Butterflies Will Burn: Prosecuting Sodomites in Early Modern Spain and Mexico

Chapter 4: Cotita and the Antipodas, or How a Cadre of Effeminate Sodomites Infested New Spain with an Endemic Cancer Known as the Abominable Sin Contra Natura

chapter 4 COTITA AND THE ANTIPODAS or How a Cadre of Effeminate Sodomites Infested New Spain with an Endemic Cancer Known as the Abominable Sin contra Natura mentira Mentira lo que dice Mentira la mentira Mentira la verdad Mentira lo que cuece Bajo la oscuridad Mentira no se borra Mentira no se olvida Todo es mentira en este mundo Todo es mentira la verdad¿Por qué será? Manu Chao, Clandestino hen Juan de Correa, aged “over seventy years,” appeared before His Majesty’s High Court in 1656 Mexico City, the “old mestizo” continuously denied ever having committed the nefarious sin against nature. But the lord magistrate persisted in his interrogations of Correa, and the old man finally admitted that he had committed the pecado contra natura “for more than forty years with many persons,” whose names he also revealed. The surgeons of the Mexican High Court, in fact, “proved that Correa had committed sodomy since the age of seven.” Correa so “lamented the past.” Thus, he “applauded” the fact that “the millennium was soon drawing to an end,” because not as many men “took pleasure with him in the present century as they had in the past millennium just before the great inundation of the city.” Back then, he still esteemed himself as a “pretty fine young girl.”1 [ 131 ] W Decades earlier, Correa had “dressed like a woman along with the other men and boys” he had referred to in his deposition before the High Court. Furthermore, Correa had taught “his skills to the men and the younger boys,” because they took “great pleasure committing the nefarious sin among themselves.” Correa often hosted parties for his guests at his house and had spent the proceeds of his entire estate on such gatherings . “Although an old man,” Correa “still considered himself a beautiful young girl,” and he reminded the boys that “one should eat” men just like one “ate a frog”: that is, “from the waist downward.”2 Correa and his comrades no longer ate human meat, but they could surely host a party, much to the chagrin of colonial authorities in Mexico City who with great zeal had sought to exterminate the practices of anthropophagy , human sacrifices, and sodomy in the Indias. The present chapter examines how “just causes” of Spanish imperial rule and perceptions of manliness and of sodomy prompted changes in the textual representations of sodomites in New Spain. In the Spanish peninsula, moralists defined sodomy as a crime and a sin against God and usually associated its hideous practice with the foreigners . Peninsular moralists and authorities dedicated folio after folio to the physical, raw abominations of the act as they sought to prove its detestable and nefarious nature. However, over the course of the early modern period in New Spain, colonial officials, jurists, theologians, and other writers associated signi- fiers like the diabolic, anthropophagy, inebriation, and effeminacy with perceptions of the pecado nefando. By insisting on an inherent link between these multiple cultural constructs, historians, chroniclers, and theologians fabricated one more “just cause” for the permanence of colonial rule in the Indias (Fig. 4.1). As in the peninsula itself, imperialist-colonialist politics would signi ficantly taint and exploit perceptions of manliness and of sodomy in New Spain. Not surprisingly, Spanish writers tended to praise Christian values, whereas chroniclers of indigenous blood extolled the virtues of the pre-Columbian societies. In the midst of these distortions, the sources, especially the reports written by colonial scriveners, offer the reader but a glimpse of how sodomites in the metropolis of Mexico City contested and usurped Spain’s early modern sexo-político paradigm. In my attempt to demonstrate how different writers portrayed sodomy and sodomites in New Spain, I have examined the texts of clergy who wandered about the Mexican countryside and relations written by [ 132 ] B U T T E R F L I E S W I L L B U R N Hernán Cortés, other conquistadores, and royal historiographers. The authors of these various manuscripts all directly participated in or had some strong affiliation with the discovery, conquest, and colonization of the Indias from 1492 up until the infamous 1657–1658 sodomy prosecutions in Mexico City. The trial records of these prosecutions, postColumbian manuscripts written by indigenous chroniclers, and the correspondence of colonial officials all complement my reading of the aforementioned texts. Mi Vida, Mi Amor...