"Oficios de su raza y sexo" (Occupations appropriate to her race and sex): Mayan women and expanding gender identities in twentieth - Century Guatemala

Journal of Women's History

Volumn 20, Issue 1, 2008, Pages

  Carey Jr , David ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN MAINE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 54849425078     PISSN: 10427961     EISSN: 15272036     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jowh.2008.0020     Document Type: Article

References (113)

1. and Frederick Starr, Notes upon the Ethnography of Southern Mexico (Davenport, IA: Putnam Memorial Publication Fund, 1902), 80-82.
2. Wheelwright, Amazons and Military Maids, 9, 11.
3. Susan Migden Socolow, The Women of Colonial Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 29.
4. Lois Paul, "The Mastery of Work and the Mystery of Sex in a Guatemalan Village," in Woman, Culture, and Society, ed. Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1974), 284.
5. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1999), 106.
6. Serena Nanda, Gender Diversity: Crosscultural Variations (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 2000), 7, 105.
7. See also Vern L. Bullough and Bonnie Bullough, Crossdressing, Sex, and Gender (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 46, 52.
8. Ralph Lee Woodward Jr., Central America: A Nation Divided, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 151-75, 203, 204;
9. E. Bradford Burns, The Poverty of Progress: Latin America in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 35-50;
10. Charles Hale, The Transformation of Liberalism in Late Nineteenth-Century Mexico (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989);
11. and Brooke Larson, Trials of Nation Making: Liberalism, Race, and Ethnicity in the Andes, 1810-1910 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 64-66.
12. Robert Buffington and Pablo Piccato, "Tales of Two Women: The Narrative Construal of Porfirian Reality," The Americas 55, no. 3 (1999): 402-3.
13. Donna Guy, Sex and Danger in Buenos Aires: Prostitution, Family, and Nation in Argentina (Omaha: University of Nebraska Press, 1991);
14. and Sueann Caulfield, "Getting into Trouble: Dishonest Women, Modern Girls, and Women-Men in the Conceptual Language of Vida Policial, 1925-1927," Signs 19, no. 11 (1993): 173-74.
15. Elizabeth Dore, Myths of Modernity: Peonage and Patriarchy in Nicaragua (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 54, 161.
16. Lara Putnam, The Company They Kept: Migrants and the Politics of Gender in Caribbean Costa Rica, 1870-1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 129-30.
17. Cecelia F. Klein, "The Fate of Ambiguous Gender in the Aftermath of the Spanish Conquest of Mexico" (paper presented at Congreso Internacional de Americanistas, Seville, Spain, 17-21 July 2006);
18. O'Brien, "Songs of the Face of the Earth," 179-80, 187;
19. and Robert Carlsen, The War for the Heart and Soul of a Highland Maya Town (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997), 26, 152-57.
20. Samuel K. Lothrop, "Further Notes on Indian Ceremonies in Guatemala," Indian Notes 6, no. 1 (1929): 20.
21. Charles Wisdom, The Chorti Mayan Indians of Guatemala (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1940), 410.
22. Robert Redfield, "The Coati and the Ceiba," Maya Research 3, nos. 3-4 (1936): 241;
23. Robert Redfield, Tepoztlan, a Mexican Village: A Study of Folk Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1930), 106-7, 110;
24. and J. Eric S. Thompson, Ethnology of the Mayas of Southern and Central British Honduras (Chicago: Field Museum of Natural History, 1930), 103, 113.
25. See also Victoria Reifler Bricker, Ritual Humor in Highland Chiapas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1973), 181-87;
26. and Evon Z. Vogt, Lortillas for the Gods: A Symbolic Analysis of Zinacanteco Rituals (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 148-49.
27. On the Yucatán peninsula in Hocabá, for example, in 1971 a woman dressed in "short trousers, an old torn shirt, an apron, and an old torn straw hat trimmed with turkey feathers" as part of the fiesta of Carnaval. That she wore pants and an apron underscores the gender ambiguity in her cross-dressing; see Bricker, Ritual Humor, 182.
28. Nanda, Gender Diversity, 4.
29. Klein, "None of the Above," 219.
30. See also Olivia Harris, "The Power of Signs: Gender, Culture and the Wild in the Bolivian Andes," in Nature, Culture, and Gender, ed. Carol P. MacCormack and Marilyn Strathern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 70-94.
31. Tarn and Prechtel, Scandals in the House of Birds, 81.
32. Klein, "The Fate of Ambiguous Gender," 11-13.
33. Judith M. Maxwell and Craig A. Hanson, Of the Manners of Speaking That the Old Ones Had: The Metaphors of Andres de Olmos in the TULAL Manuscript (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1992), 175;
34. Diario de Centre América, 9 de julio 1936.
35. Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 1992), 13.
36. Susan K. Besse, Restructuring Patriarchy: The Modernization of Gender Inequality in Brazil, 1914-1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 5.
37. Dore, Myths of Modernity, 53.
38. Alduous Huxley, Beyond the Mexique Bay (New York: Harper, 1934), 136.
39. For evidence of Albanian women cross-dressing to join the army, see Antonia Young, Women Who Become Men: Albanian Sworn Virgins (Oxford: Berg, 2000), 112-13.
40. Catalina de Erauso, Memoir of a Basque Lieutenant Nun: Transvestite in the New World, trans. Michele Stepto and Gabriel Stepto (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996).
41. Trumbach, "London's Sapphists," 121-25;
42. and Wheelwright, Amazons and Military Maids. By the nineteenth century, women had a harder time passing as men;
43. see Julie Wheelwright, Amazons and Military Maids, 8.
44. Sabine Lang, "There is More than Just Women and Men: Gender Variance in North American Indian Cultures," in Gender Reversals and Gender Cultures, ed. S. P. Ramet (New York: Routledge, 1996), 189;
45. Anne Bolin, "Traversing Gender: Cultural Context and Gender Practices," in Ramet, Gender Reversals and Gender Cultures (New York: Routledge, 1996), 25;
46. Gilbert Herdt, "Introduction: Third Sexes and Third Genders," in Herdt, Third Sex, Third Gender (New York: Zone Books, 1996), 49;
47. In some societies such as those in Samoa and Laos, boys are raised as girls and fulfill feminine responsibilities; see Young, Women Who Become Men, 114-16.
48. Carey "Empowered through Labor," 526-28.
49. Carol Smith, "Race-Class-Gender Ideology in Guatemala: Modern and Anti-Modern Forms," Comparative Studies in Society and History 37, no. 4 (1995): 739;
50. Robert Carmack, Rebels of Highland Guatemala: The Quiche-Mayas of Momostenango (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995), 155;
51. René Reeves, Ladinos with Ladinos, Indians with Indians: Land, Labor, and Regional Ethnic Conflict in the Making of Guatemala (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 109.
52. Charles Wagley, Economics of a Guatemalan Village, Memoirs of the American Anthropological Association, no. 58 (Menasha, WI: American Anthropological Association, 1941), 67;
53. Morris Siegel, "Effects of Culture Contact on the Form of the Family in a Guatemalan Village," Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 72, no. 1/2 (1942): 56-58;
54. Oliver LaFarge, Santa Eulalia: The Religion of a Cuchumatán Indian Town (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947), 22-26;
55. and Oliver LaFarge and Douglas Byers, The Year Bearer's People (New Orleans: Department of Middle American Research, Tulane University, 1931), 87.
56. David Carey Jr., Engendering Mayan History: Kaqchikel Women as Agents and Conduits of the Past, 1875-1970 (New York: Routledge, 2006), 31-60;
57. David Carey Jr., "Contestations in the Marketplace: Mayan Vendors and the State in Early Twentieth-Century Guatemala" (paper presented at New England Council of Latin American Studies, Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine, 1 October 2005). At times, however, females did head male religious confraternities. To cite one example, in 1953 a ladinoized Mayan female curer became the head of a cofradía in Cantel; author's conversation with June Nash, April 2005.
58. Florencia E. Mallon, Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), esp. 324;
59. and Reeves, Ladinos with Ladinos, Indians with Indians.
60. and Carey, "Contestations in the Marketplace."
61. Carey Engendering Mayan History, 108-14, 125.
62. Diario de Centre America, 14 de agosto 1936.
63. La Gaceta: organo de publicidad de la policia nacional de Guatemala, 15 de febrero 1931, 211-12.
64. O'Brien, "Songs of the Face of the Earth," 197, 245;
65. David Freidel, Linda Scheie, and Joy Parker, Maya Cosmos: Three Thousand Years on the Shaman's Path (New York: Quill/ William Morrow, 1993), 169;
66. Gender duality among Maya can be traced at least as far back as the seventh century. In an image at Palenque, the Maya ruler Kan-Bahlum II wears a skirt and though male is referred to as the "Mother" of the gods. See Freidel et al., Maya Cosmos, 286;
67. Elizabeth Ann Newsome, "The Trees of Paradise and Pillars of the World: Vision Quest and Creation in the Stelae Cycle of 18-Rabbit-God K, Copán, Honduras" (PhD diss., University of Texas, Austin, 1991), 24.
68. Eleanor Lothrop, Throw Me a Bone: What Happens When You Marry an Archaeologist (New York: Whittlesey House, McGraw-Hill, 1948), 108.
69. Brent E. Metz, Ch'orti'-Maya Survival in Eastern Guatemala: Indigeneity in Transition (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006), 177.
70. Gaceta de Policia, 12 de enero 1941.
71. Ixjinan, 10 June 2001, Comalapa (Ixch'on mumus, Comalapa;
72. Ixchun, 6 July 2001, Comalapa; Ixch'uma', 26 June 2001, Comalapa;
73. Ixchul, 21 June 2001, Comalapa;
74. Carmack, Rebels of Highland Guatemala, 256;
75. Richard Wilson, Maya Resurgence in Guatemala: Q'eqchi' Experiences (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995), 111;
76. Douglas Brintnall, Revolt Against the Dead: The Modernization of a Mayan Community in the Highlands of Guatemala (New York: Gordon and Breach, 1979), 80;
77. and Wagley, Economics of a Guatemalan Village, 42.
78. Sol Tax, Penny Capitalism: A Guatemalan Indian Economy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 117.
79. Zur, Violent Memories, 61;
80. Lynn Stephen, Zapotec Women (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991), 77;
81. Mary Elmendorf, Nine Mayan Women: A Village Faces Change (New York: Schenkman Publishing, 1976), 45;
82. Paul, "The Mastery of Work," 290;
83. Marilyn Anderson and Jonathan Garlock, Granddaughters of Corn: Portraits of Guatemalan Women (Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press, 1988), 79;
84. and Tax, Penny Capitalism, 121-22, 130.
85. Carmen Diana Deere, Household and Class Relations: Peasants and Landlords in Northern Peru (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 109-10, 116-17;
86. Reina, The Law of the Saints, 242.
87. Dary Fuentes, Mujeres tradicionales, 18;
88. Like Kaqchikel men's oral histories, in general the literature on Guatemala's agricultural history focuses on men. See Julio Castellanos Cambranes, Coffee and Peasants: The Origins of the Modern Plantation Economy in Guatemala, 1853-1897 (South Woodstock, VT: CIRMA, 1985);
89. Robert G. Williams, Export Agriculture and the Crisis in Central America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986);
90. David McCreery Rural Guatemala 1760-1940 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994);
91. and LaFarge and Byers, The Year Bearer's People, 59-74.
92. Elmendorf, Nine Mayan Women, 63.
93. Wagley, The Social and Religious Life of a Guatemalan Village, 42;
94. and Paul, "The Mastery of Work," 282.
95. In contrast, women from the Tz'utujil town of San Pedro la Laguna never used a tumpline; see Paul, "The Mastery of Work," 284.
96. Huxley, Beyond the Mexique Bay; and Greg Grandin, The Blood of Guatemala: A History of Race and Nation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 184.
97. Leslie Devereaux, "Gender Differences and the Relations of Inequality in Zinacantan," in Dealing with Inequality: Analysing Gender Relations in Melanesia and Beyond, ed. Marilyn Strathern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 97-98.
98. Metz, Ch'orti'-Maya Survival in Eastern Guatemala, 98.
99. and Grandin, The Blood of Guatemala, 181.
100. Marjorie Garber, "Spare Parts: The Surgical Construction of Gender," in Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Henry Abelove, Michéle Aina Barate, and David M. Halperin (New York: Routledge, 1993), 322.
101. Lara Putnam, Sarah C. Chambers, and Sueann Caulfield, "Introduction: Transformations in Honor, Status, and Law over the Long Nineteenth Century," in Honor, Status and Law in Modern Latin America, ed. Sueann Caulfield, Sarah C. Chambers, and Lara Putnam (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 17;
102. and Buffington and Piccato, "Tales of Two Women," 402.
103. Many Native American groups afforded women this adaptability; see Evelyn Blackwood, "Sexuality and Gender in Certain Native American Tribes: The Case of Cross-Gender Females," Signs 10, no. 1 (1984): 27-42;
104. Sabine Lang, Men as Women, Women as Men: Changing Gender in Native American Cultures, trans. John L. Vantine (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998);
105. Monique Wittig, "The Straight Mind," Feminist Issues 1, no. 1 (1980): 103.
106. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, "Feminist Encounters: Locating the Politics of Experience," in Destabilizing Theory: Contemporary Feminist Debates, ed. Michéle Barrett and Anne Phillips (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 76.
107. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990);
108. and Garber, Vested Interests.
109. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (London: Routledge, 1966);
110. and Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols (London: Cresset Press, 1970).
111. Harris, "The Power of Signs," 90.
112. Klein, "None of the Above," 239;
113. and Barbara Tedlock, Time and the Highland Maya (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992), 116.