Daily Life In Colonial Latin America (11 page)

THE CLERGY

Canon law governing sexual behavior was not infrequently
transgressed by the individuals most directly responsible for upholding it.
Many priests were involved in heterosexual relationships, despite their vows of
celibacy. In some cases, these relationships were coercive, as it was
relatively easy for priests who were so inclined to exploit the power they
enjoyed over female parishioners, especially inside the confessional. In many
other cases, and most often in rural parishes, a priest lived more or less
openly in a presumably consensual relationship with a local woman and was
understood by all concerned to be the father of her children. The attitudes of
parishioners toward such relationships depended remarkably little on
disapproval of priests having sex. Instead, those attitudes tended to derive
from assessments of a priest’s overall performance of his duties.

In 1805, the native governor of the village of Huitzuco, in
Guerrero, Mexico, protested against an official investigation of an illicit
relationship involving Huitzuco’s parish priest and a local woman. The governor
praised the priest, Manuel Urizar, for his “steadfast, most honorable conduct
[and] great many acts of charity,” adding “we have never seen a priest with
such zeal for his parishioners.”  Urizar’s active sex life, in other words, did
not appear to offend villagers at all, or at least not the village head. As
long as the priest performed his duties faithfully, going well beyond them in
this case in the apparent interest of easing financial burdens on his flock,
his contravention of church law in the matter of celibacy was a largely
irrelevant trifle.

It mattered, however, whom priests singled out for their
attentions. Parishioners were most likely to be upset by the sexual
peccadilloes of a priest who pursued married women or young women who were
presumed to be virgins, even if the attraction was mutual. Meanwhile, for
church authorities the most reprehensible sexual misconduct by priests involved
using the power of the confessional to extract sexual favors from female
parishioners, whoever they were. Even in such cases, though, convicted priests
usually escaped with relatively light punishment at the hands of their
superiors. In late-colonial Mexico, even the worst repeat offenders usually
retained the right to be given a new parish after serving a temporary period of
exile or a similar sentence. And the very power that priests exercised over
parishioners during confession, the abuse of which was of such grave concern to
the higher-ups, undoubtedly ensured that many instances of illicit behavior
were never reported in the first place.

The cases that do show up in the historical record indicate
that some priests pressed their luck quite blatantly. In 1795, the parish
priest of Xochicoatlan, a few hours north of Mexico City, persuaded the parents
of at least five young women that the girls needed to come and live with him in
his residence so he could oversee a careful regimen of spiritual exercises. One
of the girls later reported that the priest had successfully forced his sexual
attentions on her almost as soon as her mother had said good-bye. The aggrieved
mother declared to church officials that “no confessor, no matter how saintly,
can have women penitents in his house.” 

The saintliness of a pair of Franciscan friars serving in
the Mexican province of Jalisco, the brothers Gregorio and Joseph Yriarte, was
presumably the object of some significant doubt among their parishioners.
Gregorio was accused of having solicited sexual favors from at least 19 women,
mostly in the confessional, before being hauled before an ecclesiastical court
in 1758. Joseph, meanwhile, was said to have pursued every young woman who came
to him for confession, in some cases inviting them to his quarters and in
others exposing himself to them.

SAME-SEX RELATIONSHIPS

Some expressions of sexual desire were not to be tolerated
at all, whether exhibited by priests or any other member of colonial society.
The most unacceptable, at least on paper, involved men engaging in sodomy.
Defined by the church as the
pecado nefando,
or “abominable sin,” it was
sufficient grounds for execution by strangulation, to be followed by the
burning of the corpse at the stake. In 1595, this grisly fate befell a certain
Juan González, a young shopkeeper’s assistant, after he was arrested along with
several other alleged participants in homosexual activities in the Andean
silver-mining city of Potosí. The same year in Brazil, this punishment was
decreed by the Inquisition for André de Freitas Lessa, a shoemaker from Olinda
who confessed to having had no fewer than 31 male sexual partners “in his home,
close to the Church of Conceição or at the top of Rua Nova, he being the one
who always assaulted and begged them.”  In both of these cases, following the
dictates of both church and crown, allegedly sinful men of modest social status
found themselves charged with a capital crime for participating in an
unapproved expression of a basic human desire.

Significantly, the same harsh punishment was never
suggested at all for the man Juan González identified up to the moment of his
execution as his sexual partner on several occasions: Dr. Gaspar González de
Sosa, a high ranking and well-respected local church official. Although Dr.
González attempted suicide while briefly imprisoned during the 1595 investigation
in Potosí, after resolutely denying all the allegations made against him he was
eventually acquitted and resumed his clerical post. Within a few years, he was living
openly in a far more intimate and long-term relationship with another young
man, whom he reportedly showered with lavish gifts, honors, and public displays
of affection. When the weight of the law was finally brought to bear against
this couple, letters the two had written to each other were described by one
witness as expressing “such delicate and tender things as when a man writes to
a woman, calling each other my soul, my life, and other complimentary things.” 

Despite this evidence of his passion for another man, Dr.
González again escaped with relatively few negative consequences, although his
longtime partner was tortured and sentenced to six years’ unpaid labor at the
galleys, serving as a rower in the Spanish fleet. Church authorities only
reluctantly pursued charges against their esteemed colleague after failing for
some time to persuade him to change, at least in public, what they viewed as
scandalous behavior. Even then, an ecclesiastical tribunal cast doubt on the
veracity of the testimony made against this “highly qualified preacher,”
declaring that “the majority of the witnesses who condemned him were vile and
low people.”  He was, nevertheless, eventually placed in seclusion and finally
ordered removed to another diocese in 1614. But it appears he never suffered
any of the draconian physical punishment administered to his former partners.
As in cases of heterosexual misconduct on the part of priests, and perhaps even
more remarkably given legal and social intolerance for homosexual activity, Dr.
González benefited from the church’s clear desire to protect its own.

The reader will not be surprised by now to learn that
social status was an important determinant of an individual’s fate, even in
circumstances involving activities seen as intrinsically worthy of death under
the prevailing religious and social norms. Another case from the early 17th
century, this time unfolding just north of Lake Titicaca in the southern
Peruvian Andes, underscores colonial society’s intolerance of same-sex
relations while also confirming the notion that accusations of homosexual
behavior did not lead inevitably to death or even disgrace. In this instance,
the testimony of an enslaved man, “Antón from the land of Congo,” resulted in a
1611 investigation of another high-ranking member of the colonial elite: Damián
de Morales, the appointed Spanish legal advocate for local indigenous peoples.
According to Antón, Morales had propositioned him while visiting a rural estate
owned by Antón’s master, a close friend of Morales. On reporting the incident
to another Spanish visitor on the estate, Antón was immediately asked “why he
hadn’t killed Damián de Morales, and [he] answered that he hadn’t done that
because [Morales] was a friend of his master.”  The social implications of this
conversation as recorded in Antón’s testimony are clear, and rather remarkable.
They suggest that in Spanish eyes an enslaved man would have been fully
justified in killing a male member of the colonial elite who made sexual
advances toward him. Such an attitude was far different from those commonly
held regarding the prerogatives of enslaved women confronted with unwanted
sexual attentions from slave owners or other elite men.

At the same time, it is important to note that Damián de
Morales suffered even fewer adverse consequences as a result of his alleged
behavior than Dr. Gaspar González de Sosa. Although a good deal of hearsay
evidence, admissible in colonial courts, was collected against him, in addition
to Anton’s eyewitness testimony, he was soon released from jail and
subsequently rose even higher in the colonial bureaucracy. It is possible that
the authorities threw out the case against Morales as a fabrication launched by
an enemy, as one scholar has suggested in the absence of a final decision in
the records. What is clear is that his social status assured him a level of
protection that would surely not have been accorded Antón from the land of
Congo had the roles in the alleged attempt at seduction been reversed.

A narrow legal focus on the illicit sex act itself may also
have saved Morales. Acceptable proof that sodomy had actually taken place,
often obtained through confessions elicited by means of interrogation and
torture, was another vital ingredient in securing a conviction on charges of
engaging in the
pecado nefando.
News of Morales’s attentions to a slave
was sufficiently provocative to have become the subject of a popular verse
making the gossip rounds, which ran

Captive I am, I will not say of
whom

Tell it to Morales that I am
his.

Nevertheless,
neither Antón nor anyone else claimed that sodomy had in fact occurred. Even
when culpability for the act itself was under consideration, distinctions were
generally drawn between participants who took the active versus the passive
role, with the latter deemed particularly lacking in masculine honor as defined
by Spaniards and therefore most threatening to the established order. Juan
González, for instance, confessed to taking the passive role in his relations
with Dr. Gaspar González de Sosa, which made him a
puto,
or male whore,
in the parlance of the times. This confession perhaps ensured his payment of
the ultimate penalty for engaging in sexual practices that lay outside the
accepted norm of heterosexual reproductive sex.

Assessing the frequency of such unlawful practices in
colonial society as a whole is as difficult as determining the extent of
participation in forbidden religious rituals, discussed later in the book.
Neither was well documented, for obvious reasons. Their social meaning is even
more hotly debated, particularly with regard to their manifestation among indigenous
peoples both before and after the European arrival. Some scholars argue that
native groups had few qualms about same-sex relations among men, based in large
part on the tendency of Iberian invaders to list sodomy prominently among the
vices said to afflict societies they labeled heathen. Social acceptance in many
parts of the pre-Columbian Americas of the
berdache,
or “cross-dressing
man,” is cited as additional evidence of this enlightened attitude. But others
see instead a hyper-masculinized warrior ethos that shared the Iberian contempt
for the “passive,” who was deliberately and publicly “feminized” and thus
relegated to a decidedly inferior status in the gender hierarchy. One thing is
clear: sexuality and power are never far removed from each other, as the
evidence discussed throughout this chapter indicates, and prevailing patterns
of social hierarchy had a profound impact on all sexual relationships in both pre-colonial
and colonial Latin American society.

It might well be asked at this point: Given all this
attention to same-sex relations between men, what was the frequency of, or the
reception accorded, same-sex relations between women? Ironically, we know even
less about these subjects because such relations were not systematically
targeted for punishment by the colonial authorities. We can suppose that
convents provided an important refuge for women’s expression of same-sex
desire, strongly suggested in
I, the Worst of All,
an Argentine film on
the life of the famous Mexican poet and scholar Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, who
may or may not have been a lesbian. But in the end, there is very little
evidence to go on.

A last important point to consider is that many of our
modern notions about sexual identity do not seem to have been shared by people in
colonial Latin America. For example, the “sin” of sodomy involved very specific
sex acts, not sexual orientation. And it was the notion of male passivity in
those acts which was seen to threaten the supposedly natural order of things
most directly in a highly patriarchal society. In a seeming contradiction, this
focus on specific and exclusively male acts may have allowed for the display of
a wide range of same-sex physical affection, not only but perhaps especially
among women, without the concomitant idea that such displays were a reflection
of a fundamental essence at odds with social norms. Undoubtedly, the lower
social status of women also carried with it the sense that whatever they did
amongst themselves was of little consequence, anyway, with the acts being as
insignificant as the individuals who engaged in them in the absence of men.