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In Mexican visual culture, the notion of the racialized/indigenized body (El indio, the Indian) and its subsequent encounters with Europe became the agent centering indigeneity as the locus of a mestizo nation. As noted by art historian Shirley Samuels, sentimentality “acts upon the problem of the ‘body,’ what it embodies, and how social, political, racial, and gendered meanings are determined through their differential embodiments.” Sentimentality is here rendered as sentimentalismo, a Latin American artistic methodology that makes possible the understanding of Mexican visual culture as an extension of European enlightened Romanticism. A tactic of the Mexican state to deploy mestizaje as a racial category of sameness by evoking personal feelings. The affective qualities of images ranging from the printed to the cinematic demonstrate the applicability of this methodology and its novelty for the study of Mexican visual culture of the long nineteenth-century and the early twentieth.