Let’s have a look at Miss Mexico, v. 2!

As you can see, the new dress follows the original form, being cut from the same traditional manta and so on. Gone, however, is the band of bullets, replaced with a black lace shawl. Also gone are the scenes of civil war destruction, now replaced with “landscapes of corn and cactus fields and decorative elements from Indian cultures,” according to the Houston Chronicle.

I must admit that I am a little bit suspicious of this corn. I know: who could be suspicious of such a cute and important grain? (I strongly recommend the animated “what is corn and what’s its story” tour at The Great Corn Adventure!) But I guess that I am suspicious because I find it hard to avoid interpreting the dress change as meaningful– if only because the original was so oversteeped in its attempts at meaningfulness. It seems to me that whoever ultimately made this decision was looking for a way to keep the original message by offering up an “alternative” that is only different on its surface.

One connection between the original dress and this new one is in the way the new dress shifts its scene from a time of conflict to one of prelapsarian innocence. Rather than displaying a moment when the Catholics lost political power, it shows a scene from before when such power became necessary– before there was a nation-state. And by offering a vision of meso-america before political subjecthood, before the establishment of the Mexican state that the previous dress implicitly critiqued, the dress ultimately skirts (ha!) the issue of its divisive politcs.

The irony, of course, is that immense violence transformed meso-america into the very Mexico represented by the dress. In this sense, the dress indeed fulfills its mission to show the “nation’s culture and history,” but the details, this time, are only revealed in its seams and folds.

It would be like Miss USA wearing a dress showing images of the Ku Klux Klan in the Deep South. [...] A beauty contest is very far from being the right place to vent political and religious ideologies.

Oh my! Let’s have a look at this dress…

According to msnbc, this well-accessoried ensemble features a “billowing, hoop skirt adorned with sketches of Catholic rebels hanging from posts. Rosaries and scapulars hung from the bullet-studded, bandolier belt; a large crucifix necklace, black halter top and wide-brimmed sombrero completed the outfit.”

(I really like it when ladies remember their hats. Bullets, however, are often that one thing too much that bogs down the look.)

The msnbc and BBC articles each do a good job pointing out some of what is at stake in this choice for representing Mexico to the world. There is also an article in La Jornada* that is particularly good at reading the dress as a signifier of contemporary Mexico’s political moment, which Melissa has also pointed out to us to in her response to JL’s post on the new abortion laws in Mexico City.

Further, as all of the articles point out, there is something troubling about this fetishization of the violent Cristero War, which hinged on Catholic rebellion against the secularization of the Mexican state. And for some, the images, which include Roman Catholic rebels hanging from posts and a man facing a firing squad (maybe Blessed Miguel Pro, SJ.?) also have an uncomfortable resonance with the pervasive public violence brought on by the escalating drug war in Mexico.

Hey Princess Propaganda and Princess Production, what do you think of this sticky uber-princess situation?

[*By the way, the Jornada article is in Spanish though, since it is a newspaper, you might only need to dredge up your sixth-grade Spanish! I suggest taking a look. If you get stuck, feed the article's URL into Babel Fish.]