Gender, Male Homosexuality, and Power in Colonial Yucatán

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES Sigal / HOMOSEXUALITY IN COLONIAL YUCATÁN Gender,Male Homosexuality, and Power in Colonial Yucatán by Pete Sigal Scholars have been studying the history of homosexuality for two decades, but only rarely have they ventured beyond the study of homosexuality in modern Europe and the United States.In the past several years, others have begun to challenge the Eurocentric biases of these works.One set of issues often overlooked by both Latin American historians and historians of homosexuality in general is the connection between homoeroticism, colonialism, and discourse among the Maya of Yucatán.Examining the colonial years, one can establish a variety of power dynamics at work.The Spaniards asserted their own power in an attempt to create an effective labor force made up primarily of Yucatec Maya (see Patch, 1993), while Maya nobles main- tained power over the populations under their control (see Roys, 1943; Quezada, 1993: 125-138; Restall, 1997).I suggest that gender and homosexuality were central to power dynamics in the colonial situation. The few major works on homosexuality in colonial Latin America have focused on the building of community, the berdache in indigenous societies, and the use of discourse (see Sigal, 2002).Historians have found that, in colonial Brazil and Mexico, men found other men who wanted to have sex with them.In urban environments these men engaged in a wide variety of sexual activities and even formed their own subcultures with their own rules of engagement (see Gruzinski, 1985; Mott, 1989).The berdache, a cross- dressing Native American figure, has intrigued anthropologists for the past century.While most of the scholarship has related to nineteenth-century North America (see Roscoe, 1998), many academics have assumed that the berdache existed in colonial and preconquest Latin American indigenous societies.Indeed, such a cross-dressing figure does appear to have existed, but his meaning is in dispute (see Trexler, 1995; Horswell, 2002).Early mod - ern Europeans engaged in some discussion of homosexuality, and scholars have begun to analyze this discourse.This article expands on this scholarship by attempting to understand indigenous discourse as well. Pete Sigal is an associate professor of history at California State University, Los Angeles, and a coordinating editor of Latin American Perspectives. LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 123, Vol.29 No.2, March 2002 24-40 © 2002 Latin American Perspectives 24 Sigal / HOMOSEXUALITY IN COLONIAL YUCATÁN 25 Homosexuality was not an undifferentiated sexual identity in the colonial era.The distinction between the “active” and the “passive” was particularly strongly marked, and there existed a variety of theories regarding the putative “causes” of “sodomy,” itself defined in an imprecise and seemingly obscure manner (see Bleys, 1995; Sigal, 2002).Elites in Hispanic societies used con - cepts of male passivity to structure a gendered discourse of warfare (see Bleys, 1995; Trexler, 1995: 38-63).To discredit their enemies, they charged them with sodomitic passivity.Some of this discourse assumed commoners guilty of endemic sodomy.Alternatively, commoners were seen as lacking sodomy precisely because they were not as corrupt as the elite.Whichever view was taken, the sexual ethos asserted a marked sexual difference between elites and commoners. Elites among the Maya considered passivity in males feminine and viewed the vanquished warrior as symbolically if not actually passive.The Maya nobles, lords, and priests at the time of the Spanish conquest used this notion of activity and passivity to assert their ability to harness the powers of the gods for community well-being.They ritualistically raped the gods, thus asserting themselves as the active partners to the passive gods.The Maya appear to have viewed this act as a way to harness sacred power.Maya elite discourse did not place commoners in the realm of endemic sodomy but viewed them as blind followers of the nobles.Thus, when the elites were corrupt, sodomy reigned throughout society.When “good” nobles came to power, sodomy was curtailed, perhaps to nonexistence.This discourse asserted that the commoners were followers of the nobles and that the central issue was not commoner sexuality but noble control.1 In both the Spanish and the Maya case, notions of same-sex sexual desires and behaviors were constructed in a gendered universe to assert the superior- ity of one elite faction over another.What was at stake in this discourse was nothing less than the establishment of a hegemonic ideology.This article ana - lyzes the place that homosexual desires and acts were given in the literature of both the Maya and the Spaniards in colonial Yucatán. THE SETTING Yucatán was not an ideal place for a Spaniard to live.Lacking in the min - eral wealth of Peru or the extensive tribute mechanisms of central Mexico, the Yucatecaneconomy left much to be desired.Still, many Spaniards settled in the cities of Mérida, Campeche, and Valladolid and attempted to establish 26 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES themselves as overlords to the Maya who lived there.But this was not to be. Relatively low numbers of Spanish immigrants, economic pressures, peri- odic Maya resistance, and, perhaps most important, Maya understandings of European ideas within a Maya cultural framework prevented them from establishing hegemony over Yucatán (see Farriss, 1984; Clendinnen, 1987; Jones, 1989).Nonetheless, while no real cultural conquest seems to have taken place, the Spaniards influenced Maya culture through vast changes in the systems of meaning that the Maya used to make sense of the world.2 As indigenous culture and religion took on Spanish and Christian elements, Maya rituals allowed for the survival of a mixed tradition at least through the middle of the nineteenth century (see Bricker, 1981).3 Thus what happened to the Maya may more appropriately be called the development of a hybrid culture after some centuries of struggles for hegemony. When discussing a topic such as the sexual culture of the Maya people, one may be tempted to ignore colonial rule and Spanish influence, assuming that the Spaniards were not as concerned with sexual culture as they were with economics and religion.But colonialism always necessitated some cultural changes on the part of the colonized peoples.Many of these changes were gradual, influenced by contact between individuals from different cultural groups (see, e.g., Farriss, 1984: 286-351; Restall, 1997). The changes among the Maya influenced the meanings placed on sexual behaviors.The Spanish introduced the concept of sin, changing the ways in which the Maya may have defined certain sexual acts (Sigal, 2000: 53-61).At the same time, the Maya influenced the new hybrid culture, often not by actively resisting Spanish intrusion into this sphere but by continuing to engage in many traditional practices even as these practices were being reconceived in a Hispanic Catholic framework.4 Even the most traditional practices were changed, however, and more customs were inscribed with new meaning.5 Colonialism influenced homosexual practices and desires by reconfiguring the cultural matrix within which those practices and desires were formulated.To the Maya, Spanish colonization meant slow and subtle change leading to a hybrid culture that mixed traditional Maya and Spanish concepts (see especially Farriss, 1984; Clendinnen, 1987; and, on the meaning of “hybridity,” Vattimo, 1988: 153-162).The hybridity changed meaning by, for example, asserting that sodomy was both sinful and accepted as part of colonial Maya ritual, the apparent contradiction being resolved by the ritual itself.Colonialism produced a new and different culture within which the Maya could assert meanings and understand homosexual acts and desires. Sigal / HOMOSEXUALITY IN COLONIAL YUCATÁN 27 COLONIAL POWER When the Spaniards colonized Yucatán in the sixteenth century, they did not effectively penetrate much of the countryside.The rural areas remained, for the time being, essentially Maya territory.Even by the middle of the nine - teenth century, much of the peninsula remained in Maya hands, despite the presence of a few creoles and mestizos (see Rugeley, 1996: 1-32).The rural economy, with a few exceptions, simply was not strong enough to attract sig- nificant numbers of non-Maya people.The Hispanic population centered in the three main cities.The early Spanish settlers wanted to make the Maya an effective labor force and to attract as many Europeans as possible, for a larger European population would enhance their status by giving them “seniority” over later arrivals.It is in this context that the documents discussing homo - sexual acts must be read. In contemporary stories about Mayans, literate early modern Spaniards read that Bernal Díaz del Castillo (1989: 7-8) had found many idols of men committing sodomy with each other.Díaz, writing from Guatemala late in his life, intended his work to counterbalance Hernando Cortés’s self-presenta- tion as the great hero of the conquest.He wanted the crown and the Spanish public to know that he and the other conquerors had distinguished themselves in battle (see Brading, 1991: 46-54).Attempting to correct a perceived wrong, he insisted that his account of the conquest was accurate, and the idols that he found (and smashed) were details that legitimated his narrative. Contemporaries may also have read the Relaciones Histórico- Geográficas.These documents—surveys that, from

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