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CHAPTER 1
Benito Juárez - México´s Liberal Leader
There’s probably not a town in México of any size that does not have a street named after Benito Juárez, as well as schools and businesses. México City’s international airport is named after him; and, as we know, the City of Ciudad Juárez was also named Benito Juárez. Additionally, of all the presidents México has had throughout its long history, Benito Juárez is the only one to have his birthday made a national holiday. What made this man such a revered figure in México’s politics?
Benito Juárez grew up in the humblest of beginnings. He was a Zapotec Indian born into a peasant family in the rural hamlet of San Pablo Guelatao, Oaxaca on March 21, 1806. Both of his parents died from diabetes when he was only three. Shortly after his grandparents took him in, they too died.
Rearing him then fell to an uncle. While with his uncle, Benito worked in the corn fields and shepherd his uncle’s flock of sheep. At age 12 he left his uncle and walked the 34 miles south to the city of Oaxaca to live with his sister. Speaking only Zapotec, he worked as a servant.
With this humble start in life, I have wondered, and asked quite a few Mexicans, how in later life Benito Juárez became such a liberal. Unfortunately, answers have not been forthcoming. It was not until I began looking into his life, I found some answers.
Muxes: The Third Gender
Mexico has long been known for its machismo. Many of its men are aggressively proud of their masculinity. Although the population is becoming better educated and the middle class is growing in Mexico, gay-bashing is still found in the rural areas of the country.
Even though the issue of sex and gender is widely divergent from Mexico City to the countryside, the indigenous Zapotec culture is not divided by the usual dichotomies: gay or straight, male or female. There's a commonly accepted third category of mixed gender, people called muxes.
The word muxe is said to be mujer. The Zapotec word muxe (pronounced MOO-shay) is used to describe the young boys and men who choose to identify as women or are unable to identify concretely with either gender.
Anthropologists say that the acceptance of people of mixed gender reaches back to pre-Colombian Mexico. They note stories of cross-dressing Aztec priests and Mayan gods who were male and female at the same time. However, those ideas and beliefs were pretty much eradicated when the Spaniards forced the indigenous to convert to Catholicism.
But mixed-gender identities managed to survive in the area around Juchitán de Zaragoza, a place so traditional that many people speak ancient Zapotec instead of Spanish. Juchitán de Zaragoza is located on Mexico’s Isthmus of Tehuantepec. The isthmus is the shortest distance between the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean.
The Isthmus of Tehuantepec is part of Oaxaca, a state with 16 different ethnic groups that speak 18 different languages. The isthmus's isolation has helped indigenous cultures survive, and it's debatable whether the muxe tradition could have endured in another part of the country.
A muxe may be vestidas (wearing female clothes) or pintadas (wearing male clothes and make-up). Some who choose to dress as women take hormones to change their bodies. But what the two have in common is that the community accepts them; many in it believe that muxes have special intellectual and artistic gifts.
CHAPTER 11
The New World´s First Feminist
Who would have thought that the first feminist in the New World would come from Mexico, and especially in the 1600s? Even today in Mexico when 91 percent of all cases of rape and sexual abuse are not reported by women and complications during birth is the sixth leading cause of death in girls between 10 and 14 years of age, feminism in Mexico sounds like an oxymoron.
Nevertheless, the woman who adorns the obverse side of Mexico’s 200 pesos note is generally regarded by many as the New World’s first feminist; a word that was created long after her death. Her name is Sor Juana Inéz de la Cruz, whose original name was Juana Ramírez de Asbaje.
Juana Ramírez de Asbaje was born on November 12, 1651, out of wedlock to a creole woman, Isabel Ramírez, and a Spanish Captain, Manuel de Asbaje, in the village of San Miguel Nepantla, located on the slopes of the Popocatépetl volcano, in what is now called the state of Puebla and some 60 km from the capital of Nueva España (now Mexico).
It is said that the father soon abandoned the family; so, beginning at the age of three Juana lived with and was raised mainly by Pedro Ramírez, her paternal grandfather. It was in her grandfather’s rented book-filled hacienda, Hacienda Panoaya, where Juana learned to read; which at that time was rare, as girls were seldom educated.
She could read and write before her fourth birthday, by age five she reportedly could do math and at age eight she composed a loa, or short dramatic poem, in honor of the Blessed Sacrament. It is said that when she was six or seven, her desire for learning was so intense that she begged her mother to let her dress up in men's clothes and allow her to go and study at Mexico University, which only men were allowed to attend.
When she was eight, she was sent to Mexico City to live with her maternal aunt and the latter's husband, Juan de Mata, possibly on account of the death of her grandfather. By the time she left her grandfather’s home it is said she had read his entire 3,000 plus book library. Juan de Mata recognized the brilliance of the young girl and had her further educated by a scholarly priest named Martín de Olivar.
To the priest’s amazement, Juana mastered Latin in 20 lessons. By adolescence she had mastered Greek logic and had also learned the Aztec language of Nahuatl and wrote some short poems in that language.
CHAPTER 11
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