Gertrude Duby traveled extensively in the Zapatista region in order to interview several female revolutionaries. Amelio Robles made the strongest impression on her. Visiting Robles at home, she asked him questions about his participation in the revolution, addressing the Zapatista at all times as a male, as everyone else did. However, both her field notes and the final version of her chronicle refer to Robles in the feminine: “La Coronela Amelia Robles will forgive me for treating her as a woman; she honors the female sex with her courage, intelligence, and industriousness.”
According to Duby, Robles’s masculinity was not the expression of an authentic subjectivity and physical identity resulting from a powerful, in- timate desire, but rather a pragmatic resource used to confront the social restrictions weighing down on the female sex. “During a century in which women are relegated to second-class status because of their sex and in which their capacities are considered worthless,” she wrote, “in a town far from the highway, it is my understanding that la Coronela Amelia Robles lives, works, and serves her people by dressing as a man and acting like one.” From Duby’s perspective, Robles represented an emancipatory ideal in which men and women shared public responsibilities and women did not dedicate them- selves exclusively to the home. Instead, they participated in social life in an egalitarian utopia, a vision that had inspired Duby’s militant efforts as far back as her leadership of the feminine section of the Swiss Social Democratic Party in the early 1920s.
The photographs featuring Amelio Robles capture his masculinity of pose and appearance. Confronted by the obvious, Duby described Robles’s “men’s clothing, short hair, the will to be treated as a man.” However, Duby, who was a keen observer and noted that Robles’s skin was not dark as most Zapatistas’, pointed out features that undermined the masculinity of Robles’s appearance: “Her voice is strong, but melodious and not masculine; her skin is fine and very white.” In addition, Duby interpreted stereotypically feminine, even maternal, characteristics in the hospitality and protective, warm attitude of “la Coronela Robles” toward visitors: “Despite the late hour, we were served an excellent dinner with genuine hospitality; later, in a bed prepared for me with very white sheets and warm, soft blankets, I spent the night in perfect rest.” The person described by Duby does not seem to be the same described by others. Duby’s desire was to find in revolutionary and indigenous Mexico a local figure who would incarnate her own ideals of revolution, social justice, and egalitarian emancipation for women.
Like many other authors who sought visibility for women’s participation in historical processes, Duby attributes a coherence and a unique meaning to the activity of women who participated in the Zapatista revolutionary faction. She does not consider that the armed movement might have held diverse meanings for its protagonists, both men and women, or recognize that despite its destructive momentum, the war may also have made possible the expression of unconcealable realities of desire, including Amelio Robles’s marginalized and silenced desire to become a man. He certainly would not have forgiven Duby for “treating her as a woman.”
Duby’s narrative was implicitly homophobic and transphobic, even though it was inspired by a form of feminism that seeks to vindicate women as social and political actors. The most arduous battle fought by Colonel Robles was not out in the open and did not smell of gunpowder, nor did it require bearing the agrarian, ideological arms of the Mexican Revolution. It was a cultural battle, a slow and silent struggle, whose great victory was to become a man by denying a female physical anatomy. Amelio Robles sculpted the body he desired for himself and lived as a man for seventy of his ninety-four long years. For seven decades, during which he acted and felt like a man, he sustained a masculine presentation and behavior. Bedecked in military uniform, suit and tie, or simply peasant-style trousers and wool jacket, Amelio displayed a body whose virility most people recognized. When he died, rumor held that in his final moments, Amelio Robles requested that he be buried dressed as a woman, thus denying the masculinity he had sustained in life, occasionally at gunpoint. This purported eagerness to normalize his masculine identity prevailed on his tombstone. The obituary of la coronela Zapatista contradicted the intimate joy of Amelio Robles: to feel, present, and know himself as a man.
People of transgender identity like Amelio Robles are sometimes seen as positive symbols of transgression; at other times, their gender and physical aspects are perceived as inauthentic manifestations that are ridiculous, or even grotesque, reinforcing the conservative stereotypes of masculine and feminine. However, Amelio Robles’s transgendering should be seen neither as an optimistic reaffirmation nor as a refutation of gender ideology to be judged positively or negatively. Rather, it is a method as legitimate as any other—of articulating an individual way of being and feeling through the cultural resources at hand and within contemporary cultural debates regarding the masculine and feminine. Interwoven with social conflicts, this process exposes tensions between rural and urban environments, the transnational circulation of cultural representations, and the construction of memories regarding the Mexican Revolution.
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