"Oficius de su raza y sexo" (Occupation Appropriate to Her Race and Sex): Mayan Women and Expanding Gender Identities in Twentieth-Century Guatemala

Abstract

For many indigenous women of Latin America, their association as bearers of culture hindered their ability to efficaciously engage in national society. Yet their subordinate position as females in patriarchal communities conversely afforded them more freedom than men to negotiate their gender norms, rights, and obligations. Based on archival documents and oral histories, an examination of quotidian Mayan life in early-twentieth-century highland Guatemala reveals competing gender codes. Mayan women's efforts to expand their autonomy ranged from cross-dressing to wielding tools traditionally reserved for males. While these activities loosened the reins of gender limitations, they were not necessarily harbingers of improved lifestyles. Often women who transgressed gender identities experienced more oppression than liberation. Against the backdrop of Guatemala's effort to count itself among the world's modern nations by instituting liberal reforms and championing the ideas of positivism, these gender negotiations seem at once both appropriate and radical. When dictators Manuel Estrada Cabrera (1898-1920) and General Jorge Ubico (1931-1944) sought to impose order and progress, they assumed patriarchy was immutable; in contrast, contemporary Mayan gender benders exposed its organic nature.