Gender and Transgender in the Mexican Revolution: The Shifting Memory of Amelio Robles (original) (raw)

2020, Women Warriors and National Heroes: Global Histories

Today, in the village of Xochipala, in the state of Guerrero, there is a school named in honor of Coronel Amelio Robles, a prominent man and landowner, and a hero of the Mexican Revolution. In that same village in southern Mexico there is a community museum honoring the life of woman warrior Coronela Amelia Robles, displaying some of the furniture and personal effects of this former Zapatista fighter. Standing a few hundred yards apart, these two sites of memory represent a profound transformation and a paradox, for Amelio Robles and Amelia Robles were not brother and sister, father and daughter, or husband and wife, but one and the same person. This chapter examines the conflicting perceptions of Robles's gender identity in the context of twentieth-century Mexican history. Amelio Robles was a transgender man during most of his life. His gender transition-from female to male-began after he joined the Mexican revolution as a rank-and-file fighter when he was twenty-five years old. The violence and confusion of the armed struggle were propitious for his transition. Robles's personal qualities as a guerrilla fighter were valued and accepted as expressions of his masculinity by his comrades in the army. In the post-revolutionary era, masculine identity was generally accepted and Robles was respected as a local male hero of the Mexican revolution-being honored as an official war veteran by the highest military authorities. People in his community bore no doubts of his masculine gender, and he eventually became a respected elder in his town. The local school was given his name in order to honor his contributions to education in his village and the revolutionary movement in the state of Guerrero. Robles's family, neighbors, friends, and comrades-at-arms generally accepted his masculinity. Moreover, identification papers and photographs gave his maleness an official status. However, the social perception of Amelio Robles's identity shifted radically after his death at the age of ninety-four. Local state agents imposed a feminine gender on Robles's identity. A narrative that blatantly contradicted Robles's masculinity took over in Guerrero's memory of the Mexican Revolution, where Robles became a symbol of the nationalist woman fighter and was included as such in the local historical narrative.