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 Sodomy  Pete Sigal They burned a mulatto, who was very black, because he was a puto. His name was Domingo . . . And they dressed him in green wool; his cap was also green.Then there was a red cross on his forehead [and another], also red, on his back.Two standards preceded him, one green, one red . . . All day Friday he burned. And they buried his ashes at [the church of] San Matías.Thus for the very first time a puto burned here in Puebla.1 Can one imagine the reactions of the audience in 1690 Puebla to the spectacle of Domingo? Does our understanding of this performance change when we realize that it comes from an indigenous annal, written in Nahuatl, and that the annal as a whole suggests that the audience was made up primarily of Nahuas, the indigenous peoples of central Mexico? What can we make of the idea that this was the first time a puto (Spanish slang for a man viewed as a sodomite) had burned in Puebla, an important city in the Spanish colonization of New Spain? And what meaning can we derive from the use of the Spanish term puto in the Nahuatl text? Perhaps the puto, a figure ever present in the urban milieu of early modern Spain, received only scant attention in colonial Latin America. Still, the response here, the killing of the individual accused of being a puto, forces us to reflect on the potential violence present in colonial society that could be enacted at any moment by the forces of the criminal courts or even by the spying eyes of neighbors. In colonial Latin America local criminal courts, and rarely the Inquisition, prosecuted sodomy, which was punishable by death. An earlier event in 1658, the discovery of a network of parties in Mexico City in which men had sex with other men, led to the deaths (also by burning) of fourteen men accused of the pecado nefando (nefarious sin). Elsewhere thedocument says that the individuals burned were “actors and receivers with each other.”2 Who were these men, and how did they come to be defined as putos and practitioners of pecado nefando? When Spaniards arrived in the Indies, they witnessed people that they often found sexually suspect. Among other accusations of sexual impropriety, Spaniards accused many indigenous populations of practicing extensive sodomy. Spaniards did distinguish between different groups, however, leveling some more significant charges of sodomy against Andean populations. Still, even in Mesoamerica , many Spanish argued that virtually every community in the region practiced the “abominable” act. In particular, they found that most indigenous peoples had a position in society for men who dressed as women. One Spaniard, for example, tells us that the men in parts of central Mexico “were very much inclined to carnal acts, with both men and women.”3 Panuco, a Nahua community, had “houses of grand putos where thousands of men publicly congregated at night.”4 And the full weight of colonial violence could be brought to bear against the perpetrators of such carnal acts. A conqueror on an expedition to Central America found [the house of a cacique] full of nefarious lechery: he found the cacique’s brother in women’s clothes, and many others were also adorned that way. According to the testimony of the citizens, these men were reserved for licentious uses.Thus he ordered them thrown to the dogs, killing some forty.5 The man dressed as a woman, seemingly a ubiquitous figure in indigenous societies of the Americas, was seen as a nefarious individual, likely a puto, in the mind of the conqueror and (as seen in the quotation at the beginning of this essay) in the minds of many people within the Hispanic community and even marginally Hispanized indigenous people. The puto, the cross-­ dresser, and the sodomite could face a significant violent response from colonial authorities , so it is worth taking a moment to think, in the context of this Lexikon, about the translation process at work as Old World ways became linked with New World structures .The puto discussed by the early colonizers and clerics who worked among the indigenous populations would not likely have been theequivalent ofa Hispanic puto.The term signified an effeminate Hispanic man presumed to engage in sinful sexual activity, normally as the “passive” partner, with other men. But indigenous peoples defined intimate acts in ways other than through a compilation of sinful activities. Among the Nahuas, for example, such activities...

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