Sins Against Nature: Sex and Archives in Colonial New Spain by Zeb Tortorici

Author:Zeb Tortorici [Tortorici, Zeb]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780822371625
Google: feFdDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0822371324
Barnesnoble: 0822371324
Goodreads: 35888273
Published: 2018-05-09T07:02:12+00:00

Fig 4.2 Final page of the 1783 bestiality trial of Sebastián Martín. Courtesy of the Archivo Histórico Casa de Morelos, Morelia, Mexico. ahcm, caja 832, exp. 5, fol. 22.

sire. A wonderful example of this archival paradox comes from the 1783 trial

of a fifteen- year- old indigenous boy from Almoloyan, Sebastián Martín, who

was convicted of sex with a donkey by an ecclesiastical court in Val adolid,

Michoacán. The priest and ecclesiastical judge, Manuel José Laso, sentenced

the boy to be paraded around town on horse back, nude from the waist up,

with a coroza— a cone- shaped hat made of paper that was typical y used by the Inquisition to shame heretics—on his head, “and on it painted [images of] a

man and a donkey.” 117 With a town crier publicly proclaiming the boy’s crimes, he and the donkey were led to a giant bonfire, with throngs of people following them, where “the donkey’s throat was slit and it was thrown into the fire

until it was reduced to ashes, which were thrown into the wind.” 118

The boy was subsequently returned to prison, and one week later, it being a

holiday and holy day, the judge “commanded that … he be placed in the main

door of the parochial church, at the time of the largest Mass, standing with his hair loose, his face exposed, a noose around his neck, a crucifix in his hands, and a crown of thorns in his head, and that he be allowed to kneel only between the liturgical preface [the Eucharistic prayer] and the ablutions [when

the priest rinses his hands in wine and then in water following the Commu-

nion].” 119 Afterward, he was given over to a Spanish resident of the town, who, to deAdeN the memory 159

because of his “God- fearing conscience and well- known virtue,” was to take care that the boy be properly raised and fulfill his spiritual penances until he became of legal age. The two- part punishment itself is astonishing, especial y as it is one of the few cases in this corpus of documents in which an ecclesiastical court adjudicated bestiality. The symbolic shaming in the entry way of a church for the crime of bestiality is itself unique in our corpus. Particularly intriguing, in light of the donkey’s being “reduced to ashes” to erase the memory, is the

legal language on the final page of the case file, dated December 9, 1784, which reads: “Reserve [ these files] in the Archive of this, our tribunal as evidence for al time” (fig. 4.2).

The animal thus dis appears from the archival rec ord, but does so in contra-

dictory ways that leave behind textual traces that are to be preserved “for all time” to come. These rec ords offer us examples of how “the animal emerged as

humanity’s other,” both in the historical past and in the colonial archive itself. 120

Historical y, theological discourse has framed bestiality, even more so than sodomy and perhaps even cannibalism, as the epitome of that which contravened

“natu ral law,” but scholars of the Iberian Atlantic world have remained largely silent about this act.

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