Reading the Signs of Sodomy in Colonial Mexico

In the early eighteenth century, in Coyoacán, a black slave named Lorenzo Joseph Carrion denounced two men for sodomy in a textile mill. According to Carrion, he “observed a free mulato named Juan de Dios, apprentice and tailor, and Joseph de Santiago, unmarried [indigenous], commit the pecado nefando—the nefarious sin of sodomy. The said mulato served as a ‘woman,' and the Indian as a ‘man.' And although this witness was sleeping, their movements awoke him and he saw them consummate the sin.” The importance of eyewitness testimony in colonial Mexican sodomy cases cannot be overstated; yet, such evidence was interpreted by courts and witnesses in conjunction with other cultural markers and physical signs through which courts sought to prove (or disprove) sodomy. Built on a corpus of some 115 archival references from colonial Mexican criminal trials and Inquisition cases, this paper examines the signs through which sodomy was interpreted by colonial authorities, judges, medical practitioners, witnesses, and participants in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. We will examine how sodomy narratives were constructed and how such stories acquired meaning through eyewitness testimony, tangible evidence, medical examinations, gender and the markers of femininity, affective ties, and coercion. Special attention is paid to why there are so few recorded cases of sodomy among women in the colonial period—the only unambiguous case of a woman being tried and punished for sodomy, for example, is that of Josepha Garfias who, in 1732, was convicted of “the crime of sodomy she perpetrated with other women” (el crimen de sodomia que perpetró con otras mugeres), and whose “instruments which she used for her sordid crime were to be publicly burned.” By historicizing narratives of sodomy in the colonial period, we contest any presupposed trajectory of “homosexuality” and uncover broader social meanings along the way.