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13 1 A History of Latina/o Sexualities R AMÓN A. GUTIÉR R EZ A history of Latina and Latino sexualities in the United States is not easy to write. The Oxford English Dictionary notes that the word “Latino” comes from the Spanish latinoamericano, which means Latin American. Most of those who now call themselves Latinas or Latinos in the United States either migrated from one of Latin America’s many nations or are descended from such immigrants and here putatively were transformed in some profound ways.1 If we were simply dealing with one set of national values, ideals, and norms about sexuality coming into contact with another, that in itself would be terrain complex and difficult to map. What complicates the story are the immense social, cultural, and historical differences that developed in Latin America over time. The differential impact of Spanish colonialism on the hemisphere’s indigenous peoples compounds the task, as does the massive importation of African slaves into the area; roughly 2 million between 1500 and 1821. (The total number of slaves imported to all the American colonies—British, French, Spanish, Portuguese— was 1 million, of which 10 million went to Brazil, with 2 million more going to British and French colonies.) Today Latin American nations have mostly erased this brutal history of oppression and extermination of indigenous and African peoples from their memories by proclaiming a history of mestizaje, a word that in the English language translates poorly as “miscegenation.” The mythology of mestizaje cheerfully celebrates the extensive biological mixing that transpired in Latin America among Spaniards, Native Americans, and Africans, producing a hybrid race—a race of mestizos and mulattoes—through sometimes legal but most often illegal and violent conjugation.2 The Spanish conquistadores repeatedly said that they came to the Americas primarily to convert to Christianity the many pagans they encountered. But except for some of the Spanish crown’s lofty but clearly delusional pronouncements on this point, conversion of the native peoples was quite a secondary goal. What really made the passions of the enterprising conquerors 14 RAMÓN A. GUTIÉRREZ boil, what made them pant and slobber, what made them engage in deathdefying feats, were gold and silver. When most of them failed to find such instant wealth, they turned to the next best thing: lordship over others and the accumulation of land. The Spaniards who came to America were largely young and single men. From the start of the Conquest, they exercised their sexual dominion over native women and men. The conquest of the Americas was a sexual conquest of Indian peoples. Indians were made objects both of desire and of derision, vessels that would reproduce a new people and that would provide the domestic labor to reproduce households, and ultimately, the profitability of a massive mercantile empire. The history of Latino and Latina sexuality thus necessarily begins with the conquest and proceeds by exploring the nexus among bodies, gender, and power. I draw most of my examples from colonial Mexico and Peru, which were the hubs of the Spanish Empire from 1500 to 1800, and from the experiences of mexicanos and mexicanas who set up residence in what became the United States or who in more recent times migrated there. Where the Mexican and Peruvian evidence is sketchy or incomplete, I draw on studies from other areas of Latin America, mainly from Argentina and Brazil. The general patterns of sexual ideology and behavior are really quite uniform across Latin America in colonial and early national times. As distinct nation-states were born in the hemisphere, different inflections were given to longer historical patterns of sexual ideology and behavior. At the end of this essay, I delve into these changes. We moderns, living in the secularized, industrialized countries of the West, have very definite ideas about what we regard the “sexual” to be. Whether it be in defining the sexual and the asexual; what is heterosexual, homosexual, and bisexual; or pathologies that are thought of as having a sexual component, those categories come to us largely through the discourses of illness, crime, and depravity first articulated in late-nineteenth-century science. Today we deem the scientific ideas about sexuality to be “true” and “natural,” or as the French philosopher Michel Foucault put it, “the truth of our being.” Just how much we are still products of our historical moment is readily apparent on consulting the oldest known dictionary of...

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