Muxe June 19, 2022
The car traffic on Calle Garcia Vigil is at a complete standstill on a Friday afternoon, but this has nothing to do with weekend rush-hour, if such a thing even exists in downtown Oaxaca City. The cause of the clog is a parade that suddenly appears to the west of Templo Santo Domingo. Much of the ritual seems fairly typical—bloated bobbing headdresses, rainbow banners, Guadalupe images, uniformed drum majors, big-hatted brass-blowers—but some additions are unusual, including a clarinet section, which gives the band a bit of a gypsy-jazz vibe. Most peculiar, however, are the costumed ladies with elaborate makeup. To my discerning eyes, them ain’t no regular ladies.
These elegant marchers are called Muxes, pronounced Moo-shase, and they are performing a Zapotec tradition that reaches back to before the Conquest. From my Yanqui vantage point, these cross-dressing men would be called transvestites or drag-queens, but I am said to be the product of some decadent modernity. According to experts of the indigenous culture, meanwhile, the Muxe represents not so much a sexual orientation but a valuable and utterly organic societal role, the “third gender” as it is called, keeper of the home, protector of the mother. Although he-she came of age subsequently in a macho Catholic society that otherwise persecutes such queerness, the Muxe is long honored among the Zapoteca of Oaxaca and celebrated today in full pageantry.
The present procession calls out for spectator participation, pelting me with hard candy, waving red handkerchiefs in my face, and offering complimentary shots of mescal. Many of the Muxes are quite convincing in their adopted femininity, while others carry the brawny physiques of tight ends and linebackers. Regardless, the face paint is that of a delicate China doll, the long dresses florally embroidered in the Oaxaqueña style made famous by Frida Kahlo, whose mother came from here. I cannot help but wonder if Frida herself felt she may have been a Muxe trapped in a female’s body.
Academics and activists from abroad have seized on this unique piece of native culture—with published dissertations like Portraits of a Lady: Visions of Modernity in Porfirian Oaxaca City (2007)—but I hesitate to draw too much from such cultural appropriations, as one can easily cherry-pick sources of wisdom from antiquity. Indeed, I have seen similar attempts to expose lessons gleaned from supposed colonies of homosexual penguins. The fact is that leaning on the ancients for essential insights into human nature can result in the rationalization for all sorts of bad behavior—from genital mutilation to child trafficking to religion itself. To my thinking, even the very idea of tolerance is subject to dispute, if only because it requires that we tolerate the intolerant and bigoted.
Fortunately, the parade on Calle Garcia Vigil requires none of this soul-searching. Everyone here is simply happy for yet another reason to dance and rejoice, something Oaxaqueños are especially good at. Gay Pride proponents can make their righteous case based on this precedent from a prior millennium, but I suspect that the Zapoteca have something very different in mind from the secular hedonism and human resource issues of the modern world. One indelible image from today is the beautiful Muxe that spontaneously pauses from the march beside Templo Santo Domingo to genuflect before an icon of the Virgin Mary. His own blessed Mama must have taught him to do that. She will be happy to have her special son home with her tonight.