Contents:
Tobias Stillman. Carlos N. Back Matter Pages About this book Introduction This book adopts a human ecology approach to present an overview of the biological responses to social, political, economic, cultural and environmental changes that affected human populations in the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico, since the Classic Maya Period.
Human ecology Environment and health Yucatan peninsula Mayan populations Nutritional status Culture and health Living conditions and human biology Bioarchaeology and health Growth stunting. Editors and affiliations. Buy options. None has ever overtly betrayed himself as a homosexual to his family in a group situation, even in those cases where most of the family members knew about his homosexuality. At birthday parties, for example, respondents always invited and danced with neighborhood girls. Even the most effeminate of my respondents presented the most masculine image possible during family gatherings.
With few exceptions, the only homosexuals who are open about their orientation are those with little or no choice. That can be either because their personality gives them away, or because their livelihood requires them to cross-dress. The very prejudices that cause most homosexuals to carefully conceal their identity cause those who service them sexually to have to expose their identity in ways that subject themselves to the most extreme prejudice.
Because the vast majority of the homosexual population remains hidden from view, homosexuality becomes identified in the minds of many with prostitution, disease, and cross-dressing. That reinforces a vicious cycle, as prejudice keeps homosexuality underground, and the few surface manifestations of homosexuality reinforce prejudice. It also means that transvestites are subject to hatred, harassment, and police abuse. Police abuse stems not only from popular prejudice, but from the fact that prostitution is illegal.
Seizing on the vulnerability of male and female prostitutes alike, they frequently wait for them to complete a transaction, then appear on the scene to demand payment. Should the prostitute not comply, he or she may face detention and physical abuse. Also, when prostitutes are mistreated or killed by their patrons, the police generally show little interest in pursuing investigations.
When first assigned to a neighborhood, his commander told the rookies:. Yours truly does not tolerate extortion, let alone any kind of corruption. However, the zone can be characterized as a gold mine, and all it's missing is some good miners.
A senior officer elaborated, saying "the money must come in little by little, without forcing anything, without giving any reason to be caught. And if she doesn't want to, force her into the patrol car and take her to the station. Try it and you'll see. Openly gay or effeminate individuals who are not transvestites and do not engage in prostitution also face daunting challenges, including violence.
With his slight build, soft features, and curly hair, Marcos could never pass for straight.
As a child, Marcos didn't like to get dirty and was delicate in his mannerisms. At 7, his aunt would yell, "Be like a man! By 14, Marcos was being beaten regularly by boys in the street who taunted him for his feminine looks. During his teens, he tried to kill himself several times. Four years after leaving Guadalajara, Marcos considers San Francisco a "sanctuary. Not like Mexico, where the police beat you up, too. I came out at the age of 20, but my parents thought it was just a phase. I was popular at school but at the same time I was always picked on because other students had trouble dealing with me.
I was kind of feminine and different. Today, in Mexico City, it's more acceptable but the machismo is still very aggressive. Effeminacy is systematically repressed throughout society, from the family to the community, as described by Joseph Carrier:. There appears to be an accommodation not only between families and their effeminate sons and brothers but also between the society at large and effeminate males. The principal tactic, common both to the family and society, is to keep effeminate behavior out of sight as much as possible.
An effeminate male tries as best he can, especially in family gatherings, to behave in a masculine way. If he has sexual contacts with males rather than females, he does it discreetly. The fact that the contacts are taking place is ignored by all parties concerned. On a more general level Another manifestation of the desire to keep homosexuality out of public view is a bit more bizarre. In Mexico, however, such behavior is universally accepted, and assumed to signal no more than friendship. Yet if two men should hold hands, it is commonly seen as homosexual and as an affront to community values.
According to Joseph Carrier, police often invoke municipal ordinances against public morals por faltas a la moral against men who hold hands. Miguel Flores is a gay Mexican who grew up in Guadalajara. Until he moved to San Francisco at age 23 and visited the Castro, a predominantly gay part of town, he had never seen two men holding hands in public, and it shocked him. Debbie Landeros, a second-generation Mexican lesbian who also lives in San Francisco, says "If two women walked through the Mission [a predominantly Mexican part of town] holding hands, there would be a lot of stares.
If it were two men, they'd get beat up. Three men assaulted him outside town. With the exception of the Federal District Mexico City , there are no laws protecting homosexuals against job discrimination. Employers in most trades, conscious of the impression their businesses make with the public, seek to avoid the embarrassment of having obviously effeminate or homosexual men on their payrolls.
That tends to constrain such individuals to trades that have traditionally been considered fit for women and by association homosexuals, such as cooking, the arts, hairdressing, and, unfortunately, prostitution. Annick Prieur, a female Norwegian doctoral student who lived for extended periods among male transvestite prostitutes in Mexico, has provided a rare glimpse of that subculture from within.
She stayed in the two-bedroom home of Mema, a sex worker in his 30s who provided a sort of sanctuary and way station for young effeminate boys with nowhere else to go. Typically, the boys had been molested by male relatives such as uncles or brothers, beaten by family members or peers, and expelled from their households. For most of these boys, the only two options for making a living are hairdressing and prostitution.
Reinforcing attitudes toward homosexuality in Mexican culture is the stance of the Roman Catholic Church. Mexico City's Cardinal Norberto Rivera denounces "euphemisms" that contribute to "moral disorientation": "The arguments expressed by those who sympathize with this current that favors sexual libertinism, often appear under humanist banners, although at root they manifest materialist ideologies that deny the transcendent nature of the human person, as well as the supernatural vocation of the individual.
The new Catholic Catechism describes homosexual acts as a "grave depravity" and "intrinsically disordered. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved. Not surprisingly, that influence is being felt most strongly in Mexico City, in the tourist zones of such cities as Acapulco and Puerto Vallarta, and on the border especially in Tijuana , where a semantic change is signalling new perspectives among youth.
According to anthropologist Marta Lamas,.
Because machismo is by definition male-oriented, and is premised on male dominance in relations between the sexes, lesbian relationships are generally perceived as far less threatening to society. That is, to the extent that they are perceived at all, because to a great degree they remain invisible in a cultural context that gives little recognition to female sexuality in the first place.
One of the cultural factors that has had the greatest impact in making lesbian women invisible is the notion that we women do not have our own sexuality That has made the culture much more permissive towards female partnerships.
In general, lesbians are more invisible than gay men in urban and rural areas. People don't believe that lesbians exist, and less is known about us. Perhaps, that makes us feel less vulnerable, less easily attacked. I am not sure, but I suspect that in the community where I live with my lover, our neighbors don't think we are a couple.

They can't imagine it, they can't believe it, so we are invisible. In their minds, we can be friends. Perhaps it would be different if we were two men living alone.
Then I believe the two men would be sufficiently scandalous. That helps explain the view often expressed among Mexican men that lesbians are just women who have not experienced real sex with a real man. If women lack their own sexuality, what could possibly fulfill them other than a man? In that sense, lesbians suffer much the same treatment as other women in a society that so exalts the masculine over the feminine. Though Mexico's dominant mestizo racially mixed and assimilated culture, permeated by machismo , is hostile to male homosexuality particularly in its more effeminate manifestations , some of its indigenous cultures are a lot more tolerant.
That attitude is nowhere near as prevalent among many of the other indigenous cultures of Mexico. In some cases, those cultures have developed an alternative perspective on gender and sexual orientation that is in some ways more tolerant than that of advanced industrial societies such as the United States. As conquerors, the Spanish sought to justify the subordination of native peoples. When they encountered cultures that sanctioned male-male sexual relations, they immediately labeled such behavior "sodomy," after the biblical city of Sodom, which was said to have been destroyed by God for the sinful behavior of its inhabitants.
That the biblical sin in question was the failure to show hospitality to strangers was irrelevant in the light of subsequent ecclesiastical interpretation, which ascribed it to homosexuality. Homosexuality also conflicted with the warrior ideal of "manliness. The Spaniards had previously leveled the same accusations at the Moors, their enemies on the Iberian Peninsula.
Among the Aztecs, the evidence points to similar ways of thinking about masculinity, and similar ways of delegitimizing conquered peoples.