8 - Sexual fantasies and older, Indigenous Purépecha women: sociocultural constraints and possibilities

Summary

The lives and sociocultural structure of Indigenous communities in Mexico have been extensively documented, as evidenced in the documentary heritage of the National Commission for the Development of Indigenous People. While little attention has been paid to native people's sexuality, on rare occasions when the erotic lives of Indigenous people have been addressed, the focus has been placed mainly on teenage pregnancies, early marriages, ignorance of the body and sexually transmitted infections. Consequently, the experience of pleasure is neglected and emphasis placed on the reproductive age population, erasing from the erotic panorama the sexual and post- reproductive lives of older Indigenous people.

In light of the concerns just described, this chapter explores the sociocultural phenomena that enable, nurture or condition expressions of sexual fantasies of Purepecha women aged 50 years and above, inhabitants of Purepecha Indigenous communities in the state of Michoacan, in north- western Mexico. The first part of this chapter sets the historic- cultural and political contexts for subsequent examination of the empirical materials co- generated with older Purepecha women study participants. The first part of my analysis, then, refers to information contained in the oldest source of the pre- Hispanic history of the state of Michoacan, Mexico: the sixteenth- century codex (collection of old manuscripts) called ‘Relacion de las ceremonias y ritos y poblacion y gobernacion de los Indios de la Provincia de Michoacan’ [‘Relation of the ceremonies and rites and population and government of the Indians of the Province of Michoacan’; hereafter ‘La Relacion’] (Miranda and Le Clezio, 1980; Amezcua and Sanchez Diaz, 2015). This source is recognised as the most authoritative by the scholarly community for its knowledge of the ways of life and sociocultural organisation of the population settled in the Michoacan territory before, during and after it was conquered by the Spanish Crown in the sixteenth century (Amezcua and Sanchez Diaz, 2015).

From the codex, we gain insight into components of social and cultural organisation which, as Weeks (1986), Rubin cited in Lamas (2000) and Foucault (2007a, 2007b) would argue, regulate erotic activity.