Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies

Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 24.2&3 (2003) 10-14

An Aztec Two-Spirit Cosmology
Re-sounding Nahuatl Masculinities, Elders, Femininities, and Youth

Gabriel S. Estrada

*

Quetzalcoatl sparkles on the dark morning horizon as my mother pushes me out of her bleeding body. ¹ Quetzalcoatl, the morning star Venus, is a cool and dazzling twin to me, a steaming newborn birthed in the fiery menudo of the uterus. My mother's words to my waiting father slowly pop like small pink bubbles on a red pool of adrenaline, "Well, you've got your boy." He doesn't hear her speak. In his dark reflective eyes, I am but a wavering mirage, a small sun waiting to envelop the whole world in my brightness, power, and laughter. Yet around this small mirage, the pale hospital lies like a silver sliver of moon in winter solstice, the longest night of 1970. Quetzalcoatl is but one of the last in a constellation of stars to flash a fading dance across an endless indigo sky. "Gabriel," the name my mother dreams for me, will slowly bleed its indigo form onto the ivory of certificates, journals, or love notes scented in both rose and musk. From nine pulsating months of darkness, I am born into a sequined skywomb of greater darkness. Quetzalcoatl is a brilliant period in the spinning message sung by crystalline star white voices:

the farther you go the more you return
to the Winter Solstice night
of your birth.

**

In western and colonized mestizo cultures, the darkness of femininity is feared even as it supports and creates all life. ² This fear of the dark is unnatural. Mammal eggs mature in the protective shade of skin and bones. A plant's first [End Page 10] growth is away from the sun and into the wet shadows of earth, and dreams of what is to be flower best at night. Yet, as people mature into the light, they forget their very roots and the darkness that formed them in their youth. As a gay Indigenous person, or two-spirit, I do not forget so easily. After my birth, when the 1970s Chicana/o movements of Orange County, California, were flourishing, my family vanished into the protective darkness of the north. Far from the sunny smog of L.A., I grew up in the blue winter snows of Pullman, Washington, and Moscow, Idaho. I rooted myself at the feet of the soaring Rocky Mountains. There, my parents helped to organize campesinos and Chicana/o students to overcome a history of segregation. They also worked to help African Americans, Saudi Arabians, local Nez Perce and Coeur d'Alene Indians, women, and drug addicts around Washington State University. In the white snows and white communities there, I was a dark one. A white girl was so shocked to see my brown Indian skin at school that she asked if I was painted, never knowing the history of Native Americans or the genocide that her own people hid behind the blinding rhetoric of Manifest Destiny and Progress. A white boy asked if I was a boy or a girl; I never bothered to answer the strange and puzzling question until I was older. ³

***

Before every winter solstice in these early years, my mom, dad, sister, and I would drive south past waterfalls and even through a huge redwood to my grandmother's house in Orange County. Christmas Eve tamales, cousins, aunts, and uncles waited for us there. People who didn't know me used to ask, "Doesn't having a birthday near Christmas ruin everything?" And I'd tell them, "No, I get two presents from all of my family."

My parents' separation in the mid-1970s paralleled the increasing separation of Chicana and Chicano politics as mujeres stood up for their rights when los hombres could not accept female power within their colonized brand of machismo. Although those long family trips to California stopped, winter solstice never stopped being my time of year. Far to the south...