China poblana (lit.Chinese woman from Puebla) is considered the traditionalstyle of dress of women inMexico, although in reality it only belonged to some urban zones in the middle and southeast of the country, before its disappearance in the second half of the 19th century.Poblanas are women ofPuebla.
¡Plaza!, que allá va la nata y la espuma de la gente de bronce, la perla de los barrios, el alma de los fandangos, la gloria y ambición de la gente de "sarape y montecristo", la que me subleva y me alarma, y me descoyunta y me... (The plaza!—filled with the cream and the dregs of the bronzed people, the pearl of the neighborhoods, the soul of thefandangos, the glory and ambition of the people of "sarape and montecristo", that which stirs and alarms me, and disjoints me, and...)
— La china. José María Rivera.[1]
The fashion design of thechina poblana dress is attributed toCatarina de San Juan, although it certainly incorporates elements from the diverse cultures that were mixed inNew Spain during three centuries of Spanish rule.
According to descriptions written in the 19th century, the era in which the dress was very popular in various cities in the middle and southeast of Mexico,china outfit is made up of the following garments:
Eso sí que no; yo soy la tierra que todos pisan, pero no sé hacer capirotadas.
(It is so that it is not so; I am the ground that everyone walks on, but I don't know how to make bread pudding.)— La china. José María Rivera.
Nineteenth-century descriptions of women wearing thechina paint them as simultaneously attractive and too risque for the times. Men saw these women as beautiful for their brown complexion, their "plump" but not "fat" body and face, and, most significantly, their differences from women of higher social strata in their lack of artifices[clarification needed] to enhance their beauty[citation needed]. Author José María Rivera notes that if achina woman would have seen acorset, she would have thought it a torture device such as used onSaint Ursula and the Eleven Thousand Virgins; and that her face was not some sort of "cake frosting", an allusion to the "proper" women whose faces would have to be washed to see if the colors run:
[...] no conoce el corsé; si lo viera, desde luego pensaría que semejante aparato fue uno de los intrumentos que sirvieron para el martirio de Santa Úrsula y sus once mil compañeras [...] y está tan a oscuras en eso de cascarillas, colorete y vinagres radicales, que si se hallara tales chucherías entre sus limpios peines y adornadas escobetas, creería sin duda que aquello era para pintar las ollas del tinajero, pues, como dijo el otro, el novio de la china no tiene necesidad de lavar antes a la novia, como a las indianas, para ver si se destiñe, prueba a que deberían estar sujetas algunas hermosuras del buen tono.
...she knows not the corset; if she saw it, right off she would think that it such a device was one of the instruments that served to martyrSaint Ursula and her eleven thousand handmaidens...And she is so much in the dark in matters offacial masks (literally,husks), rouge, and radicalvinegars, that if she encountered such trinkets among her cleancombs and adornedhairbrushes, without a doubt she would believe they were for painting pots from the potterymaker, since, as someone else has said, the boyfriend of thechina woman has no need to wash his girlfriend beforehand, like Indian women, to see if her colors run, a test that some "proper" beautiful women should have to go through.— José María RiveraIbid., p. 32.
In that sense, the wardrobe of thechina woman was considered too provocative. Contemporary Mexican journalists and foreigners who knew these women in the first half of the nineteenth century call attention to the way in which the fashion of peasant women showed off their feminine forms, or were an appropriate feature of all the graces that were attributed to these women. A verbal portrait was made of them as excellentdancers ofjarabe music popular in that era—likeEl Atole,El Agualulco,El Palomo and others that form part of the folkloric jarabes of the twentieth century—also as models of cleanliness and order; of fidelity to "their man" although also seen as very liberal sexually.
As mentioned in the introduction of this article, the Pueblan origin of thechina poblana outfit has been put in doubt on occasion. The correlation between thechina—as a popular figure—and the outfit worn by the historic China Poblana—the alluded-toCatarina de San Juan—is a product of the evolution of Mexican culture during the first decades of the 20th century. In fact,las chinas became a well defined meme in the 19th century, a little more than a century after the death of Catarina de San Juan. WriterGauvin Alexander Bailey points out:
The china poblana of popular imagination—of shiny embroidered blouse and shawl—is a product of the nineteenth century. Symbol of Mexican femininity, she is linked to Spanish prototypes such as themaja, immortalized in paintings byMurillo yGoya[9]