Resumen de Queering the Spanish conquest of AmeRíca: who were the berdache and "amujerados”
This essay explores the contemporary search for historical antecedents for LGBTQIA+ identities by turning to the remote past, delving into the chronicles of the Spanish conquest of the Americas initiated by the Columbian voyages of 1492. When Europeans first arrived in the Caribbean and soon ventured into North and South America, they routinely reported on the plethora of sexual practices. What at first glance seemed familiar to the “conquistadores” was that men had sex with other men, a behavior they had known for centuries, calling the receptive male partner in such acts berdache, or male prostitutes compensated for their service. Over time Europeans came to understand Native American sexual customs with more complexity, calling the receptive partner in male-male intercourse “amujerados” (womanish). These were captured prisoners of war, transvested as women and segregated among them, denied access to the instruments of war, enduring lives of hard labor and humiliation, reviled even by women and children. This essay argues that the labors of the “amujerados” illuminates gender as a status. Men and women share more biological similarities than differences. The feminine is most often a mark of subordination and inequality. LGBTQIA+ persons who seek less rigid, more fluid, liberatory historical models with which to grow and prosper, will not find them by looking backward to the lives of “amujerados”, to these enslaved prisoners of war.
