Masculine Friendships, Sentiment, and Homoerotics in Nineteenth-Century Mexico: The Correspondence of José María Calderón y Tapia, 1820s-1850s
2007; University of Texas Press; Volume: 16; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/sex.2007.0068
ISSN1535-3605
Autores Tópico(s)Gender and Feminist Studies
ResumoMasculine Friendships, Sentiment, and Homoerotics in Nineteenth-Century Mexico: The Correspondence of José María Calderón y Tapia, 1820s–1850s Víctor Manuel Macías-González University of Wisconsin–La Crosse Mexican statesman Guillermo Prieto (1818–97) narrated in his memoirs how in 1840 and 1841 he became the companion—confidant, private secretary, and bedfellow—of President Anastasio Bustamante (1780–1853), a lifelong bachelor thirty-eight years his senior.1 Seeking to prove himself worthy of the hand of his beloved María, the impoverished twenty-two-year-old Prieto crashed the National University of Mexico's graduation ceremony to deliver a speech critical of Bustamante's administration. Upon concluding his fiery remarks, the Mexico City police chief informed Prieto that the president wanted to see him the following evening.2 At the subsequent meeting, Prieto explained his actions, telling Bustamante [End Page 416] that he only wanted to become famous and popular and to find a job so he could marry. Prieto's tale charmed Bustamante, who laughed heartily. Suddenly, the president called for his valet. "López," said Bustamante, "set up a bed in my room for this gentleman, . . . he is staying. . . . Obey him and tell everyone to see after his every need because he is like my son."3 Next, Bustamante called his private secretary, telling him to arrange for Prieto a monthly allowance of 100 pesos and to appoint him to a post at the government gazette for an additional 150 pesos per month.4 Over the next year—until Bustamante's fall from power in October 1841—Prieto slept in the presidential bedchamber. By day they worked and ate together, and at night they conversed, sharing intimate impressions of the successes of the day.5 The two became inseparable. Called mi caballerito—"my little gentleman"—by Bustamante, Prieto had risen, through friendship, from potential revolutionary to first bedfellow. Their relationship is perhaps best characterized as one of friendship; it entailed great intimacy predicated upon the frequent exchange of ideas, a strong emotional bond, and an unparalleled degree of companionship. Indeed, upon initiating this friendship, Prieto began to use the first-person plural—nosotros—in his narrative, suggesting that in his actions and thoughts he had become one with Bustamante; it was, after classical fashion, an instance of "a soul living in two bodies."6 The episode complicates and expands our understanding of traditional gendered identities and normative sexual relations, allowing us to explore the meaning and practice of male friendships in Mexico's century of nation building. How did contemporaries understand Bustamante and Prieto's bond? Did their private intimacy transcend into the public sphere? How did sublimated homoerotic desire coexist with socially mandated marital and extramarital relationships with women? Most significantly, how did participants in such relationships make sense of them, and to what extent did they write or reflect about the meaning and practice of intense amities in their diaries and correspondence? Historians have written much on the taxonomy and practice of friendship in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Anthony Rotundo emphasized that passionate friendships in the nineteenth-century United States occurred between men of similar age and generally in adolescence, replacing the affective nurture of parents, and that these served as "rehearsals" for subsequent marriage.7 Much too restrictive and far too dismissive [End Page 417] of homosocial friendship's transcendence of heteronormative intimacy, Rotundo's ideas do not help to explain the many different types of intense friendships evident in nineteenth-century Mexico. Perhaps a better model—and one that informs this article—are the categories of friendship that David M. Halperin has devised. Halperin observes historical patterns of friendship as existing along a continuum, from the hierarchical to the mutual. At one extreme, friendships were similar to patron-client relationships that assign "radically different duties, positions, and roles...
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