This website is a project by Hector Agredano, PhD student in Geography at the CUNY Graduate Center. This website was created as part of the course “The Visual in Field Research” taught by David Chapin at the CUNY Graduate Center in the Spring Semester of 2013. In the course we explored the questions of the visual and its perception in and outside of research. From this course I have learned that the visual is an archive in its own right and that it must be taken seriously by researchers.
As my class project I focused on visual presentation and visual documentation of Porfirian Mexico and the Mexican Revolution. While there are numerous books on the photography of these periods of Mexican history I was hard-pressed to find documentation of queer, homosexual, gay, lesbian, homosexually ambiguous and homosexually affirmative histories in archival sources.
However, it doesn’t mean that homosexuality didn’t exist in Porfirian and revolutionary Mexico. To the contrary, there exist numerous individuals and stories of same sex love, desire and oppression in the annals of Mexican history but they remain hidden from dominant narratives. As I began to do research for my dissertation I began to find these histories in various places and I became aware of the need to compile them so that it wouldn’t be so difficult to have to bring them out of the closet of history.
Therefore, I decided to create a repository of multimodal documentation to gather queer interventions in Mexican history in one place. There are of course many limitations to this project and by no means does it claim to be a “correct” way of looking at homosexual/queer histories in Mexican history. These are my interpretations with the restrictions but also with the insights I bring to them.
It is the hope of this author to create a virtual presence for queer histories of Mexican history and to continue to grow this database as I continue my research. If you are interested in contributing to this project please fill out a contact form to get in touch.
I hope you enjoy the vignettes that I have prepared thus far.
