El caso de una beldad asesina: La construcción narrativa, los concursos de belleza y el mito nacional postrevolucionario (1921-1931)
- Autores: Víctor Manuel Macías González
- Localización: Historia y grafía, ISSN 1405-0927, Nº. 13, 1999, págs. 113-154
- Idioma: español
- Títulos paralelos:
- The Case of the Murdering Beauty: Narrative Construction, Beauty Pageants, and the Elaboration of the Post Revolutionary National Myth (1921-1931)
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Resumen
In the summer of 1929 María Teresa de Lana -Miss Mexico 1928- killed her bigamous husband, Brigadier General Moisés Vidal Corro after finding out that his previous marriage invalidated their union. In the subsequent trial, the defense manipulated the honor, chivalry, decency, class, merit and racial backgrounds of the parties involved, practically ignoring the fact that a murder had been committed and acknowledged. In this case about how a popular jury pardoned an aristocratic celebrity who murdered her socially-inferior yet politically-prominent husband, we find that Post-revolutionary society continued to conceptualize power and individual self-worth employing values and beliefs inherited from Porfirian, and to some exent, viceregal society. This incident succinctly reflects a greater Kulturkampf about national identity, evolving notions of gender, modernization, and the post-revolutionary government's national project. Natalie Zemon Davis's research on women's narrative strategies appeal to Early Modern French authorities and Sarah Maza's work on the encoding of gender and class in pre-Revolutionary French judicial briefs provide a useful approach to deconstruct the self-fashioning and narrative construction of María Teresa de Landa's case. By focusing on a beauty queen, the article shows not only women's efforts to redefine the meaning of feminity but also illustrates their agency in the imagining of community.
