'Queer Paradise': How a Remote Town in Southern Mexico Reinvented Sex and Gender Rafa Fernandez de Castro, Ana Camus and Leslie-Anne Frye - Fusion
go to original May 31, 2015

Meet Marluu (Fusion)

Marluu Ferretti climbs into a chair at the local beauty salon to get her hair done for the annual festivity known as Vela de la Santa Cruz de Los Pescadores, one of roughly 25 fiestas held in Spring to honor the Patron Saint of Juchitán Vicente Ferrer. As the hairdresser transforms Marluu's bushy curls into one big iconic Mexican braid, she says she’s looking forward to dancing and drinking at the party. She watches her transformation carefully in the mirror as Culture Club’s Karma Chameleon plays on her cellphone.

Marluu is a "muxe," a term derived from the ancient Zapotec dialect to describe a community of gay men who date heterosexual men while dressing as women, sometimes assuming traditional female roles within the family and society.

“They say God gave St. Ferrer a bag of muxes to spread across Mexico and the entire continent. But upon arriving in Juchitán, the bag broke and he spilled them all,” Marluu says with a shy smile.

Back in the United States, muxes may not be spreading across the continent, but the awareness that some people don’t see their gender as fixed or exclusively male or female is on the rise.

Approximately 50 percent of young Americans in a Fusion poll think that gender is not binary, but falls on a spectrum. High-and low-profile trans people alike have begun to teach the nation about who they are and what their life experience has been. It’s been a remarkable time for the transgender community, although discrimination and outright violence remain an everyday part of life.

Muxes, though, are different. Their roots in the region go back to at least the 1950s and - though documentation is sparse - likely far deeper into the region’s indigenous past. They are different from the American trans movement and not really part of the larger global LGBTQ community. The muxe tradition is local and indigenous, and its own thing.

Read the rest at Fusion

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