Defeating the ‘social danger’ of homosexuality while ‘forging the fatherland’: Sexual science and biotypology in Mexico’s national development,1927–57

In July 1934, 16-year-old Margarito Hernández Pérez appeared before Mexico City’s specialized youth court, the Tribunal de Menores (TdM). Police allegedly had surprised him ‘committing immoral acts’ with others in a brothel where he may have resided and labeled him a ‘pederasta’ (‘pederast’, then synonymous with ‘homosexual’ rather than age-stratified sexuality). ¹ Tribunal officials commissioned reports to determine his culpability. A social worker detailed his biography, family life, sexual background, and social world. While Margarito had worrying antecedents—an alcoholic mother who abandoned him, a propensity to run away and shirk work—the social worker concluded he was innocent, believing Margarito’s claims of heterosexuality and that police apprehended him leaving a billiards hall, not having sex. However a psychiatrist rejected Margarito’s claims, concluding he was ‘abnormal, probably a constitutional sexual invert, and hereditary alcoholic’ based on his ‘general aspect’, ‘exaggerated, rather feminine gestures’, and the ‘bad company’ he kept. Despite offering little evidence beyond these subjective claims—and admitting Margarito committed no homosexual acts under observation—the Tribunal weighed possible sexual deviance as justifying intervention. Given his social background, Margarito was dangerous to himself, peers, and ultimately, the nation’s future. The Tribunal therefore sought to prevent him from contaminating others and to restore his social ‘usefulness’.

Twenty years later, Marta Olmos Romero underwent Mexico’s first widely known medical transition via sex reassignment surgery (‘Lo único que nos faltaba!’, 1954: 1). The transition earned international acclaim in May 1954 as proof of Mexican scientific advances. Physician Rafael Sandoval Camacho claimed surgery provided a humane alternative to ineffective psychotherapies, hormonal treatments, and imprisonment; in fact, he asserted it ‘cured’ homosexuality outright, converting otherwise antisocial queer deviants into functioning, ‘socially useful’ women-citizens (Sandoval Camacho, 1957). However, critics soon called Sandoval’s intervention drastic, incomplete, and fraudulent—to them, it spread ‘perversion’, rather than curing it. As a result, most Mexicans across the political spectrum rejected transitions for rehabilitating queer adults (Jones, 2023).

Comparing these cases, separated by decades, might seem facile because sexuality and gender identity are now viewed as related, if distinct, categories. However, the same was not true after the Mexican Revolution (1910–20) when homosexuality and gender nonconformity were understood as part of the same phenomenon. Both cases demonstrate the preoccupation postrevolutionary experts had for ‘solving’ the so-called ‘homosexual problem’, which complicated national projects, social development, and eugenic aims. A few months after Margarito’s case, Alfonso Millán, director of Mexico City’s Castañeda asylum, argued in Asistencia—mouthpiece of the city’s social beneficence department—and in Criminalia, Mexico’s premiere criminology journal, that homosexuals ‘should be seen as ill’ but were ‘incapable of living in a society as useful elements’. They posed ‘antisocial’ threats to civilization, still rickety following the Revolution: ‘In our environment, already emaciated and rich in political intrigues and schemes, the homosexual is a supreme producing element of every class of conflict’. He implored legislators to ‘control the social life of homosexuals, no longer from the moral point of view but the modern concept of criminology’, because they would not ‘by their own volition … be corrected or become less harmful’ (Millán, 1934a: 49).

Millán’s argument revealed how ‘homosexuals’ were understood as dangerous, antisocial, even criminal individuals in need of treatment they were unwilling or unable to accept. To solve this ‘problem’, he staked out roles for experts as guardians of social defense and national health. Effecting a ‘social prophylaxis’ immediately was ‘preferential to treating the already consummated crime’ (Millán, 1934a, 1934b). Influential thinkers agreed. Psychologist Alfredo Saavedra, a member of the Sociedad Mexicana de Eugenesia (Mexican Eugenics Society, SME), claimed that childhood was the best time to intervene at home or school, before infractions were committed or individuals were perverted (Saavedra, 1941: 10–15). In 1946, jurist Armando Hernández Quiros argued that ‘the State’s work, more than ever, must … be directed to avoid the phenomena of criminal association and spread of sexual perversions’ (1946: 535). Like Saavedra, Hernández believed early intervention essential for avoiding cumulative negative effects; true rehabilitation during adulthood was uncertain (ibid.: 538). Experts thus treated youths differently from adults. While most youths were regarded as pliable and redeemable—even when expressing homosexuality and gender nonconformity—adult ‘plasticity’ decreased with age. Queer adults were deemed harder to rehabilitate and socially (re)integrate than criminals: the common refrain was ‘Criminals maybe, homosexuals definitely not!’ (Buffington, 2000: 137).

Nevertheless, most postrevolutionary experts, like their Latin American peers, remained influenced by Comtean positivism, believing in the ‘inevitability of progress as the historical force governing all peoples’ that produced ‘universal results wherever civilization was embraced’ (Levine and Novoa, 2012: 48). This belief meshed well with ‘Latin’ forms of eugenics and sexology prioritizing neo-Lamarckian over Darwinian or Mendelian ideas of inheritance (Beccalossi, 2017a, 2017b; Stepan, 1991; Stern, 1999, 2003; Walsh, 2022[2018], 2022). Politically, neo-Lamarckian ideas ‘justified the belief that human effort had meaning, that improvements acquired in an individual’s lifetime could be handed on genetically, that progress could occur’ (Stepan, 1991: 74). Such ideas resonated with the postrevolutionary state’s agenda, which stressed ‘redemptive possibilities’ (Buffington, 2000: 137). Experts argued social factors could be improved, leading to progress and the betterment of the Mexican ‘race’. Heredity was not destiny, and their ‘soft’ theory of heredity politically ‘legitimated a medical-interventionist approach to health’ (Stepan, 1991: 198). Interventions thus included positive and preventative eugenics, public health and sanitation programs, and pro-population, family-centric initiatives, rather than sterilization (i.e. negative eugenics). Though prevention was deemed less drastic than ‘negative’ interventions, it often remained coercive and repressive; the main aim was to exclude ‘undesirables’ from the so-called postrevolutionary ‘gran familia mexicana’ and prevent them from contaminating others (Sánchez-Rivera, 2021; Stepan, 1991: 11).

This article explores how professionals and the state used sexology and related disciplines to (hetero)normativize Mexicans in the ‘estado peligroso’—those like Margarito and Marta seen as antisocial threats and/or in danger of perversion, whether or not they committed infractions. It examines how homosexuality was deemed incompatible with national development, how sexological interventions differed based on an individual’s age and social background, and how controlling homosexuality and gender nonconformity paralleled and intersected with more familiar postrevolutionary projects including the incorporation of indigenous peoples, the expansion of public education and social programs, and the production of disciplinary, scientific knowledge used in modernization, all of which were part of what influential anthropologist Manuel Gamio labeled ‘forjando patria’ (forging the fatherland) (Gamio, 1916). Indeed, the postrevolutionary state aimed to fashion ‘new politics, institutions, and mechanisms of control’, redefine the social world, and modernize mentalities, habits, and modes of life (Sosenski, 2010: 1229). Prominent intellectuals sought to transform people’s psychology and ‘reconstruct’ their social conscience. These efforts, along with education programs, eugenics, puericulture, and targeted incarceration, were part of the project of ‘modernizing patriarchy’, in which the state advanced specific binary sex/gender roles in education, households, the military, and other spheres (Rath, 2019; Vaughan, 2000).

As part of these overlapping efforts and mutually constitutive ideologies, generations of experts, state agents, policemen, and lay people alike labeled queers antisocial, ill, and criminal simultaneously. Their interventions were as much about politics as truly assisting queer individuals because not everyone was deemed capable of rehabilitation into productive citizens. Overall, experts preferred preventative social ‘solutions’ that reaffirmed the importance of families, binary sex/gender, and heteronormative patriarchy. Most wayward youths were regarded as redeemable through education and treatment, while ‘constitutionally’ queer youths were often segregated from reform institutions to prevent others’ ‘perversion’. Queer adults, seen as largely irredeemable and outside the body politic, were instead imprisoned and often exiled to the Islas Marías penal colony—which housed Mexico’s worst ‘habitual’ criminals—although some practitioners including Sandoval sought solutions to manifest adults’ social utility.

Important previous scholarship on national development has focused on youths, puericulture, childrearing, eugenics, institutions, and education (Osrich, 2018; Rodríguez Sánchez, 2019; Sosenski, 2010; Stepan, 1991; Stern, 2003; Vaughan, 1997). Scholars have also explored how experts deployed legal reforms and biotypology to confront Mexico’s mixed racial heritage, incorporate its indigenous population, and combat crime (Buffington, 2000; Lewis, 2006; Piccato, 2001; Rosenblatt, 2018; Stern, 2003). However, many issues of queer sexuality and gender within these initiatives remain understudied. Scholarship on homosexuality has largely focused on the Famous 41 scandal (1901), elite culture, crime, and penal institutions (see Buffington, 2000; Irwin, 2003; Irwin, McCaughan, and Rocío Nasser, 2003; Macías-González, 2014, 2019; Piccato, 2007). Recent work has begun exploring working-class queer experiences, including in relation to sexology, criminology, and eugenics (see Jones, 2012, 2017; McManus, 2014; Rodríguez Sánchez, 2019). Building on this scholarship, I seek to ‘do justice’ (to borrow Judith Butler’s phrase [2001]) to those brought under official scrutiny by interconnected apparatuses of sexology, criminology, and eugenics during postrevolutionary, state-directed development projects. In what follows, I engage how many Mexicans viewed homosexuality as an unwanted product of modernization threatening civilizational ruin, a view framing approaches to homosexuality both before and after the Revolution. I then examine sexology as an expert-mediated nexus of scientific knowledge tasked with confronting ‘social dangers’ in postrevolutionary projects, representative cases that linked preventing homosexuality to eugenics and national development, and finally Marta’s case, which was initially embraced as a model for adult ‘rehabilitation’ then ultimately rejected as a form of negative eugenics.

‘Social dangers’

While experts like Millán claimed their negative views regarding homosexuality were scientific—not subjective—they can be rhetorically traced back to 19th-century legal and cultural debates about what constituted modern civilization. On one hand, Porfirian experts sought to impose morals and guide Mexico’s ‘lower’ classes toward modernization and away from a dangerous ‘underworld’ (Garza, 2007). They rhetorically linked homosexuality with civilizational ruin: much as Sodom and Gomorrah’s perversion led to biblical destruction, so too did modern homosexuality foretell catastrophe. On the other, inspired by French and Spanish legal codes (see Cleminson and Vázquez, 2007; Merrick and Ragan, 1996), experts decriminalized sodomy federally in 1871. Justice minister Antonio Martínez de Castro argued that although pederastía constituted a ‘very grave offense to morality’, acts that ‘did not disrupt the public peace’ lay outside legal purview. ² The 1871 code was intended to show Mexico’s progress in rational, legal terms and theoretically, if not always in practice, it enshrined privacy rights: sexual acts were beyond state purview except when ‘offend[ing] decency, when they cause[d] scandal, or [we]re executed through violence’ (Martínez de Castro, 1891[1871]: 44–5). Even so, decriminalization (re)encoded queer behaviors as social crimes deleterious to youths (and the socially or intellectually ‘less developed’). Arbitrarily enforced, subjectively defined ‘moral outrage’ (ultrajes a la moral) and ‘corruption of minors’ laws—concepts also borrowed from the French—replaced anti-sodomy statutes. The state cared less about ‘sodomites’ themselves than mitigating their alleged collateral damage.

Simultaneously, many Mexicans continued associating homosexuality and gender nonconformity with actual crime, viewing queer individuals—regardless of whether they acted on desires or not—as pernicious, creeping threats from which social degeneration sprang. Identification was thus essential. In 1877, medical jurists Luis Hidalgo y Carpio and Gustavo Ruiz y Sandoval published their influential Compendio de la medicina legal, which showcased rubrics for identifying deviants. It also illustrated sodomy’s continued relevance in medical jurisprudence, despite decriminalization. Chapter 1 focused on sodomitical ‘types’; the authors assumed all ‘afeminados’—a catch-all used well into the 20th century covering effeminate dandies, ‘pederastas’, homosexuals, and those now understood as trans—practiced sodomy and could be ‘typed’ through appearance, behaviors, and hygiene (Hidalgo y Carpio and Ruiz y Sandoval, 1877: 7–20). Such rubrics made prosecuting nebulous ‘moral outrage’ charges easier.

Decriminalization also did not end moralizing on sexuality. As pseudonymous commentator ‘Ángel’ asserted in 1878,

The current civilization, which has removed sodomy, bestiality, and others of the sort from the catalogue of crimes, is a barbaric civilization, a civilization that repudiates society; it is a civilization that provokes disaster, that drives itself to its own dissolution. (1878: 1)

Such ‘excess’ became more pronounced as Mexico urbanized: urban ‘civilization’ too frequently fostered ‘sapphism, sodomy, and bestiality’. Villacreces del Fosco concluded ‘a people cannot be dignified, vigorous, nor respected if in it exist prostitutes, libertines in abundance, and … worse, sodomites of both sexes’ (ibid.: 302, 463). She thus critiqued the foreign-oriented Porfiriato, whose mantra, ‘Order and progress’, belied its libertine civilization, which exuded ‘sexual chaos’, to borrow Pablo Ben’s term (Ben, 2017: 29). For like-minded critics, the November 1901 Famous 41 scandal in Mexico City, in which police arrested dozens of partying men, half in drag, epitomized the era’s depraved decadence. The event remains the most notorious queer incident in Mexican history (Irwin, McCaughan, and Rocío Nasser, 2003).

Villacreces del Fosco’s arguments—(a) civilization was a ‘necessary evil’ obligated to control its excesses, and (b) sexual perversions stemmed from poor education (Villacreces del Fosco, 1895: 302–3)—persisted thereafter, meshing well with neo-Lamarckian thought. Notions of homosexuality as a social danger—and the obligations of experts and the state to intervene against it—were well established by the 1920s. Preventing, treating, and isolating homosexuality and gender nonconformity were central aims of postrevolutionary social prophylaxis programs and nation-building. Experts leading these efforts hailed from overlapping fields including law, criminology, and medicine, among others. Many contributed to Mexican sexology, an eclectic field especially influenced by medical jurisprudence and criminal anthropology that appropriated seemingly contradictory ideas from a spectrum of local and international scholars (Jones, 2017).

Moreover, experts’ ‘scientific’ approaches continued to evoke moral concerns. For instance, criminologist José Ángel Ceniceros in 1926 argued ‘crime, more than an act, is a state of mind’ (Buffington, 2000: 121). Similarly, criminologist José Almaraz, one architect of the short-lived but influential 1929 penal code, claimed ‘an individual can be dangerous to society even before committing a crime’ (ibid.). Almaraz argued criminal law’s principal duty was defending the nation against deviant types including alcoholics, addicts, vagrants, beggars, and paranoids, all of whom experts (and popular culture) associated with degeneration and homosexuality. Crime was a ‘natural product, born not of free will but of physical, anthropological, and social factors’; personal motivations or whether ‘infractors reveal[ed] hereditary or acquired, permanent or temporary biopsychic anomalies’ did not matter, because ‘healthy, “rational” societies, in a Social Darwinistic spirit of self-preservation, protected themselves from all threats, regardless of these threats’ motivation’ (ibid.: 122). Experts drew upon positivist notions advocating for ‘individualizing punishment in order to better rehabilitate the criminal but especially to “defend” society by keeping dangerous criminals off the streets (regardless of the severity of their actual crime)’ (ibid.: 120).

Privileging an ‘abstraction, criminality, over the more narrow category of lawbreaker’ encompassed more people and enabled the punishment of potentially (if not technically) criminal categories and states of mind, rather than predefined criminal acts (Buffington, 2000: 122–3). Millán, for instance, calibrated this moral imperative in his 1934 ideological salvo against homosexuality. Queer individuals, he argued, allegedly possessed a ‘specific’ psychology justifying intervention (Millán, 1934a: 49). Moreover, by virtue of their sexuality, they were seen as perverse recidivists worthy of exile to the Islas Marías to prevent them from ‘contaminating’ others. Many queer inmates there were rounded up arbitrarily, rather than for legitimate reasons (Martínez Ortega, 1938). Thus, while legal, experts continued associating homosexuality with antisocial criminality and degeneration: ‘homosexuals’ were always potential threats. While this association was partially thwarted by the 1917 constitution’s protections, queer individuals inhabited a grey zone where guarantees were often waived, though many, sometimes successfully, challenged punishments in court.

As a result, queer Mexicans—and others labeled ‘queer’ in the socially nonnormative sense—were caught between overlapping penal codes, criminological doctrines, eugenics initiatives, and policing that proponents claimed safeguarded society. The main debate was whether, when, and if deviance could—or should—be modified, mitigated, or changed. Two related concerns oriented this debate: was deviance congenital or acquired, that is, due to immutable heredity (Mendelism/Darwinism) or shaped by environmental and social conditions (neo-Lamarckism)? No absolute answer was reached; instead, these ‘theoretically opposed poles of hereditarian and environmental causation served … often as peacefully co-existing, mutually reinforming subdisciplines within larger fields’ (Buffington, 2000: 40). In this ‘coexistence’, homosexuality and gender nonconformity were understood as both somatic issues and contingent, environmentally or socially caused problems. Margarito, for instance, was labeled a ‘constitutional invert’, but his inversion stemmed from parental failings and was exacerbated by a prejudicial homelife. Solutions were needed to address both.

How experts confronted homosexuality and gender deviance was part of a wider project of national eugenics. Sarah Walsh has argued that in Latin America, eugenics was ‘meant to facilitate the human civilizing process, which was possible for everyone regardless of race, ethnicity, or ability’ (Walsh, 2022[2018]: 21). Such a process, which emphasized education, appealed to those eager to develop and modernize after centuries of colonialism and conflict. But could queer Mexicans be similarly incorporated as part of civilization? What, if any, obligation did the state have to individuals if homosexuality was congenital—or if it instead were acquired? If homosexuality was indeed transmissible, how could the state intervene to prevent transmitting negative traits and instead effect rehabilitation? No experts claimed queer individuals deserved rights as such. Instead, at stake was determining whether homosexuality and gender deviance were criminal and/or a form of sickness, permanent and/or malleable—if homosexuals were culpable for their sexuality (just as criminals were for crimes) or were victims of natural disfunction or social contamination. Vigilance was essential: as prolific Veracruz sexologist Gustavo Rodríguez argued, sexual perversions could occur at any time due to endocrinological or cerebral changes; because the criminal ‘germ’ innately existed in everyone, homosexuality represented a permanent social threat (Rodríguez, 1941: 158–9).

Sexology as social prophylaxis

The postrevolutionary era experts answering these questions came from a tight-knit cohort who enjoyed prestige and political support. They produced and applied sexology, formed professional organizations advancing it, and fostered methodological cross-pollination. Most were male, middle- or upper-class, and trained in law, criminology, medicine, psychiatry, and/or anthropology; only a handful of women were among them. Most were born in or shortly after the Porfiriato and called to action during post-Revolution rebuilding and modernization. Most attended the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), Latin America’s largest university. Among these were Millán, as well as the ‘Generation of ’31’ criminologists, including Ceniceros, Raúl Carrancá y Trujillo, Luis Garrido, Carlos Franco Sodi, Javier Piña y Palacios, and José Gómez Robleda, among others, who founded the Academia Mexicana de Ciencias Penales (AMCP) in 1940 (García Ramírez, 2010). It joined other organizations advancing sexology, including the SME (est. 1931) and the Liga Mexicana de Higiene Mental (LMHM, est. 1938; later the Sociedad Mexicana de Psicología). Each produced a journal. In 1932, the SME debuted Eugenesia, which promoted eugenics, education, and puericulture into the 1940s. Criminalia, appearing in 1933, published on criminology, eugenics, psychiatry, education, and related fields; many among the AMCP comprised its editorial board. The LMHM premiered the Revista Mexicana de Higiene Mental (later Psiquis) in 1946, which published interdisciplinary works, as well as Ignacio Sierra and José Luis Patiño’s column ‘Sexologia y higiene mental’ on sexuality and social development.

Mexican experts claimed to belong to an ‘international fraternity’ of scientists; bolstered by a well-developed publishing industry that translated foreign works and by local universities’ scholarly production, they tapped into and influenced circuits of global exchange (Jones, 2017; Rosenblatt, 2018: 43). For instance, their organizations and publications fostered region-wide discussions. The SME boasted associates in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, and the US. Eugenesia published works from across Latin America, as did Criminalia, which published Peruvian expert Susana Solano (1935) on homosexuality and the estado peligroso and Cuban expert Armando M. Raggi y Ageo (1938) on imprisoned youths and social defense. In 1947, Ceniceros, Criminalia's editor, published Cuban expert José Agustín Martínez's influential book, who argued ‘Homosexuality is a sickness, but not an incurable one. It is a dangerous enemy, but not an invincible one.’ Warning ‘one homosexual can contaminate 10' otherwise normal subjects, Martínez advocated interventions, a view Ceniceros promoted regionally (Martínez, 1947). As a result, only Argentina and Brazil matched Mexico’s significance within Latin American sexology (Stepan, 1991: 14–16).

In forming their perspectives, Mexican sexologists drew upon and deployed an eclectic array of ideas and methods to approach homosexuality and gender deviance. Particularly influential were ideas transiting ‘Latin circuits’ of sexology, criminology, and eugenics linking Latin America with Italy, Spain, and France (Beccalossi, 2017b; Jones, 2017). Above all, Mexicans embraced neo-Lamarckian ideas, but they also took influences from Italian criminal anthropologist Cesare Lombroso’s ‘atavism’ concept, endocrinologist Nicola Pende’s ‘biotypology’, and criminologist Enrico Ferri’s estado peligroso concept and schema of anthropological, environmental, and social causes of crime. Influential ideas also came from Spanish endocrinologist Gregorio Marañón, who argued all humans were essentially ‘intersexual’ (i.e. having both sexes) and homosexuality was an illness, not crime. Blended, these ‘Latin’ ideas suggested Mexico could advance by changing social conditions.

Eminent figures outside Latin circuits also proved influential. Mexican experts used Freudian theories to imagine versions of a ‘radically utopian society’, believing that ‘prophylactic psychoanalysis would eradicate crime’ thereby producing ‘a world in which men would no longer be tortured by neuroses or unconscious traumas’ (Gallo, 2010: 230). Criminologist Raúl Carrancá y Trujillo soon made ‘wild’ appropriations of Freudian ideas, mapping them onto Lombroso’s ‘born criminals’ and atavism (ibid.: 201–30). This process informed decisions on countering social deviance:

With proper information and interpretation … the criminal-justice system could identify and isolate dangerous ‘born’ and career criminals while ‘occasional’ and accidental criminals were rehabilitated or spared the corrupting prison experience altogether. (Buffington, 2000: 159)

He and his contemporaries also used Freud’s tripartite categorization of congenital, amphigenic, and contingent homosexuals, as well as notions of sexual objects and sexual aims, to classify those passing through the TdM, commissaries, and courts. In debate remained whether afeminados and ‘passive’ homosexuals were true, congenital homosexuals, whether ‘active’ homosexuals were likewise, or whether either had been circumstantially perverted. Views that homosexuality was a chosen vice, not just imparted by social environment or biology, persisted, tapping into older ideas of sodomy and civilizational ruin.

Nevertheless, most experts believed that removing poor environmental conditions and practicing segregation would decrease—or eliminate—homosexuality. This is why Austrian psychiatrist Alfred Adler’s theories proved particularly compelling. He viewed homosexuality as a social pathology and rejected the existence of congenital homosexuals—arguing for social causes and individual culpability and alleging sexual deviance was voluntary—yet offered assurances that homosexuality could be tamed through courageous volition (Adler, 1917). In essence, Adler optimistically argued for ongoing plasticity. In essentialist, biologically determinate models, little amelioration could be achieved: a society might have to accept homosexuality as ‘natural’ or perpetually exclude queers from civic participation. But if it were instead a malleable condition, progress was attainable. His concepts of the ‘inferiority complex’—related to fearing the opposite sex after negative experiences—and ‘failures of life’—antisocial types including cowardly, unrestrained criminals and prostitutes unable to fulfill social roles—also proved influential. Adler’s views interfaced with neo-Lamarckian ideas of social betterment, helping experts reject biological determinism and sexual essentialism, while simultaneously forestalling the emergence of a rights-based movement viewing homosexuality as natural.

For instance, synthesizing arguments from Freud, Adler, and Marañón, Armando Hernández Quiros argued homosexuality was not biologically determined, but treatable through social, psychological, and endocrinological means. Citing Adler, Hernández argued ‘the origin of homosexualism … is not constitutional, but psychological, with causes profoundly rooted in an erroneous sexual education’; he compared it to acquiring sadomasochism through improperly applied corporal punishment (Hernández Quiros, 1946: 530). Sexual perversions were thus caused by social and environmental factors, a view meshing well with positivist and neo-Lamarckian frames of amelioration. Potential causes included (a) failed households (due to parental death, youth abandonment, and divorce), (b) failed heterosexual experiences and resulting fears of encounters and venereal diseases, (c) somatic disfunction, and (d) ridicule from women and friends. For Hernández, Marañón’s arguments further reinforced Adler’s viewpoints and jived with neo-Lamarckianism. Rejecting biological determination, Marañón argued that homosexuality stemmed from imbalances in an individual’s inherent ‘intersexual’ components: while homosexuality could be both congenital and acquired, it was ‘possible to elevate the primordial sex, the legitimate one, and suffocate or attenuate the secondary sex’, thereby restoring normative expressions of sexuality and gender (Marañón, 1926: 196; 1930). Marañón’s views stressed malleability: environmental conditions, biological aberrations (e.g. hormonal abnormalities), and errant expressions could be treated, and individuals could learn self-control (Hernández Quiros, 1946: 531).

In sum, for experts and the state, under the sway of neo-Lamarckian thought and skeptical of biological determinism, Adler and Marañón offered scientific validation for promoting social education, sexual hygiene, and expert interventions as forms of national social defense. Hernández argued the three best moments to intervene were (a) before a crime occurred with education and social development, (b) when passing judgment, and (c) during sentencing and treatment. Any penalties or therapies should match offenses, lead to regeneration, and prevent further vice propagation (Hernández Quiros, 1946: 538). Among the most important interventions was preventing premature sexual initiation, which put youths in the estado peligroso and promoted degeneration, crime, and perversions. Premature initiation, often incorrectly attributed in racist terms to some inherent Mexican ‘temperament’, Hernández argued, was instead due to

environmental factors from the disorganization of the Mexican indigenous home and that of the humble classes, from the relaxation of parental authority, from the collapse of fragile moral ties, and from the anguished economic situation leading to every vice. (ibid.: 533)

As a result, an alliance of parents, teachers, professionals, and state agents needed to provide age-appropriate sex-ed that prevented youths’ premature sexual initiation and access to prejudicial knowledge offered by friends and pornography. Squeamish adults who cloaked sex in sin and mystery exacerbated the problem—a secular rebuke against growing conservative Catholic influence in the 1940s (Blancarte, 2014). Instead, authority figures needed to be straightforward about sex in order to foster good citizenship through honorable behaviors, morality, and strong work ethic. For youths lacking a family life conducive to healthy development, the state was obligated to intervene through social prophylaxis that ‘straightened’ them out—pun intended.

‘Queer’ (bio)types

Hernández’s linking of race, social class, vice, and sexuality echoed views from other prominent thinkers. Philosopher Samuel Ramos, for instance, promoted Adlerian ideas in his influential El perfil del hombre y la cultura en México (1987[1934]). He argued for a postrevolutionary ‘Catholic, virile, nationalistic … and chaste’ culture and civilized society in which sexuality was under control. In so doing, he ‘banishe[d] sex to the urban slums, associating it with the poor, the uneducated, and the vulgar’ (Gallo, 2010: 70, 76). His archetype of this ‘barbaric’ world—and a dangerous expression of Mexico’s ‘national character’—was the pelado, the urban mestizo scoundrel who defended his honor through Adlerian ‘masculine protest’—in other words, violent physicality and sexually inflected albures (language games) involving masculine ‘winners’ and feminized ‘losers’. Ramos viewed such acts—in contrast to elite, ‘moderated’ masculinity—as revealing counterfeit masculinity rooted in feelings of ‘inferiority’. Extending his ideas, writer Octavio Paz argued in El laberinto de la soledad (1950) that Mexican men genealogically descended from forced, improper racial mixing (mestizaje) during colonialism. As the emasculated sons of la chingada (the traitorous ‘fucked one’), they, in compensation, aspired to be chingónes (‘big fuckers’) who dominated others while defending their own vulnerability (Paz, 1950). Yet such acts were performative ‘masks’ hiding inferiority and potential queerness; as Robert McKee Irwin summarized, Mexicans ‘pose as virile men’ and their ‘competitive masculine relations … take on homosexual overtones’. Homosexuality was thus not antithetical to hypermasculinity but a latent attribute therein (Irwin, 2003: 192, 195–6). It was not outside the Mexican ‘race’, but a worrisome, potentially inheritable trait born from foundational trauma.

Ramos developed his classist, ethnocentric, prudish philosophy against the backdrop of Mexico City’s growth and associated visible expressions of sexual and gender nonconformity, which many saw as unwanted products of modernization. Prostitution, libertine nightlife, and the expanding ambiente (queer social world) were, like Ramos’s pelados, found in economically precarious working-class and poor neighborhoods. Such neighborhoods were deemed ‘suitable’ for ‘unsavory’ people and behaviors—hence, officials placed red-light districts there—in order to inoculate the city’s ‘decent’, wealthier neighborhoods (Bliss, 2001). But such neighborhoods also showcased the limits of postrevolutionary progress: they included the ‘disorganized homes’ Hernández decried. Many arrests for ‘pederasta’, ‘afeminado’, and ‘public immorality’ occurred in such neighborhoods. Simultaneously, press reports described a thriving social world of bars, parties, and public cruising; even ‘decent’ Mexicans sought thrills there, undermining official attempts to isolate ‘deviance’ (Jones, 2012; Rodríguez Sánchez, 2019). In this context, Ramos psychoanalyzed pelados as epitomizing Mexico’s own societal ‘inferiority complex’, which had to be overcome. Fortunately, he concluded, psychology could solve human problems and ‘better’ society toward an imagined future in which modernity’s ‘evils’—‘loosened’ sexual mores, ‘unsavory sexual imagery’—no longer existed (Gallo 2010: 68–9, 72–3). Social interventions including education would eradicate the ‘collective feeling of inferiority’; while extant pelados and other undesirables might be socially ‘lost’, prevention would ensure their future disappearance.

A direct parallel existed in Mexican biotypology, whose father was José Gómez Robleda. Biotypologists turned to ‘mestizophilia’, rather than Mendelism, in order ‘to impose a new social order that privileged heredity without relinquishing external factors’ in a neo-Lamarckian sense (Stern, 2003: 197). Gómez Robleda argued biotypology helped ‘create a true ethnic inventory’ by providing ‘knowledge of the value of the indigenous human material and the most adequate ways and means to manage their assimilation into modern society, which is the same as realizing national unity’. This incorporation—a form of positivist progress and rehabilitative uplift—was key because ‘physically degenerate, tradition-bound indigenous peoples hindered (often deliberately) national development’ (Buffington, 2000: 158). Incorporation, though, was challenging because Gómez Robleda found numerous ‘deficiencies’ when comparing Mexicans to Giacinto Viola’s Italian normal types (normotipos): Mexican women were masculinized, short types (braquitipos), while men were long types (longitipos) with effeminate and homosexual proclivities. Youths were ‘mixtotipos’, that is, deformed normotypes; males had feminine characteristics; females were masculine (Gómez Robleda, 1948: 14–25). Nevertheless, echoing Hernández, Gómez Robleda rejected biological determinism, asserting that Mexicans were not ‘constitutionally deficient’. Instead, deficiencies came from poverty—‘an accident in the people’s evolution’. If social conditions improved, so did the race (ibid.: 71–6).

Gómez Robleda’s biotyplogy showcased how eugenicists contributed to proliferating categories of race, ethnicity, gender—and sexuality. Biotypology catalyzed the ‘reemergence of tropes of degeneration and criminal anthropology that had been so common during the Porfirian period’ (Buffington, 2000: 162). It promoted the revival of persistent stereotypes, including the allegedly ‘apathetic and resistant Indian’ (Stern, 2003: 203). Similarly, professionals needed criteria to recognize homosexuals and blended earlier cultural tropes of male effeminacy signifying degeneration, queer sexuality as a ‘vice’, and Ramos’s notions of counterfeit hypermasculinity with newer, ‘scientific’ biotypology. In this way, biotypology reinforced subjective claims about sexuality and gender; case studies on both youths and adults linked certain biotypes (including Viola’s) with deviance and, thus, social problems to overcome.

Police likewise turned to ‘typing’. Policework manuals offered criteria for discerning deviants through observation, blending approaches stretching back to the 1877 Compendio with biotypology. In 1942, professional police magazine Ciencia y Policía—which claimed scientific objectivity—argued ‘inverted’ trapezoidal faces, with narrower foreheads and wider jaws, were common among afeminados (‘Curso de agente secreto', 1942: 13). While admitting that not everyone with such faces were homosexual, the publication nevertheless armed gendarmes with a diagnostic beyond familiar stereotypes of afeminados being violent and using makeup, feminine clothing, and nicknames. This meant police could size up passersby for potential criminality and sexual deviance at a glance. Police thus became agents in the state’s ‘scientific’ social prophylaxis. Once in custody, ‘bodily signs’ could confirm any suspicions (Jones, 2017).

Overall, professionals supported state efforts in containing the social dangers posed by ‘chaotic’ types—criminals, unruly or violent men, indigenous peoples, the mentally ill, queers—who undermined Mexico’s future. After the Revolution, new methodologies relied on an ‘existing tradition of social analysis that guaranteed a considerable degree of perceptual continuity’ (Buffington, 2000: 63). Mexican sexology was defined by this continuity, relying on an eclectic mélange of ‘scientific’ and cultural rubrics to intervene against the ‘homosexual problem’, which became more concerning precisely as the ambiente gained greater visibility in Mexican cities after 1920. Everyone from philosophers to sexologists to the police were involved in a version of what David Halperin has called the ‘cumulative process of historical overlay and accretion’ (2000: 91) and what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick termed the ‘unrationalized coexistence of different models’ (1990: 47). This process was evident in the ‘scientific’, biotypological categories experts used to discuss sexual and gender deviance, as well as in the converging meanings of widely used, locally significant terms—afeminado, pederasta, sodomita, joto—and newer terms including homosexual and invertido. Margarito’s case offers an example: he was labeled a ‘pederasta’ and a ‘constitutional invert’, a term combining scientific notions of sexual inversion, popularized by Arrigo Tamassia (1878), with Carl Westphal’s ‘contrary sexual feeling’ (1869); such labels also affirmed local ideas of sexuality framed through gender transgressions and 19th-century sodomy debates.

Interventions: Youths

Like Margarito, many youths were caught in this nexus of state interest in disciplining sexuality—in part a response to the ambiente’s expansion—and the proliferation of ‘typing’ because they were seen as key to the nation’s future and its most vulnerable population. During the Porfiriato, youths had been housed in adult jails, placing them in contaminating ‘schools of vice’ (Frías, 1895). The Revolution then displaced families, orphaned youths, and left others socially precarious. So, the postrevolutionary state positioned itself as guardian for those lacking stable families and initiated preventative reforms. Experts held congresses on child development in 1921 and 1923, and the Secretaría de Educación Pública ‘gauge[d] the abilities of large numbers of individual schoolchildren through tests. By identifying physical abnormalities and illnesses, they hoped to correct them’ (Rosenblatt, 2018: 51–2). Overall, this postrevolutionary ‘welfare regime’ was

inextricably linked to the formation of the eugenics and puericulture movements; together, they helped to reposition the coordinates of power within the family. What had once existed largely in a patriarchal private sphere—motherhood, childhood, and sexuality—became part of an increasingly medicalized and paternal state. (Stern, 1999: 387)

As part of this process, the state deployed specialized institutions to identify concerning youths, keep them out of contaminating environments—adult prisons, deficient homes—and rehabilitate them. From 1927, the TdM assumed the pater familiae role for absent parents, applying punishments but more importantly ‘preventative’ medical and educational treatments that restored youths’ ‘social equilibrium’ and prepared them for ‘future action as useful citizens’ (Sosenski, 2010: 1230, 1265). By the 1930s, five magistrates, including Gamio and feminist Matilde Rodríguez Cabo, oversaw its ‘program of discipline and reform, which ‘was predicated on eugenic understandings of heredity, sexuality, and cognitive capacity’ (Stern, 1999: 386).

Controlling sexuality was fundamental to their efforts. Dozens of youths like Margarito were processed as ‘pederastas’, ‘afeminados’, or ‘homosexuales’. But officials interrogated nearly all youths, regardless of infraction, about sexual behaviors during social, medical, psychiatric, and pedagogical evaluations, identifying many as deviant due to their body dimensions, proclivities for masturbation or affectionate friendships, sexual encounters with prostitutes, and homosexual experimentation. For instance, in May 1927, experts examined teenage mestizo runaway Juan Velasco. ⁴ Sociological and medical evaluations stated he was a pallid, sickly boy with few friends, ‘an afeminado’s aspect’, and passive bearing—mutually reinforcing, subjectively analyzed physical attributes confirming his ‘type’. Juan and his mother had moved from Tampico to Mexico City; her alcoholic boyfriend abused them both. Eventually, Juan fled to the home of neighbor Teodora Velasco, who had ‘incessantly invited him over’, offered gifts, and hidden him previously. However, rather than offering a healthier environment, Velasco treated Juan ‘like a servant’: he routinely helped with ironing and laundry, tasks he greatly enjoyed. For experts, Velasco thus enabled Juan’s degeneration through gender-inappropriate ‘feminine labors’, degeneration further manifesting through his incorrigibility toward his mother and abandoning school. Overall, due to poor living conditions, abuse, and Velasco’s influence, Juan had been perverted into a pederasta, a diagnosis based on his effeminacy rather than evidence of associating with afeminados, homosexual behavior, or the bodily ‘sodomitical signs’ for which medical examiners typically looked. While normal in size for his age, experts concluded his body still revealed acquired degeneration through an ‘ultra-brachycephalic’ head, plagiocephaly, and ‘hereditary tuberculosis’.

Apparent in Juan’s case were concerns over the social origins of homosexuality and gender deviance—and preventing them. His heredity was doubly prejudicial: because parental disease, just like parental absence, was believed to mark youths, he was imperiled because his father had died of tuberculosis, leaving him without a paternal figure, an absence further exacerbated by his abusive living situation. Juan was in grave danger of being perverted beyond state assistance—his body reflected social degeneration, and his incorrigibility was a warning. So the Tribunal placed him in its Casa de Observación. His peers bullied him for being feminine, but Juan endured, gifting peers clothing and helping them work. Agents concluded he could still be redeemed: while exhibiting negative traits and refusing to defend himself, he also displayed positive qualities including obedience and scholastic interest, a judgment acknowledging his remaining plasticity.

Although his family wanted him back, the Tribunal determined they had been unable to control or nurture him. It therefore put him in his married godmother Soledad Zamora’s care; she offered a stable family life and a clean, multiroom home in contrast to his mother’s ‘disorganized and foul-smelling’, unsanitary one-room shack filled with booze, pornography, and abuse. This environment catalyzed the worrisome perversions stoked by Velasco’s tutelage. Zamora also cared about his education, already deficient by three years. Zamora was thus tasked with assuming the motherly role. Months later, however, she and Juan returned because he had stolen her sweater. Exasperated, Zamora hoped Juan would be remitted to an industrial school to learn a useful trade. As a consequence, the TdM interned him at the Casa de Observación and the Escuela Correcional from 6 February through at least 21 July 1928. ⁵

Years later, Margarito received his own mixed prognosis: experts believed he could be rehabilitated through education and removed from the estado peligroso by improving his social conditions, but acknowledged ‘innate’ sexual inversion would be difficult to remedy. Still, they prescribed opotherapy, ‘mental orthopedics’ (referencing French psychologist Alfred Binet’s notion of malleable intelligence) to ‘inculcate moral principles’ leading him away from deviant sexual habits, and ‘mental hygiene’ monitored by a tutor who helped him avoid perversion and learn a trade. Ultimately, Margarito was released to his elder sister, an ‘honorable woman’, contingent on good behavior and continued family support. She was tasked with providing a stable home and reporting any deleterious behaviors, so that the TdM could again intervene. ⁶

In both cases, family-based remedies—an ‘honorable’ home, suitable adult models— were the primary interventions to prevent and treat ‘homosexuality’, even though neither youth was clearly homosexual nor identified as such. The boys needed better home lives and education, regardless of assumed proclivities, but labeling them and peers as ‘pederastas’ reinforced justifications for intervening. In contrast, Tribunal officials, despite admitting their obligations, viewed some actually queer youths as beyond rehabilitation because they embraced their sexuality and gender openly. One was Pablo Garcia Ayala, known as ‘La Israela’, who had been ‘corrupted’ by afeminados (as evidenced by his behaviors and nickname), was often homeless, and who frequented the Alameda park to cruise for sex. ⁷ Rather than intervene, experts worried such youths would contaminate peers in institutions; thus, Pablo and similar youths were often turned loose, sacrificed back to negative social conditions for their peers’ benefit.

In general, homosexuality in male youths was seen as deriving from degenerative heredity and social conditions. The same was true for females, although most appeared before the TdM for deviant heterosexuality, particularly sex work. Female same-sex behaviors were far less discussed—or concerning—in Mexican sexology. Nevertheless, the earliest TdM case specifically listed under ‘homosexual’ involved Maria Concepción Carrera Palacios, who lived at the Casa Hogar (foster home) in 1939. Remitted as incorrigible by her mother in 1937, Maria Concepción, like Juan and Margarito, displayed concerning behaviors including laziness, sexual precocity, and running away with her boyfriend. Such behaviors did not improve under state care; her second Tribunal appearance occurred because of bad behavior, including homosexuality, in the Casa Hogar. The state’s solution was to restore her to her family once her mother found employment. ⁸

Overall, state interventions sought to ensure preferred outcomes where youths’ home lives, education, and development benefited the nation and race. This meant ensuring a family’s fitness for raising youths, whether it was an ‘adopted’ or biological family. Building strong youths required strong homes, not long-term state custody; experts believed family ties mitigated perversions. A good home—even of modest means—was superior to youths living on the streets or in group homes. This goal fit within state projects bolstering the ‘revolutionary family’ as society’s building block. Nevertheless, appeals illustrated how parents saw Tribunal experts as allies in disciplining wayward youths—and how they often acted outside state expectations. In both Juan and Maria Concepción’s cases, mother figures recognized their limitations in ensuring eugenic prevention, choosing to fulfill their ‘revolutionary motherhood’ roles by requesting relief from their obligations; to them, state-managed care was the only option for irredeemable youths.

Such cases raised questions about youth rehabilitation: in state care, youths still strayed, and ‘civilizing’ institutions often promoted the perceived degeneration they were intended to forestall. Critics pounced on this problem: Saavedra, for instance, criticized the system as rarely working precisely because parental figures ‘dumped’ unruly youths at the Tribunal without truly addressing their needs. He called for a broader system that harmoniously surveilled youths at home, school, and beyond, catching them before they became delinquents, as well as separate institutions for different types of youths according to their infractions and developmental needs. Therein, youths expressing homosexual tendencies could be better isolated (Saavedra, 1941: 10–15).

Experts also sought to reach youths before they arrived at the Tribunal. Influential psychologist Raúl González Enríquez, for instance, called for comprehensive sex-ed for adolescents, including not just information about puberty and procreation, but also about eroticism, desires, and love. More importantly, such education would prophylactically inoculate youths against not just acquiring venereal disease, but ‘social’ diseases including prostitution, masturbation, ‘inversion’, perversions, and ‘psychopathic sexualities’ (González Enríquez, 1933: 516–17). Unsurprisingly, Freudian and Adlerian theories were to be introduced throughout this curriculum. But few practitioners attempted to understand how youths felt about sexuality outside their schema. Many youths expressed reticence toward coercive sexual questions when examined, prodded, and measured by experts. Youths could refuse to answer or dissemble, but such responses only ‘confirmed’ their deviance to experts; they could defend themselves and offer exculpatory evidence, but experts came to their own conclusions anyway.

Confirmation bias even inflected queries posed during sexological studies of seemingly willing youths. In 1932, Alfonso Segura Albiter, who taught biology at Mexico City’s normal school, conducted a survey, likely the first of its kind in Mexico, of future teachers, all male. He queried their masturbatory habits, first sexual experiences with women (at what age and with what ‘types’—i.e. virgins, prostitutes, etc.), histories of venereal disease, and whether or not they had homosexual inclinations or practiced bestiality. He asked how they would solve the ‘sexual problem’. Segura revealed the answers during a 1943 SME presentation; while the survey raised concerns—some respondents felt little shame about homosexual impulses—Segura averred most young adults shared eugenicists’ convictions. ‘All spoke of the need to protect youth’ and agreed that education and sexual information free of shame and dogma promoted societal health and racial improvement. Segura held up his classes, in which he imparted such information and for which he received heartfelt thank you letters, as proofs of concept (Segura Albiter, 1943: 11). Of course, his students were socially and educationally privileged compared to most youths in the Tribunal, and thus, hardly representative; the survey’s anonymity was also doubtful. Still, he positioned them as agents in achieving the future experts wanted.

Interventions: Adults

As with youths, state agents sought to discipline ‘deviant’ adults: police periodically arrested afeminados and others in the ambiente; most received short jail sentences or fines. Those appearing before Mexico City’s Tribunal Superior court received longer stints in Lecumberri penitentiary; some ended up in the Castañeda. Many, often through extralegal means, were exiled to the Islas Marías, which was the closest in intent to the TdM insofar as it theoretically offered opportunities for rehabilitation through a working life distant from urban influences. But in practice, it was used similar to other institutions: to segregate those deemed dangerous from others they might contaminate. Age again mattered: whereas many adult criminals ‘might be products of social injustice’ and thus still redeemable, most adult homosexuals were seen as ‘unproductive sexual degenerates whose perversion threatened the moral health of the newly reborn Mexican nation’ (Buffington, 2000: 137). Few experts directly advocated integration. An exception was leftist general Francisco Múgica, an architect of the 1917 constitution’s most radical sections and Islas Marías director from 1928 to 1932. He offered afeminados prominent roles, believing everyone should contribute, even though he viewed their sexuality immutable and problematic (Martínez Ortega, 1938). Others questioned the humanity of incarcerating or exiling homosexuals. Yet ‘solutions’ for adults expressing gender and sexual ‘pathologies’ remained limited beyond confinement and isolation.

Most adults suspected of homosexuality or gender deviance were given only physical exams looking for ‘signs’, including a ‘funnel-shaped’ anus (Jones, 2017: 243–6). Sexologists generally distinguished afeminados—often seen as congenital homosexuals—from men situationally ‘tempted’ into homosexuality due to sex-segregated conditions, such as in prisons. As with youths, experts recognized that institutions removed adult deviants from the general population, but also concentrated them in conditions fertile for degeneration. As a consequence, fearing situational perversion among inmates put in the estado peligroso while under state jurisdiction, and recognizing sex as a ‘drive’ needing fulfillment, sexologists like González Enríquez pioneered prison conjugal visits. As he wrote in his 1934 magnum opus on prison sexuality, the goal was to provide ‘natural’ sexual outlets, thereby forestalling homosexuality, which in his view could forever corrupt an otherwise redeemable convict. But just as important was reaffirming familial bonds threatened by separation due to incarceration (and the lingering traumas caused by the Revolution; González Enríquez, 1971[1934]). This effort again prioritized families and stable homes as essential for national development. Touted as a prevention tool for adults, it also benefited youths by incentivizing inmates to seek rehabilitation and rejoin their families. However, though international experts took notice and introduced conjugal visits in their own prisons, the practice was inconsistently applied in Mexico. Raúl Carrancá y Trujillo, who debuted a Criminalia column on prison sexuality in 1933, discovered conjugal visits were unavailable to most inmates due to restrictions, since state interest remained focused on more ‘deserving’ individuals. Because sex was a fundamental drive, according to Freud, this meant prisoners were subjected to cruel, forced abstinence (Carrancá y Trujillo, 1933: 27–9). Worse, to Carrancá y Trujillo’s chagrin, many inmates actually preferred each other.

Concerns aside, prisons did afford prime sites to study adult homosexuality and gender deviance. Published case studies used similar methods to those used with youths and reinforced tautologies linking homosexuality and crime. One prolific investigator was criminologist Alfonso Quiroz Cuarón. A pupil of the Generation of ’31 and Gómez Robleda and a UNAM alum, he became the star of Mexican criminology’s ‘second generation’ by analyzing notorious cases (including Trotsky’s 1940 murder). Quiroz authored studies on inmates, co-wrote works with prominent medical jurist Benjamin Argüelles Medina, and collaborated on Tendencia y ritmo de la criminalidad en México D.F. with Gómez Robleda and Argüelles in 1939.

In 1935, Quiroz published a study on 44-year-old inmate ‘LPBB’ in Criminalia. ⁹ He investigated LPBB’s biography, social world, and sexual experiences; deployed psychiatric, somatic, and endocrinological tests; and biotyped him. ¹⁰ Certain worrisome attributes stood out: LPBB’s hair, for instance, terminated at his nape, his arms and legs had limited hirsuteness, and he lacked chest and perineum hair entirely. Combined with test results, these ‘feminine’ hair patterns and his ‘misplaced’ abdomen and chest fat led Quiroz to conclude LPBB was an intersexual pseudohermaphrodite suffering from hypogenitalism and gynecomastia caused by endocrine disfunction (Quiroz Cuarón, 1935: 175–185). LPBB’s sexual history was likewise problematic: his first lover was a woman who dominated and cuckolded him; another was a teen with whom he fathered a son—a fact that nevertheless did not confirm his ‘normal’ sexuality. Instead, Quiroz concluded LPBB had engaged sexually with other abnormal ‘intersexual’ types and, in Freudian developmental terms, remained in the masturbatory ‘narcissistic era’. Overall, Quiroz claimed LPBB suffered from morphological intersexuality and ‘testicular insufficiency’ affecting his organs; although intellectually normal, he suffered depressive tendencies, melancholia, and introversion, which confirmed his sexual perversity. Quiroz attributed LPBB’s conditions to heredity—particularly his father’s alcoholism—and birth traumas, childhood illnesses, and testicular damage, which were exacerbated by negative social factors including a harmful homelife and prolonged maternal coddling during adolescence. Quiroz concluded LPBB’s propensity toward ‘undifferentiated, intersexual’ experiences, endocrine disfunction, and ‘instinctual perversions’ proved he was degenerating into homosexuality despite encounters with women (ibid.: 170).

LPBB was thus evidence of failed prevention, demonstrating how detrimental acquired traits could be. Yet, while Quiroz hinted at treatments, he argued these were ineffective during imprisonment and pointless to discuss. LPBB thus remained imprisoned rather than rehabilitated. Two years later, Quiroz and Argüelles studied a 35-year-old merchant (M) accused of murder and ‘corrupting’ an 18-year-old. ¹¹ The cases paralleled: both LPBB and M manifested irredeemable physical and psychiatric ‘degeneration’; their alleged intersexual syndromes and homosexuality were seen as symptoms and causes of this degeneration and confirmed by criminality (Quiroz Cuarón and Argüelles Medina, 1937). M claimed he was heterosexual—he too had children—but the experts disagreed: M’s syndromes and behaviors proved he was a bad father who endangered youths, including a tenant accusing him of coercive sex. Both cases demonstrated little interest in treating adults and how self-reporting, just like with youths, mattered little when it did not conform with ‘scientific’ data revealed through ‘bodily truths’ (Jones, 2017).

Changing sex for ‘social utility’

Nevertheless, while criminologists like Quiroz shared Porfirian-era concerns about public order and protecting civilization, such concerns after the Revolution were also linked to ideas of an inclusive, redemptive (if not democratic) modern state (Buffington, 2000: 137). Despite interventions and the development of institutions and schemata for diagnosing and isolating queer individuals, questions remained whether they were truly irredeemable antisocial types, or if the state was obligated to somehow integrate them. Seeing an opportunity, physician Rafael Sandoval Camacho sought to permanently ‘cure’ adult ‘homosexuality’—that is, sexual and gender deviance. A well-read UNAM graduate citing numerous sexological treatises by foreign experts, as well as activist Donald Webster Cory’s Homosexual in America (1951), in his work, Sandoval agreed homosexuality was not criminal but antisocial: homosexuals should not be accepted as such because their sexuality was pathological. He regarded psychotherapies, hormonal treatments (including opotherapy), and behavioral modifications—such as reorienting desires toward heteronormative objects and, implicitly, incarceration—as insufficient for adults because they left an ‘implicit antagonism between the psychic and the somatic’ untreated (ibid.: 32). Instead, it was necessary to therapeutically align the psyche, body, and comportment to purge antisociality and reintegrate an individual. For Sandoval, surgical sex reassignment ‘cured’ homosexuality by converting deviants into functional, socially useful heteronormative women with defined binary sex/gender roles. His test case, detailed in Una contribución experimental al estudio de la homosexualidad (Sandoval Camacho, 1957), was Marta Olmos, then known as Jorge. ¹²

The methods and moral imperatives supporting Sandoval’s ‘cure’ offered experts and the state new opportunities to intervene in adults by extending plasticity. From the start of Olmos’s transition in 1952, Sandoval deployed a refined form of methods used to evaluate youths and adult inmates. Interns Antonio Mercado Montes, Carlos Dupont Bribiesca, and Marco Antonio Dupont researched Olmos’s biography, noting childhood illnesses, a cousin suffering ‘oligophrenia’ (‘interrupted mental development’ associated with hysteria and homosexuality), preferences for flashy men’s clothing, and desires to cross-dress (Jones, 2017: 241; Sandoval Camacho, 1957: 35–6). To them, Olmos’s case history revealed pathological orientations toward femininity and men since childhood. Young Olmos preferred role-playing with dolls in maternal roles and ‘imitated his sisters’ mannerisms and habits’, created menus, and enjoyed washing, ironing, and sewing. At 13, Olmos had sex with a masculine man, who provoked feminine, ‘voluptuous feelings’; Olmos sought similar sexual interactions thereafter.

Sandoval’s team also compiled anthropometric data. Olmos had ‘normal-sized’ genitals but also a ‘feminine’ triangle of pubic hair like LPBB and an ‘infundibular’ anus, both bodily ‘stigmata’ allegedly confirming feminizing pathologies, degeneration, and passive homosexuality (Jones, 2017: 245; Sandoval Camacho, 1957: 36–7). They administered Binet-Simon and Raven intelligence tests, as well as Rorschach, Szondi, and thematic apperception tests. The Rorschach revealed ‘sexual complexes’ causing insecurity and aggression toward society, while the Szondi found ‘feminine sexual tendencies’, a need to constitute ‘himself as a love receptacle’, ‘an intense desire for receiving tenderness’, and hysteria (Sandoval Camacho, 1957: 37, 51–4). With such information and disregarding contrary evidence, the team diagnosed Olmos with an ‘intersexual syndrome’ manifesting in homosexuality and feminine mannerisms, habits, and libido (ibid.: 35–6, 54). Olmos had a ‘conscious and unconscious opposition to contradictions between his physical appearance and psychological processes of a feminine character’. This antagonism elicited ‘depressive and hysterical states’ and suicidal thoughts (ibid.: 52). Altogether, there was clear evidence of the estado peligroso: Olmos embodied stereotypes as a maladjusted, effeminate homosexual and psychosexual hermaphrodite whose body did not correspond to psyche or desires. Sandoval argued surgery would rectify Olmos’s dysphoria, since previous masculinizing and heteronomativizing treatments had failed.

Between 26 May 1953 and 10 March 1954, Olmos underwent six surgeries—including a penectomy, testicle biopsies, orchiectomy, and vaginoplasty—conducted in private clinics and at home (Sandoval Camacho, 1957: 54). Throughout, Sandoval tapped peers for diagnostics, psychotherapies, and hormonal therapies promoting feminine development; they initially received support from more than a dozen experts, including Quiroz, as well as funding from individuals close to president Adolfo Ruiz Cortinez, tacitly showing state interest in the outcome (ibid.: 11). By May 1954, Sandoval’s team deemed the transition successful, though admitted some characteristics—Olmos’s deep voice and facial hair—resisted total transformation. Postsurgical ‘abnormal’ fat redistribution gradually subsided, and breasts developed with treatment (ibid.: 11, 75–8). This progressive feminization was essential to reclassify Olmos from ‘intersexual’ to woman. Sandoval’s team also redeployed psychodiagnostics, finding ‘notable’ changes including increasing self-identification with Olmos’s new ‘feminine personality’ and diminishing depressive, dangerous states (ibid.: 119). They claimed surgery cured Olmos’s homosexuality by normatively reordering her body and psyche and by enabling (hetero)normative sexual acts.

Sandoval saw himself as heir to French physiologist Claude Bernard, who argued that while experts could not change many phenomena, science enabled them to ‘vary and modify’ much under their control (Sandoval Camacho, 1957: 11). Likewise, his solution echoed earlier efforts in the ‘Latin’ sphere where new medical technologies were deployed in practical terms. Pende, for instance, used hormonal therapies to shift patients’ secondary sexual characteristics, appearances, and sexual instincts toward ‘normalcy’ (Beccalossi, 2021: 114). The difference was Sandoval’s shift toward surgical normalization, which was considered more permanent than social, psychological, or hormonal interventions. Surgical sex reassignment was necessary because ‘plasticity’—directly inscribed on adult bodies—re-entered the equation: science could now normatively modify sex/gender and sexuality. Reordered anatomy allowed previously queer adults to be (re)incorporated into the social body, making good on postrevolutionary developmental ‘rehabilitation’ in a way previously difficult: socially useful redemption became possible later in life, with more challenging subjects. Surgical sex reassignment also complemented prevention by precluding at least one alleged source of contamination.

To showcase Marta’s social reincorporation as a woman, Sandoval’s team paraded her before the press in May 1954 (‘El caso de hombre se volvió mujer’, 1954: 2; ‘Jorge Olmos Romero se convierte rápidamente en una real hembra’, 1954: 15; Serrano, 1954: 23). Photographs depicted her enjoying a new domestic life of cleaning, holding a baby, cooking, praying, and shopping, all while decked out in feminine attire and makeup now appropriate to her body and psyche. Initially, commentators, local and international, expressed admiration at the achievement: ‘The doctors’ success … should be considered a medical triumph’, a 6 May newswire remarked, ‘especially when considering that only in England and Germany … have interventions of this genre been carried out successfully’ (Asociación de Editores de los Estados, 1954a: 1). Read sympathetically, transitioning ‘did justice’ by revealing Marta’s true self: Marta herself proclaimed satisfaction with the outcome (International News Service, 1954: 8; Viniegra, 1954: 3). She had ‘migrated’—to use Jesse Bayker’s term—her gender and sexuality in order to become her true self (Bayker, 2023; Jones, 2023).

Yet, while the physicians wished Marta well, it is clear they had ulterior motives. Their hubris is notable: while acknowledging the transition’s technical difficulty—given a lack of surgical models to follow—they remained confident that a female body could be readily built through castration and plastic surgery. They were among those viewing femininity as ‘little more than a surgical construction, an elimination, a cutting away’ (Butler, 2001: 626). This is one reason why Siobhan McManus has argued Marta was homophobically coerced into transitioning, since her initial appointment with Sandoval concerned intestinal ailments, not a transition (McManus, 2014). Thus, was Marta’s transition performed to create a legible, ‘normal-looking’, ‘socially useful’ body? Or was Marta ‘subjected to medical machinery’ marking her for life because queer status was ‘inconceivable’ in the postrevolutionary, binary sex/gender system? Much like in the case studies Judith Butler described, in which ‘the mutilation and scars that remain[ed] hardly offer[ed] compelling evidence’ of normalcy (Butler, 2001: 626), critics argued Marta’s surgeries had mutilated an otherwise healthy, if misguided, male.

Transitions as negative eugenics

Sandoval’s solution represented a novel form of postrevolutionary eugenics, which in general focused on socially integrating problematic groups, such as indigenous peoples, who were recognized as existing but denied societal roles if they maintained their traditions (Stepan, 1991: 150). They were considered social problems to overcome by subsuming their differences within mestizo nationalism. Sandoval offered something similar by recognizing homosexuals existed, the limits of previous therapies, and that some ‘homosexuals’ wished to change. But he denied roles for those seeking validation as queer. Instead, inclusion required eliding ‘deviant’ sexuality and gender. Thus his solution claimed to convert queer men excluded from the national social body into women-citizens whose appearance, gender, and sexuality reinforced expected norms.

Even so, Sandoval’s solution did not catch on in the face of sustained public criticism from Catholic prelates, medical peers, and pundits who denied sex/gender could be changed (Asociación de Editores de los Estados, 1954b: 11; Iglesias, 1954: 1026–7; ‘No es cordero, que es cordera’, 1954: 6). The only debate was whether Marta was a vice-free, ‘true’ hermaphrodite or a deviant afeminado taken in by charlatans. Acceptance hinged in part on believing Marta (and others like her) was not a ‘failure of life’ seeking self-mutilation, but instead deserved treatment for an ‘illness’ that could not otherwise be helped. Such acceptance did not materialize. Expensive surgeries were beyond the state’s means to implement widely. Influential collaborators including Quiroz remained silent instead of rebutting criticism. Perhaps most importantly, support endangered a useful mid-century political alliance between church and state (Jones, 2023). And, in critics’ neo-Lamarckian-influenced, eugenicist thinking, reorientation during youth might have prevented Marta’s deviance, rendering surgery unnecessary, while also mitigating other negative consequences. Tabloid La Prensa, for instance, lamented that had Jorge only oriented toward women, he could have lived normally and prevented an admirer’s suicide (‘El hombre vuelto mujer anhela su hogar', 1954: cover, 2, 12). Many critics, conflating (homo)sexuality with desires to be a woman, also worried transitions would become too popular and lead to demographic imbalances (Jones, 2023). While Millán had argued homosexuals would not change voluntarily, reactions to Marta revealed concerns that they would all want to transition into women, not become ‘normal’ men.

Simultaneously, Marta’s case evoked concerns about sterilization. Most Latin Americans had rejected negative eugenics—including coerced sterilization—following Nazi Germany’s 1933 sterilization law and the Holocaust (Walsh, 2022[2018]: 24). Regionally, the only successful similar law passed in 1932 in Veracruz. It advocated surgical sterilization without castration—a slim distinction, but one leaving the patient with the appearance of their sex/gender assigned at birth. Quickly panned, many experts instead favored other treatments, viewing coercive sterilization as outside the ‘humanitarian civilization’ Latin eugenicists advocated (Stepan, 1991: 133; Turda and Gillette, 2014: 128; Walsh, 2022[2018]: 19). Even so, the SME in the 1940s still viewed eugenic sterilization as valuable for treating undesirables. But it advocated voluntary sterilization and exhorted individuals with perceived hereditary ailments (homosexuality, alcoholism, undesirable racial traits, feeble-mindedness) to willingly sacrifice for the collective good (Sánchez-Rivera, 2021: 180–3). Sandoval’s ‘anatomical solution’ involved seemingly voluntary sterilization, but required castration; it also (re)constructed anatomy and suggested future reproduction might be possible. His aim—to surgically engender a socially useful woman from a queer male—thus went beyond the SME’s preventative eugenics.

An important rationale for transitions had been that feminine gender performances alone were insufficient for social integration—and when expressed by queer males, decidedly deviant. While post-surgery performances were crucial for confirming womanhood—Marta had to look and act the part to demonstrate her physical realignment—critics rejected surgeries as simply cosmetic, not substantive. Prelates, for instance, argued sex was immutably tied to the soul (Jones, 2023). But because Marta remained biologically male, she still inappropriately performed femininity: her postsurgical gender performances were veneers applied to an inhumane form of negative eugenics. Thus, for critics, Jorge had been bamboozled by charlatan ‘gynecologists for androgynes’ into being sterilized: Marta—still a queer male—had only vague promises of someday conceiving children (Yo, 1954: 9). Even for those who considered sex reassignment a potential therapeutic, this went too far: her sterilization entailed a version of the tragic loss of sexual self-determination that many Latin American eugenicists, including some Mexicans, had already rejected (Walsh, 2022[2018]: 23–4).

Sexual perversity was thus ensured by transitioning, rather than any socially useful sexual duty enabled. While Marta seemingly transitioned for self-affirmation, for critics this did not matter: as neither man nor woman, her perversity—and perceived antisocial inutility—increased. She had not been redeemed (that is, realigned to an appropriate place in the approved sex/gender and sexual binary); instead, her transition represented a failure of prevention and an unjustifiable, extreme intervention. How could the state, which sought to bolster families, support transitioning an otherwise functioning, if deviant, man and enable his degeneration? What eugenic aims were served by castrating Jorge, which ended his ability to serve as a father, or by embracing Marta, seen either as a counterfeit woman incapable of bearing children or embodying national motherhood, or a mutilated queer male who might somehow still pass on ‘undesirable’ traits? Sandoval’s solution, claimed to stabilize a deviant physical body into an acceptable, useful form, instead destabilized both physical and social bodies. True social rehabilitation would have entailed making deviants into ‘normal’ men rather than attempting to convert them into heteronormative women; queer Mexicans ‘volunteering’ to transition did not bolster eugenic aims. Officials ultimately remained ambivalent, rejecting transitions as generally applied, normativizing processes but accepting their value for individual cases of indeterminate sex. They permitted locals and foreigners to receive clandestine operations, thereby acknowledging Mexican scientific prowess, but withheld public support (Jones, 2023).

Conclusions

Siobhan Somerville has argued that the ‘invention’ of the homosexual ‘occurred at roughly the same time that racial questions were being reformulated’ in Western thought: it was not ‘merely a historical coincidence that the classification of bodies as either “homosexual” or “heterosexual”’ emerged as race was being policed in the United States (Somerville, 2000: 16). James Green demonstrated a similar process in Brazil, where positivist experts warned of ‘social maladies’ threatening the nation: notions of ‘perversion’ and criminality were understood through prejudicial racial categories and definitions of deviant gender and sexuality. Prevention was thus essential (Green, 2007). Mexican experts likewise conducted eugenicist projects that defined deviant, immoderate antisocial types—criminals, indigenous peoples, poor mestizos, afeminados—through intersecting frames of race, class, gender, and sexuality. These types represented the ‘wrong’ ways of being Mexican, the ‘failures of life’ to overcome who threatened the national vision that the largely middle-class experts advocated. Such types were seen as having interrelated hereditary and social-acquired characteristics threatening civilizational progress. All existed outside the norms reformers sought to impose or reinforce; ‘excessive’ attempts at self-determination—a pelado’s violence, for instance, or a youth denying homosexual acts to unsympathetic officials—only reinforced their alterity. All were ‘queer’ in terms of being socially nonnormative and, to varying degrees, in terms of gender and sexuality.

Manuel Cuellar has argued that ‘as a means of configuring an aesthetic and political vision and fostering group identification, the mestizo as a racialized, classed, gendered, and sexualized category’ has been ‘paramount in the development of Mexican national narratives’ (Cuellar, 2022). This article has shown how central expert analysis was to this process through (bio)typing, classifying, and disciplining queer deviants and ‘dangerous’ states of mind. Preserving and protecting the Mexican nation’s ‘gran familia’ and ‘race’ required mitigating and preventing ‘contamination’ of all sorts; for many postrevolutionary experts, it also meant intervening to restore an individual’s ‘social utility’. While recognizing that spectrums of sex/gender and sexual expressions existed, experts could not leave indeterminate states alone. Instead, they sought to police, treat, or discipline them into binary alignment.

Accepting biological determinism would have meant that Mexico, with a legacy of racial mixing, as well as too many deviant, ‘feminoid’, or ‘inferior’ men and masculine women, could not progress. Thus, while not fully abandoning heredity, experts instead integrated positivism and neo-Lamarckianism, believing they could mitigate negative traits socially by (re)building civilization, especially through generations of healthy youths. With the ‘right’ education, ‘perfect’ young couples without perversions would lead the nation forward. Simultaneously, youth-oriented social rehabilitation was believed to have lasting effects in bettering the ‘race’; through ‘education and persuasion’ dangerous individuals would be prevented from influencing society (Segura Albiter, 1943: 20; Walsh, 2022[2018]: 22). For ‘irredeemable’ queers, experts preferred segregation, but sometimes advocated endocrinological, psychological, and surgical interventions to ‘fix’ so-called ‘errors of nature’. In so doing, sexologists decided ‘nonnatural intervention in anatomy and biology [wa]s precisely what [wa]s mandated by nature’ (Butler, 2001: 628). Nevertheless, Marta’s case demonstrates the limits on how far the state would go.

Eugenic interventions—social and medical—were believed most effective for reorienting youths. ‘Social-legal’ roundups, institutionalization, and exile remained preferred for adults; ‘rehabilitation’ was a happy occurrence, not the specific aim. Most experts did not believe social (re)integration possible or politically expedient for queer adults. During ‘Iron Regent’ Ernesto Uruchurtu’s Mexico City administration (1952–66) raids on ‘centers of vice’ increased (‘Con mano de hierro combatirá Uruchurtu el vicio en la capital', 1954: 8; ‘Redada de tipos exóticos de vivir', 1953: 24). Concurrently, prominent murders spurred authorities to arrest afeminados and foreigners as subversives (Asociación de Editores de los Estados, 1956: 3; ‘La policía identificó ya a uno de los presuntos asesinos de Mercedes Cassola y su amante, y le persigue', 1959: 10). The increasingly homophobic, xenophobic press lauded this social prophylaxis. Such raids absolved the state of incorporating queers as citizens; critics positioned them as ‘foreign’, anti-Mexican others against which progress, nationalism, and civilization were defined, rather than as pesky evidence of the limits of postrevolutionary redemption. This posture highlighted the state’s focus on youths, families, and engendering heteronormative futures, rather than on more expansive forms of social inclusion and transformation.

Unfortunately, we know little of the internal identities of those against whom experts intervened. Each case above involved generally unsympathetic mediation; social workers, physicians, criminologists, and journalists filtered information through their biases and theories. Even with Marta, who gave numerous interviews before being censored, we cannot be certain ‘justice’ was done. This is not to classify her or others described here as victims. Instead, it is important to consider how they negotiated status and expressed agency within prevention-oriented systems of domination; many, it seems, manipulated options when possible. Marta—who embraced international celebrity as a blonde bombshell, said she had ‘found herself’, and expressed happiness—is the clearest example (Jones, 2023). Glimmers can also be seen among youths, who should be understood as historical agents, not just victims (Sosenski, 2010: 1231). By denying deviant sexuality and gender and demonstrating good behavior under observation, youths gained credibility as ‘redeemed’, whatever their true senses of self and orientations were. Further scholarship should examine these attempts.