Making the American berdache: Choice or constraint?

Journal of Social History, Spring, 2002 by Richard C. Trexler

In fact, there is no case I know of in this immense Latin American frontier historiographic tradition of an individual child who himself is said to have chosen this path. To be sure there are cases of boys said to make their living through prostitution, but they are nor said to have themselves entered that profession as a career choice and of their own free will. Indeed on examination, the entrepreneurial berdaches one meets in these Spanish sources are almost always said to be attached to what, for a better term, we should call harems or brothels run by big men, obviously for motives of profit and patronage. The Spanish ethnographers in fact document coercion. Either it is of the type described above or the origins of the berdache status are said to involve homosexual rape, in which big men first rape and then dress their victims as girls or, inversely, first dress their intended victims as girls and then rape them. Thus the two young Andean berdaches who in mid-sixteenth century defended themselves before a friar by saying that they had not entered that life of their own free will, but had been forced into it by older men perfectly reflects the reality described by all early sources. (17) There are no sources alleging free choice which would permit us to doubt this picture.

Another early source takes us the next step on the road to understanding the quality of constraint that was the lot of the berdache at least in this time and place. In the Florentine Codex, Bernardino de Sahagun (d. 1590) dramatically describes an event surrounding a "small boy" who is about to go off with a group of Aztec merchants. The parents must decide on the gender of their child. What "should [they] make of him," he has the parents ask themselves, with one possibility running as follows: "Is he perchance a woman? Shall I place, perchance, a spindle, a batten, in his hands?" (18) Sahagun does not say what the criteria were for the parents in arriving at their decision, but in the coming pages we will comment further on the tests that were common elsewhere to precisely this end. What is decisive at this point, however, is that in the mid-sixteenth century Valley of Mexico, the executive power to assign a small boy's gender was vested in those parents, rather than being the boy's free choice.

The processes for making a berdache that I have sketched in Meso-, Central and South America in these centuries prove to have been far more tenacious than one might have thought, given the ferocity of the Europeans' attack on the institution. Whereas in Mexico City and Cuzco the berdaches were replaced by bands of "sodomites" who by mid-seventeenth century behaved much like the young homosexual sub-cultures now appearing in Europe, on the frontiers of the Spanish empire the institution of the berdache remained firmly in place. As we have seen, it was alive and well among the Itzas around 1700. In early eighteenth-century Zacatecas and in the province of Texas, there were still many berdaches who as usual accompanied the tribal warriors to battle not to fight--berdaches almost never carried the arms of men--but, as "women of the men of war," to perform the duties that women did at home, including, of course, "their sodomitic excesses" (sus nefandos escesos) with those warriors. (19)