Amelio Robles’s masculinization should also be distinguished from strategic transvestitism—the adoption of male dress in order to pass as a man—to which some women resorted during wartime to protect themselves from the sexual violence that intensifies during armed conflicts, to gain access to military commands prohibited to women, or simply to fight as soldiers and not as soldaderas, that is, without the gender restrictions that usually burden women in combat. Women who adopted male identities during the war usually returned later to wearing women’s clothing and performing female roles in society as mothers and wives. Not Amelio Robles. His radical change in gender and sexual identity was not simply due to a pragmatic desire to enjoy the social advantages of men, but rather the product of a deeper, more vital desire to radically transform the female identity assigned to him at birth in order to make himself masculine in every aspect of life.
Amelio Robles made the transition from an imposed feminine identity to a desired masculinity: he felt like a man, acted like a man, and constructed a male appearance. Little is known about his sexuality, but reports suggest that he sustained romantic relationships with feminine women and that he once courted a schoolmate; these were erotic relationships inscribed within a heterosexual logic in which Amelio Robles performed the masculine role. Nothing in the available sources suggests that he saw himself as a butch lesbian or a tomboy. He did not identify himself as a transgendered person. The term transgender did not exist in his time, but it is useful for understanding his masculinity. Robles adopted the physical appearance, the behavior, and the gender role culturally assigned to the opposite gender in binary systems. His transition from a woman to a man involved neither surgery nor hormone therapy; he gave himself a masculine social identity and performed as a man using only the cultural resources available to him in a rural area of Mexico. He dexterously manipulated those resources, including a modern press that took an interest in the story of the Zapatista revolutionary and legitimized him. The poses, gestures, and attitudes involved in this daily performance were complemented by a carefully selected wardrobe, featuring the pants, shirts, jackets, and hats common in rural environments. He chose shirts with large chest pockets that concealed his small breasts. Studio photography was central to the establishment and acceptance of this masculine appearance. Photographic portraits made it possible for common people to fix their de- sired physical images in lasting prints.
Amelio Robles’s masculinity was a cultural declaration of the body and a political act that troubled the social assignation of gender and heterosexual norms. His transgendering questioned the naturalness attributed to the feminine and the masculine; it subverted the ingrained notion of gender identity as an unavoidable consequence of anatomy that neatly defined men and women into social groups with immutable qualities. Transgendering processes interrogate (and sometimes reify) the fixed categories of man and woman. Such categories are often considered transparent and unchanging realities, but their plasticity becomes evident in light of gender transitions such as Amelio Robles’s. His masculinization did not take place overnight; it was a gradual process that began during the forced displacement and social disorder of wartime. In combat, manners and reserves were abandoned, creating spaces of confusion that allowed Robles to begin to reconstruct himself as a man and enjoy acceptance among comrades-in-arms, who admired his courage and capacity as a guerrillero.
Interest in Amelio Robles’s story goes beyond its particulars: his figure can be seen as a site of debate, a dispute around the definition and meaning of gender, of masculinity and femininity, framed in the discourse of postrevolutionary Mexican nationalism. Coronel Robles embodied the ideal of the male revolutionary soldier: courageous and daring, capable of responding to aggression immediately and violently, and skilled in handling arms and horses. His romantic relationships with women conformed to conventional heterosexual models and reproduced the gender polarity of feminine and masculine identities.
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