Muxe

Where the word muxe came from

The etymology is not settled. The most common account derives muxe from the Spanish mujer, woman, borrowed at a time when the letter x in Spanish carried a sound close to English sh, which is why the word is said moo-shay. Like many words in Zapotec, it is grammatically neutral.

Whether the three-gender arrangement predates the Spanish is unknown, because almost nothing survives from the colonial period that would settle it. There is evidence of same-sex activity in Mesoamerican societies and of cross-dressing given ritual weight, but nothing that traces the origin of this category in particular. The earliest dated English attestation in the lexicographic record is an August 1985 report in Gay Community News, which spells the word mushe and describes a muxe walking in a women's procession without anybody remarking on it.

Juchitán has its own account. San Vicente, the town's patron saint, was given three sacks to distribute, one of women, one of men and one of a third kind, and the third split open when he reached Juchitán, which is why the town has more than its share.

How a muxe is recognised

Recognition is partly social and partly individual, and it begins early. Families and neighbours watch sons for signs of femininity in childhood; a mother who reads them may steer the child towards work usually done by women and provide the clothing to do it in. The anthropologist Beverly Chiñas recorded in 1995 that Zapotec culture treats gender and sexual identity as inherent rather than chosen or changeable, something given by God, and that few muxes want genital surgery. Most take up the identity in their teens.

Presentation varies widely and is not what settles the category. Many muxes hold a masculine birth name and a feminine muxe name at once, and much of the literature switches pronouns with the clothing. Some dress in traditional women's clothing constantly, others only on particular occasions. Vestidas are those who dress; pintadas wear make-up without the clothing. Dressing as women is itself a recent development, beginning in the 1950s and spreading until nearly all younger muxes are vestidas today.

What muxes do at a vela

The velas are Zapotec festivals held since before the conquest. A vela runs four days: a mass, the regada de frutas or tossing of fruit, an all-night dance, and the lavada de ollas, the washing of the pots, the following afternoon. Muxes matter to them economically, as the artisans who make the traditional dress most attendees wear, and organisationally, as hosts and sponsors.

The best known is the Vela de las Intrépidas, held each November and organised by Las Intrépidas, whose full name translates as the authentic intrepid searchers of danger. Because generosity carries weight in Juchitán, muxes compete to finance it, and one is crowned at the close as mayordomo. The festivals are not a straightforward welcome: muxes were banned from wearing traditional clothing to the vela festivities for sixteen years, returning only in 2019, and in 2009 invitations to some velas stated that men dressed as women would not be admitted.

Why muxe resists translation

Gay men live in Juchitán and generally do not overlap with muxes: they identify as men, dress as men and do men's work. Trans people live there too, and the same separation holds. What the muxe category asks for is not a statement about interior identity but the maintenance of Zapotec custom, language and dress, which is why a muxe presenting as masculine is not thereby less muxe.

The economic setting matters. Juchitán is matrifocal, and women hold the local economy as matriarchs, artisans and merchants at once. Muxes work inside those spheres, in artisan work, household maintenance and trade. Where men and women leave the parental household on marriage, muxes have traditionally stayed to care for ageing parents, which is one reason families have described a muxe child as a blessing. The comparison usually drawn is with Hijra and Fa'afafine, categories that are also positions inside a family and a community rather than descriptions of an inner sense, and the same objection to Third gender as an outsider's label applies to all three.

How the media distorts Juchitán

Coverage of Juchitán as a queer paradise is common and misleading, since it foregrounds visibility and acceptance while leaving out the discrimination, violence and stigma that persist. Muxes outside Juchitán, and in wealthier and more Westernised towns of the region, meet considerably more hostility, and gender variance there is more often read through the categories of gay, bisexual and Transgender. Because muxes belong to an Indigenous community, they generally sit among the poorer classes.

The record of hostility is specific. In the late 1980s and 1990s muxes in Oaxaca were accused of spreading HIV, and the state's HIV rate remains several times the Mexican average. Muxes have repeatedly denounced transphobic crimes including homicides, framing them as attacks on Zapotec cultural patrimony rather than only on individuals. An ethnographic study by Jessie Ford, Eli Coleman and Swagata Banik, drawing on fieldwork in 2004, 2013 and 2023 with 38 self-identified muxes, found both gender-based discrimination and a substantial degree of family and community acceptance, and treated the second as the finding worth carrying into research elsewhere. Estrella Vazquez appeared on the December 2019 cover of Vogue México in the huipil grande, the ruffled collar that frames the face.