Fashion and identities: Dressing up the cultural discourse in Argentina, Cuba y Mexico, 1800--1920

At the end of the nineteenth century, Latin America underwent a process of modernization and fashion featured as a crucial tactic to create modern identities. This study analyzes the connections between fashion, literature, and culture in Argentina, Cuba, and Mexico during the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth century. The new fashion systems in these countries are linked to developing modern notions of citizenship, cultural consumption, and the construction of identities during the rise of the Nation-State. This dissertation also explores the role of fashion in the configuration of femininities and masculinities during modernity, at the same time that it addresses issues of class, nationalism, and cultural consumption within these nations. Chapter 1 historizes the political definitions of Latin American fashion linked to ideas of civilization and society in a transatlantic frame. Fashion locates differences in the body, structuring models of gender performance. Chapter 2 explores how fashion regulates material culture and its marked differences between the center and periphery in postcolonial Latin America. Both lack and excess of clothing and adornment configure social and particular racial categories as shown in paintings of everyday life in Mexico and mixed-race characters in tobacco lithographs from Cuba. Chapter 3 illustrates how the interconnection of clothing and literature modernizes national subjects in the writings of Argentineans Domingo Faustino Sarmiento and Eduarda Mansilla, Mexican Guillermo Prieto, and Cuban Renee Mendez Capote. Chapter 4 challenges the myth of the male renunciation of fashion and adornment suggested in European fashion history. It argues that fashion transforms the male body into a cosmopolitan subject who accesses national political participation. At the end of nineteenth century, the Argentinean magazine Caras y Caretas conceded special importance to mass male fashion consumption in the streets of Buenos Aires. In Mexico, the rejection and desire of male fashion are analyzed in the modernist writings of Manuel Gutierrez Najera and the novel El Zarco (1901) by Manuel Ignacio Altamirano. In Cuba, the aesthetic discourses of Julian del Casal and Jose Marti help to establish an image of an independent nation identified with exile and cosmopolitan desires to obtain political participation. Chapter 5 focuses on Latin American models of femininity through aesthetic knowledge in fashion as a way of articulating women's restricted social participation. Political definitions of femininity are intimately linked to adornment and consumption as a means to regulate and discipline sexual, racial, and class identities. In Mexico, two magazines, El Album de la mujer and Las Violetas del Anahuac, illustrate the construction of fashionable fantasies, which challenged women's roles as defined by the State. For example, in Argentina, Lola Larrosa's novel El lujo (1889) allows her to create her own cultural space linked to excess of adornment, aesthetic imitation, and national desire from a middle class standpoint. Similarly, Cuban writer Lesbia Soravilla renounces fashion and adornment in her novel El dolor de vivir (nd), challenging both masculine and racial identities in Cuba. Social discourses on fashion not only help to reconsider material culture and mass consumption within the nation; fashion aesthetics also articulate racial, class and sexual differences as well as national models of citizenship.