UC Irvine

Early gender and sexuality scholars established that the Isthmus Zapotec societies organize around womanhood and tolerate gender and sexual variance. However, their literary tradition has been dominated by male authors, and Zapotec women and sexual variant authors were only able to find the right conditions to see their literary works published only after the turn of the twenty-first century. Historically, there have been many reports of domestic violence and trans/homophobia accounts that the well-known description of the matriarchal nature of the Zapotec people has come into question. The dissertation delineates the expansion of both the Western and the Zapotec literary traditions by analyzing contemporary Zapotec works that challenge colonial notions of gender and sexuality by sharing the perspectives and lived experiences of Zapotecs living in the present. These texts foreground how these Indigenous writers negotiate and navigate the borders of gender and sexuality between Zapotec cosmovision and the modern views of the hegemonic Mexican society. A theoretical consideration of these literary works using the perspective of Coloniality of power can help reframe the relationship between colonialism and gender and sexuality. In addition, a reading o f these works based on kab’awilian (double gaze) strategies will be useful to describe how these authors negotiate their existence between the mainstream Mestizo culture and their Zapotec cosmolectics; as well as to exist between the normalized patriarchal violence of Mexican and Zapotec cultures and the solidarity safe spaces they can find in the communities they choose to love. One of the main arguments is that these literary works offer a deeper first-person insight to the nuances of the intersection of race, gender, and sexuality in an Indigenous nation from Oaxaca, México, than any other of the works produced about their people and their culture by multiple artists, scientists, and writers. The dissertation examines the works of writers from two different generations. I named the first generation “Guie’ Xhuuba’” (isthmus jasmine) and includes Natalia Toledo Paz, Irma Pineda Santiago, Víctor Cata, Gerardo Valdivieso Parada, and Lukas Avendaño. The next generation of zapotec writers is called “Siadó’ Guie’ Ru’” (morning flower, sunrise) and includes the works of Yadira del Mar, Elvis Guerra, and Paula Ya López.