Homosexuality in Mexico
The study of homosexuality in Mexico can be divided into three separate periods, coinciding with the three main periods of Mexican history: pre-Columbian, colonial, and post-independence.
The data on the pre-Columbian people and those of the period of colonization is scarce and obscure. Historians often described the indigenous customs that surprised them or that they disapproved of, but tended to take a position of accusation or apology, which makes it impossible to distinguish between reality and propaganda. In general, it seems that the Mexica were as homophobic as the Spanish, and that other indigenous peoples tended to be much more tolerant, to the point of honoring Two-Spirit people as shamans.
The history of homosexuality in the colonial period and after independence is still in great part yet to be studied. Above all, the 1658 executions of sodomites and the 1901 Dance of the Forty-One, two great scandals in Mexican public life, dominate the scene.
The situation is changing in the 21st century, in part by the discovery of the LGBT community as potential consumers, the so-called pink peso, and tourists. Laws have been created to combat discrimination, and two federal entities, the Federal District and Coahuila, have legalized civil unions for same-sex couples. On 21 December 2009, despite opposition from the Catholic Church, the government of Mexico City approved same-sex marriage, with 39 votes in favor, 20 against and 5 abstaining. It was the first city in Latin America to do so. However, Mexico in 2007 was still one of the countries in which the most crimes were committed against the LGBT community, with the murder of a person in a homophobic crime every two days.
Pre-Columbian Mexico
The majority of information on the pre-Columbian peoples comes from the reports of the Spanish conquest. Those accounts must be taken with caution since the accusation of sodomy was used to justify the conquest, along with other accusations real or invented such as human sacrifice, cannibalism, or idolatry. Given that the defenders of the natives manipulated the information to their opinion as much as those who were opposed by them, some trying to minimize the incidence of sodomy and others exaggerating the stories, it proves impossible to get an adequate picture of homosexuality in pre-Columbian Mexico. The historian Antonio de Herrera arrived at that conclusion as early as 1601.Maya
The Maya were relatively tolerant of homosexuality. It is known that there were orgies among the Maya that included homosexual sex though sodomy was punishable by death.Mayan society considered homosexuality preferable to premarital heterosexual sex and so the nobles got sex slaves for their children.
Mexica
The Mexica had different worldviews from the Spanish authorities who compiled the sources presently available for study, which makes understanding of pre-colonial Mexica gender and sexuality more difficult to understand since they were recorded through a Spanish filter. Geoffrey Kimball argues that later texts from the early colonial-period like the have been mistranslated because of the homophobic prejudices that were prevalent in the United States at the time.Social attitudes towards homosexual men and women were negative and ranged from disgust to amusement because they were perceived as violating Mexica gender roles, but attitudes were less negative on homosexuality for women than men. Homosexual men during the period of the Aztec Empire had methods of publicly identifying each other, which made them highly visible in Mexica society, and according to certain records, homosexual intercourse was performed in Mexica bathhouses.
Nonetheless, executions of male homosexuals are not attested during this period, and the existence of public identification methods by homosexual men makes it unlikely that they would have been persecuted; evidence from by Juan de Torquemada suggests that same-sex sexual relationships between men and between women were not criminalized.
While male and female homosexuality were known and disapproved of in Mexica society, there is no evidence of any suppression of homosexuality among Mexicas, with all homophobic persecutions having been introduced after the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire after various forms of homosexuality acknowledged by the pre-colonial Mexica were redefined as "sodomy" and "sin" by Christian friars.
Homosexual men in Mexica society also had a religious role, with records suggesting that there was a connection between them and Titlacahuan, that is the trickster aspect of the god Tezcatlipoca. Titlacahuan himself was depicted carrying a flower signifying his eroticism and blowing on a phallic flute denoting penance and communication with the gods, and was associated with excessive sexual activity.
There were four terms in Classical Nahuatl that referred to homosexuality; they were defined by the sexual activities of their subjects, rather than by psychological characteristics:
- ,
- ,
- ,
- and.
The held an institutionalised, albeit degraded, role within Mexica society whereby they were kept as dependents of high-level nobles for whom they performed household chores, cleaned temples, accompanied warriors in war, provided them with services such as sexual ones.
The verb, made by using the prefix, denoting a human object of a verbal action, literally meant "to use flowers on someone" and was used metaphorically in the sense "to seduce someone."The term referred to a sub-category of who held the passive role during sexual intercourse. The name was derived from the term, itself the non-active stem of the verb, meaning "to sexually penetrate someone." Thus, meant "one who is sexually penetrated."The term was derived from a verb or, of uncertain meaning. The word designated homosexual men.The term was used to refer to homosexual women, and the verb was used to denote female homosexual intercourse.
Other indigenous peoples
In spite of the puritanism of the Mexica, the sexual customs of the people conquered by the Aztec Empire varied to a great extent. For example, Bernal Díaz del Castillo speaks of homosexuality among the ruling classes, prostitution of young people, and cross-dressing in the area of Veracruz. The yauyos had prostitution houses full of men with painted faces and women's clothing.The Toltecs, elsewhere, were extremely tolerant of homosexuality.
Colonial era
In 1511, Peter Martyr d'Anghiera published his De orbe novo decades, with the information that he was able to get about the first explorers from his friendship with Isabella I of Castile. D'Anghiera told how Vasco Núñez de Balboa, during his exploration of Quarequa, in the Isthmus of Panama, in 1513, upset with "a brother of the king and other young men, obliging men, dressed effeminately with women's clothing went too far with unnatural" temerity, threw forty of them as food to the dogs. D'Anghiera continues his story saying that the indigenous people's "natural hate for unnatural sin" drove them so that, "spontaneously and violently, they searched for all the rest that they would know who were infected". After all, D'Anghiera mentions that "only the nobles and the gentlemen practiced that kind of desire. indigenous people knew that sodomy gravely offended God. the tempests that with thunder and lightning so frequently afflicted them, or the floods that drowned their fruits that had caused hunger and sickness."In an account on the indigenous people realized in 1519 for the council of the town of Veracruz to report to Charles I, attributed to Hernán Cortés, it is mentioned that they had "managed to know for certain that they are all sodomites and practice that abominable sin". In another account from an anonymous Italian conquistador, it is said that the men and women of Pánuco worship a masculine member and have erect phalluses in their temples and public plazas to worship them: "the multitude of methods used by the men to satisfy their abominable vice almost too unbelievable to be sure. the devil contained in their idols has possessed them. It has given them instructions to sacrifice their fellow men, to extract their hearts and to offer the hearts, as well as the blood taken from the tongue, the ears, the legs and the arms, all to the idols". Finally, he comments that "all the inhabitants of New Spain and those of other adjacent provinces ate human flesh, all commonly practiced sodomy and drank to excess" and compared some of the customs of the indigenous people with those of the ungodly Saracens.
In the middle of the 16th century the conquistador Bernal Díaz del Castillo and the soldier Juan de Grijalva write about scenes of sodomy carved into the architecture, in gold jewelry, in terracota and in statues. The West Indies explorer and gold smelting manager Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés included specifics in his 1526 La Natural hystoria de las Indias, expanded in his Historia general y natural de las Indias. Around the same time, Núñez Cabeza de Vaca writes:
Isabella of Portugal, wife of Charles V, possibly driven by these accounts, banned in 1529 the planting or use of maguey for the fermentation of pulque. The queen thought that it caused "drunkenness and drove the Indians to carry out" human sacrifices and unspeakable sin.
Those and other accounts were converted into an authentic literary genre, circulated to the whole Peninsula, and were used to justify the idea of Eepire; it was another "just cause" for the domination and occupation of the West Indies. Francisco de Vitoria, despite believing that the indigenous people were right and that as such, the emperor did not have law over them, thought that "the heathens that committed sins against nature, such as idolatry, pederasty or fornication, all those offenses to God, could have been stopped by force". Among those sins against nature was naturally sodomy, the sin against nature par excellence. The legislation was based on the different culture and its customs, among the most notable: cannibalism, human sacrifice, and sodomy, in this case the conquest of the Aztec Empire could have represented simply an extension of the Spanish reconquest of the infidels, represented then by the Moors. Thus the circle was closed with the relationship of Moor, sodomite, Indian.
In reaction to those writings, as of 1542, Bartolomé de Las Casas, along with other indigenous and missionary writers, launched a literary counteroffensive. Las Casas considered the "beastly vice of sodomy as the worst, the most detestable of any human wickedness". He denied with passion the reports passed on by the conquistadors and explorers, who had "defamed the Indians, having accused them of being infected with sodomy, a great and wicked falsehood" and thought that they observed "abstinence towards the sensual, vile and dirty affections", although he admitted that in a country so big there could be isolated cases of particular people in particular cases, attributed to "a natural corruption, depravity, a kind of innate sickness or fear of witchcraft and other magic spells", but in no case among the converts to Christianity. Las Cases gives for example the mixe who cruelly set fire to the sodomites discovered in the temple. According to the statements of Friar Augustín de Vetancurt, those men who dressed as women were hanged if they committed unspeakable sin and the priests were burned, a report that Friar Gerónimo de Mendieta confirms. Friar Gregorio García, in his Origin of the Indians of the new world, assured that before the arrival of the Spanish "the men of New Spain committed huge sins, especially those against nature, although repeatedly they burned for those and were consumed in the fire sent from the heavens punished the sodomites with death, executed them with great vigor. They strangled or drowned the women who lay with other women since those also considered it against nature". Garcia attributed the cases of sodomy to the fact that the "miserable Indians act like that because the Devil has tricked them, making them believe that the gods they worship also practice sodomy and therefore they consider it a good and lawful custom".
Nevertheless, Las Casas could not stop giving news about homosexual acts in contemporary Indian societies, as the custom of the fathers buying young boys for their children "to be used for the pleasure of sodomy", the existence of "infamous public places known as efebías where lewd and shameless young men practiced the abominable sin with all those who came into the house" or the two-spirits, "impotent, effeminate men dressed as women and carrying out their work". Also, Friar Gregoria García gave news of that kind, such as "some men dressed as women and some father had five sons dressed him as a woman, and instructed him in his work and married him as a girl, although even in New Spain they scorned the effeminate and womanly Indians". The mentions of sodomy continued for a long time, even in 1666, in Cristóbal de Agüero and in 1697, in Friar Ángel Serra.
Indigenous writers did not delay in joining Las Casas to defend American culture. Fernando de Alva Cortés Ixtlilxochitl, governor of Texcoco, wrote in 1605 that among the Chichimecs, the one who "assumed the function of the woman had his internal parts extracted by the backside while he stayed tied up to a stake, after which some boys poured ashes on the body until it was buried under them they covered all the pile with many pieces of firewood and set it on fire. covered that which had functioned as man with ashes while he was alive, until he died". Alva Ixtlilxochitl's account is, according to Crompton, too detailed to be invented, but according to Garza the story shows clear signs of Mediterranean influence in the fact of the differentiation between active and passive homosexuals.
During the Spanish Golden Age, the crime of sodomy was handled and punished in equivalent manner to that of treason or heresy, the two most serious crimes against the State. Initially the Inquisition was controlled by the local bishops, such as the archbishop Juan de Zumárraga, of whom a study of the cases judged shows that homosexuality was one of the main preoccupations of the court. The punishments for sexual sins tended to be fines, penance, public humiliation, and lashing in the most serious cases. In 1569, Felipe II officially creates the tribunal of Mexico City, but in the Viceroyalty of New Spain, only civil law took charge of judging the unspeakable sin.
The first known burning of sodomites in Mexico was in 1530, when they burned on the Caltzontzin pyre for idolatry, sacrifice, and sodomy. Pedro Cieza de León also tells that Juan of Olmos, principal judge of Puerto Viejo, had burned "great quantities of those depraved and demonic Indians". In 1596, the viceroy, Gaspar de Zúñiga, Count of Monterrey, reported in a letter that was sent to Philip II to justify the increase of the salary of the royal officials that those had seized and burned some delinquents for the unspeakable sin and other types of sodomy, although he does not give the number of victims or the circumstances of the event.
In 1658 the Viceroy of New Spain, the Duke of Albuquerque, wrote to Philip IV about a case of unspeakable sin in Mexico City in which he had "nineteen prisoners, fourteen of which sentenced to burn". Lucas Matheo, a young man of 15 years, was saved from the bonfire thanks to his youth, but suffered 200 lashes and six years of forced labor by cannon. Among the documents sent to the king is a letter from the judge of the Supreme Court of His Majesty, Juan Manuel Sotomayor, who describes sodomy as an "endemic cancer" that had "infested and spread among the captive prisoners of the Inquisition in their individual cells and the ecclesiastical officials have also begun their own investigations". The letter from Sotomayor reports that between 1657 and 1658 they have investigated and sentenced 125 individuals, whose names, ethnicities, and occupations he lists next. The viceroy, as much as the magistrate, bases his rejection of sodomy on the Bible and religion, although they use stories sui generis, like Sotomayor, who writes "as some saints have professed, that all the sodomites have died with the birth of Our Lord Jesus".
The previous case allows us to catch a glimpse of the subculture of homosexuals in Mexico City in the first half of the 17th century since many of the accused were more than 60 years old and took that life for more than 20. All those involved came from the lower classes: blacks, indigenous people, mulattos, and deformed Europeans. There are signs that the wealthier classes were also implicated, but were not deemed affected thanks to their influence. Many of the accused had nicknames, like Juan de la Vega, who was called "la Cotita", Juan de Correa, "la Estanpa", or Miguel Gerónimo, "la Cangarriana", the nickname of a prostitute from the city who was known for her promiscuity. The group met periodically in private houses, often on the days of religious festivities with the excuse of praying and giving tribute to the Virgin and the saints, but in reality they had cross-dressing dances and orgies. The next meeting places and dates were mentioned in the previous parties or were disseminated by mail and messengers who belonged to the group.
Image:Sor Juana by Miguel Cabrera.png|thumb|150px|Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz has become an icon for modern lesbian culture.
Colonial culture was similar to that of Spain and had and had prominent intellectuals among those born in America. Perhaps one of the most important was Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, of whom it has also been said that she was a lesbian, based on the intense friendships that she had with various women, the beauty of whom she praises in her poetry.