The University of Arizona Press
October 7, 2024
Five Hundred Years of LGBTQIA+ History in Western Nicaragua by Victoria González-Rivera, reframes five hundred years of western Nicaraguan history by giving gender and sexuality the attention they deserve. González-Rivera decenters nationalist narratives of triumphant mestizaje and argues that western Nicaragua’s LGBTQIA+ history is a profoundly Indigenous one.
In this expansive history, González-Rivera documents connections between Indigeneity, local commerce, and femininity (cis and trans), demonstrating the long history of LGBTQIA+ Nicaraguans. She sheds light on historical events, such as Andres Caballero’s 1536 burning at the stake for sodomy. González-Rivera discusses how elite efforts after independence to “modernize” open-air markets led to increased surveillance of LGBTQIA+ working-class individuals. She also examines the 1960s and the Somoza dictatorship, when another wave of persecution emerged, targeting working-class gay men and trans women, leading to a more stringent anti-sodomy law. Read an excerpt from the book’s Introduction below.
SEXUALITY, GENDER, AND LANGUAGE IN NICARAGUAN HISTORY
Spanish colonial authorities sought to punish those they believed to be guilty of what they considered to be the crime (and sin) of sodomy, and they called those who committed it sodomitas, someticos, or sodometicos. Not surprisingly, given that the country’s legal system has its roots in the colonial period, as recently as 2008, Nicaraguan law forbade “scandalous relations between people of the same sex” using exactly the same word: sodomy (sodomía). Pecado nefando (nefarious sin) was another Spanish term used by colonial authorities, a term they brought with them from Europe. But there are also occasional references in the colonial record to a Nahuat word, cuylon (sometimes spelled cuilon), which, according to the Spanish, referred to a man who had sex with another man among Indigenous peoples in western Nicaragua. The existence of the word suggests that at least some of the Nahuat-speaking Indigenous residents of what is now the Pacific coast of Nicaragua, members of a group known as Nicarao, thought of men who had sex with men as a category apart. Alternatively, this usage of the word could have been a simplified Spanish interpretation of a more complex Indigenous lived experience. We also do not know if Nicaraos used the word cuylon in derogatory ways, or if it was simply a descriptive term. An additional question that remains unanswered is whether other Indigenous groups in the area, like the Chorotegas, had terms in their own language that were comparable to cuylon.
Historical evidence suggests that the Nahuat word cuylon evolved over time into the ubiquitous Nicaraguan Spanish word cochón, a word that for much of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries was typically used in a derogatory fashion. It has now been reclaimed by LGBTQIA+ activists, but it continues to be used by others in Nicaragua, usually as an insult for men who have sex with other men. Women who have sex with other women are often called cochonas.
In the twenty-first century, the terms cochón and cochona are commonly used in Nicaragua, along with other terms such as lesbiana, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, and cuir. One of the most common umbrella terms used by LGBTQIA+ activists is the term diversidad sexual, a term that encompasses gender and sexual diversity. This term has been widely adopted, and LGBTQIA+ individuals will sometimes refer to themselves as being sexualmente diversos, diversos, diversas, or de la diversidad.
In this book I use the umbrella terms LGBTQIA+ and sexual diversity interchangeably, even when referring to people who lived hundreds of years ago, when neither of these terms existed. It is impossible to avoid
the anachronistic usage of terms, but I have made every effort to document the lives of people in the past as accurately as possible. The most difficult decision regarding terminology was deciding what term to use in English for those individuals whose lived experience did not correspond to the Spanish/Catholic gender binary. When referring to individuals alive before the mid-twentieth century, I use the term trans in the broadest way possible to refer to individuals who might have identified as trans had the term existed at the time, or had they lived in contemporary times. However, if I am referring to individuals who are currently alive or those who had the opportunity to go on the record with a preferred word, I use the term/s they prefer. For earlier periods I usually use the umbrella term LGBTQIA+ to refer to individuals who today might call themselves gender-fluid, nonbinary, asexual, and/or intersex. It is important to point out that I do not use the terms berdache, two-spirit, third gender, or Muxes. There is no evidence to postulate that any of these terms make sense historically in Nicaragua.
THE LITERATURE ON PRE-1979 LGBTQIA+ HISTORY
Many Nicaraguan writers have briefly described moments or individuals in Nicaragua’s pre-1979 LGBTQIA+ history. Erick Blandón and David Rocha, however, are the only two scholars who have written more than a few pages on the subject. Blandón and Rocha have written the only books that address Nicaragua’s pre-1979 LGBTQIA+ history, albeit from cultural studies and/or literary perspectives. Blandón’s Barroco descalzo, published in 2003, is a magisterial “cultural genealogy” that “investigates . . . the limits of what is considered ‘culture,’ what is excluded from the hegemonic concept of the national, what ‘interrupts’ the official history, [and] the inconvenient or the immeasurable.” It is within this cultural genealogy that Blandón sought to “understand what is the place of anomalous sexualities in the hegemonic culture.” While Blandón’s book is not a chronological LGBTQIA+ history, Barroco descalzo is foundational, for it addresses homosexuality in the colonial period as well as its presence and absence in different historical instances of “popular” and dominant culture.
Rocha’s book, Crónicas de la ciudad, published in 2019, is also a groundbreaking text that defies categorization. It is history, fiction, poetry, and cultural studies, but most of all it is a love letter to Managua and Managua’s LGBTQ+ population. Rocha writes: “This work is for the locas from yesterday, the current ones, the future ones and the urban locas who were born and who will be born in this Managua full of fugitive spaces.” His book constitutes the first “gay” history of Managua, focusing on the years between 1968 and 1972. Building on the Argentine activist and anthropologist Nestor Perlongher’s work, Rocha created a cartography of Managua to map sexual subjectivities based on oral interviews, ethnography, archival research, and participant observation. Like Blandón’s work, Rocha’s is heavily informed by theory and a critical interpretation of the lived experience (whether their own or that of their fellow Nicaraguans) of the Sandinista revolution. In that sense, Blandón’s and Rocha’s books are crucial to understanding not only Nicaragua’s pre-1979 LGBTQIA+ history but also Nicaragua’s postrevolutionary LGBTQIA+ history. They are indeed foundational, and my work builds on theirs.
METHODOLOGY
Between 1990 and 2023, I spent over three years in Nicaragua, conducting participant observation, dozens of interviews, and substantial archival research at the Archivo Nacional de Nicaragua (National Archive of Nicaragua), the Instituto de Historia de Nicaragua y Centroamérica (the Institute of Nicaraguan and Central American History), the newspaper La Prensa, the Biblioteca del Banco Central (the Library of the Central Bank), and multiple privately held collections in Nicaragua. I also conducted extensive research online at the Biblioteca Enrique Bolaños (the Enrique Bolaños Library) and the British Library’s Endangered Archives. Additionally, I visited the Bancroft Library in Berkeley and the National Archives in Washington, D.C. Over the course of my research for other projects, I encountered snippets of Nicaragua’s LGBTQIA+ history, and I knew that the topic deserved a book of its own. I have devoted the last decade specifically to this project.
