Masculinity and Sexuality in Modern Mexico

Víctor M. Macías-González,Anne Rubenstein

• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780826329066
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia messicana

In Masculinity and Sexuality in Modern Mexico, historians and anthropologists explain how evolving notions of the meaning and practice of manhood have shaped Mexican history. In essays that range from Texas to Oaxaca and from the 1880s to the present, contributors write about file clerks and movie stars, wealthy world travelers and ordinary people whose adventures were confined to a bar in the middle of town. The Mexicans we meet in these essays lived out their identities through extraordinary events--committing terrible crimes, writing world-famous songs, and ruling the nation--but also in everyday activities like falling in love, raising families, getting dressed, and going to the movies. Thus, these essays in the history of masculinity connect the major topics of Mexican political history since 1880 to the history of daily life.

Part of the Diálogos Series of Latin American Studies

PART 1

EXPERIENCES

CHAPTER 1

The Bathhouse and Male Homosexuality
in Porfirian Mexico

VÍCTOR M. MACÍAS-GONZÁLEZ

ON A WARM JUNE AFTERNOON IN 1908, A GROUP OF TEENAGERS congregated after school on a dusty town plaza in Jalisco, waiting for the five o’clock prayers.¹ As the youngest of the boys—Elías Nandino, age eight—contemplated buying five cents’ worth of flower-scented water to sprinkle in front of the Sacred Heart, his friend Lencho showed up—a brawny, tall, hairy older boy with an outgoing personality, charming smile, and great singing voice. Instead of going to church, Lencho suggested that the boys go for a bath. The heat must have been overwhelming, because they immediately forgot God and rushed down to the river. On its banks, they stripped, and using handfuls of the grasses that grew there, scrubbed and lathered. As the bathers frolicked in the water, Lencho, “who had a really big body and used both hands to cover his privates,” would, when swimming past Nandino, pinch his thighs:

I liked it, and with each lap, he would pinch higher and higher, until he caressed my peepee. He did this—I do not know how many times—until my peepee got hard and then, intentionally, stroked it with his big hand.²

Over the next three or four years Nandino continued to bathe with his classmates, either at the river or in the large pool of a bathhouse next to the town’s electrical plant. While he relished these occasions—he wrote about “the beauty of their bodies”—he also felt awkward, not knowing what to make of emotions he felt for his chums, hesitating about “what I so much wanted to tell them.”³

Not until 1914 would Nandino, now a young man of fourteen, finally grasp the meaning of the sensations he felt. That year, he had two sexual encounters with different men at bathhouses in Cocula, Jalisco. The first encounter—with a handsome, timid young man who was on his way to the United States seeking refuge from the Revolution—culminated in a brief romance that Nandino later described as “beautiful days of sincere love . . . I do not remember who started it, but it began with a hungry kiss . . . it was the first time I kissed a man.”⁴ The second incident occurred at “Los Baños del Pensil.” Instead of bathing in the open with others, Nandino opted for a private tub—and into it he invited another young man, whom he had long admired from afar. With him, Nandino would develop his first relationship:

I invited him and he accepted. We undressed, I saw his body and he saw mine. We were like rifles . . . We got into the water. We played and without meaning to, our bodies touched. I already knew how to kiss. I knew its impact, its meaning. We shared one. We got out of the tub, and in that place where we were supposed to scrub and cleanse ourselves, we pleasured each other . . . Thereafter, each week, he came looking for me . . . to bathe.⁵

Some seventy years after these incidents, in the 1980s, as Nandino drafted his memoirs reflecting on his life as a prominent physician, bureaucrat, poet—and homosexual—his memories of bathing helped Nandino to frame or conceptualize same-sex love between men. Bathhouses and similar aquatic recreation spaces helped individuals to imagine themselves as belonging to a distinct community of same-sex attracted men. These bathing spaces allowed the crystallization of abstract identities, becoming “showcases” that made possible and tangible desires and identities that until then had not been as easily manifested.⁶ As such a “showcase,” the bathhouse transformed same-sex desire from a behavior into an objective identity. Although the evidence is not conclusive, it appears that a few men did define themselves that way and that they did so exactly at the point in Mexican history when public discourse around homosexual acts peaked: 1901, the year of the “41” scandal.

Late in the evening of Saturday, November 16, 1901, from his post at the street corner, the neighborhood watchman observed an unusual degree of traffic at the entrance to No. 4, La Paz Street; many elegant people were alighting from carriages, dressed as for a ball. He did not recall anyone filing a permit for a dance at his precinct, so he moved closer to investigate . . . and to his disbelief, he saw that the persons whom he had taken for women were actually men wearing heavy makeup and wigs! He alerted his superiors, and within minutes, undercover police had the place surrounded. In the ensuing raid, forty-one men were arrested—nineteen dressed as women—and over the next week, the lurid details seeped to the public.⁷ Authorities moved quickly to punish the arrested men, publicly humiliating them before exiling them to the Yucatán, where they served as conscripts. Newspapers and handbills informed the public of the crime, condemning the forty-one’s subversion of society’s gender order. The scandal—at a time when the world’s attention was on Mexico City owing to its hosting of the Second Pan American Conference—even gave rise to corridos and a novel, transforming “41” into the euphemism for homosexuality that it remains to this day. Many people feared that the scandal threatened a gender disruption that might undermine the regime through its implication of elite effeminacy. Politicians, intellectuals, social critics, businessmen, clergy, and others responded, increasing their surveillance of public spaces where they suspected homosexual acts occurred—including bathhouses.

Bathing, Class, Gender, and the Nation

When Porfirian educators, social reformers, politicians, and entrepreneurs discussed bathing practices and spaces, they did so in relationship to the regime’s goal of transforming Mexico into a modern society. Bathrooms, washhouses, and public baths became crucial sites of encounter between individuals of humble social origins and their social superiors. There, it was hoped, the poor would acquire not only the elite’s superior sanitary practices, but also their notions about how bathing could potentially be an object of national pride.⁸ Elites may have also hoped that in adopting the daily bath or shower, the lower orders would accelerate their “Westernization” (and this would be measured by the degree that their appearance and dress conformed to the styles in Europe and the United States and other visible markers of difference) that foreigners found lacking. This introduced a racial dimension to bathing. For the white (and whitish) members of the gente decente, this may have implied that the symbolic superiority connoted through bathing—a practice that economics restricted to the middle and upper classes—also defined the mestizo underclass as dirty. Ironically, Mexicans also made proud, boastful nationalistic observations about the bathing habits of the predominantly Indian peasantry. Porfirian efforts to disseminate statistical reports of water consumption and bathhouse modernization abroad, together with the travel accounts of middle- and upper-class Mexicans disdainful of foreign hygiene practices, suggest that Mexicans may have regarded their modern baths as superior to those of a dirty Europe.⁹

The Porfirian elite understood bathing as a gendered activity. The sumptuous settings of the bathhouse somehow transgressed the gender order and consequently feminized the males that spent too much time there. This, clearly, contradicted elite expectations that the bathing experience would teach the lower orders the gente decente’s superior values of cleanliness and morality.¹⁰

Social classes in Mexico perceived the morality of bathing and bathhouses differently. While the socially redeeming value that the upper classes saw in the daily bath echoed Enlightenment-era notions of ablutions as therapeutic, the lower orders espoused medieval superstitions associating immorality, disrepute, and ill health with full-body immersions.¹¹ Bathing—because it required the human body to be unclothed—has historically been regarded as an ambivalent, dangerous, morally threatening activity. During the Reconquista, one of the first things that kings did upon taking possession of a newly liberated Moorish town was to close the bathhouses, because in the dark shadows of the steam rooms, the Devil could easily lure the Christians to commit nefarious acts.¹² Early modern Spanish dichos (folk wisdom) are perhaps the best measure of the traditional Hispanic mentality toward bathing: “De los baños, menos provechos que daños” (“You have more to fear than gain from bathing”), “La corteza guarda el palo” (“Bark protects the stick”—bark as in encrusted grime), “Más vale tierra en cuerpo que cuerpo en tierra” (“It is better to have dirt on your body than for your body to be six feet under”), and “Más vale oler a puerco que a muerto” (“It is better to stink like a pig than like a corpse”).¹³ Thus, even when authorities or philanthropists funded free public baths, the poor shied away. When authorities decreed in 1901 that all guests of the public shelters should wash themselves in order to secure a bed, over half of the people vacated the premises. By 1905, the municipal government of Mexico City closed its free public bathhouse in La Lagunilla for lack of use.¹⁴

Porfirian Mexico’s bathhouses thus tended to attract men of the middle and upper classes—a small but demanding clientele. These urbane, well-heeled males converged at bathhouses for reasons beside hygiene. They primarily used balneal establishments as a space where they could socialize with friends and pamper themselves with steam baths, treat themselves to a massage, and get a haircut while having a drink, gossiping, and closing business and political deals. According to numerous testimonials, the baths were a popular meeting place that drew men from intellectual, professional, business, political, military, and artistic circles. José Juan Tablada related in his memoirs—in rhymed verses, no less!—the good times he spent in the company of bohemians like Julio Ruelas and Bernardo Couto y Castillo swimming in the pools of the Military College at Chapultepec or washing himself in the showers at the Club Ugartechea, one of the first public gyms in Mexico City.¹⁵ Tablada also commented amply on the bathing routines of his contemporaries, like the millionaire don Sebastián Camacho, who took cold morning baths in order to prevent pneumonia.¹⁶ Jesús E. Valenzuela, primary financial backer of the literary journal Revista Moderna, described in his memoirs the dinners and musical soirées that frequently followed his baths at the Alberca Pane, where he assiduously swam in the company of General Carlos Pacheco, Secretary of War and Development. Of Pacheco, Valenzuela said, “He [was] a man that liked pleasure . . . one day I went to bathe with him, because he had a bathroom in his home, but we also bathed together frequently at the Alberca Pane Baths, from where we usually went to eat menudo.”¹⁷

Porfirian Mexico’s contemporary European societies understood balneal practices and spaces within the context of a complex interplay of social, economic, political, and cultural phenomena. As the leisurely and hygienic bathing practices of western European elites spread to the rest of society, the middle and working classes reinterpreted the meaning and practice of bathing.¹⁸ Originally regarded as dangerous, barbaric, or immoral, by 1750 river or sea bathing became more acceptable and was increasingly practiced with therapeutic aims.¹⁹ Maladies as varied as venereal disease, cardiovascular afflictions, or dyspepsia were treated through medically supervised bathing regimens and the ingestion of mineral waters, leading to the development of spas and similar health resorts throughout Europe and the Americas.²⁰ By the fin de siècle, the French middle classes increasingly rationalized “therapeutic vacations as a sensible, even productive way of spending time.”²¹

Bathing practices and spaces formed individual identities in Mexico as in Europe. A person’s ablutions provide us with an opportunity to dissect her or his ideas (and those of his or her society) about class, gender, nationality, and consumption.²² Taking “the cure” at a genteel spa—European resorts like Karlsbad or Évian were ideal, but those that developed in Tehuacán, Puebla, were just as exclusive, if more accessible—allowed the upwardly mobile individual to define his or her sense of self-worth as a member of a neat, tidy, and washed proper society.²³ Personal cleanliness—and acquisition of the cultivated aquatic leisure—distinguished the rising middling sorts from unclean masses widely regarded as the culprits for the precarious state of public health. Philanthropists in Liverpool and London, for example, funded the first public baths and washhouses between 1850 and 1890 to curb disease in working-class districts adjacent to middle-class neighborhoods.²⁴ Building on the efforts of the British reformers, the bourgeoisie of France and Germany targeted their laboring classes for a much-needed soak and wash, hoping to thus combat disease in crowded tenements—and to consequently diminish any threat by the unwashed poor to the middle classes. These imposing public baths, through their grand scale and luxurious appointments, also prompted a feeling of civic pride among their patrons.²⁵

As sites of consumption, leisure, sociability, civic pride, and identity formation, the numerous bathhouses, clubs, and gyms that Mexican entrepreneurs developed for the expanding numbers of affluent, otiose, sophisticated male consumers in search of modern, chic locales also served to affirm middle- and upper-class manhood.²⁶ These new bathing and leisure spaces answered the need for sites where new models of masculinity emerging in response to...