Content provided in partnership with
Making the American berdache: Choice or constraint?
Journal of Social History, Spring, 2002 by Richard C. Trexler
These berdaches played a significant social role. Dressed as women, they tended to spend their time in the company of women's work teams, performing domestic labor, weaving, beading, or whatever pertained to women in that particular social world. Because they were taller and stronger than women, they seem at times to have led these women's associations and, for the same reasons of physical strength, they were regularly sought out by men to be their wives. Indeed there is some evidence here and in other venues to be described later that boys who were especially pretty were raised as berdaches because that beauty attracted future "husbands." (15) Perhaps equally important is the evidence that in certain Latin American venues, berdaches served a communal purpose, for instance, as sex servants for young braves who would otherwise violate the marriageable girls of the community. All in all, the berdaches in these early settings served demographic, prostitutional, and economic functions that maintained hierarchy.
- Most Popular Articles in Reference
- The importance of understanding organizational culture
- Credit card attitudes and behaviors of college students
- What factors attract foreign direct investment?
- Libraries Need Relationship Marketing - mutual interest marketing concept, ...
- How to set performance goals: employee reviews are more than annual critiques
- More »
Implicit in the previous paragraph are two presumptions. The first is that some native American communities at the time of the Spanish conquests planned for berdaches or, to put it another way, that these polities appointed berdaches to certain communal functions. The second is that motivations for becoming a berdache that are related to the nature of a particular person--for example, that one was effeminate and thus belonged to that small percentage of a male population technically called "sissies" in modern literature--are of secondary not primary importance. Indeed, the Spanish sources leave us in no doubt on this score. In what follows, I summarize the most important documents clarifying the appointive status of the berdache as he appears in the Spanish and mestizo sources on the Spanish frontiers in these centuries.
In 1540 or 1541, the Spanish soldier Hernando de Alarcon while exploring in the lower reaches of the Colorado River was given hospitality by the chief of a certain village. This chief explained that the four berdaches Alarcon saw before him, one of whom was the chief's son, were there for the purpose of providing sexual service to the community braves, obviously so that the same community's marriageable girls would not be violated. (A similar prostitutional setup could still be found among the Itzas of the Yucatan peninsula at the end of the seventeenth century (16).) Alarcon's informant continued by confirming that as each of these four males died, their places would be filled by the first male born thereafter. In short, in this case a community filled a sexual need from the latent or foetal male resources at its command. We will encounter the same institution elsewhere in the hemisphere at a later point.
Then around the middle of the seventeenth century, in the frontier area of Nueva Granada (Colombia), bishop Fernandez Piedrahita in narrating his missionary activity described an institution he found among the Laches people. If parents had produced only boys among their first five children, custom permitted them to convert one of these boys at least one year of age into a girl, "because every father likes to be served." Here is a case in which domestic rather than communal considerations dictated the creation of a berdache, and our later documentation of this phenomenon of familial balancing of the gender of one's children will prove a decisive link between southern and northern berdaches. It is important to emphasize at this point, however, that neither in Alarcon's experience, nor in that of Piedrahita, can there be any talk of free choice being exercised by the boys in question. Indeed, in the Alarcon case, the cross-gendering was dictated for a foetus before birth.
Find Research Guides for:
Find Featured Titles for: News
Most Popular Articles in Reference
- The importance of understanding organizational culture
- Credit card attitudes and behaviors of college students
- What factors attract foreign direct investment?
- Libraries Need Relationship Marketing - mutual interest marketing concept, ...
- How to set performance goals: employee reviews are more than annual critiques
- More »