Extermination of the Joyas: Gendercide in Spanish California

GLQ

Volumn 16, Issue 1-2, 2010, Pages 253-284

  Miranda, Deborah A ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 77249171426     PISSN: 10642684     EISSN: 15279375     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/10642684-2009-022     Document Type: Article

References (82)

1. Paula Gunn Allen, "I Don't Speak the Language That Has the Sentences: An Interview with Paula Gunn Allen," Sojourner: The Women's Forum 24, no. 2 (1999): 26-27.
2. Paula Gunn Allen, "Some Like Indians Endure," in Living the Spirit (New York: St. Martin's, 1988), 9-13.
3. Elaine Mills, ed., The Papers of John Peabody Harrington in the Smithsonian Institution, 1907-1957, microfilm (White Plains, NY: Kraus International, 1981).
4. Salvage ethnology is a term coined by Jacob Gruber to refer to the paradoxical obsession of Westerners to collect artifacts, linguistic traces, and cultural knowledge of cultures that they had previously spent much effort to colonize or exterminate. Rather than basic ethnological research, the study of a culture, "salvage ethnology" was concerned with an almost fanatic search (and often the hoarding of) any remains of a colonized culture. See Jacob Gruber, "Ethnographic Salvage and the Shaping of Anthropology," American Anthropologist, n.s., 72 (1970): 1289 - 99.
5. I use this name as it was coined during the Third International Two Spirit Gathering, to provide a positive alternative to the unacceptable term berdache: Two - Spirit people are "Aboriginal people who possess the sacred gifts of the female-male spirit, which exists in harmony with those of the female and the male. They have traditional respected roles within most Aboriginal cultures and societies and are contributing members of the community. Today, some Aboriginal people who are Two-Spirit also identify as being gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender" ("Background and Recent Developments in Two-Spirit Organizing," International Two Spirit Gathering, intltwo spiritgathering.org/content/view/27/42/ [accessed July 28, 2009]).
6. The archaeology of sexuality refers to a fairly recent movement within archaeology that brings together theoretical work from gender and women's studies, science studies, philosophy, and the social sciences on sex and gender to study material remains and to approach questions often considered accessible only through texts or direct observation of behavior, such as gender or multiple genders. An excellent collection of articles on this topic is Robert Schmidt and Barbara Voss, eds., Archaeologies of Sexuality (London: Routledge, 2000).
7. My use of the term third gender relies on and refers back to work done by Will Roscoe, Sabine Lang, Wesley Thomas, Bea Medicine, and others as a way to identify a gender that is neither fully male nor fully female, nor (more importantly) simply "half and half," but a unique blend of characteristics resulting in a third or other gender. See Sue Ellen Jacobs, Wesley Thomas, and Sabine Lang, eds., Two-Spirit People: Native American Gender Identity, Sexuality, and Spirituality (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997).
8. As Brian Gilley summarizes, "The institution of the third gender [in Native American precontact societies] was less about an individual's sexuality and more about the ways their special qualities were incorporated into the social and religious life of their community" (Becoming Two-Spirit: Gay Identity and Social Acceptance in Indian Country [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006], 11).
9. Father Gerónimo Boscana, a Franciscan priest who kept extensive notes about Native culture and customs during his stay at Mission San Juan Capistrano from 1812 until 1826, wrote that the "Indians of California may be compared to a species of monkey" ("Chinigchinich," in Alfred Robinson, Life in California: During a Residence of Several Years in That Territory, Comprising a Description of the Country and the Missionary Establishments, ed. Doyce B. Nunis Jr. [New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1846], 335).
10. Postsecularization, perceptions had not changed much; in 1849 Samuel Upham commented on California Indian genealogy and eating habits: "Like his brother, the gorilla, he is a vegetarian and subsists principally on wild berries and acorns, occasionally luxuriating on snails and grasshoppers" (Notes of a Voyage to California Via Cape Horn, Together with Scenes in El Dorado, in the Years 1849 - 50 [New York: Arno, 1973], 240).
11. This attitude persisted when John Audubon wrote in his journal of a Miwok child "eating [acorns] with the judgment of a monkey, and looking very much like one." Although the journal covers the years 1840 - 1850, it was published in 1906, perpetuating the distorted view of California Indians into the twentieth century (John Audubon, Audubon's Western Journal: 1840 - 1850, ed. Frank Heywood Hodder [Cleveland: Clark, 1906], 213).
12. Although most scholars still use the population estimates by Martin Baumhoff (Ecological Determinants of Aboriginal California Populations [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963])
13. and Sherburne Cook (The Population of the California Indians, 1796 - 1970 [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976]), many contemporary scholars view their numbers (150,000-350,000) as greatly outdated.
14. In American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History since 1492 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), Russell Thornton, for example, writes that California Indian precontact population was "approaching 705,000" (200). In private correspondence with the author about more current population data, William Preston writes that "at this point I think Thornton's high number is totally reasonable. In fact, keeping in mind that populations no doubt fluctuated over time, I'm thinking that at times 1 million or more Native Californians were resident in that state." William Preston, e-mail message to author, July 8, 2009.
15. Pedro Fages, A Historical, Political, and Natural Description of California by Pedro Fages, Soldier of Spain, trans. Herbert Priestley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1937), 33.
16. Stanley Coren, The Pawprints of History: Dogs and the Course of Human Events (New York: Free Press, 2003), 67 - 80.
17. Coren, Pawprints of History, 76.
18. Coren, Pawprints of History, 72-73.
19. Coren, Pawprints of History, 74.
20. Peter Martyr d'Anghera, "The Third English Book on America" [De Orbe Novo], trans. Richard Eden, in The First Three English Books on America: [?1511] - 1555 A.D., ed. Edward Arber (Birmingham, 1885), 138.
21. Coren, Pawprints of History, 76.
22. Maureen Heibert, "'Too Many Cides' to Genocide Studies? Review of Jones, Adam, ed. Gendercide and Genocide," H-Genocide, H-Net Reviews, www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=10878 (accessed December 17, 2008); emphasis added.
23. D'Anghera, "Third English Book on America," 138.
24. Herbert E. Bolton, trans. and ed., Fray Juan Crespi: Missionary Explorer on the Pacific Coast (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1927), 171.
25. Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 83.
26. Wayne Dynes, "Gay Spanish," Homolexis, December 25, 2006, homolexis.blogspot.com/2006-12-01-archive.html.
27. Fages, Historical, Political, and Natural Description of California, 59.
28. Francisco Palóu, Palóu's Life of Fray Junipero Serra, ed. and trans. Maynard J. Geiger (Washington, DC: American Academy of Franciscan History, 1955), 33.
29. Leanne Hinton, Flutes of Fire: Essays on California Indian Languages (Berkeley: Heyday, 1994), 13.
30. Boscana, "Chinigchinich," 284.
31. Connie M. Toops, Hummingbirds: Jewels in Flight (Stillwater, MN: Voyageur, 1992), 15.
32. James Sandos, "Christianization among the Chumash: An Ethnohistoric Perspective," American Indian Quarterly 15 (1991): 71.
33. Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez, Spanish and Indian Place Names of California: Their Meaning and Their Romance (San Francisco: Robertson, 1914), 44.
34. Huntington Library, "Early California Population Project Database, 2006" (ECPPD), www.huntington.org/Information/ECPPmain.htm (accessed September 30, 2007).
35. ECPPD, Santa Barbara, Baptismal #04128.
36. ECPPD, San Jose, Baptism #04733.
37. ECPPD, San Francisco Solano, Baptism #00977.
38. Sandos, "Christianization among the Chumash," 71.
39. Irving Berdine Richman, California under Spain and Mexico, 1535 - 1847 (White-fish, MT: Kessinger, 2007), 442; emphasis added.
40. Boscana, "Chinigchinich," 245.
41. Palóu, Palóu's Life of Fray Junipero Serra, 214 - 15.
42. For a general survey, see Jacobs, Thomas, and Lang, Two-Spirit People; and Will Roscoe, Changing Ones: Third and Fourth Genders in Native North America (New York: St. Martin's, 1998).
43. J. Alden Mason writes, "That the mention of the dead was as serious an offence among the Salinans as with other Californian Indians is well illustrated by the incident that when asked jocularly for a Salinan word of profanity, Pedro Encinales gave ca MteL and translated it 'go to the devil' (ve al diablo). [Father] Sitjar writes chavmtel 'cadaver.' "Sitjar, who compiled a useful list of Salinan words and phrases, knew enough of the Indian language to make his own translation, which apparently Pedro Encinales, the indigenous speaker, wasn't comfortable speaking (J. Alden Mason, The Ethnology of the Salinan Indians [Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2006], 167).
44. Sandra E. Hollimon, "Archaeology of the 'Aqi: Gender and Sexuality in Prehistoric Chumash Society," in Archaeologies of Sexuality, ed. Robert Schmidt and Barbara Voss (New York: Routledge, 2000), 193.
45. Holliman, "Archaeology of the 'Aqi," 192.
46. Holliman, "Archaeology of the 'Aqi," 182.
47. Palóu, Palóu's Life of Fray Junipero Serra, 193.
48. Palóu, Palóu's Life of Fray Junipero Serra, 445.
49. Linda B. King, The Medea Creek Cemetery (CA-LAN-243): An Investigation of Social Organization from Mortuary Practices, UCLA Archaeological Survey Annual Report, no. 11 (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969), 47. I call Solares a "consultant" here rather than use the traditional ethnological term informant out of respect for all Native peoples who have retained and chosen to share their cultural knowledge and expertise; my purpose is to acknowledge that Indigenous knowledge puts Native consultants on an equal intellectual level with scientists and academics.
50. Hollimon suggests that "daughters" of male-bodied 'aqi were probably fictive kinships (such as adoption) formed with other members of the same guild or role or premeno-pausal children of women who took up the 'aqi role late in life, and when colonization had created a shortage in the usual mortuary profession (Holliman, "Archaeology of the 'Aqi," 185).
51. For information about the life expectancy of mission-born children, see Robert H. Jackson and Edward Castillo, Indians, Franciscans, and Spanish Colonization: The Impact of the Mission System on California Indians (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), 53 - 56.
52. Walter L. Williams, "The Abominable Sin: The Spanish Campaign against 'Sodomy,' and the Results in Modern Latin America," in The Spirit and the Flesh (Boston: Beacon, 1992), 129.
53. Williams, "Abominable Sin," 130.
54. Williams, "Abominable Sin," 129.
55. For a fascinating study of Librado's history, see John Johnson, "The Trail to Fernando," Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology 4 (1982): 132 - 38.
56. Fernando Librado, Breath of the Sun: Life in Early California as Told by a Chumash Indian, Fernando Librado, to John P. Harringon, ed. Travis Hudson (Banning, CA: Malki Museum Press, 1979).
57. Librado, Breath of the Sun, 33.
58. Librado, Breath of the Sun, 33.
59. See King, Medea Creek Cemetery, 47.
60. Hollimon says that "her identification may have been an intended insult based on personal animosity" ("Archaeology of the 'Aqi," 192).
61. Mills, Papers of John Peabody Harrington, 73:282 B.
62. Multiple translations of joto exist: for example, faggot, queer, homosexual, pansy. After consultation with colleagues, I believe I have chosen the word most likely to carry Isabel's meaning.
63. Isabel's older half-brother Jacinto Meadows (San Carlos, Baptism #04279), a son from her mother's first marriage to Quirino (San Carlos, Baptism #02993X), married my great-great-great-grandmother Sacramento Cantua (San Carlos, Baptism #04202). As Jacinto's baptismal information lists no surname, it seems that Jacinto adopted the Meadows name when his mother married Englishman James Meadows in 1842. Sacramento and Jacinto, both previously married, had no children together; hence, this is a familial, not blood, relationship.
64. ECPPD, San Carlos, Baptism #04700.
65. "Real" was a name conferred by common community use on Estefana and her sisters, probably because of their association with Padre Jose Real, a well-known womanizer; his women were known as the "Real women" and mothers of the "Real children." Even their father, Fructoso Real Cholom, acquired and used the Real name.
66. Steven Hackel, Children of Coyote, Missionaries of Saint Francis: Indian-Spanish Relations in Colonial California, 1769-1850 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 388.
67. Hackel, Children of Coyote, 401.
68. Estefana's "muchos maridos" - her many husbands and/or men - look quite different from this perspective. Rather than being a bad Indian woman who slept around a lot, a sinner, or a lewd and loose woman, as the priests saw her, Estefana was actually practicing a very California Indian form of resistance and cultural preservation: maintaining her right to choose her sexual partners and bear children by the men she preferred regardless of Catholic marriage ceremony. Hurtado notes that Father Serra recognized early on that "common Indian sexual behavior amounted to serious sins that merited the friar's solemn condemnation" (Albert Hurtado, Intimate Frontiers: Sex, Gender, and Culture in Old California [Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999], 6).
69. Worst of all, of course, were the joyas, but normative men and women were a close second, practicing premarital sex, polygamy for higher-status men, serial monogamy for everyone else (in which marriage and divorce were both accomplished quickly and without "legal" or spiritual repercussions), the taking of lovers while married to someone else (which had its own risks and costs but was not forbidden), the restrictions preventing sexual relations for up to two years after childbirth or a day or two before hunting, acceptance of masturbation, birth control, and so on. It seems to me that Estefana was resisting the countless rules, punishments, pressures, and basic colonization methods of the Spaniards via her woman's body. Therefore it is possible she would have had fewer issues with her son's status as a joto than many and may have even seen his sexual orientation as Victor's own form of resistance and self-ful fillment.
70. This field note, in transcription, was generously shared with me by Philip Laverty. It reads in full: "76:37B [Iz. May 36; Victor Acedo, el cosinero de Esnáyvli [Snively], used to put up aulones in frascos (mason jars); mussels, clams]."
71. L. Frank Manriquez, Acorn Soup (Berkeley, CA: Heyday, 1999);
72. L. Frank Manriquez and Kim Hogeland, eds., First Families: A Photographic History of California Indians (Berkeley, CA: Heyday, 2007).
73. L. Frank Manriquez, "There Are Other Ways of Getting Tradition," Museum Anthropology 24, nos. 2/3 (2001): 41.
74. Manriquez, "There Are Other Ways of Getting Tradition," 41; emphasis added.
75. Manriquez, "There Are Other Ways of Getting Tradition," 42.
76. Manriquez, "There Are Other Ways of Getting Tradition," 42.
77. Manriquez, "There Are Other Ways of Getting Tradition," 43.
78. L. Frank Manriquez, e-mail message to author, December 21, 2008.
79. Janice Gould, "American Indian Women's Poetry: Strategies of Rage and Hope," SIGNS: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 20 (1995): 799. Gould's essay discusses poetry by eight Native women (Paula Gunn Allen, Luci Tapahonso, Janice Gould, Wendy Rose, Chrystos, Louise Erdrich, Linda Hogan, and Joy Harjo), four of whom have primary relationships with women as life partners, including Gould herself. I find this significant in light of the "exhumation" Gould speaks of; she also calls this "our imperative⋯ to resurrect, sometimes hundreds of years after the fact, a history that has been buried, lost, or ignored" (799). As Gould's work points out, the liminal states of birth and death are strangely connected twins, whose mediators are often Two-Spirit people and women.
80. Other indigenous peoples around the world attributed special powers and rights to Two-Spirits within their tribes; although they were not always the mediators between life and death, similar patterns may be found. Because of the limitations of this essay, I leave that to future scholars and seekers.
81. Linda Hogan, The Woman Who Watches Over the World: A Native Memoir (New York: Norton, 2001), 59.
82. Jacobs, Thomas, and Lang, Two-Spirit People, 3.