Queer(ly) Mexican: Social Rupture, Cultural Change, and the Homosexual Mediation of Mexican Citizenship, 1950–85

My project argues that sexuality has been crucial to the construction of the Mexican nation by serving as a positioning device, i.e., a strategic maneuver through which individuals, groups, and the nation orient themselves towards specific aims at times of significant cultural, social, and political rupture. In rendering invisible queer sexualities, our current perspectives deny a complete understanding of how marginalized Mexicans negotiated societal tensions around the definition of citizenship, tensions that sexuality frequently mediated. Two key visions of Mexican citizenship—one of universal citizenship and equal rights; the other of patronage-based citizenship and hierarchical rights privileging white, heterosexual, Catholic men—have been central to major 20^th century social upheavals (Lomnitz). Without factoring in queer sexualities, our received notions of these visions and their implications for Mexican social action remain myopic, limited to Octavio Paz’s binary of active (male) citizens and passive, abjected, anti-Mexican homosexuals. Homosexuality has been present in the most significant 20^th century cultural and social ruptures. Moreover, homosexuals and their social justice efforts have often coincided with or have been incorporated into grassroots movements of socialists, feminists, peasants, the indigenous and others as they have fought for universal citizenship and equal rights. This paper traces the development of these alliances as a form of “everyday state formation.” In particular, grassroots alliances between homosexuals and others have gradually shifted definitions of “Mexicanness” from exclusion (supported by the PAN party and the Church) to diversity, and this paper demonstrates the implications of these alliances for homosexuals and Mexican post-revolutionary nation-building. A surreal illustration: recently, a protest occurred against a new Mexico City airport where farmers resisted land seizures and where drag queens trucked in by a local gay bar magnate danced against police brutality and the closing of LGBT spaces, each group supporting the other in their common marginality.