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Fabiano S. Gontijo
Barbara M. Arisi
Estêvão R. Fernandes
Queer
Natives
in Latin
America
Queer Natives in Latin America
Fabiano S. Gontijo • Barbara M. Arisi
Queer Natives in Latin

America
Fabiano S. Gontijo Barbara M. Arisi
Graduate Program in Anthropology (PPGA) Programa de Pós-Graduação Interdisciplinar
Federal University of Pará (UFPA) em Ciências Humanas
Belém, Pará, Brazil Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina
Santa Catarina, Brazil
Department of Social and Cultural
Department of Social Sciences (DCS)
Anthropology
Federal University of Rondônia (UNIR)
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Porto Velho, Rondônia, Brazil
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
ISBN 978-3-030-59132-8 ISBN 978-3-030-59133-5 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59133-5
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of
the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation,
broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information
storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication
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protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
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are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the
editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any
errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional
claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Preface
This book was written in the hope that the native people’s non-hetero-normative
sexualities become less taboo. We hope to contribute to make the lives of LGBTQI2+
indigenous people easier and nicer. We wish that “Queer Natives in Latin America”
can be an inspiring book that will encourage other researchers, indigenous scien-
tists, in particular, and queer people, in general, to write more about the topic. We
hope to support indigenous queer people to be whomever they choose to be and to
enjoy the freedom to live “out of the closet” and to be proud of who they are and
who they want to be.
We intend to show in this book that indigenous people who are considered les-
bian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, intersex, two-spirit or any other letter from this
rainbow’s wonderful “letter soup” (as the Brazilian expression calls the acronym
LGBTQI2+) have a tradition of “native queers” that existed in indigenous culture
before the arrival of the European occupation and colonization. Some indigenous
people were (what we now might call) “gay”, “lesbian” or “trans” before the arrival
of Columbus and all other Europeans.
We hope that based on our historical and anthropological data, indigenous peo-
ple who have relationships with people from their same sex or who like to cross-
dress (as men or women) are not going to be labelled as “indigenous who are
becoming white” just because they are not hetero-normative.
We wish to have learned from academic people who call themselves “two spir-
its”, so that our book can be part of this “two-spirit” turn that fight for lesbian, gay,
trans, queer, intersex, two-spirit people are accepted by their peers and by the non-
indigenous societies and that they can live their lives respected in the choices they
made for their own lives.
Belém, Pará, Brazil Fabiano S. Gontijo

Amsterdam, The Netherlands Barbara M. Arisi
Porto Velho, Rondônia, Brazil Estêvão R. Fernandes
v
Contents
1 Taking a Closer Look at “Queer Natives” �� 1

References�� 7
2 Mesoamerica�� 9
Invasion�� 9
Nahua Culture�� 11
Homosexual Copula in Rock Painting �� 15
Queers Deities and Transvestism �� 18
Muxe Sexual Fluidity�� 20
References�� 23
3 The Andes �� 25
References�� 33
4 The Amazon�� 35
A History of Shaping �� 36
Colonization, Racialization, and Exploitation �� 45
Assimilation, Organization, and Resistance in Brazil�� 51
References�� 56
5 Conclusion: What Does It Mean to Be Native and Queer
in Latin America Today? �� 63
An Amazonian Indigenous Gay �� 65
References�� 72
Index�� 75
vii
Chapter 1
Taking a Closer Look at “Queer Natives”
Anthropology is the art and the science of studying human communities and human
lives. We are the artists and the scientists that devote our time to live among people
to try to grasp how diverse and amazing they are. Anthropology tries to open up the
spectrum of the diversity of ways that human (and now also non-human) communi-
ties create, transform, dream, and experiment during this short time we spend on
this planet being born, growing, and dying. We try to follow some footprints of
some of our ancestor anthropologists to write in a way that we make familiar what
is considered, at a first glance, as being totally different from the way we live. At the
same time and with the same passion, we try to make familiar to us what looked as
strange or as very different from us. And so we try to produce reflections on what
makes us human, the senses of humanity, and how we can make the world better for
all people, despite the effects of the multiple forms of colonialism and imperialism
of the past and of capitalism and neoliberalism of the present, that is, of cultural
globalization and persistent coloniality.
The process of colonization, to which imperialism and capitalism were linked
as marks of modernity, had as one of the most unshakable effects precisely the
dehumanization of an enormous portion of the planet’s population. Or rather,
colonization, as well as the corollary imperialism and capitalism, would not have
acquired the necessary strength to impose themselves on the entire planet, exploit
resources, and establish modernity if they had not supported themselves in the
submission of people in the name of certain legitimator values of domination and
submission, such as hierarchies by race, gender, and sex. From the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries, culminating between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries,
powerful discourses developed in Europe, establishing truths about bodies and
minds with the institutionalization of the modern biomedical sciences and moral-
legal disciplines (Foucault 1995, 1999). The knowledge then instituted have con-
tributed to legitimizing the colonial and imperialist bourgeois expansionist
projects by producing, naturalizing and justifying the hierarchies of race, gender,
and sex which, until the present day, continue to essentialize, through bodies, the
“metaphysics of difference” (Mbembe 2000) and the “colonial and imperialist
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 1

F. S. Gontijo et al., Queer Natives in Latin America,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59133-5_1
2 1 Taking a Closer Look at “Queer Natives”
difference” (Mignolo 2011)—that is, the particularism and the exceptionality of

the human experiences of the immense area subjected to colonization and imperi-
alism. This established European white and male bodies as authentic bearers of
civilization, rationality, and hombrity1, while non-white bodies, such as Native
Americans, as bestial, emotional, or feminine bodies, on which discipline of con-
trol and domestication should rest, thus granting their submission and/or enslave-
ment, now on a “scientific-legal-moral.”
The European values instituted by medical-scientific discursivity and legal-
normative disciplines, as well as by religious beliefs camouflaged with scientificity,
were universalized as the true values that all humanity should share. The bearers of
these values, the European colonizers, thus became the promoters of civilization,
imbued with a “civilizing mission.” This mission imposed a new model of govern-
ment of people on a global level. Michel Foucault proposed that this model of gov-
ernment of the modern nation-states should be called governmentality, that is to say,
“[…] the set of institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, calculations and
tactics that make it possible to exercise a very specific form […] of power that is
primarily aimed at the population, as knowledge the political economy, and as a
technical instrument the security dispositive.” (2004a, pp. 111–112). In the modern
era that begins with the colonization process, it is about the imposition of a type of
power over all people, characterized by the control of bodies and territories through
the use of control and disciplinary dispositives. Foucault called dispositive a hetero-
geneous group of things that encompass “[…] discourses, institutions, architectural
organizations, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific enun-
ciations, philosophical, moral, philanthropic propositions […]” (1998, p. 244) that
may have as its strategic function the production of truths with powerful effects on
bodies, thus becoming biopolitical dispositives. Biopolitical governmentality would
thus be this peculiar government of bodies and minds instituted by European moder-
nity which has expanded and infused itself across the planet as a missionary civiliz-
ing mission, with the persuasive force of colonial weapons and capitalist deterrence.
Biopolitical governmentality is based on the production of truths about bodies—
through medical-scientific discursivities—and truths about minds—through legal-
normative disciplines, and truths about being in the world—through the scientific,
legal, and religious moralities thus constituted. The truths about some bodies to
which certain minds are tied are naturalized, considered from then on as “normal,”
and aimed at the production and reproduction of governmentality, the state, national
ideology, and the expansionist capitalist mode of production. “Naturally,” therefore,
would be considered as “abnormal” and “abject,” as suggested by Judith Butler
(1990, 1993), all the other forms of human expression, animalized and susceptible
to submission of their bodies, exploitation of their resources, minimization of their
thoughts, silencing of their voices and concealment of their existence, that is, era-
sure of their ontology and consequent enslavement.
1
Hombridy comes from the Spanish term “hombredad”.
1 Taking a Closer Look at “Queer Natives” 3
Some of the most powerful biopolitical dispositives are the racial and sexual
taxonomies that have hierarchized (and still hierarchize) the bodies and minds at the
service of the persistent colonial project. Although submission and even enslave-
ment based on racial hierarchies predate European and Arab colonialism and
imperialism (Trabelsi 2010, 2016), as are gender binarism and heteronormativity
(Fausto-Sterling 2000), we can affirm, after reading Quijano (2000) and Foucault
(1995, 2004b), that the biopolitical dispositives of governmentality established by
European modernity have created and continue to create quite particular social rela-
tions of racial and sexual cleavages that particularize coloniality. In this way, for
example, the image of nègre-biologique-sexuel-sensuel-et-génital was forged, in the
words of Fanon (1952, p. 163), who would endorse the sexualization and erotization
of Africa, as a powerful instrument of domination at the service of colonization
(McClintok 1995). This instrument is a powerful instrument of colonization as well
in the Americas and Asia, making all natives’ bodies always “natural” objects of
desire and repudiation, under the control of the colonizers.
The decolonization of Latin America, still in the nineteenth century, led the new
nations to adopt the Western state model with the maintenance of much of its ideo-
logical structuring based on those biopolitical dispositives of modern governmen-
tality, including the conservation of the religious morality of the colonizers, although
with local nuances. The post-colonial Latin American national elites were not faced
with the obligation to reinforce the particularism of the common Latin American
experience or the exceptional continental uniqueness concerning the “rest” of the
world since these elites maintained close visceral ties with the former colonizers.
Sexuality and the control of the bodies, as well as the medical-scientific and legal-
moral discursivities of European origin, would not cease to be instruments of power,
but would acquire other meanings, for example, by naturalizing the subordination of
women, essentializing the primordial patriarchalism, reconducting the sexualized
racial hierarchy, invisibilizing sexual practices, and identities or gender and sexual
diversity, as in force in the societies of the ancient colonizers at the time of the inde-
pendence movements.
Throughout the twentieth century, Europe was no longer so religious, heteronor-
mativity was no longer based on the same moral principles, and female protagonism
and alternative sexualities were no longer threats to the development of the world-
system idealized from the West or from the Global North, and colonialism, as a doc-
trine, became an evil to be condemned. Western national states are now considered
“civilized” because they defend the ideal of Human Rights and individual freedoms
and even act on some ways to protect some identities based on the experiences of
sexual and gender diversity, always in the name of scientific truth and international
legal security. Non-Western nations, on the other hand, are now accused of being
“uncivilized” for keeping the population or part of it under the yoke of violent secu-
rity mechanisms to guarantee the sovereign integrity of the national territory, most of
the time legitimizing the use of coercion in the name of religion and tradition to
enforce biopowers. The former are seen as the bearers of universal happiness, while
the latter are seen as “others,” promoters of hatred; and thus whiteness is normalized
as a “natural” expression of civilization and “true” human values (Dabashi 2011).
However, the relationship between state and sexuality mediated by social control
and disciplinary practices would not be exclusive to political regimes considered by
Western states as oppressors but would be on the existential basis of all national
states, including Western ones, that create any type of Homo sexualis, just as they
constituted the “legitimate” modern and westernized Homo œconomicus, Homo
politicus, Homo religiosus, in short, a Homo nationalis. Analyzing the work of sev-
eral authors who approached the relationship between state and sexuality, Jyoti Puri
(2004) or Alexandre Jaunait et al. (2013) noticed the recurrence of the theme of
regulation by the state on the most diverse aspects of private life, by delimiting the
contours of the “respectable sexualities.” Since the invention of “homosexuality”
and “heterosexuality” in the nineteenth century (Foucault 1999), each person has
been designated by state institutions as the bearer of “sexual identity,” according to
Eve K. Sedgwick (1990), and becoming thus the locus of intense social regulation.
Ruth Vanita (2002) adds that, because they are Euro-American or Western inven-
tions, the concept of sexual identity gained the planet through European expansion-
ism with meanings particular to each cultural context, due to the local configurations
of power relations that define truth regimes, biopolitical dispositives and institu-
tional and ideological mechanisms of social control of bodies. It is these regimes,
dispositives, and mechanisms that locally determine what is “normal” and what is
“abject” and that institute and reinforce the inequalities of gender, class, race, etc.—
the local forms of coloniality of power/knowledge (Gontijo 2018a, b; Quijano 2000;
Lander 2005). It is up to anthropology to understand how the coloniality of power/
knowledge works to minimize its persistent and perverse effects on bodies and
minds considered as “others.”
Latin American anthropologies, since their beginnings, have adopted particular
characteristics related to the national contexts in which they developed, despite their
common European and North American origin. One of the hallmarks common to
these anthropologies would have been the relationship between theoretical produc-
tion and commitment to the societies studied, since researchers also participate, in
this region, together with the interlocutors, in the process of national construction
through the struggle for democracy and the constant revision of the ideological
bases of the national state and against coloniality and the imposing forms of internal
colonialism (Cardoso de Oliveira 1993; González Casanova 2006; Krotz 1996;
Jimeno 2007). The interlocutors of Latin American anthropologists, as well as
Indian anthropologists or African anthropologists (initially indigenous, peasants,
and orality people, respectively), demand, with the help of researchers, not only
political recognition of their former social existence, but the right to participate in
the processes of elaboration of the national memory, acting in this way to reinvent
the concepts, dear to anthropology, of civilization, culture, identity, community,
society, ethnicity, democracy, and cultural diversity in the context of the nation-
state, as Myriam Jimeno Santoyo (2004) pointed out for the Latin American con-
text, Veena Das (1998) for the Indian context or Archie Mafeje (2001, 2008) and
Jean-Marc Ela (2007) for the African context. Aware of the heuristic potential to
deprovincialize the anthropological doing from the point of view of the Global
South (Chakrabarty 2007; Mafeje 2001, 2008; Restrepo and Escobar 2005), Latin
1 Taking a Closer Look at “Queer Natives” 5
American anthropology and social sciences, in general, can analyze, from the mar-
gins of the State, the original and creative forms of resistance to knowledge, dis-
courses, practices, and disciplinary powers based on religious, medical, and legal
truths that have been historically naturalized and have become hegemonic in the
region, such as those that deny sexual and gender diversity and sexualized native
realities and oppress them with the use of the force of State institutions.
In this book, we will use our anthropological skills to produce reflections on the
historical relations between the formation of Latin American national states, the
effects of colonization and imperialism, the impacts of capitalism and neoliberal-
ism, the racialization of ethnic-cultural differences, on the one hand, and, on the
other, the expressions of sexual and gender diversity in native populations of Latin
America. The purpose of this book is to question the projects of biopolitical govern-
mentality that instituted the national state and legitimized forms of coloniality and,
therefore, to reinforce the anti- and counter-hegemonic and decolonial reactions that
ensue. Thus, the book seeks to openly confront the Western discourses that insist on
imposing on the entire world a hegemonic civilizational, salvationist, and redemp-
tionist order, on the one hand, and, on the other, also to counteract nationalist or
regionalist narratives of a sexist and/or homophobic nature that deny gender and
sexual diversity in Latin America, particularly among the native peoples, and install
what Herdt (2009) called “sexual panic” as a modality of moral panic.
Each of the following chapters deals with one of the three regions of Latin
America that we have chosen to present here. The first one is dedicated to the
Mesoamerican reality. Reports of a diversity of sexualities and its multiple expres-
sions and practices are ancient in Mesoamerica, even before the arrival of the con-
quistadors, as evidenced by archeological artifacts and pre-conquest paintings, such
as the ones located at the Naj Tunich caves in Guatemala. Similarly, as old as colo-
nization are the reports of non-normative sexual practices in Mesoamerican peoples.
On the other hand, along with the conquistadors came the Spanish Inquisition, and
the strict control over native sexual practices by the crown, the church, and Spanish
adventurers. We will recall reports made by Hernan Cortéz and by Alvar Nuñez
Cabeza de Vaca, check the possible translations for terms registered by Bernardino
de Sahagún and his indigenous coauthors in the Florentine Codex. Then, we will
learn about contemporary stories of gender diversity resistance, as in the case of the
muxe, seen as a “third gender” or as a “hybrid” gender among the Zapotec indige-
nous communities in Guatemala. In this way, this chapter will seek to establish how
the colonial and patriarchal practices in Mexico and Central America affected, at the
time of the beginning of colonization and still affect today, in different ethnic con-
texts, the life of queer indigenous people in the region, supported by a self-reflection
presented by anthropologist Dorotéa Gómez Grijalva that explores her identity of
being a Mayan indigenous lesbian feminist.
The next chapter is dedicated to the Andean reality. As in Mexico and Central
America, the reality faced by the Indians in the Andes region was of great persecu-
tion, carried out by José de Acosta and Francisco de Toledo. As in Central American
reality, there are also archeological findings that prove to be the non-normative
sexual practices in the region older than the presence of the colonizer (as the huacos
eróticos, for example). Our contribution in the first part of this chapter will be to
draw a parallel between the form of economic occupation (especially the exploita-
tion of indigenous labor in the exploration of precious metals) in Central America,
Mexico, and the Andes, with the ways of surveillance and punishment of queer
natives. Our hypothesis is that religion and state depended on justifications for the
extermination of these populations and their cultural and religious systems, and the
natives’ sexual tolerance provided the crown and the church with such justifications.
In this sense, there are clear parallels between the challenges facing the north of the
continent with those in the Andean region.
Finally, one chapter is dedicated to the Amazon Basin. In this chapter, we will
compare the forms of Portuguese colonization (Brazil) with the Spanish coloniza-
tion undertaken in the Amazon Basin, one of the largest native socio-diversities in
the world. In this context, unlike the Virreinato del Perú (Viceroyalty of Peru) or the
Virreynato da Nueva España (Viceroyalty of New Spain), there were no alleged
high civilizations, which make the reports about the peoples of the region more
sparse and diffuse. Besides, several of these populations have only recently been in
permanent contact with non-Indians, no longer having to face only the struggle
against the historical exploitation of silver and gold in their lands, but also of oil,
gas, occupation of their territories with roads and power plants. Such perspectives
imply updating the critiques of colonialism made in previous chapters to understand
how the present challenges faced by queer indigenous people in the region are
linked to those historically faced in the Amazon as well as in the Andes and south of
the Río Bravo del Norte.
At the end of this chapter and in the conclusion, we will seek to systematize ele-
ments that allow us to answer the question indicated at the conclusion of this book:
What does it mean to be queer and indigenous in Latin America? What are the
implications, starting from this questioning, to understand the intricacies of the
colonial process? What are the current challenges faced by openly queer natives in
their cultures, demonstrating how the fact of presenting different sexuality from the
hegemonic model does not imply a loss of their culture, but rather a movement of
resistance to the colonization process? Thus, we hope to open new spaces for toler-
ance and understanding of indigenous sexual diversity, demonstrating how this is
part of their culture and history.
Before continuing, we would like to explain some of the words or categories that
we have chosen to use in this book. In the title of the book, why “queer” instead of
“homosexual”? Why “natives” instead of Indians or indigenous people of America?
And why “Latin America,” when so many indigenous people prefer “Abya Yala,” for
example, an indigenous word some claim to have been used to designate the South
American continent?
We choose “queer” to other possibilities (such as “non-hetero-normative,”
“homosexuality,” “LGBTQI2+,” and so on) because we wanted to engage mainly
with a queer theoretical and a decolonial epistemological perspective. We consider
as well that “queer” is a contemporary word that serves as an umbrella term to des-
ignate all “bodies that matter” (Butler 1993) and how the weight of heterosexual
hegemony still falls on these bodies that do not perform according to society and
state imposition on how they should as a gendered body. “Queers” are the ones that
References 7
do not perform accordingly to what certain cultures consider to be the proper way
for certain bodies to perform or to behave. In addition to designating people who do
not conform to current norms, “queer” is also a critical and reflexive stance toward
any normative thinking based on naturalized cultural arbitrary imposed by modern
biopolitical dispositives.
We prefer “natives” instead of Indians or indigenous peoples. We think that
“natives” take into account that “Indian” is considered a prejudiced term in Central
America, even though it is commonly deployed by indigenous people themselves in
Brazil (where the three authors were trained in Anthropology). Indian is a term that
the indigenous people use with pride as a self-identification word in Brazil, there-
fore the word previously chosen by two of the authors, Fernandes and Arisi (2017),
in the title of their book “Gay Indians in Brazil: untold stories of the colonization of
indigenous sexualities”. The word “natives” would pay more respect to the fact that
these are populations that were living in the continent before the arrival of the
Spanish, the Portuguese, the French, the Dutch, and the English colonizers that
brought the term “Indian” with them.
We understand that what happened in the area that is now known as Latin
America was a violent process of invasion and colonization. We hope to show, in
this book, that the European colonizers brought with them their prejudices and prac-
tices of persecuting the bodies, the minds, and the souls of the native people they
met on this side of the Atlantic Ocean. These colonizers persecuted and punished
the indigenous people that did not perform according to the gender rules and the
sexualities restrictions that existed in Portugal and Spain back then. So, we will
present records of how Spanish soldiers and priests killed so may indigenous people
based on the accusation that they were “sodomites,” or deciding that the way that
they had their sexual lives was a “pecado nefando”—the unspoken sin, even though
the ones who had this idea of sin were not the indigenous people themselves, but the
Christian colonizers.
The term “Latin America” also presents its controversies. Because it has an ori-
gin in the colonizer’s vocabulary as well, as Latin refers to the southern populations
that inhabit Europe and speak languages originated from the popular variations of
the spoken Latin language, like Spain and Portugal. But as we focus on the arrival
of such colonizers in the Americas, we thought we would clarify about which spe-
cific region and about which specific period in history we were studying and bring-
ing into our consideration. It is about this encounter of native communities and the
Latin colonizers that we will treat in this book, we will not study how the coloniza-
tion happened in the North of America, but specifically we will focus on the reports
of the colonization on the Latin area of the continent also known as Abya Yala.
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———. 2018b. Biologia, Direito, Perspectiva Queer e Intersexualidade. Teoria Jurídica
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33–58.
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siones intrínsecas y puntos de partida. Maguaré 11-12: 25–39.
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———. 2008. A Commentary on Anthropology and Africa. Codesria Bulletin 3-4: 88–94.
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Chapter 2
Mesoamerica
Invasion
Colonization of America that we could rename the invasion of Pachamama starts in

the Caribbean sea, with the arrival of Columbus fleet in 1492.
The colonization history is recorded by chronicles written by captains and sailors
that report what they did experience as the cultural difference from the start of the
colonization period. Many of those reports fantasize on the cultural differences,
some emphasize accusations that come from an Iberian conception of enemy calling
the indigenous “sodomites” and the ones who commit the “nefarious sin,” the same
vocabulary used to accuse in Spain and Portugal to the just defeated Muslims, as
Olivier explains:
The conquest of America can be considered as an extension of the Spanish “reconquest”. In
the place of the Muslim enemy, often accused of homosexuality, the Indians of the New
World were naturally placed, they will receive the same accusations. The practice of “nefar-
ious sin” is one of the arguments put forward by Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda in his treatise on
“the just causes of the war against the gods”. The destruction of the people of Sodom and
Gomorrah was not only lawful but was also carried out for the good of the inhabitants. The
millenarian hopes that presided over the spiritual conquest of the New World are well
known. In this context, the religious emphasize the “positive” aspects of the pre-Columbian
customs that can serve as a basis for the creation of a future indigenous Christianity. (Olivier
2010, p. 59, our translation)1
1
In the original in Spanish: La conquista de América puede considerar-se como una prolongación
de la “reconquista” española. En lugar del enemigo musulmán, frecuentemente acusado de homo-
sexualidad, se puso naturalmente a los indios del Nuevo Mundo, que recibirán. Las mismas
acusacio- nes. 10. La práctica del “pecado nefando” consti- tuye uno de los argumentos esgrimidos
por Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda en su tratado sobre “las justas causas de la guerra contra los indios”.
La destrucción del pueblo de Sodoma y Gomorra no sólo fue lícita, sino que se realizó paraelbi-
endesushabitantes. 11 Sesabedelas esperanzas milenaristas que presidieron la conquistaespiritual-
delNuevoMundo.Eneste contexto los religiosos destacan los aspectos “positivos” de las costumbres
precolombinas que pueden servir de base para la creación de una futura cristiandad indígena.”
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 9

F. S. Gontijo et al., Queer Natives in Latin America,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59133-5_2
10 2 Mesoamerica
Before the European colonization, Mesoamerica had densely populated indigenous

cities and rural areas, with many different indigenous people and their languages,
some with their crops, some with their temples, and very complex economic, politi-
cal, and warfare systems. According to historian Hassig, “Mesoamerica had enjoyed
almost three thousand years of high civilization, cultural achievements, and the suc-
cessive rises and falls of many state empires” (2006, p. 17). After studying military
practices deployed in the conquest of Mexico, Ross proposes that the victory of the
Spanish crown was a victory of some indigenous people over other indigenous peo-
ple and that the Spaniards this defeat in their benefit.
The area known as Mesoamerica includes the countries nowadays called
Guatemala, Honduras, Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Nicarágua, and Panama plus
nine provinces of Mexico (Campeche, Chiapas, Guerrero, Oaxaca, Puebla, Quintana
Roo, Tabasco, Veracruz, and Yucatán). After the arrival of the first “Conquistadores”
on the islands of Hispaniola and Cuba, the colonizers began exploring the continent.
The Spaniards arrived in the Yucatán peninsula in 1517. They found themselves in
areas densely populated living in a political and economic complex system where
Empires like the Aztec and the Mayan existed.
According to a mitochondrial-DNA based developed physical anthropology and
demographic study in Mesoamerica, researchers conclude that there had been a
demographic decline that took place also before the European occupation started:
although the arrival of Europeans had a major impact on the demography of the indigenous
population, the demographic decline began in Mesoamerica a few hundred years before.
This result can be contrasted with paleoclimatic studies conducted in both Mesoamerica
and the Mayan region. (...) Regarding the Mayas region, it is estimated that the collapse of
this culture occurred in the years 1,110 to 1,200, which practically coincides with the values
detected for the demographic decline of the Yucatan Mayas (625 ybp).2 (Gonzáles-Martin
et al. 2015)
The same scientists consider that the development of maize domestication, and
courgette, bean, and pepper crops “led to a more sedentary lifestyle, an increase in
social and urban complexity and the development of trade and migration routes”
(idem) in southern populations, meanwhile, the northern indigenous communities
would have remained small in size due to their hunter-gather’s lifestyle. They also
listed that geographical barriers, like Sierra Madre, added to these communities
limited contact with other populations, and that could also explain these popula-
tions’ low diversity and high genetic differentiation relative to other Mesoamerican
groups. “Trade, which stimulated migration and contact between human groups
within and between cultural areas, is a factor that can largely explain the genetic
structure of Mesoamerica expressed in the genetic homogeneity for the central area,
Oaxaca and the Maya region” (idem).
Hassig considers that the Mesoamericans shifted “from living in small, nomadic,
hunting, and gathering bands to settling in larger, sedentary, agricultural villages by
1500 B.C.” (2006, p. 17). He writes that by that time, the Olmecs were a “truly more
2
Ybp means “year before the present”, present for the paper is the year 2015, when the study was
published.
Nahua Culture 11
sophisticated” and complex society compared to the other human groups living in
the Americas by the same time. As a kind of funny critic for this evolutionist com-
mentary, we would like to add that we believe the Olmecs were “more sophisti-
cated” than the people living in Europe at the same period. The Olmecs developed
on the Veracruz Gulf coast around 1200 B.C. thanks to the possibility of raising
maize twice a year that could be harvested because of the more fertile soils and good
rain conditions. Considered by some researchers to be the “America’s first civiliza-
tion” (Diehl 2004), the Olmecs left engraved in stone several works of art represent-
ing their culture. They developed a kind of rubber ball game and that is probably
why Olmecs is the name we have still nowadays to designate this indigenous civili-
zation, as the term is derived from the Nahuatl word to designate “rubber.” The
Olmecs are believed to have proceeded the Maya culture in many archeological
sites, we will go back to the Maya culture after we introduce some information
about the Aztecs.
Nahua Culture
By the time of the arrival of the Spaniards, the Aztec Empire was the greatest power
in Mesoamerica. They formed a confederation of three city-states: Tenochtitlan,
Texcoco, and Tlacopan. Sometimes the term Aztec is deployed to refer to the inhab-
itants of the city of Tenochtitlan (by then a lake and island, and where now is located
the Mexico City capital), the dominant power city. While other authors use the term
Aztec to refer to an “Aztec civilization” or “Aztec culture” in a broader sense, it was
the German scientist Alexander Von Humboldt who used the term Aztec in the mod-
ern sense many scholars still deploy, as an umbrella for the union of the three city-
states and the people living in this area and involved in relationships of trade,
religion, language, and rituals, previous to Spanish invasion.
Nowadays, Mesoamerican scholars use the term Nahua culture to refer to indig-
enous groups that lived in the central region of now Mexico, because Aztec would
be better to define the Mexica people, the ones who lived on the island in the Texcoco
lake. So, we will use the term Nahua to refer to the people who had shared cultural
practices such as the centrality of the maize in their cosmology, division between
noble and non-noble people, variations of the náhuatl language, and most of the
same pantheon deities.
After the quick establishing of Spanish settlements in the Caribbean islands, one
captain, probably moved by the desire of becoming richer and more powerful, dis-
obeyed superior orders and set sails to lead the third expedition to the continent.
Hernán Cortés arrives in the territory where now is Mexico in 1519.
“Even beyond what we have above reported to Your Majesties concerning of the children
and men and women who kill and offer in their sacrifices, we have known and been informed
of the truth that they are all sodomites and use that abominable sin.” This judgment of
12 2 Mesoamerica
Hernán Cortés appears in more than one Spanish author (Olivier 1992, p. 47, our
translation).3
Since then, the reports written by non-indigenous people keep on summing up

accusations of the “nefarious sin” and “sodomites” against indigenous people. The
accusations have been deployed against indigenous people and they have worked a
solid ground to a history of violence against sexual diversity, in particular, and
indigenous people, in general. As López-Austin concludes “identified by the invad-
ers as enemies of the human race, the indigenous people were labeled like savages,
brutal, barbarians, traitors, liars, lazy, sodomites, infidels, non-believers”4 (1980,
p. 64, our translation). He reports, as an example, the colonizer Gabriel Soares de
Sousa believed that the indigenous people “were very affectionate to the nefarious
sin” (idem) and in the countryside cities had “public tents for the ones who want
them as public women” (ibidem).
In the article “Conquistadores y misioneros frente al pecado nefando”, Oliver
(1992) writes that the conquest of America can be considered as a continuation of
the “reconquest of Spain,” where the indigenous people replaced the Muslim enemy,
being labeled with the same accusation of homosexuality and practitioners of the
“nefarious sin.” In another article, titled “Homosexualidad y prostituición entre los
Nahua y otros pueblos del posclasico,” Oliver remembers the kind of paradox pre-
sented in the Spanish debate: on one hand the indigenous were accused of the
“nefarious sin,” and on the other hand, they were also praised for having laws and
customs to reprehend homosexual practice (2004). The “nefarious sin” accusation
was the base of the arguments presented by Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, Spanish
Crown historian, to defend the “fair war” against indigenous people. On the other
side of the dispute, the arguments were defended by the Dominican priest Bartolomé
de las Casas in the historical debate that took place in Valladolid in 1550. While
Sepúlveda argued in favor of the submission of the indigenous people as they were
considered to be inferior and soulless against De las Casas who defended that they
were also human beings and should be treated as such.
Although there is a debate as to whether we can affirm that the Nahuas tolerated
(or not) homosexuality or, in other words, if the same-sex practice would be pun-
ished or tolerated (Oliver 2004), we can be more certain about adultery, consider a
crime to be punished by capital death and that there was a male predominance in
Aztec social life (López Hernández 2014, p. 367). In the book La Mujer Azteca,
Rodriguez-Shadow (2000) sustains the same that Nahua’s societies were patriar-
chal, where women were subaltern with an educational system devoted to keeping
them in a submissive place. Nevertheless, she also observes that food and textiles
3
In the original: “Porque aun allende de lo que arriba hemos hecho relación a Vuestras Majestades
de los niños y hombres y mujeres que matan y ofrecen en sus sacrificios, hemos sabido y sido
informados de cierto que todos son sodomitas y usan aquel abominable pecado”. Este juicio de
Hernán Cortés aparece en más de un autor español.
4
In the original: “Identificados por los invasores como enemigos de la raza humana, los pueblos
indígenas fueron etiquetados como salvajes, brutos, bárbaros, traidores, mentirosos, perezosos,
sodomitas, infieles, incrédulos”.
Nahua Culture 13
control were women’s tasks and that they were the ones that worked in the public
markets, as we can still observe nowadays in the majority of Mexican cities.
Rodriguez-Shadow also quotes Doris Heyden and López-Austin to affirm that the
Mexica society was one under the male domain in the period previous to the Spanish
invasion (idem, p. 49). López-Austin understands that this virile society is related to
the drastic moral and juridical position against homosexuality and all social prac-
tices that would go against this ideal of a virility (1980, p. 355).
The Aztec resisted the Cortés invasion, but not for long. So, in the year 1521, the
Spaniards defeated the Aztec empire and started the colonization of indigenous bod-
ies and territories. Among the many reports made by the military and clergymen,
much of what is known about pre-Columbian indigenous people from Mesoamerica.
Among the many reports about how life was in the pre-Columbian time, there is one
recorded in the almost encyclopedic work developed by fray Bernadino de Sahagún.
He arrives in Nueva España (how the territory was called by the just-arrived
Spaniards) with some other religious people to work in the evangelization of the
indigenous people.
He became fluent in the náhuatl language—the most spoken language in the
region back then. Sahagún developed what is considered to be the biggest ethno-
graphic oeuvre, and the “biggest historiographic monument of the XVI century,” as
López-Austin considers (1996, p. 43) with detailed accounts about rituals and lives
of the indigenous people living in what now is Mesoamerica. He died in 1590 after
he had endured several punishments due to the opposition that his erudite work
represented to the Spanish authorities (idem). Sahagún reported several terms used
for same-sex practice. Aguilar (2015) presents terms that would have been used to
refer to people who would have homosexual relations or desire.
First, he registers xochihua, which could be literally translated to “the ones who
carry the flower.” According to Sahagún, “the xochihua dressed like a woman, spoke
like a woman, corrupted, confused and deceived people, and possessed the flower.”
About the interpretation of the symbolism of the one who “possessed the flower,”
Aguilar (2015) notes that Pete Sigal interpreted it as “the one who has the sexual
desire.” When analyzing the “Florentine Codex,”5 Sousa proposes that in
“Mesoamerican ideology, flowers conveyed a broad range of concepts and mean-
ings, from potency, fertility, and (re) production to destructive aspects of illicit sexu-
ality” (2019, p. 188).
Kimball had worked in offering critic translations of the Florentine Codex and he
proposed to understand the word “xochihua” for both men and women homosexu-
als, and that the word is derived from “xochitl” in nahuatl that means “flower” (1993).
5
Sousa examines the book 10 of the Florentine Codex, explaining that it covers “several interre-
lated themes, including kinship, age, and occupations; parts of the human body; illness and medi-
cines; and brief descriptions of some of the ethnic groups that inhabited New Spain. Nahuas wrote
the first draft of the Nahua text between 1558 and 1565, based on interviews with elders and nobles
in Tepepulco and Tlatelolco, when Sahagún educated and Christianized Nahua coauthors asked
them to describe different social groups” (2019, p. 186).
14 2 Mesoamerica
Another term collected by Aguilar is “cuiloni.” According to him, Sahagún

translated the word as “puto, excrement, corruption, pervert, shit dog, mierducha,
infamous, corrupt, vicious, repugnant, disgusting, effeminate, the one who pre-
tended to be a woman, puto who suffers,” which he believes to relate to the one who
takes the passive role in the coitus. Oliver (1992, p. 59) registers “cuiloni” and “chi-
mouhqui” as possible translations for “sodomite” and “puto” (in Spanish)—as terms
recorded by indigenous informers of Sahagún. He stresses that we have to take into
consideration that the negative and prejudicial terms were pronounced under the
influence of the religious people, so we cannot be sure they represent indigenous
conceptions. Sousa also translates “cuiloni” as “homosexual or the one who
receives,” the “sodomético” or the “sodomite” (2019, p. 186).
For female homosexuals, Sahagún and his Nahua coauthors would have recorded
the words:
“patlachuia” or “patlache” to refer to “an unclean woman, a woman with a penis, who has
an erect penis, who is with a woman, seeks out young women, who looks like a man, who
does it with another woman”. Fray Alonso de Molina, author of the dictionary Vocabulary
in Spanish and Mexican, says that it means “the woman who does it with another woman”.
This term has a curious connotation because of its representation in the Florentine Codex it
was translated as “hermaphrodite”. (Aguilar 2015)
Analyzing the same Florentine Codex, Sousa presents other possible translations
to the term “patlache” as intersexual or lesbian (from Nahuatl to English), or “la
mujer que tine dos sexos” (from Nahuatl to Spanish) or “the woman who has two
sexes” (translating from Spanish to English) (Sousa 2019, p. 186). Another vocabu-
lary registered by the abovementioned Molina’s dictionary is “yollococoxqui”
which the literal translation would be “sick in the heart.” According to Aguilar, it
was translated by Molina as “crazy fool,” although the word “cocoxqui,” besides
being sick6 also meant homosexual or effeminate and “the one who does it to
another.” Aguilar thinks that this is a clear reference to the one that is being active
in a carnal relationship. He registers that in the same dictionary, Fray Alonso refers
to the word “cuilonyotl” that would mean “nefarious sin of a man with another man”
and the related word “cuilontia” to the one who “commits the nefarious sin.” Aguilar
concludes that the existence of such indigenous words would mean that the theme
of homosexuality was not alien to the pre-Hispanic cultures. He also calls the atten-
tion to the fact that probably the translations made by the religious men and soldiers
maybe did not reflect the real meaning of these words. He thinks that based on these
records it is not possible to comprehend completely how the pre-Hispanic societies
had their conception about sexual dissidents.
In Mexico, some indigenous people refer to lesbians as “patlache” that literally
could be translated as “the ones that have a flat surface.” According to Sahagún’s
6
The term “cocoxqui”, for Lopez-Austin (1980, p. 352) is a clear association of sickness to homo-
sexuality, or someone who is considered to be anti-social and sick. He informs that the nahuas had
a way to find the origin of sickness by throwing grains of maize in a cloth open in the ground and
when a grain stayed on top of another one this would be proof that the person was sick due to
homosexual practice (idem).
Homosexual Copula in Rock Painting 15
recordings, there would be a verb correspondent to the expression that is

“patlachhufa(nite),” which would be translated as “to act with the flat surface.” But
it is worth noting that the informants of Sahagún refer to this term to a woman with
a body with a penis and testicles. Many indigenous communities, such as the
Tojolabales and the Tarascos, understand that lesbians are hermaphrodites.
Houston and Taube (2010, p. 40) registered that the Maya Tzotziles from the
colonial time had a word for “hermaphrodite” that meant “feminine-masculine,” in
indigenous language 'antzil xincb 'ok also translated as “sterile woman” and that it
could mean a permanent condition. They consider that the “majority of Mayan evi-
dence refers to the sexual act itself without stressing homosexuality of heterosexual-
ity as a fixed and invariable trace of someone’s identity” (idem).
The only term for same-sex between women that we have found in other indig-
enous languages apart from the Nahuatl recorded by Sahagún is one entry, as
recorded by Oliver (2004, p. 318), in the “Vocabulario de la lengua cakchiquel, from
Fray Thomás de Coco”, that recollected words in this Mayan language: “also use to
say tequi, a,arihquij, so say the women when, viciously, lay one upon the other to
make filth”. Oliver also takes note of the Dominican Cristóbal de Agüero that regis-
tered that, among the Zapotec: “sometimes, some women accuse themselves of hav-
ing played with other women, treating them as if they were men” (idem).
Homosexual Copula in Rock Painting
Among the Mayas, in the region where now is Guatemala, we found some archeo-
logical recording, dated previous to the invasion by the Spanish and other European
colonizers. So, let us look at what the archeology has to inform us about the diver-
sity of sexualities expressed in rock painting made by the Mayas.
Olivier comments about the difficulties he had in writing about homosexuality in
pre-Spanish Americas because of the lack of “archeological proof, plastic or picto-
graphic representation of homosexuality” (1992). So, we would like to draw atten-
tion to a debate concerning the pictorial representations found in the cave Naj Tunich.
In stunning pieces of rock art expression, Andrea Stone registered a painting in
the deep cave Naj Tunich that is considered by Houston et al. (2006, p. 212),
Houston et al. (2006) as evidence of male same-sex relationship made by the ancient
Mayas with black pigment.7 Oliver (2010), in a more recent work published 10 years
ago, also reports about the stone rock painting as an example of a homosexual cop-
ula. All of them reproduce the image registered by Andrea Stone. In Stone’s book
Images from the Underworld: Naj Tunich and the Tradition of Maya Cave Painting,
she presents a catalog of the cave paintings with drawings and photographs, where
she details her findings of the archeological site and its relation to the mythological
meaning of the underground for the Mayas. She started working on the site in 1981.
7
According to UNESCO’s site: “the use of charcoal, manganese oxide, other minerals and organic
materials such as chalk and/or pigments for use with brushes in the finer works are the result of
learning processes and acquired pictorial techniques, accumulated and transmitted by the Maya
and used to draw in their caves” (UNESCO 2020).
16 2 Mesoamerica
The site suffered an attack of vandalism in 1989 and, since 2012, the Guatemalan
government tries to make the place become UNESCO’s world heritage. According
to UNESCO’s site, “for centuries, pilgrims and shamans have interacted with the
rock formations of the cave and the element of water present within, believing it
linked with the underworld and the realm of the dead” (UNESCO 2020).
In the book titled “The Memory of Bones: Body, Being and Experience Among
the Classic Maya,” Houston, Stuart, and Taube published two images recorded
firstly by Andrea Stone that they identify being of an older male with a younger
male: “(a) Kinal graffiti (published primarily by I. Graham 1967, Fig. 26) and (b)
homosexual lovemaking, Naj Tunich Drawing 18, published originally by A. Stone
1995, Fig. 8.18)” (Houston, Stuart and Taube 2006, p. 212).
The first image recorded in that book shows a man in a position where he is bend-
ing his body forward and there is another person standing behind him, something
that looks like a penis hangs from his body. The second image shows a mutual
embrace of an old and a young adult man facing each other that the authors identify
as “homosexual lovemaking” (Houston et al. 2006). The same “embraced male
couple” image was published in the article written by Houston and Taube in a spe-
cial dossier titled La Sexualidad en Mesoamerica where they wrote that it was pos-
sible to consider the image as of a homosexual copula between an old and a young
man (Houston and Taube 2010). For them, it is evidence of male homosexual-
ity (1992).
The authors consider that the native sources reflect partly the Spanish crying out
against the homosexuality of the Mayas, but they also understand that there is
enough evidence of homosexuality among different age groups during the pre-
Spanish period. They think that these encounters had specific places to take place
and that the darker areas of the Naj Tunich deep caves could have offered shelter for
these encounters, as they were visited by royal young people as appointed in some
texts, sadly that they do not refer to bibliographical sources to this information.
Based on their study on Mayan archaeology, they conclude that these places
probably had proportionated a space for sexual freedom and the “experimentation
and encounters” between young and older men. They also mention that other places
had been registered, always in a negative and reproachable manner, in other colonial
information sources, and that the relationships between members of the same sex
were part of a “rite de passage” of young boys becoming men (Houston and Taube
2010, p. 40).
The Naj Tunich caves are located in the Naj Tunich Archeological Park, in the
Department of Petén, a village of La Compuerta, located on the southern edge of the
Mayan mountains, in Guatemala, seven kilometers far from the Belize border. Naj
Tunich means in the Mayan language of quiche “stone house” and archeologists
sustain that they were been in use by the Ancient Mayas between 400 BC and 900
AD. According to UNESCO’s site, it was discovered in 1979 by a hunter from the
Kekchi Maya people. The site is proposed to become UNESCO’s world heritage.
UNESCO’s site also informs that:
Homosexual Copula in Rock Painting 17
Because of its pictorial record Naj Tunich is a cultural asset that can be considered unique
and of exceptional value and as cultural heritage for humanity. Found inside are ancestral
gestures as well as ideological and religious manifestations that represent human figures,
gods, animals and painted hieroglyphic inscriptions and groupings of offerings have been
found commemorating different events. Further, outside there was a small archeological
site, which may have been a place of residence for those who were responsible for the care
of the cave, their maintenance and protection. (UNESCO 2020)
UNESCO praises the cave’s artistic quality and the degree of conservation of its
rock art and compares it to the Lascaux cave in France. Apart from the art, the “cer-
emonial site and sanctuary” present pottery vessels and ceramic fragments and
other artifacts made from jade, shell, obsidian, and flint. Naj Tunich’s rock paintings
could be considered among the first evidence of registered same-sex sexuality in the
continent, bringing down all belief and affirmation that states that sexual diversity
and homosexuality were non-existing in the continent previous to the European
invasion.
Analyzing the concept of masculinity among Ancient Maya archeological arti-
facts, such as sculptures, and cave painting, especially the ones devoted to phalli
figures, Ardren and Hixson conclude that their research shows that the only constant
in studies of ancient sexuality “is its variety, not its uniformity” (2006, p. 7). They
note that the first archeologist to comment about the “phallicism prevalent in
Northern Maya art,” especially the several carved in stone penis sculptures found in
the region of Uxmal, was Edward Wyllys Andrews IV. In 1943, he published that he
believed these phallic monuments probably represented the remains of a later and
non-Mayan culture. Ardren and Hixon inform that new research concluded that
there is no doubt that the sculptures were created by the Olmecs and that they pre-
dated the Maya in the region. Interestingly for us, based on their archeological
research and bibliographic review, they have also noted that:
Male sexuality, in particular, has been defined narrowly as procreative, heterosexual, and
utilitarian. This imposition of Western mores upon a very non-Western culture has obscured
the meaning of some Maya art and impeded the elucidation of Maya conceptions of mascu-
linity. (Ardren and Hixson 2006, p. 16)
The authors also inform that Mayan art usually does not depict the genitalia and in
the few cases that the genitals are shown it is to identify that they were images of
elite individuals that bared the scars of penile bloodletting. Scholars usually linked
these “penile bloodletting”8 with offers of precious substances and understand that
penis perforation performed among royals in Classic Maya religious practices was
probably used as a way to communicate with gods or ancestors (idem, p. 18).
8
We have seen that one of the positive uses of the penis was to depict the ability of royal men to
offer blood from the most intimate area of their body on the part of the body politic—in essence,
the transmutation of the individual ruler into a stage where the fortunes of an entire population
were played out and perhaps rectified. As one of the most profound acts performed by ancient
Maya men, as well as perhaps by Maya gods, penis perforation was a dramatic and powerful way
to demonstrate royal prerogative and the violence associated with masculinity and dominance in
this particular ancient state (Ardren and Hixon 2006, p. 22).
18 2 Mesoamerica
In a recent examination of male sexuality in Classic Maya culture, Rosemary Joyce has
argued convincingly that there is a sexualization of the male subject in Maya art that derives
from an emphasis on male/male sociality and competition (Joyce 2000b). Visible in the
depiction of the penis and more common themes of partially clothed or unclothed young
male bodies or all-male groups of young men in competitive activities such as the ballgame,
warfare, or ceremonial dances, this artistic theme glamorize the display of the male body to
peers and re-emphasize the definition of masculine gender roles and masculinity held by
elite Maya culture. Joyce argues that the depiction of the erect penis, in cave art and graffiti
but especially in the free-standing stone monuments of the northern lowlands which may
have marked areas of all-male ritual (as suggested by Colonial descriptions of male houses
for ritual training), is further evidence of sexuality that included male-male interactions, not
to the exclusion of heterosexual relations but in the fluidity of experience outside Western
dominant values. Drawing upon earlier work by Andrea Stone on the erotics of cave imag-
ery, Joyce suggests caves and certain temple structures like those with stone phalli may
have been loci for male gender performance, where the male gaze was focused on other
men, and the significance of youthful male beauty was reinforced (Joyce 2000b, p. 273;
Stone 1995). (Ardren and Hixson 2006, p. 21)
Ardren and Hixson criticize Houston that claimed that these “rare examples of male
homoerotic and autoerotic” cave art paintings were depicting comments on illicit or
abnormal behavior. They consider instead that they are like “windows into a world
of largely undocumented all-male ritual behavior” and they prefer to understand the
art examples as “meaningful information about ancient values (and practices) (idem).
The archeologist authors concluded that
Recent studies of gender in antiquity have shown that Western concepts of the inevitability
of gender and sex cannot be applied universally. While dominant Western culture sees gen-
der, or the roles and expectations associated with being male or female, to derive from the
biological reality of our bodies and especially our reproductive capabilities, modern (and
ancient) non-Western cultures do not see gender or sex as inherent. As explained by Tim
Yates (1993, p. 51), ‘nature is not a fixed and inviolable process, it is already a text requiring
a reading and an interpretation’. (Ardren and Hixon 2006, p. 22)
Queers Deities and Transvestism
In many cultures, gods and deities are queer, beyond female and male. It is not dif-
ferent in Mesoamerica. Tezcatlipoca, the god of the smoking mirror, is associated to
the night and, in some reports, when not happy with their fate, because of sickness
or for being made prisoners, indigenous people would insult the god by calling him/
her a “miserable sodomite” (Oliver 2004, p. 321). Some myths present Tezcatlipoca
as a transvestite. Also according to Oliver (1992, p. 61), other deities were also rep-
resented as female and as males, like Cintéotl (god/ess of corn). Mirandé brings the
critic presented by Sigal that Sahagún transformed Tezcatlipoca into a “puto” (fag-
got) by transposing him with a lesser god, Titlacauan, who was described as a
“cuiloni” (Mirandé 2017, p. 58), but that Sigal proposed as well we could understand
Tezcatlipoca as a “trickster,” complex figure that could symbolize both masculinity
and femininity (idem).
Queers Deities and Transvestism 19
There were several reports about another sexual diversity practice that we could
call with the contemporary term transvestism. Apart from the one made by Hernán
Cortéz, already mentioned above, Oliver brings another one written by Cabeza de
Vaca who had also observed indigenous “men dressed as women.” The Spaniard
conquistador Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca had had a unique life experience among
indigenous people, a result of his survivor and in-depth experience living among
them. He wrote a book that we consider to be a kind of proto ethnography of the
indigenous people in the American continent. In 1527, Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, with
three other men, survived a shipwreck of the expedition that was led by Narváez.
They were stranded in the Gulf of Mexico and he spent around eight years living
among indigenous people until he arrived on foot in the area where now is Mexico
City. He described his adventure and survival story in a kind of ‘avant la lettre eth-
nographic account’ how the indigenous people lived. Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca
reported that, in the region where now is Texas, there were “men married to other
men, who are ‘amariconados’ (feminine males), impotent and go around covered up
as women and do women labor” (Olivier 1992, pp. 62–63).9
Oliver (idem) also refers to an event when one Spanish threatened to burn alive
young men because they were dressed as women and that the violence was avoided
because indigenous women intervened and protected these young men. Based on
this, the author considers that the “transvestites” were integrated with (which in
other words mean that they were not segregated from) the indigenous societies
where they lived in, in the territories that we now call Mexico and the USA.
Nevertheless, Oliver also points out that the pre-Columbian moral reproached
effeminate manifestations, as many sources presented “transvestism” as infamous
practice and there were laws that condemn it. Again, we have always to keep in
mind that the majority of the reports were made by non-indigenous people, and that,
even when they were recorded by indigenous people, they were writing these reports
alongside clergymen with their judgments about what was or not morally consid-
ered as proper behavior.
López-Austin suspects that some erotic practices of the noblemen that we could
consider to be same-sex or homosexual intercourse were probably related to ritual-
ized acts, which mean that they were considered to be “beyond what would be
purely human” (1980, p. 73). According to him, there are reports that the homosexu-
ality was not alien to the noble classes and that some noblemen would have men
dressed as women making their textiles and would have one or two of them for
“their vices” (idem).
The author also points out that the old nahuas had a negative image of homo-
sexuality. They had laws that punished female and male same-sex acts, not caring
for classifying them as passive or active and punished as well what was considered
an attitude of cross-dressing. There were some nuances and differences among the
9
In the original in Spanish: “Uno de los primeros testimonios sobre hombres vestidos como
mujeres se debe a Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, quien describe en la region de Texas “hombres
casados con otros, y estos son unos hombres amariconados, impotentes, y andan tapados como
mujeres y hacen oficio de mujeres” (pp. 62–63).
20 2 Mesoamerica
diverse communities as well, López-Austin takes notes that, among the other
nahuas, the tlaxcaltecas were more tolerant and did not juridically punish the homo-
sexuals, but they would attribute them the quality of tetzauhtin, the same word used
for adultery men or women, and then would avoid them.
About female travesties or what in contemporary terms we could call “cross-
dressers,” Oliver had found that female travesties reports were mainly related to
women occupying a male social position. For example, he mentions a lady called
Quenomen that occupied the role of her deceived husband as Lord of Tzacapu
(Michoacan), when she would dress with his military insignia. He also recalls when
women, armed with arrows and bows, fought among the tukuche people against the
cachiqueles, who won the battle. He considers that, unfortunately, we do not know
much about female same-sex relationships previous to the Spanish invasion. At the
end of this chapter, we will bring the interesting contribution of contemporary
lesbian-feminist scholars as a way to pay tribute to their contribution to the field of
anthropology and sexual diversity studies.
Diversity in the culture of course also means a difference in ways that people
explore their bodies and their sexualities and desires. So, several differences always
will be observed from one indigenous people to another, apart of course from all the
differences that exist on a personal level observed inside a given community, as
anthropologists show to be the case in the present time.
Muxe Sexual Fluidity
Mesoamerica is also remarkable for being the place where the Zapotec indigenous
people live in communities that have a social sexual fluid identity known as Tenoch
Laaksonen wrote a PhD thesis about the muxes, devoted to “prove the surprisingly
modernity of the Mesoamerican tradition of gender” (2016). He conclude that the
muxes defy el dominant, normative, heterosexual and binary system of gender and
sexuality. Both “muxes and queer theory have in common the notion that generic
identity is a sociocultural construction, a practice and a performance inside of a
complementary gender system” (idem).
Juchitec third gender persons incarnate trickster features, such as ambiguity, reinvention
and transformation making transgression part of their social repertoire, provoking laughter
and breaking taboos like heteronormativity. Muxe identity is also a construction of perfor-
mances, with different phases, components and practices, questioning and reproducing gen-
der categories though ways of combining their physical attributes and personal intentions
into a individual representation. The subjects of this study are active agents of hibrydization
following methods of ethnogenesis as a medium of taking advantage of traditional plat-
forms, including velas and regional costumes, and recent incorporations of cross-dressing
catwalks and redesigned customary garments, to integrate themselves in local culture and
to distinguishe themselves as public personalities (Tenoch Laaksonen 2016, p. 433)
Sometimes culturally translated as a “hybrid gender,” sometimes they are also

called a “third gender” (Mirandé 2017, p. 104). The muxes are comprehended as
Muxe Sexual Fluidity 21
“part of a continuum, with their ritual functions in the vela [festival] activities that
renew the community and the Juchitec social body” (Tenoch Laaksonen 2016,
p. 81). We would like to stress that we understand that the zapotec word “muxe” is
a specific cultural contribution to the world of sexual diversity. We agree with
Tenoch Laaksonen that considers the muxe as a key element that contributes to the
pre-Hispanic and post modern sexual diversity debate. Living in the Istmo of
Tehuantepec, the muxes are a “representative case of the Amerindian gender sys-
tems” (2016, p. 82). The authors understand them as “queer actors with a thoughtful
capacity and practice of incarnating the generic sex indefinition” (2016, p. 83).
In “Behind the mask,” Mirandé (2017) presents the many different ways that
muxe live their lives in a non-binary gender role in the Zapotec communities in the
Juchitán area, Guatemala. The muxe organize religious parties known as “velas”
and are socially very active. Some of them dress in traditional colorful Zapotec
attire, some keep on working with embroidery and selling in markets, but some have
a more relaxed way of navigating between the dressing codes.
Mirandé offers some tables where he shows how his interviewees classify them-
selves as different kinds of muxe: “pintada” (with makeup and jewelry), “vestida”
(women attire), or “international” (contemporary urban clothes).
He writes that some families have had generations of muxes and even though
some of them suffered prejudice by their families that was not the case for the
majority of them. Most of the muxes were respected and appreciated by their fami-
lies, Mirandé writes about a father who commented that “my son was born like
this,” explaining that it can be considered a characteristic of someone: to be born
muxe. Another interesting note is that some mothers consider a blessing from God
to have a muxe as (grand)son/daughter as they were considered to be hard-working
and very caring people (2017, p. 106), but he also registers that several of them had
a sexist father who did not accept well to have a “muxe” son/daughter (idem,
p. 113, 118).
Mirandé considers that the “muxe” are “not simply doing gender” or acting as
women, but that they are “actively undoing and redoing gender” and that is why, in
his point of view, people should understand them “through social and not sexual
categories” (2017, p. 104). Following two-spirits scholars like Driskill, Finley, and
others, Mirandé concludes that the “muxe identity is less about sexual identity and
more about Zapotec cultural categories and practices” (idem, p. 175). Finally, he
concluded that “being muxe is less about contemporary identity politics and more
about retention of gender categories in indigenous communities” (idem, p. 199).
To end this chapter, we would like to bring attention to the self-reflective work
developed by Dorotea Gómez Grijalva, an anthropologist from the Maya k’ichi
people. She remembers how her childhood and youth years were marked by the
internal armed conflict that started in the decade of 1960 and hit very hard all
Guatemalan population during 36 years, especially the indigenous Mayan descen-
dant persons that were targeted as being “guerrilleras” (2012, p. 4). In that period,
around 200,000 people were exterminated, around 900,000 seeked refuge in other
countries, thousands were considered missing people, and more than one million
displaced internally in Guatemala. The Guatemalan army committed several mas-
22 2 Mesoamerica
sacres, collective sexual rape against indigenous women, kidnappings, extrajudicial

executions to “disarticulate mechanisms of Mayan identity and the social cohesion
that facilitated commentary actions” (idem, p. 5).
Analyzing her trajectory and how she tries to heal from trauma and painful mem-
ories inscribed in her body, Gómez Grijalva nominates her own body as a “political
territory” (2012). Following Dominican feminist Yuderkys Espinosa and the Chilean
feminist Margarita Pisano, she comprehends her body as being historical and not
biological (Gómez Grijalva, p. 6). She intends to renounce to the “mandates imposed
by the patriarchal, racist, and heterosexual system that rules in the Guatemalan soci-
ety and elsewhere” (idem, p. 7).
So, to end this chapter, we present our translation of a passage written by Gómez
Grijalva, a self-reflective life story:
As I went on understanding the complexity of sexualities, I deepened my political-feminist
reflections and I deepened my process of searching for and finding. Through healing pro-
cesses, I advanced in decolonizing patriarchal ideas that inhabited, not only my reason, but
also my emotions and feelings. Through this complex process and from different perspec-
tives, I decided to assume and to live as a lesbian-feminist, because for me, being a lesbian,
acquired a special meaning in my political and spiritual choice to bet on patriarchal decolo-
nization from my body and my sexuality. However, in spite of the clarity of my desire to
make a decision, I felt insecure about the implications this had for my world.
My body is political territory, emotional and spiritual, in the face of a global and local
society that is strongly racist, lesbo-phobic and misogynist. Despite my fears, I decided to
become a lesbian, even though I knew that accepting my sexual choice was not going to be
easy. Especially because assuming that I was a lesbian definitely meant preparing myself
emotionally so that, in addition to dealing with racism, I could deal with lesbian discrimina-
tion and exclusion in a healthy way.
Therefore, assuming myself as a lesbian-feminist implied a deep process of emotional,
political and spiritual reflection, which I matured and decided as I sharpened my analysis of
feminist thinking and acting. In this sense, I claim to be a lesbian-feminist, because of my
political choice and not because of my sexual orientation. In other words, and to paraphrase
Norma Mogrovejo, I assume myself as a political lesbian because I refuse consciously
patriarchy and the traditional roles assigned to women, and because I rebel against the limi-
tations imposed on us women over the control of our own lives.
I feel that I prefer to live my lesbianism, rather than negating it and subjecting my body
to heterosexual logic. Especially because I assume that rethinking how I want to live my life
with my body, necessarily involves respecting what really gives me sexual, spiritual and
emotional pleasure. Finally, I can say that I have been confirming that understanding and
knowing how my emotions influence the physical well-being of my body and how impor-
tant it is to understand its language are fundamental to understand that all the dimensions of
my being are closely interconnected.
For that reason I assume my body as a political territory, a daily and incessant learning,
which has required a lot of love, decision strength and courage to renounce to what threat-
ens my physical, spiritual and emotional health. This way, I intend to continue respecting
the particular rhythmic and vibrant style of this body with which I live my life. (2014,
pp. 22–24)
References 23
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Another random document with
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open one into another, giving a fine perspective, and they lead,
through a dozen different doorways, on to a splendid, white-tiled
verandah which runs out to the bank of the Pásig River. There is a
picturesque, moss-covered river landing on the verandah below.
There are about twenty rooms on the one floor, all of them good
sized and some of them enormous, and it took a great many servants
to keep the place in order. The floors were all of beautiful hardwoods
and it required a permanent force of six muchachos to keep them in
a proper state of polish. The Filipino method of polishing floors is
interesting. Your muchacho ties either banana leaves or some sort of
bags on his bare feet, then he skates up and down, up and down,
until the floors get so slick that he himself can hardly stand up on
them. It is easy to imagine that six boys skating together in the
spaciousness of the Palace might cut fancy figures and have a
delightful time generally, if they thought they were unobserved.
Filipinos of the muchacho class always play like children, no matter
what they are doing, and they have to be treated like children.
The Palace furniture, which must have been very fine in Spanish
days, was of red narra, or Philippine mahogany, handsomely carved
and displaying on every piece the Spanish coat-of-arms. But during
the changing Spanish régimes some one with a bizarre taste had
covered all the beautiful wood with a heavy coat of black paint. The
effect was depressingly sombre to me.
The porcelain, however, or what was left of it, was unusually good.
The Spanish coat-of-arms in beautiful colours was reproduced on
each plate against a background of a dark blue canopy. I must say
there were quite as many reminders of Spanish authority as I could
wish for and I frequently felt that some noble Don might walk in at
any moment and catch me living in his house.
But, it didn’t take us long to get settled down in our new domain,
and I soon ceased to regret the sea breezes and the salt baths of
Malate. Malacañan enjoyed a clean sweep of air from the river and
our open verandah was in many ways an improvement on the
gaudily glazed one that we had gradually become accustomed to in
the other house. The Malacañan verandah, being much of it roofless,
was of little use in the daytime, but on clear evenings it was the most
delightful spot I have ever seen. I began to love the tropical nights
and to feel that I never before had known what nights can be like.
The stars were so large and hung so low that they looked almost like
raised silver figures on a dark blue field. And when the moon shone—
but why try to write about tropical moonlight? The wonderful
sunsets and the moonlit nights have tied more American hearts to
Manila and the Philippines than all the country’s other charms
combined. And they are both indescribable.
TWO VIEWS OF MALACAÑAN

PALACE. THE FIRST PICTURE SHOWS
THE WIDE, ROOFLESS VERANDA
OVER THE PASIG RIVER
When I lived in Malate and could look out across the open, white-
capped bay to far-away Mt. Meriveles, I sometimes forgot I was in
the Tropics. But at Malacañan when we gazed down on the low-
lapping Pásig, glinting in the starlight, and across the rice fields on
the other side where swaying lanterns twinkled from beneath the
outline of thatched roofs, there was little to remind us that we were
Americans or that we had ever felt any air less soothing than the soft
breeze which rustled the bamboo plumes along the bank.
Our household was in every way much enlarged on our change of
residence and circumstances. There were eight or nine muchachos in
the house, two extra Chinese helpers in the kitchen, and the staff of
coachmen and gardeners increased on even a larger scale. Our stable
of ponies multiplied to sixteen, and even then there were too few for
our various needs. It is difficult for the dweller in the Temperate
Zone to realise how small an amount of work the native of the
Tropics, either man or beast, is capable of.
We thought at first that the salary attached to the office of
Governor of the Philippines was quite splendid, but we soon gave up
any idea we might have had of saving a little of it for a rainy day. Our
rainy day was upon us. It rained official obligations which we had to
meet. The mere cost of lighting Malacañan was enough to keep a
modest family in comfort. I don’t know about conditions at the
Palace now, but I imagine they have not changed much, and I do
know that Manila is a more expensive place in which to live than it
was in my time. And yet there is serious talk of reducing the salary of
the Governor-General. It seems a pity. This would place the office in
a class with Ambassadorships which nobody but rich men can
accept. The present salary, with nice management and a not too
ambitious programme, will just about cover expenses, but I feel sorry
for the wife of the Governor who must try to do what is expected of
her on less.
My cook, who had been quite independent of me at Malate,
became at Malacañan wholly unapproachable. I don’t know why, but
so it was. He occupied quarters opening on one of the courts below
and connected with the dining-room by an outside staircase up
which I was never able to inveigle him. I had to deliver my orders
from the top of the stairs and when he had listened to just as much as
he cared to hear he would disappear through the kitchen door, and
no amount of calling would bring him back. As the kitchen was an
ante-chamber to a sort of Chinese catacombs, extending over a good
part of the basement, I never ventured to follow him and I had to
swallow my wrath as best I could.
But he was a jewel despite his eccentricities. He could produce the
most elaborate and varied buffet suppers I ever saw and I never knew
a cook who could make such a wonderful variety of cakes and fruit
tarts and cream-puffs. He took a real delight in their construction,
and for two days before a reception he would spend all his time
filling every pan in the house with patisseries elaborately iced in
every imaginable colour.
I began at once to give an afternoon reception every week and if it
hadn’t been for my disagreeable, but capable, old Ah Sing I should
have been in a constant turmoil of engagements with caterers and
confectioners. As it was, I never had to give an order, really.
“Reception Wednesday, Ah Sing,” was all that was necessary, and
except for a glance now and then to see that the muchachos were
giving the floors and the furniture a little extra polish on Wednesday
morning, the only preparations I had to make for receiving two
thousand people were to put on an embroidered muslin gown and
compose myself.
These afternoon receptions were public, our only form of
invitation being an “At Home” notice in the newspapers, and
considering the unsettled state of Manila society in those days, it is
really remarkable that we had so few unwelcome guests. There were
a great many derelicts and generally disreputable people, both
American and European, trying to better their fortunes or add to the
excitement in our agitated community, but we suffered no
unpleasant consequences from our open hospitality, though every
Wednesday the Palace was thronged and every Wednesday many
new faces appeared. Army and Navy people, civilians of every
occupation and many foreigners—Germans and British mostly—
came nearly always. I remember especially the first instalment of
American school teachers. They were, for the most part, a fine lot of
men and women who had come out with high hopes and ideals and
an enthusiastic desire to pass them on. There were some pretty girls
among them and a number of very clever looking men. I believe they
used to enjoy my parties as much as anybody in Manila. They were
homesick, no doubt, especially the girls, and I suppose the sight of so
many friendly American faces cheered them up.
The Filipinos had to have a little coaxing before they began to avail
themselves very freely of our general invitation. But by asking many
of them personally and persistently to “be sure and come
Wednesday” we prevailed on a good number to believe they were
really wanted; and after a little while there began to be as many
brown faces as white among our guests.
Speaking of school teachers reminds me that it was just about this
time that our minds were relieved of all anxiety with regard to Bob’s
and Helen’s education. My husband had wanted to send our ten-
year-old son back across the Pacific and the United States, all by
himself, to his Uncle Horace’s school in Connecticut, and I had
opposed the idea with all my might without being able to offer a
satisfactory substitute plan. But now a school for American children
was opened and they were as well taught as they would have been at
home. Moreover, Bob and Helen found a large number of congenial
companions, and I don’t think I ever saw a happier set of boys and
girls. They lived out of doors and did everything that children usually
do, but their most conspicuous performance was on the Luneta in
the evenings, where they would race around the drive on their little
ponies, six abreast, or play games all over the grass plots which were
then, and always have been, maintained chiefly for the benefit of
children, both brown and white.
My husband’s change in title and station made very little
difference in the character of his duties, but it gave him increased
authority in the performance of them. The onerous necessity for
submitting legislation to an executive whose point of view was
different from that of the Commission came to an end, and he was
able to see that such laws as the Commission passed were put in
operation without delay. Under General Chaffee the feeling on the
part of the Army against the encroachments of civil government gave
way, slowly but surely, to an attitude of, at least, friendly toleration.
It was as if they said: “Well, let them alone; we know they are wrong;
but they must learn by experience, and, after all, they mean well.”
General Chaffee and General MacArthur were two quite different
types of men. General Chaffee was less precise, less analytical.
General MacArthur had always been given to regarding everything in
its “psychological” aspect and, indeed, “psychological” was a word so
frequently on his lips that it became widely popular. General Chaffee
was impetuous; he was much less formal than his predecessor both
in thought and manner, and Mr. Taft found co-operation with him
much less difficult. He made no secret of his conviction, which was
shared by most of the Army, that civil government was being
established prematurely, but he was not unreasonable about it.
He refused at first to listen to the proposition for the establishment
of a native Constabulary. This had been the Commission’s pet project
ever since they had been in the Islands, and it was a great
disappointment to them to find that the opposition which they had
encountered in the former administration was to be continued.
What they wanted was a force of several thousand Filipinos,
trained and commanded by American Army officers, either from the
regular Army or from the volunteers. The same thing had been done
with success by the British in India and the Straits Settlements, by
the Dutch in Java and by our own General Davis in Porto Rico, and
as the insurrectionary force had dwindled to a few bands and to
scattered groups of murderers and ladrones, so acknowledged by
everybody, there was no reason why a native constabulary should not
be employed to clear these out.
This plan was among the first things submitted to General Chaffee,
but he was evidently not impressed. “Pin them down with a bayonet
for at least ten years” was a favourite expression of Army sentiment
which sometimes made the Commissioners’ explanations to the
natives rather difficult.
General Wright, on behalf of the Commission, called on General
Chaffee and was much surprised to learn that he had not even read
the Constabulary bill which had been passed some time before and
held up pending the hoped for opportunity to carry it into effect.
When General Wright explained the purport of the measure General
Chaffee said,
“I am opposed to the whole business. It seems to me that you are
trying to introduce something to take the place of my Army.”
“Why, so we are,” said General Wright. “We are trying to create a
civil police force to do the police work which we understood the
Army was anxious to be relieved of. You have announced your
purpose to concentrate the Army in the interest of economy, and to
let our civil governments stand alone to see what is in them and we
consider it necessary to have a constabulary, or some such force, to
take care of the lawless characters that are sure to be in the country
after four years of war, and especially in a country where the natives
take naturally to ladronism. The Municipal police as now organised
are not able to meet all the requirements in this regard.”
“There you are,” said General Chaffee, “you give your whole case
away.”
“I have no case to give away,” replied General Wright. “We are
trying to put our provincial governments on a basis where they will
require nothing but the moral force of the military arm, and actually
to preserve law and order through the civil arm. The people desire
peace, but they also desire protection and we intend through the civil
government to give it to them.”
The Commissioner then suggested the names of some Army
officers whose peculiar tact in handling Filipinos had marked them
as the best available men for organising and training native soldiers,
but General Chaffee was not inclined to detail them for the work, so
General Wright returned to the Commission quite cast down and
communicated to his colleagues the feeling that they were to have a
continuance of the same difficulties with which they were required to
contend under the former administration.
But a peacemaker came along in the person of General Corbin. He
spent some time with General Chaffee and then came to Malacañan
to visit us. He made a hurried, but quite extensive trip through the
Islands and gave the whole situation pretty thorough inspection.
After he left, a change was found to have come over the spirit of
affairs, and it was thought that he had managed to make clear to
everybody concerned that, while there was a military arm and a civil
arm of the government in the Philippines, they represented a single
American purpose and that that purpose had been expressed by the
administration at Washington when the Commission was sent out to
do the work it was then engaged upon.
After that General Chaffee seems not only to have been amenable
to reason, but to have been imbued with a spirit of cordiality and
helpfulness which was most gratifying to the long-harassed
Commission. To facilitate co-operation, a private telephone was
installed between the offices of Mr. Taft and the Commanding
General, and it seemed to me that my husband suddenly lost some of
the lines of worry which had begun to appear in his face.
The Constabulary, as everybody knows, was eventually established
and perhaps no finer body of men, organised for such a purpose,
exists. It took a long time to get them enlisted, equipped and
properly drilled, but to-day they are a force which every man and
woman in the Philippines, of whatever nationality, colour, creed or
occupation, regards with peculiar satisfaction. They include corps
enlisted from nearly every tribe in the Islands, not excepting the
Moros and the Igorrotes. The Moro constabulario is distinguishable
from the Christian in that he wears a jaunty red fez with his smart
khaki uniform instead of the regulation cap, while the Igorrote
refuses trousers and contents himself with the cap, the tight jacket,
the cartridge belt and a bright “G-string.” To the Ifugao Igorrote
uniform is added a distinguishing spiral of brass which the natty
soldier wears just below the knee. It is difficult to imagine anything
more extraordinary than a “crack” company of these magnificent
barelegged Ifugaos going through dress-parade drill under the sharp
commands of an American officer. The Constabulary Band of eighty-
odd pieces, under the direction of Captain Loving, an American
negro from the Boston Conservatory of Music, is well known in
America and is generally considered one of the really great bands of
the world. All its members are Filipinos.
Press clippings and some correspondence which I have before me
remind me that even at this period there began to manifest itself in
the Taft family, and otherwheres, a mild interest in the possibility
that my husband might become President of the United States. Mr.
Taft himself treated all such “far-fetched speculation” with the
derision which he thought it deserved, but to me it did not seem at all
unreasonable. We received first a copy of the Boston Herald
containing two marked articles in parallel columns, one of which,
headed by a picture of Mr. Taft, stated that in Washington there had
been serious suggestion of his name as a Presidential candidate and
the other giving a sympathetic account of an anti-imperialistic
meeting at Faneuil Hall. We thought the two articles as “news items”
hardly warranted juxtaposition, and it seemed to us the editor was
indulging a sort of sardonic sense of humour when he placed them
so. Not that my husband was an “imperialist,” but that he was
generally so considered. Indeed, he was the most active anti-
imperialist of them all. He was doing the work of carrying out a
thoroughly anti-imperialistic policy, but he recognised the difference
between abandoning the Philippines to a certain unhappy fate and
guiding them to substantial independence founded on self-
dependence. It took a long time to get the shouters from the
housetops to accept this interpretation of our national obligation, but
there was reassurance in the fact that where our honour is involved
Americanism can always be trusted to rise above purely partisan
politics.
Mr. Taft’s mother, who took an active and very intelligent interest
in her son’s work and who sent him letters by nearly every mail
which were filled with entertaining and accurate comment on
Philippine affairs, took the suggestion of his being a Presidential
possibility quite seriously. And she did not at all approve of it.
Having seen a number of press notices about it she sat down and
wrote him a long letter in which she discussed with measured
arguments the wisdom of his keeping out of politics. At that time the
idea appealed to nothing in him except his sense of humour. He
wrote to his brother Charles: “To me such a discussion has for its
chief feature the element of humour. The idea that a man who has
issued injunctions against labour unions, almost by the bushel, who
has sent at least ten or a dozen violent labour agitators to jail, and
who is known as one of the worst judges for the maintenance of
government by injunction, could ever be a successful candidate on a
Presidential ticket, strikes me as intensely ludicrous; and had I the
slightest ambition in that direction I hope that my good sense would
bid me to suppress it. But, more than this, the horrors of a modern
Presidential campaign and the political troubles of the successful
candidate for President, rob the office of the slightest attraction for
me. I have but one ambition, and if that cannot be satisfied I am
content to return to the practice of the law with reasonable assurance
that if my health holds out I can make a living, and make Nellie and
the children more comfortable than I could if I went to Washington.”
This letter is dated August 27, 1901, and was written on a Spanish
steamer which the Commission had taken from Aparri, on the north
coast of Luzon, after they finished the last of the long trips they had
to make for the purpose of organising civil government in the
provinces.
It was just after they returned from this trip; just when things were
at their brightest; when everything seemed to be developing so
rapidly and our hopes were running high, that we were shaken by the
appalling news of the attack on President McKinley. We had kept
luncheon waiting for Mr. Taft until it seemed useless to wait any
longer and we were at table when he came in. He looked so white and
stunned and helpless that I was frightened before he could speak.
Then he said, “The President has been shot.”
I suppose that throughout the United States the emotions of
horror and grief were beyond expression, but I cannot help thinking
that to the Americans in the Philippines the shock came with more
overwhelming force than to any one else. Mr. McKinley was our chief
in a very special sense. He was the director of our endeavours and
the father of our destinies. It was he who had sent the civil officials
out there and it was on the strength of his never failing support that
we had relied in all our troubles. It might, indeed, have been Mr.
Root in whose mind the great schemes for the development of the
islands and their peoples had been conceived, but Mr. Root exercised
his authority through the wise endorsement of the President and it
was to the President that we looked for sanction or criticism of every
move that was made. Then, too, the extraordinary sweetness of his
nature inspired in every one with whom he came in close contact a
strong personal affection, and we had reason to feel this more than
most people. Truly, it was as if the foundations of our world had
crumbled under us.
But he was not dead; and on the fact that he was strong and clean
we began to build hopes. Yet the hush which fell upon the
community on the day that he was shot was not broken until a couple
of days before he died when we received word that he was
recovering. We were so far away that we could not believe anybody
would send us such a cable unless it were founded on a practical
certainty, and our “Thank God!” was sufficiently fervent to dispel all
the gloom that had enveloped us. Then came the cable announcing
his death. I need not dwell on that.
Mr. Taft and Mr. Roosevelt knew each other very well. They had
been in Washington together years before, Mr. Taft as Solicitor
General, Mr. Roosevelt as Civil Service Commissioner, and they had
corresponded with some frequency since we had been in Manila. So,
in so far as the work in the Philippines was concerned, my husband
knew where the new President’s sympathies were and he had no
fears on that score. At the same time he was most anxious to have
Mr. Root continued as Secretary of War in order that there might not
be any delay or radical change in carrying out the plans which had
been adopted and put in operation under his direction. All activities
suffered a sort of paralysis from the crushing blow of the President’s
assassination, but the press of routine work continued. We were very
much interested in learning that a great many Filipinos, clever
politicians as they are, thought that after Mr. McKinley’s death Mr.
Bryan would become President, and that, after all, they would get
immediate independence.
Then came the awful tragedy of Balangiga. It happened only a few
days after the President died, while our nerves were still taut, and
filled us all with unspeakable horror intensified by the first actual
fear we had felt since we had been in the Philippine Islands.
Company “C” of the 9th Infantry, stationed at the town of Balangiga
on the island of Samar, was surprised at breakfast, without arms and
at a considerable distance from their quarters, and fifty of them were
massacred. About thirty fought their way bare handed through the
mob, each man of which had a bolo or a gun, and lived to tell the tale.
It was a disaster so ghastly in its details, so undreamed of under the
conditions of almost universal peace which had been established,
that it created absolute panic. Men began to go about their everyday
occupations in Manila carrying pistols conspicuously displayed, and
half the people one met could talk of nothing else but their
conviction that the whole archipelago was a smouldering volcano
and that we were all liable to be murdered in our beds any night. Of
course this made the Army officers more certain than ever that the
Islands should have remained under military control indefinitely,
and I cannot deny that, at the time, their arguments seemed to have
some foundation. It was a frightful nervous strain and it took several
months of tranquillity to restore confidence. If it had been a regular
engagement in which the Americans had sustained a reverse it could
have been accepted with some philosophy, but it was a plain
massacre of a company of defenceless men by many times their
number who had gotten into the town with the consent of the
American authorities, and in conspiracy with the local headman and
the native parish priest, on the pretext of bringing in for surrender a
band of insurrectos.
The man, Lucban, who was in command of the Samar ladrones
who committed this atrocity, is now a prominent politico in Manila,
and it is interesting to know that only last year, in a campaign
speech, he referred with dramatic intensity to “our glorious victory of
Balangiga.” He was appealing to an ignorant electorate, many of
whom, as he knew, wore the scar of the awful Katipunan “blood
pact,” but it is just to record that the average Filipino is not proud of
the Balangiga “victory.”
Shortly before these unhappy events my sister Maria was called
back to America by the illness of our mother, and I was left to face
the tragic excitements of the month of September without her
comforting companionship. By October I began to feel that I would
have to get out of the Philippine Islands or suffer a nervous
breakdown, so my husband and I agreed that it would be well for me
to “run up to China,” as they express it out there. Running up to
China at that time of year meant getting out of tropic heat into
bracing autumn weather with a nip of real winter in it, and there was
nothing that I needed more.
Mrs. Wright and Mrs. Moses were both anxious to see something
of China before leaving the Orient, and as this seemed an excellent
opportunity to make the trip, they decided to go with me. The Boxer
Insurrection had just been suppressed and the Dowager Empress
had not yet returned from the West, whither she had fled during the
siege of Peking. We were used to the alarums of war and we thought
we were likely to see more of China “from the inside” than if we
visited the country during a period of complete calm. Then there
were wonderful tales of valuable “loot” which interested us. Not
necessarily illegitimate loot, but curios and art treasures in the hands
of Chinese themselves who were selling things at ridiculously low
figures and, sometimes, with a fascinating air of great mystery. There
is some allurement in the idea of bargaining for priceless porcelains,
ivories, silks and Russian sables behind closed and double-locked
doors, in the dark depths of some wretched Chinese hovel. Our Army
officers who had helped to relieve Peking brought us stories of this
kind of adventure, and I secretly hoped that we should be able to
have just some such experience. But being the wives of American
officials I thought likely we should be “taken care of” every hour of
every twenty-four. And so we were.
We sailed to Shanghai and went from there straight to Peking,
where we became the guests of Colonel and Mrs. Robertson, who had
gone in with the American troops in the Allied Armies and were
quartered in no less a place than the Temple of Heaven. The casual
tourist looking now upon that glorious collection of ancestral shrines
would find it difficult to believe that they once served as barracks for
American soldiers. Most people who visit the Temple of Heaven find
in it an atmosphere of peace and serenity such as is achieved by few
structures in the world, and to have this deep calm invaded by
business-like “foreign-devil” troops must have ruffled the spirits of
the high gods. But the soldiers had to be quartered somewhere and
this great, clean, tree-sheltered enclosure in the heart of the Chinese
city offered ample space.
Mr. Conger was then our Minister to China, and after spending a
few very busy days sightseeing we went to the Legation to visit him.
The Legation quarter, which had been laid in ruins during the Boxer
troubles, had not yet begun to assume an aspect of orderliness, and
many were the evidences of the weeks of horror through which the
besieged foreign representatives had lived.
As the Empress Dowager and her court had not yet returned, we
hoped to be able to see all the mysteries of the Forbidden City, but
order had been restored to a point where it was possible to make the
palaces once more “forbidden,” so we were shown only enough to
whet our curiosity. But the wonderful walls and the temples, the
long, unbelievable streets and the curious life of the people were
sufficient to save us from any feeling of disappointment in our visit.
At a dinner given for us by our Minister we met a number of men and
women who had been through the siege, and I sat next to Sir Robert
Hart, of the Imperial Chinese Customs, the most interesting man,
perhaps, that the great occidental-oriental co-operation has ever
produced.
When we returned to Shanghai on our way down from Peking I
was greeted by two cablegrams. It just happened that I opened them
in the order of their coming and the first one contained the
information that my husband was very ill and said that I had better
return at once to Manila, while the second read that he was much
better and that there was no cause for alarm. There was no way of
getting to Manila for several days, because there were no boats going.
So I decided to take a trip up the Yangtse River on the house-boat
belonging to the wife of the American Consul. If I had been doing
this for pleasure instead of for the purpose of “getting away from
myself” I should have enjoyed it exceedingly, but as it was I have but
a vague recollection of a very wide and very muddy river; great
stretches of clay flats, broken here and there by little clumps of round
mounds which I knew were Chinese graves, and bordered by distant,
low hills; an occasional quaint grey town with uptilted tile roofs; and
a few graceful but dreary-looking pagodas crowning lonesome hill-
tops. And in addition to all of this there was a seething mass of very
dirty and very noisy humanity which kept out of our way and
regarded us with anything but friendly looks.
I had left my husband apparently perfectly well, but I subsequently
learned that the night after I left Manila he developed the first
symptoms of his illness. It was diagnosed at first as dengue fever, a
disease quite common in the Philippines which, though exceedingly
disagreeable, is not regarded as dangerous. It was about two weeks
before a correct diagnosis was made, and it was then discovered that
he was suffering from an abscess which called for a serious
emergency operation. He was taken to the First Reserve Army
hospital and the operation was performed by Dr. Rhoads, the Army
surgeon who afterward became his aide when he was President.
The children must have been much frightened. They had never
seen their father ill before, and he told me afterward that he should
never forget the way they looked as he was being carried out of
Malacañan on a stretcher borne by six stalwart American policemen.
They were all huddled together in the great hall as he passed
through, and while Bob and Charlie were gazing at the proceedings
in open-eyed astonishment, Helen was weeping.
For twenty-four hours after the operation the doctors were not at
all certain that their patient would live, nor did their anxiety end at
that time. The abscess was of long growth, the wound had to be made
a terrible one, and there was great danger of blood poisoning. Mr.
Taft rallied but a second operation was necessary. By the time I
reached Manila he was well on the way to recovery, though even then
there was no prospect of his being able to move for many weeks to
come.
He used to lie on his cot in the hospital and recite to his visitors a
verse of Kipling’s which he thought fitted his case exactly:
“Now it is not well for the white man
To hurry the Aryan brown,
For the white man riles and the Aryan smiles,
And it weareth the white man down.
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white
With the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear: ‘A fool lies here
Who tried to hurry the East.’”
It was decided at once by everybody, including the doctors, Mr.

Root and President Roosevelt, that Mr. Taft must leave the Islands as
soon as he was able to travel, and there were several reasons, besides
those connected with health, why it seemed best for us to return to
the United States. The principal one was that Congress was
becoming very active with regard to Philippine matters, and as Mr.
Taft was anxious that the right kind of legislation should be passed,
he wished to go to Washington and present the facts about the
situation as he had found them during his long hand-to-hand
struggle with the problem. Mr. Root cabled him that his presence in
Washington was necessary and granted him a three months’ leave of
absence from his duties as Governor, while General Wright was
appointed vice-Governor to fill his place for the time being.
Mr. Worcester was the ranking member of the Commission, but
my husband felt that he had not quite the same talent for genially
dealing with every kind of person, whether evasive Filipino or
dictatorial Army officer, which General Wright so conspicuously
displayed, and, moreover, Mr. Worcester was entirely engrossed with
the problems of his department, which included health and
sanitation and the satisfactory adjustment of the difficulties
connected with the government of the non-Christian tribes. These
were matters which appealed to Mr. Worcester’s scientific mind and
which he vastly preferred to the uncongenial task of administering
the routine of government, so he was only too willing not to be
encumbered with the duties of Governor. This, I understand, was Mr.
Worcester’s attitude throughout his thirteen years as Secretary of the
Interior, during which time he was always the ranking Commissioner
with the first right, under a promotion system, to the Governorship
whenever a vacancy occurred in that office.
The transport Grant was assigned for our use by General Chaffee,
and we made our preparations for an extended absence.
One incident of my husband’s convalescence in the hospital I think
I must relate. In an adjoining room General Frederick Funston was
recovering from an operation for appendicitis and he was sufficiently
far advanced to be able to walk around, so he used to call on Mr. Taft
quite often. Now General Funston, for the benefit of those who have
no mental picture of him, is by no means gigantic. He has the bearing
of a seven-foot soldier, but the truth is he is not more than five feet
three or four inches in height.
One day there was an earthquake of long duration and extended
vibration which would have been sufficient to destroy Manila had it
not lacked a certain upward jerk calculated to unbalance swaying
walls. One gets used to earthquakes in the Orient in a way, but no
amount of familiarity can make the sensation a pleasant one. My
husband was alone at the time and he had decided to hold hard to his
bed and let the roof come down on him if it had to. The hospital was
a one story wooden building and he really thought he was as safe in it
as he would be anywhere. Moreover, he was quite unable to walk, so
his fortitude could hardly be called voluntary, but he had scarcely
had time to steel himself for the worst when his door was thrown
open and in rushed General Funston.
“We must carry out the Governor!” he shouted; “we must carry out
the Governor!”
“But how are you going to do that, General?” asked Mr. Taft.
He knew quite well that General Funston, in his weakened
condition, would be incapable of carrying an infant very far.
“Oh, I have my orderly with me,” responded the doughty General,
and by this time he had begun to get a firm grasp on the mattress
while behind him hurried a soldier, shorter even than his chief, but
with the same look of dauntless determination in his eye.
In spite of the straining on the rafters, Mr. Taft burst out laughing
and flatly refused to let them try to move him. Fortunately for them
all the upward jerk necessary to bring down the roof didn’t occur, so
there is no way of telling whether or not, for once in his life, General
Funston started something that he couldn’t finish.
We sailed from Manila on Christmas Eve, 1901, and, much as I had
enjoyed my life and experiences in our new world of the Philippines,
I was glad to see the tropic shores fade away and to feel that we were
to have a few months in our own land and climate, and among our
own old friends, before I sighted them again.
CHAPTER XI
A TRIP TO ROME
The winter of 1902, the greater part of which we spent in

Cincinnati, is memorable only as a period of bereavement and
protracted illnesses. Perhaps such a record has no place in a
narrative wherein it is my wish to dwell on pleasant memories only,
or, at least, to touch as lightly as possible upon those incidents
which, for one’s peace, may better be forgotten, but a whole winter
filled with grief and worry is not so easily torn from the leaves of the
calendar rolled back.
In the first place, when I left Manila in December, 1901, I was very
near to a nervous breakdown. This was due to the long strain of a
peculiarly exacting official life in a trying climate, and an added
weight of uneasiness about my husband’s illness.
Then, too, my mother was very ill. She had suffered a stroke of
paralysis the year before from which she had never rallied and I was
extremely anxious to be with her in Cincinnati.
When we arrived in San Francisco a terrible mid-winter storm was
sweeping the country from one end to the other and we were strongly
advised to delay our trip across the continent, but we were both eager
to go on so we started East at once over the Union Pacific.
When we passed Ogden we found ourselves in the midst of the
worst blizzard I ever saw. The snow piled up ahead of us, delaying us
hour by hour; the bitter wind fairly shook the heavy train; and to
turn mere discomfort into misery the water pipes in the cars froze
solid and we were left without heat of any kind. There was nothing to
do but to go to bed; but even so, with all the blankets available piled
on top of us, we shivered through interminable hours while the train
creaked and puffed and struggled over the icy tracks.
When we reached Omaha I received a telegram telling me that my
mother had died the day before, and I found it no longer possible to
brace myself against the inevitable collapse. We hurried on to
Cincinnati and arrived in time for my mother’s funeral, but I was too
ill to be present. It was two months before I began to recover.
In the meantime Mr. Taft left us and went on to Washington for
consultation with the President and Mr. Root and to appear before
the Philippine Committees of the House and Senate which were then
conducting minute inquiries into conditions in the Islands
preparatory to passing a much needed governmental bill. For a
whole month he was subjected to a hostile cross-examination, but he
was able to place before the Committees more first-hand and
accurate information on the subject of their deliberations than they
had theretofore received. This was exactly what he wanted to come to
the United States for, and he would greatly have enjoyed it had he
been in his usual form, but he was not. During his stay in
Washington he was the guest of Secretary and Mrs. Root and only
their friendly care and solicitude enabled him to continue so long. In
March he was compelled to return to Cincinnati for another
operation, the third in five months. Everything considered, it seemed
to me the Taft family had fallen upon evil days.
However, the weeks passed, I began to improve, and as soon as my
husband had fairly set his feet on earth again we began to make plans
for our return to the Philippines. There could be no thought of
abandoning the work in the Islands just when it was beginning to
assume an ordered and encouraging aspect, nor was it possible just
then to shift the responsibility to other shoulders. This would have
been too much like “changing horses in the middle of a stream.”
My husband was able while he was in Washington to present to
President Roosevelt and Secretary Root a very clear outline of
Philippine affairs, together with such details as could never be
conveyed by cable, and the inevitable conclusion reached was that no
solution of the problem was possible which did not include the
settlement of the Friar controversy. The four monastic orders, the
Franciscan, the Dominican, the Augustinian and the Recoleto, which
held four hundred thousand acres of the best agricultural land in the
Islands, had won the lasting enmity of the Filipino people and it was
absolutely impossible to establish permanent peace while the Friars
remained and persisted in an attempt to return to their parishes.
Hundreds of them were living in practical imprisonment in the
monasteries of Manila, and that they should not be allowed to return
to their churches throughout the Islands, from which they had been
driven, was the one stand taken by the Filipinos from which they
could not by any form of persuasion be moved.
The solution of the difficulty proposed by Mr. Taft and his
colleagues in the Philippine government was that the United States
purchase the Friars’ lands and turn them into a public domain on the
condition that the orders objected to by the people be withdrawn
from the Islands.
As soon as President Roosevelt recognised the importance of
accomplishing these things he decided, with characteristic
directness, that somebody should go at once to Rome and open
negotiations with the Vatican, and after considering various men for
this delicate mission he concluded that Mr. Taft was the man best
fitted to undertake it.
The prospect of another novel experience was exceedingly
gratifying to me and I began at once to look forward with interest to a
renewal of my acquaintance with Rome and to the trip back to the
East by the Suez Canal, the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean which,
according to Kipling, “sits an’ smiles, so sof’, so bright, so bloomin’
blue.” So my feet no longer lagged in my preparations for a long trip
with my three children and another extended residence in the
tropics.
To assist Mr. Taft in his negotiations with the Vatican, and to make
up a dignified and formidable looking Commission, the President
appointed Bishop O’Gorman of the Catholic diocese of South Dakota,
and General James F. Smith, at that time a member of the Philippine
judiciary and in later years Philippine Commissioner and Governor-
General of the Islands. His rank of General he attained as an officer
of volunteers in the Army of Pacification in the Philippines, but, a
lawyer in the beginning, after he was appointed to the Bench he
became known as Judge Smith, and Judge we always called him. He
is an Irish Catholic Democrat and a man of very sane views and
exceptional ability. Major John Biddle Porter was made Secretary-
Interpreter to the Commission, and Bishop Brent, Episcopal Bishop
of the Philippines, on his way to Manila, decided to go with Mr. Taft,

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Queer Natives in Latin America:

Forbidden Chapters of Colonial History

The Routledge History of Queer America Don Romesburg

Mafalda A Social And Political History Of Latin America

A Short History of U S Interventions in Latin America

A Cultural History of Underdevelopment Latin America in

History of Modern Latin America 1800 to the Present

Armed in America A History of Gun Rights from Colonial

A history of modern Latin America 1800 to the present

Born in Blood and Fire A Concise History of Latin

Queer Natives in Latin

ISBN 978-3-030-59132-8 ISBN 978-3-030-59133-5 (eBook)

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021

Belém, Pará, Brazil Fabiano S. Gontijo

1 Taking a Closer Look at “Queer Natives” �������������������������������������������� 1

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 1

difference” (Mignolo 2011)—that is, the particularism and the exceptionality of

Butler, J. 1990. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge.

Chakrabarty, D. 2007. Provincializing Europe. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Colonization of America that we could rename the invasion of Pachamama starts in

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 9

Before the European colonization, Mesoamerica had densely populated indigenous

Since then, the reports written by non-indigenous people keep on summing up

Another term collected by Aguilar is “cuiloni.” According to him, Sahagún

recordings, there would be a verb correspondent to the expression that is

Homosexual Copula in Rock Painting

Queers Deities and Transvestism

Muxe Sexual Fluidity

Sometimes culturally translated as a “hybrid gender,” sometimes they are also

sacres, ­collective sexual rape against indigenous women, kidnappings, extrajudicial

Aguilar, Leonardo Bastida. 2015. Lo nefando de la homosexualidad. Revisión crítica de la

TWO VIEWS OF MALACAÑAN

It was decided at once by everybody, including the doctors, Mr.

The winter of 1902, the greater part of which we spent in

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