of nineteenth-century Americans had interpreted cosmetic adornment as an indecorous alteration of a woman’s “natural” body, many in the early twentieth century came to embrace not only the rise of a multitude of beauty products such as commercial soaps, skin care treatments and cosmetics, but also dramatic new medical technologies of body modification including cosmetic surgery. It was not an easy shift, however, for people to unequivocally embrace the physical display and physiognomic flexibility that the new cosmetic and surgical technologies of beauty afforded to women of means, some of which were understood to change skin color and the perceived ethnic profile of the nose. Many people were unsettled by the wide availability of products and services that enabled women to alter their bodies, an entity that, since the previous century, an increasing variety of scientific and popular practices had formulated as the most reliable indicator of one’s racial status, moral worth and personal character. In fact, Euro-American intellectuals, activists and cultural workers on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border increasingly regarded traits such as an aquiline nose or recessed brow as universal indicators of an individual’s racial fitness and individual health, and this ideology of aesthetic determinism undergirded immigration and sterilization policy, public health campaigns and social movements of many kinds 1 Widespread legislation even prohibited individuals with visible disabilities from publicly soliciting money from passersby in the form of the so-called “Ugly Laws.” 2 Yet how could a wide range of early twentieth-century nationalists, reformers and scientists define “beauty” as a fixed sign of racial identity and physical vigor when so many others increasingly accepted the practices of body adornment and modification in the commercial age? How are we to understand the seeming paradox of this aesthetic indeterminism? 3 Writing stories of Mexican women in highbrow US literary magazines such as Century, Cosmopolitan, and American Magazine during the years of the Mexican Revolution, Mexican-American author Maria Cristina Mena (1893-1965) restages these competing ideas about the propriety of cosmetics by turning readers’ attention to the political and economic context of beauty products themselves. Her stories bring beauty to life as a commercial commodity that exposes the fallacy of universal notions of both beauty and race as a priori facts. Illustrating the ways that beauty and its alleged correlative, whiteness, were increasingly mass-produced, transportable products throughout Mexico, her work makes the politically significant point that beauty was available for purchase in the twentieth-century neocolonial marketplace rather than existing outside it as a disinterested, universal ideal. Illuminating the political economy of beauty, Mena interrogated the beauty industry as a potent agent of neocolonialism that negatively impacts her characters’ self-conception, social relations and economic independence at a time when US