Last month, I posted on some of the controversy surrounding Miss Mexico’s choice for her Miss Universe parade of nations gown. As you might recall, some found her gown politically tone-deaf in its depiction of scenes from the Cristero War, crazy in its inclusion of a band of bullets as its main accessory, and simply tiresome in its relative tackiness– especially during a time when various kinds of violences are spiraling out of control across Mexico. Now it seems that her dress has been changed. Since I’m not really into hanged martyrs, but totally into corn, I should take this change as positive, no?
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.
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