In the small town of Juchitan men who dress as women, called “muxes” pronounced “moo-shes”, don their finest dresses and hair accessories to celebrate the harvest in southern Mexico. The fiesta has been held annually for the last 33 years, but gender-bending has its roots in this culture for centuries.
“‘Native people in the Americas with ambiguous gender were often regarded as wise and talented, said Rosemary Joyce, a professor of anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley.
‘They were seen as have having a kind of spiritual power that comes from being more like the ancestors who are mothers and fathers at once, and more like the divinities who may be dual gendered,’ Joyce said.” Link! (via Reuters)
This entry was posted on November 24, 2008 at 2:40 pm and is filed under International, Travel with tags fiesta, Juchitan, lgbt, Mexico, muxes, transgender, transvestite. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed
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