Sins against Nature: Sex and Archives in Colonial New Spain by Zeb Tortorici

Abstract

Reviewed by: Sins against Nature: Sex and Archives in Colonial New Spain by Zeb Tortorici Stephanie Kirk (bio) Sins against Nature: Sex and Archives in Colonial New Spain zeb tortorici Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018 344 pp. This is a wildly innovative and expansively researched book that promises to make scholars of colonial Mexico rethink the way they look at both colonial sexual practices and the colonial archive itself. Historian Zeb Tortorici offers interesting and highly self-reflexive comments on the archive both in the colonial period and today. Indeed, he asserts that the central point of his book concerns the "archiving of the 'sins against nature' [End Page 842] of sodomy, bestiality, and masturbation" in colonial New Spain (2). I really responded to his representation of the ordering and preserving of knowledge together with his explanation of how the archiving of sexuality and sexual practices "is made into our basis for understanding history" (3). The multiple cases of nonnormative sexual acts he has discovered provide us with "a diverse way of speaking about the unnatural" as well as revealing "efforts to archive desire itself" (3). More concretely, his goal is to see how desires "came into contact with the colonial regulatory mechanisms of New Spain" (3). Perhaps chief among these regulatory mechanisms is this same act of archiving, and Tortorici aims to further investigate how these particular desires came into contact with the colonial archive in New Spain, which encompasses "today's Mexico, Central America, Florida, much of the southwestern and central United States," and then, later in the sixteenth century, the "Spanish East Indies, made up of the Philippine Islands, the Mariana Islands, and, briefly parts of Taiwan" (2). Drawing on Ann Laura Stoler's reflections on the topic, he takes a new look on the colonial archive, seeing it less as source and more as subject, explaining how it "reveals the ways in which bodies and their attendant desires come to be archived in the first place" and points to how the archives—as both a place and a concept—shape "our own connections to the past" (4). By combing through often-ignored local archives alongside national repositories, Tortorici has assembled a unique and uniquely riveting corpus that reveals a wide range of desires heretofore unexplored. Less successful for me was the rather dismissive way the author treats those who have attempted to approach nonnormative colonial sexual practices previously. He holds historians and archivists to account for what he sees as a perhaps unwitting relegation of these acts to the margins. It seems to me, at least in part, that the critique of other historians functions as a straw man argument allowing the author to offer himself as the scholar most adept to understand this particular archive. While this might indeed be true—I think it is—it would make more sense to me to let his work (1) speak for itself and (2) dialogue in a more rigorous and sustained way with the specific aspects of these previous histories that seem wanting. At the beginning of the book Tortorici offers some useful definitions of the terms he is working with. As other scholars have done, he underscores the importance of "unmooring" desire from previously held psychoanalytical concepts and recurs to Covarrubias's famous dictionary Tesoro de [End Page 843] la lengua castellana o española. The connection he makes between deseo (desire)—"the word that recurs most in the archives"—and appetite, longing, and absence based on definitions culled from Covarrubias and the Diccionario de autoridades is innovative and provocative and allows him to offer a "more generous conceptualization of desire" (5). Through an interpellation of "the desires of the past with those of the present" he presents a methodology of desire (6). He recognizes the existence of "individual desires for the human, animal and the divine" along with "bureaucratic manifestations of desire" that were experienced by priests, colonial officials, and archivists both then and now in service of such acts as edification, punishment and exoneration, and confession, as well as classification and taxonomy (6). He explains his positionality in writing this book: "these past desires interact with my own desires as a historian—to...