Passing to América

This carefully researched, thought-provoking book offers an enduring testimony to the creativity, bravery, and originality of the scholarship of Thomas Abercrombie, who passed away in 2019. In Passing to América, Abercrombie guides readers on a transatlantic journey of transformative, multiple, and variable performances of self. Clothes, by the lucky fortune of a surviving inventory, figure importantly in this story, drawn from testimonies relating to don Antonio Yta's arrest for “imposture of sex.” As we learn about Yta's life and delve into Abercrombie's analysis, readers experience changes in habits, hábitos (the long gowns worn by nuns and other religious), and habitus, in the sociological sense of “the full range of acts that mark social roles” (p. 24). Abercrombie both achieves an in-depth contextualization of Yta in his era and places Yta into an up-to-the-minute transgender theory perspective. The book takes special care not to blend more recent approaches to sexuality and gender with how Yta's contemporaries would have perceived these identity transformations in a time when there was no clear distinction between “bodily sex” and the “cultural construct” of gender (p. xiv). Yta exists within the archives due to a denunciation made by his wife of four years, doña Martina, before the church and state, ultimately with the goal of annulling her marriage. Doña Martina based her complaint on the accusations that Yta had deceived her in a way that threatened their conjugal life, that he was impotent, and that he had taken a vow of chastity as a nun. Although she claimed that she had married him as a man, due to his clothing, doña Martina later noticed (or decided to publicly denounce?) Yta's womanly breasts, his menstruation, his tendency to urinate in a position more suited for a woman's anatomy, his dislike of her touching him, and his modesty in bed. While even Yta's mother wavered between male and female pronouns, the representatives of the Spanish judicial system viewed him in two ways: as either a hermaphrodite or “a woman who loved women but hated being one” (p. 3). Don Antonio adamantly insisted that he could have sex with women with his “virile member,” although a physical examination left the official view on this matter ambiguous (p. 16).The files relating to Yta narrate a life story that fits perfectly into the picaresque genre, with, from the perspective of his judges, don Antonio playing the role of the wandering rogue. Yta himself focuses on his adventures, although he lacks the fighting prowess of Catalina de Erauso, the famous sixteenth-century “lieutenant nun.” Yta had a very tenuous entitlement to the honorific don, coming from a small town outside Madrid. In his earlier youth, as doña María, convents twice expelled her—proving that living as a pious, enclosed woman presented a more difficult challenge for Yta. Doña María claimed to follow her confessor's wishes and journeyed to Rome, where another confessor assured her that she should now dress as a man, by papal order. Knowing that this path would result in conflicts and challenges in Europe, doña María only appeared as don Antonio by migrating to South America. Taking advantage of some high-ranking contacts and his training in the Madrid Medinaceli Palace in the “ways of the high nobility,” don Antonio precariously survived as an imperial functionary in the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata (p. 69).Perhaps the most fascinating part of this story comes with the descriptions of don Antonio's clothes. He chose the trendy costume of a dandy, known in the era as a currutaco, an exaggerated effete style of dress. In effect, through his dress don Antonio chose to boldly embody an eye-catching effeminate fop who confidently enjoyed all the privileges of elite white men. While it seems like this “deception,” a judgmental concept that Abercrombie usefully contextualizes in great depth, initially worked, in private his uncontrolled emotions in the form of excessive jealousy proved his undoing, pushing his wife to denounce him. However, the ambiguities remain: Yta escaped imprisonment and disappeared from surviving texts. This book is highly recommended for courses in the history of global sexuality and should be required reading for understanding gendered history in Latin America

Aesthetics · Art · Biography · Contextualization · Feminization (sociology) · Human sexuality · Identity (music) · Interpretation (philosophy) · Linguistics · Literature · Psychoanalysis · Reading (process) · Sociology · Gender Studies · Historical Studies in Latin America · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Latin American history and culture · Philosophy · Psychology