The famous 41. The scandalous birth of modern Mexican homosexuality

GLQ

Volumn 6, Issue 3, 2000, Pages 353-376

  Irwin, Robert McKee ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 4143108507     PISSN: 10642684     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/10642684-6-3-353     Document Type: Article

References (108)

1. Carlos Monsiváis, "El mundo soslayado," in La estatua de sal, by Salvador Novo (Mexico City: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1998), 13-14. All translations from the Spanish are my own unless otherwise noted.
2. José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi, Vida y hechos de Periquillo Sarniento, escrita por él para sus hijos (Mexico City: Proxema, 1979), 186.
3. Luis G. Urbina, La vida literaria mexicana (Madrid: Creer-Crear, 1917), 126.
4. Monsiváis, "El mundo soslayado," 15.
5. Joseph Carrier, De los Otros: Intimacy and Homosexuality among Mexican Men (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995);
6. Annick Prieur, Mema's House, Mexico City: On Transvestites, Queens, and Machos (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998);
7. Monsiváis, "El mundo soslayado";
8. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987);
9. Tomás Almaguer, "Chicano Men: A Cartography of Homosexual Identity and Behavior," in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin (New York: Routledge, 1993), 255-73;
10. Roger Lancaster, "Sexual Positions: Caveats and Second Thoughts on 'Categories,'" Americas 54 (1997): 1-16.
11. Octavio Paz, El laberinto de la soledad (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1989).
12. Octavio Paz, Xavier Villaurrutia en persona y en obra (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1978), 19.
13. Ana Luisa Liguori, "Las investigaciones sobre bisexualidad en México," Debate feminista 6, no. 11 (1995): 134.
14. Lancaster, "Sexual Positions," 4.
15. See Jean Franco, Plotting Women: Gender and Representation in Mexico (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989);
16. Debra A. Castillo, Easy Women: Sex and Gender in Modern Mexican Fiction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998);
17. and Rebecca E. Biron, Murder and Masculinity: Violent Fictions of Twentieth-Century Latin America (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1999).
18. See also Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley, 3 vols. (New York: Vintage, 1988-90).
19. Lancaster, "Sexual Positions," 12.
20. Novo, La estatua de sal, 115.
21. Reyna Barrera López, "Novo en la memoria," Del otro lado 14 (1994): 40.
22. Prieur, Mema's House, Mexico City, 171.
23. José Guadalupe Posada (1852-1913), "Mexico's most beloved and truly national artist"
24. (Roberto Berdecio and Stanley Appelbaum, Posada's Popular Mexican Prints [New York: Dover, 1972], vii), was a printmaker whose etchings were ubiquitous in newspapers, pamphlets, and flyers during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
25. Some of his most famous images are of calaveras, skeletons that humorously illustrate current events. Sergio González Rodríguez points out that "toward the beginning of the twentieth century there were many newspapers and few readers: written culture was practically nonexistent. Only 18 percent of those over ten years old could read, and that does not mean that they did so" ("Lectura y censura sexual en México: 1900-1990," in Los amorosos, ed. Sergio González Rodríguez, 5th ed. [Mexico City: Cal y Arena, 1996], 19).
26. El Popular, 24 November 1901.
27. El Universal, 23 November 1901.
28. Eduardo A. Castrejón, Los 41 (Mexico City: Tipografía Popular, 1906), vi.
29. The first to mention it in print was Carlos Monsiváis, "Ortodoxia y heterodoxia en las alcobas," Debate feminista 6, no. 11 (1995): 199-200. Ben Sifuentes Jáuregui managed to obtain a photocopy of the aging volume from the National Library, and although I was able to read it there, I am indebted to Sifuentes Jáuregui for sending me a copy of his photocopy.
30. Castrejón, Los 41, 5, 6, 9, 53.
31. See, e.g., Sylvia Molloy, "The Politics of Posing," in Hispanisms and Homosexualities, ed. Sylvia Molloy and Robert McKee Irwin (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 141-60;
32. Jorge Salessi, Médicos, maleantes y maricas (Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo, 1995);
33. and Oscar Montero, "Julián del Casal and the Queers of Havana," in ¿Entiendes? Queer Readings, Hispanic Writings, ed. E. L. Bergmann and P. J. Smith (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 92-112.
34. El Hijo del Ahuizote, 1 December 1901;
35. El Universal, 20 November 1901.
36. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 29-30.
37. Antonio Benítez-Rojo notes, "Given its foundational nature, El periquillo sarniento [sic] was the obligatory point of reference for later Mexican novels"
38. ("José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi and the Emergence of the Spanish American Novel as National Project," MLQ 57 [1996]: 334).
39. Ironically, the picaresque has been shown to be a genre vulnerable to some very queer readings. See Ben Sifuentes Jáuregui, "The Swishing of Gender: Homographetic Marks in Lazarillo de Tormes" in Molloy and Irwin, Hispanisms and Homosexualities, 123-40;
40. and Robert McKee Irwin, "El Periquillo Sarniento y sus cuates: El 'éxtasis misterioso' del ambiente homosocial en el siglo diecenueve," Literatura mexicana 9 (1998): 23-44.
41. Castrejón, Los 41, 53.
42. For examples of modernismo see Rubén Campos, Claudio Oronoz (1906) (Mexico City: Publicaciones y Bibliotecas, Secretaría de Educación Pública, 1982);
43. Bernardo Couto Castillo, Asfódelos (1897) (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, 1984);
44. and Ciro B. Ceballos, Un adulterio (1903) (Mexico City: Publicaciones y Bibliotecas, Secretaría de Educación Pública, 1982).
45. For examples of positivist criminology see Miguel S. Macedo, La criminalidad en México: Medios de combatirla (Mexico City: Oficina Tip. de la Secretaría de Fomento, 1897);
46. Julio Guerrero, La génesis dȩl crimen en México (1901) (Mexico City: Porrúa, 1977);
47. and Carlos Roumagnac, Los criminales en México: Ensayo de psicología criminal (Mexico City: Tipografía El Fénix, 1904).
48. El Universal, 23 November 1901.
49. El Popular, 20 November 1901, 23 November 1901.
50. Different newspapers gave different numbers: either twelve, thirteen, nineteen, or all forty-one men were sent to Yucatán via Veracruz.
51. Pelado, which refers here to a rough, lower-class, urban Mexican man, translates literally as "peeled," implying a vulnerability akin to being rajado.
52. El País, 23 November 1901.
53. El Imparcial, 23 November 1901, 25 November 1901.
54. On the battles between El País
55. and El Imparcial
56. see Alberto del Castillo, "Prensa, poder y criminalidad a finales del siglo XIX en la Ciudad de México," in Hábitos, normas y escándalo: Prensa criminalidad y drogas durante el porfiriato tardío, coord. R. Pérez Monfort et al. (Mexico City: Plaza y Valdés, 1997), 32-38.
57. El Hijo del Ahuizote, 24 November 1901, 1 December 1901.
58. Lizardi, El Periquillo Sarniento, 133, 134.
59. The actual charges were vague, along the lines of "attacks on morality" (El Popular, 20 November 1901).
60. The more contemporary charges of "offenses against good customs," addressing "scandal" and "obscenity," orginated in legislation adopted in the 1930s (González Rodríguez, "Lectura y censura sexual," 33).
61. El Diario del Hogar, 19 November 1901;
62. La Patria, 22 November 1901.
63. Castrejón, Los 41, 53.
64. According to Monsiváis, this character is meant to represent Ignacio de la Torre, President Porfirio Díaz's son-in-law ("Ortodoxia y heterodoxia," 200).
65. In the novel Don Pedro escapes (via the roof), just as de la Torre is said to have done (via political connections). The very first reports stated that forty-two men were arrested (El Universal, 19 November 1901;
66. El Tiempo, 19 November 1901;
67. El Popular, 20 November 1901;
68. La Patria, 20 November 1901), but the count inexplicably changed to forty-one a couple of days later. This change led to a persistent rumor that the forty-second maricón's name was quickly erased from all records so as not to embarrass President Díaz.
69. El Universal, 20 November 1901;
70. El Popular, 24 November 1901.
71. El Diario del Hogar, 24 November 1901.
72. El Hijo del Ahuizote disagreed: "Some, it is said, were able to pay their replacements, and those that couldn't, went to cook up beans for the troops fighting against the Mayas" (1 December 1901).
73. La Patria, 22 November 1901;
74. El Hijo del Ahuizote, 24 November 1901;
75. Castrejón, Los 47, 56-57.
76. On the uses of the number 41 see Luis Mario Schneider, "El tema homosexual en la nueva narrativa mexicana," in La novela mexicana entre el petróleo, la homosexualidad y la político (Mexico City: Nueva Imagen, 1997), 67-71.
77. It is ironic that in 1901 the 41 were incorporated into the Mexican military, while recently the military has been one of many institutions that has become paranoid about the number. According to revolution-era general Francisco Uriquizo: "The influence of this tradition is such that even official institutions pass over the number 41. In the army no division, regiment, or battalion bears the number 41." Of course, this paranoia goes beyond the army: "There is no list that has a 41st line. In municipal nomenclature, there are no houses with 41 for a street number. . . . There is no hotel or hospital that uses the number 41. No one celebrates a 41st birthday: from their 40th they skip to their 42d. There is no automobile that bears a license plate with the number 41, nor will any policeman or oilier agent accept that figure [on their badge]" (quoted Luis Mario Schneider, La novela mexicana entre el petróleo, la homosexualidad y la político ibid., 69). While Uriquizo may overstate this paranoia, there is no doubt of the number 41's continued association with homosexuality, at least in Mexico City: witness the habitual naming of queer nightspots with numbers that play on the theme, for example, the 42 and the 14, both near Plaza Garibaldi, and the 41, which closed in the 1980s in the Zona Rosa.
78. Ana María Alonso and María Teresa Koreck, "Silences: 'Hispanics,' AIDS, and Sexual Practices," Differences 1 (1988): 111.
79. Prieur, Mema's House, Mexico City, 188-89, 206-7.
80. This contrast is supported by scholars who study male homosexuality in Mexican American communities in the United States. See Almaguer, "Chicano Men";
81. and Alfredo Mirandé, Hombres y machos: Masculinity and Latino Culture (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1997).
82. Although he puts the word underdevelopment in quotation marks, Murray seems to promulgate a view that male homosexuality has historically followed, in different societies, a certain "evolutionary" (also set off with quotation marks) pattern in which relationships move from "age-stratified" to "gender-stratified" to "gay" or "modern." While he argues that "such an 'evolution' is not inevitable," Murray implies that "the globalization of an egalitarian (gay) organization of homosexuality" would be desirable ("The 'Underdevelopment' of Modern/Gay Homosexuality in Mesoamerica," in Modern Homosexualities, ed. K. Plummer [London: Routledge, 1992], 29).
83. Lancaster, "Sexual Positions," 8;
84. Carrier, De los Otros, 193-94.
85. See José Joaquín Blanco, "Ojos que da pánico soñar," in Función de medianoche (Mexico City: Era, 1984), 181-90.
86. Clark L. Taylor Jr. points out that foreign cultures have had a strong influence on the male homosexual underworld in Mexico throughout the twentieth century, at least among the bourgeois classes in Mexico City ("Mexican Gaylife in Historical Perspective," in Gay Roots: Twenty Years of Gay Sunshine, ed. Winston Leyland [San Francisco: Gay Sunshine, 1991], 197-98).
87. Roumagnac, Los criminales en México, 77-78 n. 1.
88. For an interesting analysis of this research see Rob Buffington, "Los Jotos: Contested Visions of Homosexuality in Modern Mexico," in Sex and Sexuality in Latin America, ed. D. Balderston and D. J. Guy (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 118-32.
89. Roumagnac, Los criminales en México, 299.
90. Roumagnac, Los criminales en México, Ibid., 388-89.
91. Castrejón, Los 41, 2.
92. By the end of the book Ninón reappears in the narrative and is "cured," reverting to dull, heterosexual conformity. Yet the weakest point of the novel is that once the transvestites have been sent to Yucatan, they are never mentioned again, save Ninón; the rest of the novel inexplicably focuses on the lives of Mimí's and Ninón's ex-girlfriends.
93. Here the book fuses two elements of the story: the presence of a baby and the raffling off of a handsome young man. According to one version of the events, the purpose of the party was to baptize a baby who belonged somehow to a homosexual couple. Separately, an attractive young man was to be raffled off (El Popular, 24 November 1901). In the novel Estrella, the youngest and most attractive drag queen, dresses up as a baby for the raffle. There is a plan to raffle off several other transvestites as well.
94. There were, in fact, allusions to anal penetration in the comic coverage of the 41. In one spoof, "The Letters of the 41," one of the transvestites complains, "Uy! How my heart and my posterior hemispheres ache!" (El Popular, 1 December 1901).
95. In another, "The Voyage of the 41: A Collective Diary," one entry reads, "Beatrizito complains that his seat is very hard, made of plain wood, and that it hurts the most enchanting region of his personality" (El Popular, 29 November 1901). However, most discussions were limited to the effeminacy of the 41, with the homosexual aspect implied but unstated and certainly never examined.
96. In Novo's memoirs, La estatua de sal, anal penetration is only one of the numerous sexual habits of Mexico City's male homosexuals (see Robert McKee Irwin, "La Pedo Embotellado: Sexual Roles and Play in Salvador Novo's La Estatua de Sal," Studies in the Literary Imagination [forthcoming]).
97. Many contemporary studies write off fellatio as mere "foreplay" (Alonso and Koreck, "Silences," 109).
98. Prieur is unique in recognizing its importance in some homosexual encounters (Mema's House, Mexico City, 211).
99. Matthew C. Gutmann shows that despite whatever symbolic importance machismo may have had or may still have among some Mexicans, the day to day life of men does not often conform to stereotypes (The Meanings of Macho: Being a Man in Mexico City [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996]).
100. Prieur, Mema's House, Mexico City, 199-203;
101. Murray, "'Underdevelopment' of Modern/ Gay Homosexuality," 30.
102. Francisco González Pineda, El mexicano: Psicología de su destructividad (Mexico City: Pax-México, 1961), 49-50, 52.
103. The idea of Mexican masculinity as a lie clearly derives from Samuel Ramos's Adlerian view of it as a mask, a form of "masculine protest" (Perfil del hombre y la cultura en México [1934; rpt. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México/Secretaría de Educación Pública, 1987]).
104. Paz, El laberinto de la soledad, 45.
105. Paz, El laberinto de la soledad, Ibid., 46.
106. Castrejón, Los 41, 31.
107. Paz, El laberinto de la soledad, 74.
108. Prieur, Mema's House, Mexico City, 29.