The Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) was a period of immense social and political upheaval that also disrupted traditional gender roles, creating opportunities for individuals to challenge rigid societal norms. Among these figures was Amelio Robles, a revolutionary who defied expectations by living as a man and gaining recognition within military and social spheres. Historians have increasingly revisited the revolution through the lens of gender, highlighting cases like Robles’s to explore how war and social change allowed for more fluid expressions of identity, reshaping historical narratives on gender and masculinity.
The Ministry of National Defense (Secretaría de Defensa Nacional, or SDN) legitimated Amelio Robles’s masculine identity by decorating him in 1974 as a veterano of the revolution, not as a veterana, an honor bestowed on over three hundred women for their services in the revolutionary cause. The recognition of the country’s highest military officials must have provided Amelio Robles with enormous satisfaction, although the SDN did not corrob- orate the rank of colonel (or issue a pension) that he claimed in the Zapatista army, which had no systematic procedures for promotion.
Amelio Robles adopted forms of masculinity particular to his rural envi- ronment, a cultural code that included daring courage and constant shows of force; these characteristics, in later years, led him to initiate violent per- sonal conflicts that killed more than one person. Like many men, Amelio frequently indulged in alcoholic excesses; he was authoritarian; he was a womanizer, cursed, and was rarely inclined to account for his actions to fam- ily members, not even during the periods of illness that marked a lengthy old age. His family accepted Amelio’s masculinity as a fact; his grandnieces addressed him as “uncle” or “grandfather” and learned his sexual identity only after they became adults, since the subject of his queerness was never raised at home.
Amelio Robles took the stereotype of masculinity that prevailed at his rung of the social ladder to an extreme. Paradoxically, his peculiar creation and re-creation of masculine values unsettled the naturalness with which they were recognized as virile attributes. The paradox was that Amelio Ro- bles’s successful gender transition simultaneously subverted and reinforced normative heterosexuality and the stereotypical masculinity it re-created. Amelio Robles’s masculine performance was supported by identifying documents that accredited his membership in various social and political organizations. The credentials’ identifying photographs confirm Robles’s masculinity, whose name and signature always figure as male.3 Perhaps the greatest evidence of the effectiveness of his masculine appearance is the med- ical certificate required for admission to the Confederation of Veterans of the Revolution. Issued in 1948 by a medical clinic in Mexico City, the certificate attested to Robles’s good health, age, and the scars from six bullet wounds on different parts of his body, including one in the thigh and another in the armpit—all without alluding to his sexual anatomy. The medical investiga- tion required by the Confederation of Veterans of the Revolution was not a thorough examination but rather a prerequisite intended to certify any war wounds, considered irrefutable proof of valor on the field of battle.
The Ministry of National Defense (Secretaría de Defensa Nacional, or SDN) legitimated Amelio Robles’s masculine identity by decorating him in 1974 as a veterano of the revolution, not as a veterana, an honor bestowed on over three hundred women for their services in the revolutionary cause. The recognition of the country’s highest military officials must have provided Amelio Robles with enormous satisfaction, although the SDN did not corrob- orate the rank of colonel (or issue a pension) that he claimed in the Zapatista army, which had no systematic procedures for promotion.
Amelio Robles adopted forms of masculinity particular to his rural envi- ronment, a cultural code that included daring courage and constant shows of force; these characteristics, in later years, led him to initiate violent per- sonal conflicts that killed more than one person. Like many men, Amelio frequently indulged in alcoholic excesses; he was authoritarian; he was a womanizer, cursed, and was rarely inclined to account for his actions to fam- ily members, not even during the periods of illness that marked a lengthy old age. His family accepted Amelio’s masculinity as a fact; his grandnieces addressed him as “uncle” or “grandfather” and learned his sexual identity only after they became adults, since the subject of his queerness was never raised at home.
Amelio Robles took the stereotype of masculinity that prevailed at his rung of the social ladder to an extreme. Paradoxically, his peculiar creation and re-creation of masculine values unsettled the naturalness with which they were recognized as virile attributes. The paradox was that Amelio Robless’s successful gender transition simultaneously subverted and reinforced normative heterosexuality and the stereotypical masculinity it recreated.
According to the civil registry, Amelia Robles was born in 1889 in Xochipala, Guerrero. The birth certificate leaves no room for doubt: the baby presented to the commissary by her mother and father was a girl. She came from a fam- ily of ranchers, a social class of midsized landowners who were the main political actors of the Mexican Revolution in Guerrero. Robles’s connection to Zapatismo was not so much ideological as elemental, resulting from a taste for guerrilla life. She discovered, in her words, “the sensation of being completely free,” something she had not experienced while living as a woman. She was good with horses, a talent that was highly valued in guerrilla war. When reminiscing about revolutionary times, Robles referred little to agrarianism and social radicalism; however, he delighted in tales of daily life on the battlefield.
Like many other Zapatistas, Robles left the Zapatista army, which had in- creasingly weakened, recognized the federal government as legitimate around 1918, and eventually joined the Mexican Army. He served under the leader- ship of former Zapatista Adrián Castrejón, who would be appointed governor of Guerrero in 1928. During shared experiences of combat, Robles, his officer, and his comrades-in-arms (which now included Castrejón’s men) forged powerful ties. In this way, they further consolidated bonds of friendship and homosocial solidarity, which contributed in a significant way to the official recognition of Robles’s masculine self. Aware of Robles’s peculiar identity, Castrejón often referred to Robles in the feminine as the Coronela Robles, but he seemed to support Robles’s masculinization and was instrumental in his incorporation to the Socialist Party of Guerrero and the League of Agrarian Communities, both of which provided Robles with political influence in his town.
To be classified as a revolutionary veteran, one had to apply for authorization to the SDN by providing a series of letters of recommendation and proofs of merit. These endorsements conformed with criteria established by the Mexican Legion of Honor without necessarily establishing incontrovertible versions of events that had taken place decades earlier and whose details had most likely been forgotten. Given that it was commonplace to adjust merit and service records to reflect military reports provided by superior officers, it must have seemed equally reasonable to Robles to change the sex registered on his birth certificate so that his main document of identity would conform to his appearance and internal sensation of being a man. His personal file in military archives includes an apocryphal civil-registry act that certifies the birth of a boy, Amelio Malaquías Robles Ávila. Except for the baby’s name and sex, all other data coincides with the original birth certificate found in the corresponding civil-registry book. Convinced of his masculinity and en- joying the political protection of Governor Adrián Castrejón and of a network of social relations in the region, Amelio Robles must have felt confident that it was appropriate to present apocryphal documentation in order to be classified as a veterano not a veterana of the revolution.
During the armed movement, sexual violence that especially targeted the female population increased in direct proportion to revolutionary violence. At the same time, for some individuals the revolution also opened up possibilities of self-determination that previously had remained beyond reach. The war caused geographic displacement, and a “temporary demolition of modesty” ensued, making “the realities of desire unconcealable,” at least within certain exceptional spaces such as the one that allowed Amelio Robles to enjoy relative acceptance, spaces that had no equivalent in urban areas or towns, as far as we know. Robles’s transgendering enjoyed relative tolerance precisely because it exaggerated the masculine values exalted by the civil war.
This does not mean, however, that tolerance toward Amelio Robles was simple or universal. Amelio chose to settle in Iguala in order to avoid hostilities in his hometown, Xochipala, where he owned family property, although he did return home years later. According to some accounts, Amelio Robles was assaulted by a group of men who wanted to reveal the secret of his anatomy, and in self-defense he killed two of his aggressors, costing him a jail sentence that he served in the state capital. This imprisonment is rumored to have inflicted additional humiliation, as Amelio was held in women’s facilities. Moreover, his identity was the butt of many crass jokes, even among those who offered him their protection.
Robles’s masculinity fit within the functions socially assigned to men and women within twentieth-century Mexican rural society. As a typical rural man, Amelio never took on the domestic tasks he must have learned in his youth, when he was raised as a small-town Catholic lady while also becoming an expert shot, rider, and horseman.
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