In time, recognition of Amelio Robles’s transgender condition eroded. Some- one who had achieved acceptance as a man during his lifetime in his social and family circles, and even by his country’s highest military authority, ended up, in the 1980s, as a symbol of “the revolutionary woman.” This con- ceptualization was imposed as the result of an understandable commitment to appraise the achievements and rights of women. However, it dismissed the effective masculinization of Robles, the fact that the SDN had recognized him as a revolutionary veteran, and the truth that everyone addressed him as a man. The village dandy who proudly bore arms, confidently flaunted a virile body, and boasted of his machismo and courage in the Zapatista war and as a soldier in the service of the Mexican Army was honored as a conventional revolutionary woman when the Amelia Robles Museum-House opened its doors in 1989, five years after his death. Two purposes converged in the mu- seum. On one hand, it commemorated the contributions of women whose actions were consistently relegated to a secondary role in the official history of military heroes. On the other, it commemorated local history, conven- tionally subordinated to a centralist perspective that valued regional historic processes solely from the standpoint of nation-state formation.
The erasure of Amelio Robles’s transgender identity resulted from an un- derstandable and necessary eagerness to recognize what should have been obvious: that women are historical subjects who have made significant con- tributions to civic life and all aspects of history. However, such restorative efforts attribute fixed qualities to the categories of woman and man and, therefore, recognize neither the elasticity of gender constructions nor mar- ginalized expressions of desire. This heteronormative conceptualization car- ries implicit attitudes of phobia and condemnation of gay, transgender, and transsexual identities.
Some paradoxes of this essentialist conceptualization of gender can be appreciated through the narrative elaborated by Gertrude Duby, who was exiled in Mexico from Switzerland during the Second World War. She visited Robles in his town in the early 1940s as part of a project to document the participation of Zapatista women in the Mexican Revolution. A militant in the socialist movement opposing fascism in Europe, Duby imagined Mexico as a land of social revolution, rural traditions, and ancient cultures. This was an idealized vision shared by many foreigners who visited Mexico, intrigued by the country’s possibilities of social emancipation, which appeared to be canceled in the Old World. She constructed an idealized story of Emiliano Zapata as revolutionary peasant leader who emulated the socialist aims of the Russian Revolution.
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