Dedicated to the memory of “Mariposa”, an outstanding designer of aesthetics. ngäd’i in the southern Huasteca, died in April 2025.

Abstract

Among the Otomí of the Huasteca, it is the zithū (devil, “devourer of names”), also called mpøhø, The “rich” or “mestizo”, who presides over the festive complex of the carnival. In it, we find characters such as the “ladies” (in Otomí, xumphø), men dressed as women who embody the unbridled sexual desire of the game and the party. However, there is a variant called the “crazy ones” (ngäd'i, who are men who openly define themselves as dokwe or homosexuals), a collective that has burst into the celebrations, promoting new aesthetics in the Huastecan carnivals. This text intends to address the reflections around these new aesthetics. ngäd'i-dokwe from an approach that describes the unstable transience of these sexed bodies, in their constant becoming between the Otomí world and the mestizo world.

Keywords: otherness, otomi carnival, body, homosexuals, mestizo, transformation

the ngäd'i-dokwe: ritual disruptions, altered bodies, and bodily otherness in the otomí world

Among the Otomí of the Huasteca region, Carnival is presided over by the figure of the Otomí of the Huasteca region. zithū (the devil, “devourer of names”), also known as mpøhø, the rich man“ or ”the mestizo“. Within the Carnival celebrations, one finds characters such as the ”ladies“ (in Otomí, xumphø), cross-dressed men who embody an unrestrained and sexualized desire for play and festivity. A more recent variant, known as the “madwomen” (ngäd'i), consists of men who openly identify as dokwe or homosexuals; this collective has disrupted the celebrations by introducing new aesthetics into the Huasteca Carnival. The article examines the ngäd'i-dokwe from an analytical perspective that foregrounds the unstable, shifting character of these sexed bodies as they continually move between the Otomí and mestizo worlds.

Keywords: Otomí Carnival, transformation, body, mestizaje, otherness, homosexuality, non-heteronormative sexualities.

Otherness, this unavoidable condition

In this work I intend to expose the condition of cosmopolitical reversibility in the bodies of the ngäd'i-dokwe, The “crazy-gays” of the Otomi carnivals of the southern Huasteca, who are a performative example of how otherness manages to make indispensable the modes of coexistence between the mestizo and indigenous worlds. This relationship, always tense, reveals that stability and uniformity can be not only suspicious, but openly dangerous. As the life trajectories of these “locas” express, the ordinary lies in differing, turning otherness into an almost irrefutable destiny. This article seeks to describe the cosmopolitical trajectories of these “crazy-gays”, as Otomi as they are mestizo.

If, as Eduardo Viveiros de Castro warns, “to do anthropology is to compare anthropologies” (2010: 70), it is possible that the exercise of this discipline - which is not exclusive to academics - also implies comparing the ways in which bodies, as marks of otherness, are presented and represented, produced and reproduced. Contrary to the exoticizing desires of those who aspire to see in indigenous worlds immovable spaces or cultures, these, on the other hand, reinforce their conviction of learning to live under constant transformations that, in many ways, seem to know neither restraint nor control. To account for these innovations, adaptations and incorporations of indigenous otherness into the modern world (and vice versa) remains a task of contemporary ethnology and, as documented with singular care in the works compiled by Pedro Pitarch and Gemma Orobitg (2012), it is possible to see how the Otomi madwomen are more than characters in a carnival troupe and their bodies are true “synecdoches of modernity” (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Three Ngäd'i-Dokwe at the Cruz Blanca Carnival. On the left is "Mariposa", to whom this article is dedicated. Source: Carlos Arturo Hernández Dávila. Ixhuatlán de Madero, Veracruz, 2022.

Works by colleagues such as Johannes Neurath (2008), Saúl Millán (2015) or Aparecida Vilaça (2020), emphasize that this multiple and ductile identity is not a problem for the peoples of indigenous America, as it is for many anthropologists, who often strive to precisely delimit identity, pretending to make visible the factors of invariability in worlds where mutability is a daily occurrence. The aforementioned ethnographies consider indigenous cosmologies as full-fledged anthropologies; they are able to account for the othernesses that inhabit their worlds and with which they establish complex negotiation relations to make communication possible. It must be recognized that the key to native anthropologies does not lie in the search for the underlying unities that beings share, but in rigorously applying an attentive and continuous observation of the variations that, paradoxically, make them capable of coexisting.

Mestizo alterities: masks and clothes of power

In the Huasteca, mestizo otherness is embodied in spaces of power and in those who administer them: the Church, State institutions (governments, schools, clinics). The mestizo-other is powerful. And in the ecclesial world, this mark also generates centuries-old disputes. The Gospel and the communities of the Huasteca maintain sufficiently cordial relations, which is not always replicated by the evangelizers who, on many occasions, refer to the peoples of the region either as “mission land” or as “land of idolatry”, as I was told by a Catholic priest who preferred to remain anonymous. The works of Arturo Gómez (2003) and Alan Sandstrom (2010) in the Chicontepec area recorded at the time the frustration of priests and catechists before the foolishness of the people to maintain their idolatrous practices and the reactions of these before the impositions and disqualifications not only of the Catholic evangelizers, but also of pastors of evangelical churches of various denominations, concerned about the salvation of the soul and the purification and hygiene of the Otomi body (Garret, 2013). For his part, Jacques Galinier (2022) has insisted on the role of the devil (zithū) as the moderator of contradictions and the only one who guarantees the maintenance of the weak equilibrium on which the cosmos is sustained, relegating Jesus Christ and the saints to a minor role in terms of scope and hierarchy. Precisely the community chosen to obtain the information of this text is located in this “land of idolatry”, described in the map of Figure 2.

Figure 2. The "Land of idolatry". Ixhuatlán de Madero, Veracruz, is highlighted in yellow with the number 5.

On the Otomi carnival (inside and outside the Huasteca) we have abundant materials of good depth (Lazcarro, 2017; Heiras, 2017; Rainelli, 2019). The choice of this region stems from an interest in making comparisons between Otomi communities with different degrees of evangelization. My longest-standing work has been among the Otomi of the Sierra de las Cruces and Monte Alto, in the State of Mexico, who have experienced the presence of missionary priests and friars-as well as officials, teachers, and other representatives of the State-continually since the century xvi (Hernández, 2022). In searching for a region of comparison, I found in the southern Huasteca an optimal terrain for this enterprise. It was thus that I came into contact with my colleague Santiago Bautista Cabrera, at the time a PhD student in History and Ethnohistory at the National School of Anthropology and History, originally from the Otomi community of Cruz Blanca, Ixhuatlan de Madero. Santiago -who is a renowned researcher in his own community- had given a paper at the Permanent Seminar of Otopame Peoples on the importance of the cult of the Sirena-Santa Juanita (called in Otomi xumphø dehe, “the owner” or “lady” of the water) in the sanctuary known as La Joya; the record he made about the sayings of the faithful describing this space as a “municipal presidency” caught my attention. In his master's thesis (2017), this author presented the following information:

This house of custom is an office where people of “reason” gather, judges, secretaries, policemen, teachers, the bosses arrive there. It is so then that the one who is going to make a petition must bring the complete offering, must invite more people so that there is more strength, it is as if you go to a presidency to present your papers, if something is missing they do not support you and even if you bring more people (expresses Doña Arnulfa, traditional doctor of the community) (Bautista, 2016: 178).

This statement was consistent with what I heard from the elderly Nahua women of the town of Santa Ana Acatitla, in Chicontepec, Veracruz, who told me, during the celebration of the renewal of the powers of a local Nahua shaman, that the hill on which we were standing was the “presidency” and that inside and below it were “the president, the secretaries - dressed in blouses, skirts and heels - the policemen and the judges, all people of reason”. This testimony dialogues with another similar one from the Otomí also from the Huasteca, reported by Israel Lazcarro, about the hill Mayóni'ja, also known as “Iglesia Vieja” or “México Chiquito”, and that for the neighbors of the community of Zapote Bravo (neighboring Cruz Blanca) is analogous, due to its dimension of power and hierarchy, not to a simple “municipal presidency”, but rather to the very “federal government” (Lazcarro, 2024: 139). In the same sense, Lazcarro refers that the oldest well in the community of Zapote Bravo is a “president” (Lazcarro, 2024: 139).tsët'abi bøhthe), which demands to be visited and treated with the dignity befitting its hierarchy (Lazcarro, 2024: 13).

We are not before “representations” of the otherness, but before the verification that, from the indigenous reading, the power (not only the political-state) and its attributes are, unquestionably, proper of the mestizo world. Curiosity led me to propose a trip to visit the “presidency” where the Mermaid ruled, but since the dates of her feast had passed, I asked Santiago Bautista for his hospitality to visit Cruz Blanca during its exuberant carnival (in Otomi ntëni, “the game”) the following year, a request that was granted to me, my daughter and the group of friends and colleagues with whom we attended in 2022 the party in honor of the compadre, Pattern, zithū o mpøhøthe other, the devil, the rich and great mestizo par excellence, as seen in Figure 3, with the devil embodied in a doll that has the features of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, president of Mexico between 2018 and 2024.

The devil/compadre (Zithū) of the Cruz Blanca Carnival, with the face of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and flanked by black and red devils. Source: Carlos Arturo Hernández Dávila. Ixhuatlán de Madero, Veracruz, n.d.

In Cruz Blanca and many surrounding towns, the carnival is announced a month in advance in a ceremony called Levantamiento de Banderas, during which the devil masks are awakened from their slumber and brought to the town square to receive the community's greeting. As night falls, the “costaludos” or boot, followed by the devils and other masked people, arrived at the town's galley to deposit the masks on the ground, inside a circle of protection formed by a nettle stick, where they are greeted, candles are lit and food and alcohol are offered to them in generous quantities. Families come up to them and speak to them, greeting and welcoming them. The masks were also accompanied by the devils, “their children”, who appear with their bodies painted red and black, duly masked, dragging chains and ringing metal bells. At one point, we were summoned to the privacy of a nearby house where a family was performing their own ritual in front of their impressive altar, where several dozen devil masks are piled up.

After four weeks and with this same group, we returned to Cruz Blanca, this time to the “formal” carnival.1 If the encounter with the masks that ate and received the libations had impacted me, during the carnival I was caught by the spectacle of the worship of the compadre, always characterized by the face of someone with power (in 2022, Andrés Manuel López Obrador; in the following two years, Joaquín “Chapo” Guzmán). Equally attractive was the view offered by a group of female characters whom I first identified as the “ladies” (sumphø), who participated in the game and whom I could divide into two simple categories: those who wore masks and those who did not. They were all transvestite men, but the masked women also wore traditional clothes, while the “unmasked” women wore low-cut dresses, high heels, were well made up and, perhaps most strikingly, did not necessarily look “disguised”. “We don't dress up, we just look like we polish to look better,” said one of them, who was wearing a very tight miniskirt, sandals, a white blouse and a purple wig: “but this is what you see, this is us every day,” she finished. At a certain point, this group gathered for lunch and I asked them to pose for my camera, initiating a challenging and enigmatic dialogue. When asked if they were the “ladies” of the carnival, they answered me: “No, we are the mad (ngäd'i). We are the devil's brides”. I found the answer disturbing.

Throughout that year's carnival, the locas told us their respective stories of migration from Ixhuatlán de Madero and other towns in the southern Huasteca to the metropolitan area of Mexico City, sharing their experiences about their work and the way they live their lives away from the ranch. But the focus was above all on what it meant to them to be crazy: “In the carnival there are the ‘ladies’ (sumphø u hørasu, although in Cruz Blanca both categories are not familiar), but we are ‘locas’ (ngäd'i), and when the carnival is over, we all are dokwe”said Andy, one of the “pioneers” of this collective. The fact that the “locas” were the devil's brides meant that they also represented the goods and riches that the devil holds, which also explained their mestizo appearance, as they evidently share the style of dress of the world where their boyfriend/husband rules.

That first foray into the Cruz Blanca carnival left me with several questions about those “crazy women” and the ways in which their life unfolded with ease (“triumphing”, in their own words) in the Huasteca as well as in Ecatepec, Naucalpan or Tlalnepantla and other municipalities around Mexico City.2

“Locas” and dokwebodies, words and senses

To name is to create. In many towns of Otomí roots that experience the loss of the language, words that many people tend to qualify as “rude” survive. This is the case of the word dokwe, which is in constant use even among migrants from the Huasteca living in the periphery of Mexico City. A Facebook page, dedicated to the promotion of the Otomi carnival in Ecatepec, published a meme illustrating this information, as seen in Figure 4:

Figure 4. Meme about the term "docue". Fuente: https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=3389640981337285&set=a.2014104348890962

The term ngäd'i (“loca”) differs from “dama” because the former “is always a woman, even if she is trapped in a man's body; those who dress up in masks and skirts and such only dress up for carnival, but they are not gay,” says Andy, one of the “loca pioneers” of Cruz Blanca. For his part, the term dokwe It admits different translations, the most common being “maricón” or “puto” (fag“ or ”puto"). Some crazy women told me that it could be literally translated as "angry stone", but there was not much more about it. This word intrigued me a lot and it was necessary to seek the support of linguist and independent researcher Mäst'oho Thu'bini, who tracked down the word for this text. According to his own research, dokwe:

1. It comes from “Doki/Thoki truncate” and “we to scream”; therefore, it would be interpreted as “Man who screams when he is ”broken“ (or ”broken" in the sexual act). It refers to the passive homosexual male and this meaning is supported mainly by the reference described in the Brief art of the Otomi language and Trilingual vocabulary by Friar Alonso Urbano (ca. 1604), page 352 ‘P ante O’, in the lexical entry “Puto que padece”, which in the Hñähñu written in the work is “Notocue" Y "Notâtocue”. In the same document, in the following lexical entry, mention is made of the “Fucking qhaze” and in Hñähñu it is written as “Notitocuete" Y "Notichate”which refers to the active homosexual man and possibly means “who makes screaming screaming or breaking” (in the sexual act).
2. Similar to the first proposal, this second proposal can come from “Do’my bowing or groveling” and “kwe to get angry”; therefore, it would be interpreted as “Man who gets angry at being bent over” (or “humiliated” in the sexual act and the concept of “getting angry” would refer to the “gestures and cries” of sexual pleasure during intercourse). It refers to the active homosexual man and possibly its meaning is “who makes angry by bowing or humiliating another” (in the sexual act).
3. The last proposal comes from “Do stone”and “Kwet’and to be glued”; therefore, it would be interpreted as “glued testicle or egg, that sticks”. This meaning could denote “man with vulva” or “effeminate”.

In addition, the word dokwe is referred to in other linguistic publications:

• At Etymological dictionary of colonial Otomi (1901), Lawrence Ecker mentions the word "word". Dokwe on page 352, lexical entry To9 with the meanings of “sodomite”, “puto”, “hermaphrodite” and “aputado”.
• At Diccionario otomí-castellano del patrimonio indígena del Valle del Mezquital (1956) refers to the term Docue with the meanings “inverted”, “effeminate” and “man dressed as a woman”.
• At Hñähñu Dictionary by Luis Hernández Cruz and Moisés Victoria Torquemada of the Summer Institute of Linguistics (2004) notes the following: inverted, effeminate. “T’in addition to the following, it is also̱ ra ‘beẖñä, di hñuxhuí rá mi ‘beẖñä, ha ‘bu̱ ra däme, di hñuxhuí rá midäme. They say that inverts, if they are women, lie down with their female companion, and if they are men, they lie down with their male companion”. Sodomite: “Stá nu ‘na t'enä ra dokue̱ di neki ra ‘beẖñä, pege xa me’tsa rá ‘beẖñä, ‘nä. I have seen one who they say is a sodomite; it is seen that she is a woman, but they say she has had a wife.”.
• At Yúhú Dictionary (Otomi of the Sierra Madre Oriental) by Artemisa Echegoyen and Katherine Voigtlander, published by the Summer Institute of Linguistics (2012), mentions the following: (ra) dòkwe̱. The manflorite, the homosexual (man). “Ra dokwe̱ t'ëmba n’da ran ‘yohu̱ ‘bu̱ in zohse̱ rá min ’yohu̱wi. They call a man a manflorita when he messes with another man.”.

There is another word that refers to the faggot, which is tsabxi: “Puto, joto, maricón”. It comes from the terms “Tsa swallow or devour” and “Xii skin or hide”; therefore, it would be “the man who swallows hide” (Mäst'oho Thu'bini, research and personal communication, 2024).3

• The semantic field of these definitions, however, was not complete. In my observations I noted the lustful air with which the madwomen were received and, above all, treated by the men present - old and young - with frequent jokes of a sexual nature, or with open insistence on touching them or inviting them to touch them in an open erotic atmosphere. With this idea in mind, I tried to trace a path of analysis of the trajectories of the bodies of the women who were present, and of the bodies of the men who were present. ngäd'i-dokwe as bodies as Otomi as well as mestizo, as masculine as well as feminine, as huasteco as well as urban, as modest as well as libertine, within a system of transformations that requires understanding a wide series of categories of understanding about Otomi cosmopolitics, especially from the conjugal alliance (and interspecies) between the madwomen and the devil, an alliance that, when consummated, allows considering them as a blessing for the families and the communities. Circumscribing them to people exercising certain sexual roles did not tell the whole story. Thus, a more extensive exercise was necessary to understand more precisely their role not only during the carnival, but also in the Huasteco world, since the locas themselves seemed to me to be bodies that in reality became praises of the otherness that I had detected in the attire, for example, of the Mermaid or the pathogenic entities of the ceremonial paper cut-outs.

The ngäd'i-dokwe as inhabitants of the “land of love”

On the carnival in the Huasteca we have a good bibliographic apparatus (Galinier, 1990; Heiras, 2012; Gallardo, 2012; Trejo, 2012). et al., 2014). The same authors of the Ritual Sonata The emphasis is on power and sexual tension in the workplace. games Otomi, radically different from what is observed among Nahuas, Totonacos and Tepehuas. Among the Otomi, the beneficial dead and the disgraced dead seem to run over each other in the carnival, in open competition for the release of sexual tensions. In the neighboring region of the Sierra Madre Oriental, Jacques Galinier himself had identified in the carnivalesque context the character hørasu, The origin of this word is the hot land (“la Huasteca, the land where love is made”) (Galinier, 1990: 349-351). According to this author, it is suggestive that in Serrano Otomi “copular” and “Huasteca” share a root. “La Huasteca is pure comedera and cogedera,” Bartolomé Hernández, a young and famed Nahua weaver, tells me in an informal chat, as we both contemplate the carnival frenzy in the community of Cruz Blanca.

Galinier's contribution is undoubtedly very suggestive when he mentions that, in the Sierra Madre Oriental, the hørasu are considered as “living” divinities, originating from the hot lowlands of the Huasteca (“the land of love”), who are erotically active and vitally fertile. They are, moreover, updates of Tlazoltéotl, the goddess “of creation, lust and confession of sins”, and are also always in pain both from their sexual exertion and from labor, which is its natural consequence. In a more recent work, Galinier himself reflects on the “aesthetic” and “cosmetic” ways by which the devil seduces (and threatens) with his ornaments of “lady” or “whore” (Galinier, 2025: 212-213). For his part, Santiago Bautista's work confirms the treatment that the locas (ngäd’i) are received as sacred entities (in this case, as seeds) at the Cruz Blanca carnival:

From the exegesis of the specialists of the ritual, these characters (the crazy women) represent the seed and make reference to the fertility of the earth, that is why it is necessary to supply them with abundant maintenance so that they are happy and can attract prosperity, abundance and luck for the captain of the carnival. Don Mauro explains the following: “The ladies play, as he means, as those who go to the hill do”. “They dressed him with the seed that they bring from the hill, except that they don't put on his mask. They dressed him well, they put him in good clothes, they put a hat on him” [sic]. That is why they say that they leave luck, because they feed him well, set the table, his plate and dance like a dance (Bautista, 2017: 161).

In other words, the locas present themselves well-dressed to the house of the carnival captains and are compared to the elegant covering that envelops the deities made of cut paper in the customary rituals (Figure 5). In addition, they receive - as the deities they are - special treatment at mealtime, which they do standing around the table (Figure 6).

Figure 5. The Mermaid, paper cutout, wearing a colorful quinceañera dress. Source: Carlos Arturo Hernández Dávila. La Joya, Cruz Grande, Ixhuatlán de Madero, Veracruz, 2024.

Figure 6. The locas being received and blessed at the carnival captain's house. Source: Carlos Arturo Hernández Dávila. Zapote Bravo, Ixhuatlán de Madero, Veracruz, n.d.

With these coordinates, I was able to begin to understand the information I obtained in conversations with the locas with whom I established more trust. I was struck by the fact that many of them lived in Mexico City or in neighboring municipalities and, according to their testimonies, they worked intensely for nine or ten months and then spent two whole months playing in as many carnivals as possible in a circuit that includes towns both in Ixhuatlán de Madero, Veracruz, and in the neighboring municipality of Huehuetla, Hidalgo, or even in some towns in the micro-region of Pantepec, Puebla. “They are happy that we are arriving and the crazy women from other towns invite us to theirs and we also invite them to ours, and so we accompany each other and it's all fun and frolic and slutty, although sometimes there is also competition”, one of them confided to me with the complicity of her companions while they “produced” (arranged themselves) to go out to “triumph” in the carnival of Cruz Blanca.

During the carnival of 2024 I accompanied several “locas” from this town to the neighboring community of Zapote Bravo to “play” there. I was warned that it was necessary to be careful not to disturb the party and I witnessed the ways in which the visitors were invited to eat, standing at the same table where the local “locas” were already eating, receiving a ceremonial welcome treatment consisting of smoking them with copal, an act carried out by the owner of the house, who then made a brief speech in Otomí to give thanks for having “so many locas who should bring good luck to the house”.

One of them, dressed as a bride, told me that the owners of the house had expressly asked her to go like that, because they wanted their sons “to find a good woman to marry and have children and be happy”, confirming the intuition that the “locas”, together with their lascivious condition, also represent omens of good fortune, as well as wishes of prosperity and abundance. It is not by chance that one of the “locas” of Cruz Blanca and daughter of one of the “costaludos” is considered a sign of good omen for her own father. Speaking of the relationship within the family, a friend from that house maintains that “her father knows that she is good luck. He knows that as long as she keeps playing, the family will always have a lawyer, a graduate, a doctor, an elegant lady, a woman of the city. A powerful woman who will bring them very good luck”. This condition seems to evoke Vilaça's text already quoted: the mestizo clothing does not cover the indigenous clothing: the mestizo "bachelor's skin" does not cancel out the Otomi skin, the otherness is at the same time a point of departure as well as of arrival. The skins, in any case, do not overlap, but add to each other.

Cosmopolitics ngäd'iThe madwomen as mediators between the devil and humans

Cosmopolitics is a concept that has known various interpretations, definitions and models of analysis. In a more or less recent article, Mario Blaser insists on the ways through which the term becomes useful not only to put in crisis the classic nature/culture distinction, but also to render pertinent the hazardous, if not stormy, tasks for diverse collectives -human, non-human, exhuman- to build sufficiently habitable relations of the common cosmos (Blaser, 2018). The question in this matter is the following: what cosmopolitical role do the locas play in their mediation between the devil, the great mestizo, the zithū, How do they explain that, “by putting the body”, "by putting the body", "by putting the body", "by putting the body"?”, broken relationships, conflicts between him and the people can be settled for at least one more year?

One woman in Cruz Blanca is fundamental to understanding contemporary locas and their importance. Her name is Cecilia, who is almost forty years old, mother of a little girl and works as a construction worker in the metropolitan area of Mexico City or in the towns of Ixhuatlán de Madero: “Wherever there is work, I am there,” she says with pride and autonomy. Cecilia is one of the initiators of the tradition of the locas who, over the years, have established themselves as indispensable actresses in the game. As one of them says, “I feel I am as much a player as a toy, and without us, the party is not complete”.

The enormous differences between the attire of the ladies and the madwomen are evident, which lie in the commitment, formality and neatness with which both groups wear their women's clothing. The “locas” need to “producirse”, a word in Spanish that refers to the act of beautifying themselves through an elaborate protocol that involves the fitting of prosthetic buttocks and breasts, the placement of girdles, evening, bridal or quinceañera dresses, as well as the wearing of high heels, the use of more or less exaggerated makeup, a good hairstyle and nail care, plus the inevitable perfume and complementary outfit (handbags, fans, sometimes masks). It could be thought that these attires refer “to the ways of dress of the women of the city”, but the phrase is less and less sustainable because the Otomíes of these regions already maintain a pattern of residence in the metropolitan areas of the cities of Mexico, Monterrey, Reynosa, Chicago or New York. In fact, the locas are an extraordinary example of the gradual mestization of the Otomi world and the "otomization" of the mestizo world in an absolutely reversible sense. This mestization does not imply a syncretism or a hybridization that annuls the ethnic or symbolic status in favor of a sort of cultural ecumenism: what I sustain is the mutual interpenetration that preserves the elements of each world and maintains them in an unstable equilibrium, capable of being resolved in multiple ways.

In Cecilia's words, the group possesses an identity that did not require a mask to participate in the party, nor did it imply shedding the clothes used by many of them in their daily lives. In any case, mask and disguise translate into a much more finished version of themselves, an exacerbation of their feminine attributes, of their dresses, of their openly provocative sexuality.

In my house the first times, about 20 years ago, the locas got together. At that time I was the only one who worked, so I bought whatever they needed. There were only a few of them and it's not that everyone who wanted to be a loca came with me, but we did form a good little group. We received a lot of criticism during this time, especially me for being the one who supported the boys. But I was born because I am also crazy. People thought we were whores, that we were defying the families or that we wanted to cause trouble, but we were actually doing the custom with respect. And in my house they would change, get dressed up, get pretty, and we would go out to play, to jump, to dance, to live the party (Cecilia Tolentino, personal communication, November 12, 2024; Figure 7 shows Nicole dressed in a wedding dress).

Figure 7. Nicole, dressed as a bride at the Cruz Blanca carnival. Source: Carlos Arturo Hernández Dávila. Ixhuatlán de Madero, Veracruz, 2022.

The origin of the group is linked to an organizational issue or to a variant of the carnival itself, proper to the evolutions of the aesthetic molds to which it is subject. Cecilia is very specific in this aspect:

Let's see: at carnival I don't dress the way I want to dress. I don't choose the clothes for being the most colorful, the prettiest, the most colorful or the best combinations, according to my opinion. I dress as my compadre, my old man, tells me [...] the devil, then. Because he is my old man too. He tells me in dreams how I should dress: “Today I want to see you like this and like that, with this dress, these stockings or these shoes. With these ornaments, this costume”. And the fact is that we are the ones who calm his desires, the tension he has in the world below. We are his women, his girlfriends, his ladies-in-waiting. That is why our game must be very careful, because he must give us permission, giving him a candle, inviting him a beer, a drink, and then the crazy women go around doing their crazy things (Cecilia Tolentino, personal communication, November 12, 2024).

Cecilia considers that, in the case of the locas, clothing and attire -makeup, perfume, accessories, other trappings- is more than an aesthetic element that incites male lust and female envy in the communities' inhabitants. Rather, it responds immediately to the demands of their unearthly partner, who takes care of them - and the entire village - throughout the year.

What does it mean, how does one experience this interspecies alliance with a power as complex as the devil, with zithū? One of the possible answers to this question is that this alliance allows their girlfriends to survive and succeed in the mestizo world, where the devil comes from. Moreover, the madwomen know themselves to be other, strange and different from both the women and the men of the village: they are doubly mestizo (mpøhø) and their main characteristic is that they always manifest themselves as liminal beings: neither men nor women “like those of the village”, nor entirely from the city, since they speak Otomí, have a ranch to return to whenever necessary, and have extensive parental networks both in the Huasteca and in the periphery of Mexico City.

This liminality allows them to live comfortably in many environments, even in the ordinary life of the community, but especially during carnival: “I live for carnival. All year long I work very hard and when carnival comes, I leave my job or ask for permission and go to all the carnivals I can, to all the ranches where they invite me and my companions”, commented “Mariposa”, one of the most famous locas in the area thanks to her creativity in the design of her costumes for the 2023 carnival: “Look, how nice my outfit for today!”, she tells me using the English word, as I portray her. Cecilia observes the whole festive ensemble and nods her head with a sign of agreement, as seen in Figure 8.

Figure 8. Cecilia officiating at the Cruz Blanca carnival. Source: Carlos Arturo Hernández Dávila. Ixhuatlán de Madero, Veracruz, 2023.

The aesthetics of the madwomen are daring, suggestive, outlandish and openly seductive. Miniskirts and lingerie, heels and touch-ups are a must. In short, the clothing is an indicator that these women are beings of the other-world and that, without a doubt, they feel comfortable in the mestizo world, where the Otomi can only resist thanks to powerful and effective support networks, translated into compadrazgos and godfathers or conjugal alliances.

An example that perfectly illustrates this dilemma is Nicole, one of the most dazzling crazy women I have met in the last three years of fieldwork in Ixhuatlán de Madero. Cecilia still remembers when Nicole was Ramiro, who was 13 years old at the time and decided to come out openly as a dokwe, He had to leave his family, tired of the pressures and domestic violence, to take refuge in Cecilia's house, who welcomed him as a sister in need of support, shelter and food. Nicole spent some time at her protector's house until she had to leave the ranch for a while, because she found a partner who proposed to leave to look for a new life. This escape worried his parents, who searched for him until they found him and asked him to return, promising him absolute respect in his decisions and ways of living life. Nicole then became one of the most attractive carnival freaks, although she always decides to dress up as “him” once the carnival is over. She currently works in Mexico City, in a department store in Coyoacán, and in her social networks she exhibits photos always dressed as a “boy”, as she likes to call herself. Meeting Nicole has given me the chance to experience her own version of the carnival, but it has also been an opportunity to have a coffee and chat with her. alter ego, with Ramiro in Mexico City.

In a conversation he refers to the following:

I do have to respect my quarantine. The crazy ones don't necessarily, because that's what they are there for, to get crazy, to jump, to dance, they ask permission, light a candle, a cigarette, and they can do whatever they want. The seduction, the flirting, the falling in love during the carnival takes place in the conversation, in the dance, and the devil needs us to calm his anxieties, his desires. He also has desires, he is eager and anxious to have sex. He is very hot and we take it away from him. Because what is below is not what is above. In the carnival we can see what the world below is like, that's how it is there: excess, beautiful women, dancing, music, drinking, fucking, having fun. That's why we respect each other's sex life, but during the carnival sometimes, on WhatsApp, our colleagues comment on their madness, who they slept with, who is seducing them. But to be truly crazy, a crazy person must always attract attention: I have no qualms about spending anything on my clothes, wigs, shoes. Carnival is my life. (Nicole, personal communication, May 22, 2024).

This atmosphere of carnival madness also entails a complicity that creates bonds of support in the city, where it is not easy to survive without a hitch. Both Cecilia and Nicole-Ramiro have commented that, in spite of the natural competition, envy or jealousy among the crazy ones to dazzle in the carnival, life goes on after the carnival ends and that the help and understanding between them cannot disappear: “Life is too hard to lose friends”, concludes one of them.

Dokwe: Indian, mestizo, male and female

In addition to Cecilia and Nicole and other locas, it was providential for me to meet the aforementioned Andy, born as José Tolentino Matías in 1981, and who, as I have written, is the “pioneer” not only of the locas, but of someone openly homosexual, transvestite and dokwe.

I am the first one to dance dressed as a woman in the carnival, but then I don't undress. It's not that I disguise myself, I am this woman and that's how I dance in the carnival and that's how I go back to Mexico. To continue being this woman that I am. I have seen many children begin to dress up, even if they are not yet women or even if they do not yet know what they want. I knew about the morbidity. I listened to people who told me: “You just come and make us crave, you just swell us up and you don't give us, you provoke us”. And the fact is that I didn't satisfy anyone. Maybe to one among many. But it is true that many of my friends only go to whorehouses. But I respect them, they do my cleaning for me because you have to respect them from Carnival to Holy Week, they say with the wife, nobody with sex, Good Friday. DomiThey don't have a partner, we take away their desire. They don't have a partner, we take away their desire. Where can you fuck? [In] the bush, the hotels are the wells next to the river (Andy, personal communication, April 14, 2024).

Andy opens his memoir to reveal his biographical trajectory that shows his passage from the Otomí-Huasteco world to the mestizo world:

My name is still José Tolentino Matías and I was born in 1981. But now I am Andrea Matias. I am 43 years old. I left home to go to the city to work, because there is not enough money in town, and so I went to Mexico City, and I struggled, but I found a job where I like the environment where I am now, it is a good job because you just have to dress up, get dressed up and that's all it takes to earn money. Before I used to say: “I want a job where I can dress nicely, even if I don't earn anything”, but that's in the past: now I want to earn more. I left town after finishing elementary school. I was about ten years old and in 1993 I left Cruz Blanca, my town in Ixhuatlán de Madero. We came to live in the Loma Linda neighborhood, in Naucalpan, State of Mexico, but many people came from the ranches there, especially to Ecatepec, to the San Pedro La Mesa neighborhood. If you go there, you will see that this colony and those surrounding it are the second San Lorenzo, the second Cruz Blanca, the second Zapote Bravo, the second Ixhuatlán de Madero, because of the number of people from the towns that came to live there. But we came to Naucalpan. We all came here, all my family, my sister, my mom, my dad, it was a family neighborhood. They all left there and only I stayed (Andy, personal communication, April 14, 2024).

What did it mean for Andy to reveal his identity and to conceive of himself as a dokwe? She herself tells me about her experience:

I made my identity public until 2000. I arrived in Mexico in 1993, but it wasn't until I was 19 years old that I revealed myself as I really was. After I arrived in Mexico, in 2000 I made it public. Doing it was very difficult at the beginning, but with time I was accepted by people, by my own family and in town, in town they pretended me, there was nothing else to do but talk and be myself. What I tell them and what I think is that what they see is what I am, I don't have to hide anything. And of course in the village, during carnival, some women get mad at their husbands because I dance with them. Of course I have changes in the body, step by step, hormones, pills daily, estrogen, to grow hair, nails, soft skin, feminine touch, I did not use injections I would have sprouted more, I never wanted to abuse more. If one day I die, I will never wear anything else, I will never take anything else off and I will never wear anything else. The men that I go to the hotel accept me like this. That is why I am considered the pioneer, the first one to rebel against a town and against the family, and I did it without fear, because I said, if they love me that way it's fine, but if they don't, then no way. For example, my mother always accepted me, once my mother accepted me, I was calm. My mother was questioned by people who asked her why I dressed like that, that when I was like that I should be less feminine. But when I go to a party I dress the way I am, whether it's a t-shirt, a pants, but I can no longer hide anything. I did not “discover that I am a woman”. You don't discover that. You are born with it and you put it into practice. For example, when I was a child, I used to have dreams dressed as a woman. It's you, but as a woman, that's how you see yourself in the dream, as a woman. I was riding a white horse, I saw myself as a woman. Exercising my sexuality was something very strange, because in my case no, there were no nice words, when I was with men there was only horniness and desire, and the first times, because it is obvious, you feel more pain instead of pleasure, because it hurts, don't believe it. You have to learn to control the pain, it goes away with time, little by little. Sometimes drunks yell “pinche puto” at me in Otomí: dokwe(Andy, personal communication, April 14, 2024).

I have met Andy at the bar where she works in Naucalpan, State of Mexico, and I know she has the confidence of her bosses to open for business before noon. I have seen her perfectly integrated into the neighborhood, making small talk with the shopkeepers in the area and in “action” with her clients, who are looking for her “por elegante”. I have also seen her at her own home on the ranch, when she invited me to the “costumbre” performed by her mother to clean the house and request the favor of prosperity from the antiguas, the entities that guard her family's house, well and land, and so I photographed her that night holding her candles (Figure 9). While waiting for the ritual to begin, a neighbor told me: “Ah! You came to José's [Andy's old name] custom. She is very famous: she is the great carnival girl, she dresses very well for the carnival [...]”. This statement reaffirms the value of clothing, that “social skin” that covers, covers and discovers identities that are put on and taken off, and that helps so much to think about “the inconstancy of the wild soul” (Viveiros, 2010) as a way of holding on to the world, allowing the assembly of many other worlds.

Figure 9. Andrea, during her family's custom in Cruz Blanca. Source: Carlos Arturo Hernández Dávila. Ixhuatlán de Madero, Veracruz, 2024.

Conclusions

By recovering the experiences of the ngad’i-dokwe and witnessing the excitement with which they are received, expected and desired, I can not forget that their version of carnival, although apparently it only refers to sexual games, to eroticize the world during these days, without restrictions or metaphorical appearances, it also plays a ritual work in every way. In fact, one of them told me that she did not miss the opportunity to have several sexual encounters during the two months she spent playing on the carnival route in the southern Huasteca and that she had even participated in collective experiences in which she was the center of desire of men of various ages. She did not forget to tell me also that she got very tired, but that this effort should serve to bring good luck and blessings to the world, “and the devil was happy with her performance and would reward her throughout the year”.

Another one told me how some “very young” men were “losing their fear”, year after year, until they first went crazy and then became "crazy". dokweThat's how we all start. We are afraid of what people will say, but then you feel the strength to free yourself and it is at the carnival when you say: “Now, this is who I am and I am free. If someone doesn't like it, well, no way: anyway, we have someone to take care of us and protect us, who is the patron, to whom we owe everything. We owe him everything, he should pay us for what we do for his party,‘ she says. With these ’liberations”, at the end of the extensive carnival cycle, the devil has more brides willing to temper the sexual tensions he provokes, which should lead either to new human beings or to the pleasurable eroticized Otomí world.

The life stories I heard condense these first steps of freedom and extend to narrate the ways in which they live the experience of migration from their communities to the periphery of Mexico City, also exposing the strategies of adaptation to a vast and hostile city, in which they survive not exempt from fear, but knowing that they have the support of “their old man”. The ngäd’i-dokwe, dressed in urban clothes, they are considered Indians in the city and city dwellers in the village, but they know that they are not disguised as mestizos hiding their ethnicity: they can (and must) be as Indian as mestizos, as men as women, as rancheras as urban, as peasants as graduates: true “cosmic diplomats”, they go back and forth between worlds and survive to tell us the whole story of what they observe in them.

For them (as for the Otomí), otherness does not mean unindianization, but something more sophisticated: a constant, unstable and recurrent flow between diverse worlds, a cosmopolitical exercise to inhabit the place where they happen to be, under the protection (of who else?) of their boyfriend, the zithū. With your sponsorship, these crazy women, working as hairstylists, shopkeepers, waitresses or bricklayers, whether in Ecatepec or Ixhuatlán de Madero, will return to the carnivals of the southern Huasteca dressed as brides, graduates, doctors or actresses, tempering the devil's mood and guaranteeing another year of health and prosperity for them, their families and their towns.

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Carlos Arturo Hernández Dávila is a full-time research professor at the Centro inah-State of Mexico. Professor at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City and at the Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia (National School of Anthropology and History). He is an external expert in social anthropology for the Superior Court of Justice of the State of Mexico. Author of We would go to the countryside together (enah-inah, Mexico, 2023), and The hail on the blood: the catholic shamanism of the Otomi of central Mexico (sb Editores, Buenos Aires, 2022). His documentary Fractal virus: the faces of the pandemic won the Silver Venado of the Miradas sin Tiempo Contest, in 2023.