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 Evan C. Rothera Tortorici, Zeb. Sins against Nature: Sex and Archives in Colonial New Spain. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. Zeb Tortorici, an associate professor of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures at New York University, is an accomplished scholar of sexuality in colonial Latin America. Sins against Nature analyzes sodomy, bestiality, and masturbation in colonial New Spain. The book covers the period from 1535—the establishment of the viceroyalty of New Spain—to 1821—the culmination of the Mexican wars for independence against Spain. Tortorici bases his findings on 327 documents from the criminal courts and the Inquisition courts that he found in archives throughout the Americas. Some of the documents are quite extensive, while others are barely fragments. Ultimately, he "explores how bodies and their desires are textually recorded and archived (through the collaboration of witnesses, confessants, scribes, colonial bureaucrats, and archivists), and thus survive into our own day" (18). [End Page 167] Tortorici considers viscerality by opening with a case that featured a man having sex with a corpse. He argues that viscerality has "untapped potential for archival studies of early modern sexuality (and beyond)" (31) because it "plunges us deep into the guts of the colonial archive, and it does not let go" (45). Here readers can see two intertwined objectives: Tortorici is clearly interested in what the sins against nature tell us about the contours of life in colonial Latin America, but also about archives and archival practices. From the general discussion of viscerality, he moves to an analysis of sodomy. He first adopts a microhistorical approach and scrutinizes a 1604 case from Valladolid, Michoacán, in which six Purépecha men were tried, and four were executed, for sodomy. Among other points, and in contrast to many scholars, Tortorici argues that judges made no distinction between the active and passive partners in sodomy cases. Courts often sentenced the accused to be burned at the stake or garroted and then burned. The idea being that burning the body destroyed any trace of the act. However, as he notes, "the colonial archive documents, in explicit detail, and makes visible (and eligible) the delineations and silhouettes of nefarious desire, thereby committing them to historical memory" (81), an ironic result indeed. The following chapter, in contrast to the microhistorical approach in the previous one, takes a broader scope and analyzes 129 archival references to sodomy. Sodomy did not always elicit horror and Tortorici wants scholars to move beyond polarized categories of tolerance and repression. Just as evidence of sodomy frequently depended on people's perceptions of human bodies, animal bodies also "became legal forms of evidence" (126) in bestiality cases. Tortorici examines 144 archival references to bestiality and, unlike some scholars, does not see bestiality as marginal to the historical past. Rather, he contends that it was central to the functioning of colonialism in New Spain. Bestiality cases, he asserts, "provide historians with a surprising amount of information about the colonial past—everything from rural mores and environmental change to legal traditions" (134). Interestingly, the cases reveal that, as time passed, bestiality came to be seen as an increasingly illicit act, but the punishments grew less severe. Bestiality cases, like sodomy cases, featured bodies—in this case, animal rather than human—being burned to deaden the memory of the act. However, in both types of cases, the documents in the archives preserved the memories of the nefarious sins. The last two chapters return the discussion to humans. Chapter five examines forty-one Inquisition cases about priests who solicited sex from male and [End Page 168] female parishioners. These cases composed an "archives of neglect—that is, a repository of historical records (created and maintained by the Catholic Church and, more specifically, by the Holy Office of the Mexican Inquisition) that reveal the imbalance of power between priests and their denouncers" (165). The Catholic Church usually protected priests who were fluent in native languages, or gave them light punishments, and thus valued priests more than individual parishioners. The final chapter considers pollution (masturbation) and eroticized religiosity. Tortorici utilizes a small handful of cases...