Muxe

The Isthmus of Tehuantepec is Zapotec country, not mestizo Mexico. Other Zapotec communities keep comparable roles under other names, among them the biza'ah of Teotitlán del Valle, outside the Isthmus.

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 Kate Raisz's report The Gay Mushes in Gay Community News of 10 August 1985, which spells the word mushe and describes one walking at the back of a women's procession in a new pantsuit, with nobody in the file remarking on it.

Juchitán has its own account. San Vicente, the town's patron saint, was entrusted with three sacks to distribute around the world, one of women, one of men and one of a third, mixed kind, and the third split open when he reached Juchitán, which is why the town has more than its allotment. A variant blames the muxes themselves, who were boisterous enough to burst the sack open once the saint got as far as Oaxaca.

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. Cooking, childcare and, later, the care of elderly relatives are the roles typically taken up. 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. Dressing as women is itself a recent development, beginning in the 1950s and spreading until nearly all younger muxes are vestidas today, and the vocabulary has divided as the practice has spread.

Relationships follow no single pattern either. Most muxes are attracted to and have sex with cisgender men, some marry women and have children, and longer-term partnerships with men are recorded but uncommon. Muxes sometimes pay heterosexual men for sex, which Juchitán society looks down on.

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, Auténticas Intrépidas Buscadoras del Peligro, 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. Vice filmed a three-day vela there in 2013, and the form has travelled with the community: Vela Muxe Los Angeles has crowned its own queens since at least 2014. Jessie Ford, Eli Coleman and Swagata Banik note that muxe velas have become more common in step with the growth of Mexico's LGBT rights movements, which is a Mexican political development, not a Zapotec one.

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.

What the Tehuana traje carries

The dress the velas turn on is the Tehuana traje, the embroidered costume of the Isthmus. Its floral work has a trade route behind it: the Isthmus received Chinese and Southeast Asian goods that reached no other part of the Americas, and the embroidered silks that arrived that way shaped what the women of Tehuantepec then made themselves. Selling and trading those garments is part of what built the region's matriarchal economy, and that economy is one of the reasons usually given for the standing muxes hold.

The signature piece is the huipil grande, also called a resplendor, from the Spanish for radiate, worn with its ruffled collar framing the face. Frida Kahlo painted it twice, in Self-Portrait as a Tehuana of 1943 among them, wore the Tehuana dress herself, and is held as an icon in the muxe community for it; her mother was Oaxacan. Estrella Vazquez appeared on the December 2019 cover of Vogue México & Latinoamérica in the huipil grande, the first muxe to do so.

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. The muxe category asks for the maintenance of Zapotec custom, language and dress, and makes no requirement about interior identity, which is why a muxe presenting as masculine is not thereby less muxe. Ford, Coleman and Banik add the qualification that the category is not fixed: as they read the literature it is mutable and still moving, holding ethnic, queer and transgender senses at once rather than choosing between them.

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, and Mahu and Two-Spirit are named alongside them in the same literature, categories that are also positions inside a family and a community rather than descriptions of an inner sense. The same objection to Third gender as an outsider's label applies to all of them.

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.

Mexico has federal and local laws against discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation or gender identity, and same-sex marriage moved from Mexico City in 2009 to national legalisation in December 2022, while at least half the Mexican population is estimated to discriminate against gay people and most trans people in the country report rejection, exclusion or discrimination.

The record of hostility in Oaxaca is more specific. In the late 1980s and 1990s muxes there 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, and the framing they have used, recorded by Borruso in 2010, treats such a crime as an attack on the intangible cultural patrimony of the Zapotec rather than only on a person. The ethnographic study by Ford, Coleman and 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 presented the second as the finding for research elsewhere to take up. The prevalence figures they summarise, 3 to 6 per cent of males in Isthmus Zapotec communities and 6 per cent in one community studied in the early 1970s, are estimates from that literature, not a count of anybody.