Pete Sigal

The Cuiloni, the Patlache, and the Abominable Sin: Homosexualities in Early Colonial Nahua Society

The cuiloni: the sodomite, the penetrated man, the homosexual, the passive, the third sex, the faggot, the queer. Cuiloyotl (or cuilonyotl): sodomy, homosexuality, the act without which the cuiloni could not exist. The term cuiloni reveals much about sexuality, sexual identity, and the many homosexualities present in early colonial discourse on the Nahuas, the indigenous peoples who at the time of the Spanish Conquest made up the bulk of the population of central Mexico.1 In recent years, scholars have begun to study the daily lives of the indigenous peoples of early Mexico, inquiring into the most intimate details of Nahua

Gender, male homosexuality, and power in colonial Yucatan

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 Yucatan. 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 maintained 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 crossdressing 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 modern 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.

To Cross the Sexual Borderlands: The History of Sexuality in the Americas

In 1994, during my final year in graduate school, I decided to teach courses related to the history of sexuality. My agenda was openly political: I wanted students to become more aware of the AIDS pandemic, fight for various sexual freedoms, and oppose the ascendant religious right. I also believed that historians paid far too little attention to issues of sexuality.1 The first course I taught, “Queer Bodies/Queer Histories,” focused on the ways in which gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender identities had been formed historically. The course emphasized the relationship between “queer theory” (see below) and historical discourse. This course went extremely well as students (under half of whom were openly queer) engaged the material in a very exciting way: even “straight” students felt comfortable discussing their own sexual lives and theorizing about how the historical material related to their identities. Still, the course left me somewhat unsatisfied. I was trained academically as a colonial Latin American historian, but only a small section of the course related to colonial Latin America, and the material for that section was hardly inspiring (it is only recently that early Latin American historians have begun researching sodomy and similar issues). I then taught a course on gender and sexuality in early Latin America. While I believed strongly that students must understand colonialism in