This text was initially published on the occasion of Manufacturing of Rights a pluridisciplinary colloquium in Ashkal Alwan, Beirut, 2015.

CASE #10

Date: 1563
Location: Mérida, Mexico

Description:
This presentation connects “unnatural” sex, spectacle, and desire as medi- ated by historical archives of the sixteenth-century Iberian Atlantic world. My analysis hinges on a 1563 document, in which a fourteen-year-old Maya boy in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, Pedro Na, is documented having “carnal access” with a turkey in early colonial Mexico. I show how crimes such as bestiality came to be permanently archived through the very attempt of colonial authorities to suppress such iterations of sex and desire. This ob- servation is pertinent to all ex-European colonial and post-colonial societies that enforce legal sanctions against those acts defined as contra naturam (“against nature”). Critical attention to the genealogy and construction of the category of “Nature” shows how the concept is imbued with multiple, overlapping, and contradictory meanings.

Accusations:
Na fully confessed his crime, and colonial authorities made an example of him for Mérida’s recently converted indigenous population. On February 14, 1563, the court sentenced Na to be publicly castrated and permanently exiled from the provinces of Yucatán. Adding to the grotesque nature of this ritual- ized spectacle, the court further specified that the corpse of the turkey (who died from wounds inflicted during the sexual act) would be hung around the perpetrator’s neck as he was led to the plaza, shamed, and punished. Finally, so as to obliterate all memory of the act, “after the said sentence is executed, the turkey shall be burned in live flames and turned into ashes.” ¹