“Oh! Beautiful Herd of Lucifers”

The title for this review comes from an early poem, “Ecce Homo,” of Nicaraguan modernist writer Ruben Darío. It is cited in Five Hundred Years of LGBTQIA+ History in Western Nicaragua, Victoria González-Rivera's latest book. The author points out in her analysis that the masculine poetic voice of “Ecce Homo” displays a conflicted view of femininity (156 – 58). Women's beauty and sensuality is admired, while their free sexuality is demonized and disparaged. González-Rivera's book is not about Ruben Darío and his presumed queerness. However, these contradictions toward the subaltern, as mediated and expressed in written language, are mapped throughout the ambitious project that, while geographically limited (the western region of Nicaragua), covers over five decades of Spanish and US colonialism, intervention, and imperialism, as well as LGBTQIA+, women's, and Indigenous dissidence. Despite the broad temporal scope, the author manages to pause with every example and event, carefully narrating the details in depth and demonstrating why they are important. The focus of González-Rivera's research is how the intersections of race, class, and gender have contributed to suppress gender and sexual dissidence in Nicaragua, while also making possible relations and dynamics that go beyond Eurocentric paradigms. It is commonly believed that regions like Nicaragua are not receptive to LGBTQIA+ subjectivities. This book questions those preconceived notions, while recognizing the influence of colonial impositions in any possible discriminatory tendencies.The book is divided into four chapters. The first, “Sodomites, Cuylones, and Cochones: The Colonial Period,” describes law documentation during the colonies as well as texts written by conquistadors. It must be noted that González-Rivera correctly cautions us against romanticizing pre-conquest Indigenous relations, for the autonomy of these communities would be stripped away. This non-romantic view of precolonial Native communities is absent in other queer studies texts in the United States, particularly in classics like María Lugones's “Coloniality and Gender” (2008). Other classic texts of gender studies, such as the work of French feminist Hélène Cixous (1976), essentializes the oppression of women at the hands of men so that women's participation in patriarchal systems is ignored.In the chapter title, the word cochones refers to a popular Nicaraguan slang term. While often used derogatorily against queer people, it has been appropriated by the community to signify sexual and gender diversity, similarly to cuir (the Hispanicized spelling and pronunciation of queer). There are examples of regional terms across Latin America to understand queer ontologies that have straightforward origins (for example, muxes in Mexico and travestis in South America), but the Nicaraguan case of cochon has a contested genesis, primarily because the only records of the term (beyond contemporary uses) come from Spanish colonial documents. Most if not all the documents we have of Nicaragua in the colonial period are from the Spanish perspective and are often unreliable. Take, for example, the case of sex work. Spanish conquistador Pedrarias Dávila claimed in writing that men would sell off their daughters for sexual slavery. Besides this anecdote, there is no local archival proofs of this nor if the same occurred among men. What González-Rivera convincingly argues is that the treatment of non-marital and unregulated sex, particularly when it came to Indigenous women and feminine men, on the part of the Spaniards created a culture of policing sexuality that resonates with queerphobic sentiments. Also of interest is the example of women-only open-air markets, where cisgender and transgender women can work by selling material goods. There's a temporal caesura here, where González-Rivera recounts the cultural significance of women-only markets through current mockery of transgender women street vendors. Overall, this book is effectively conscious of positing how the history of queer subjectivity in Nicaragua's past reflects in the region's current times.The second chapter, “Very Delicate Men and ‘Queer’ Filibusters: The Nineteenth Century,” addresses the formation of Nicaragua as a nation-state following independence from Spain. Despite successful independence from colonial rule, Nicaraguan elites ensured that Christian standards of heteronormativity were upheld through strict laws that regulated prostitution and sex outside of marriage. Most of the chapter focuses on William Walker, an American filibuster who took over as president of Nicaragua. Walker maintained the perception of white masculinity as imperial and aggressively heterosexual. However, González-Rivera draws from a myriad of textual sources, such as biographies, anecdotes, and historical fiction, to demonstrate how Walker's sexuality was contested, as was his gender presentation. This example seems to mirror another case from the colonial period in the first chapter: Andrés Caballero, a Spaniard who was the confirmed lover of Governor Francisco de Castañeda, a representative of the Crown. Caballero was under the protection of Spanish rule, and this privileged position was precisely what made his inquisitional death sentence so widely mentioned in archival material. The examples of both Walker and Caballero demonstrate the complex entanglement between coloniality and queerness, while also noting how Eurocentric and Christian models of sexuality and gender performance are universally oppressive.The third chapter, “The Modern-Nation State, Feminism, and the Modern Woman: The Early Twentieth Century,” expands on the scholarly contributions to modernism in Latin America. In Latin America, modernity meant economic expansion in order to assimilate to European notions of progress. Culturally, the word particularly signifies the literary production of the early twentieth century, which was characterized by stylistic innovation. Ruben Darío, a significant figure of literary modernism, then, holds an important place in this chapter. It focuses on Darío's critique of sexually liberated “modern women,” who, as in the colonial period, were often racialized. In fact, González-Rivera extensively addresses the African diaspora in Nicaragua, who, during the conservative presidency of José Santos Zelaya, were perceived as foreign threats to the nation. Interestingly, Darío was close friends with President Zelaya and promoted his wish to foment restrictions against women and their bodies, something that then affected women's participation in sports. Sylvia Molloy (2012) studied the complicated relationship between Darío and women poets of the period, like Delmira Agustini, whose work Darío helped popularize, while also infantilizing her. However, González-Rivera's study is one of the few in which Darío is placed in the context of politics beyond culture. The impact of popular poets in politics is further noted in the fourth and final chapter: “Poetry and Persecution: The Somoza Dictatorship, 1936 – 1979.” Anastasio Somoza García marks the second major dictatorship in Nicaragua after Zelaya. Somoza's regime saw the rise of the Sandinista revolution, of which the poet Rigoberto López Pérez was an important member. He is one of the few subjects in this book whose queerness is not contested, for he was murdered, in part, due to his open homosexuality.In the context of academia in the United States, there aren't many well-known books on queerness in Central America. However, I must point readers toward the work of Andrew Bentley (2021) on queer subjectivity in postwar Guatemalan literature, as well as Erick Blandón's Barroco descalzo (2003), which recounts the history of sexual dissidence in colonial Nicaragua. Furthermore, we can count as a predecessor Licia Fiol-Matta's A Queer Mother for the Nation (2002), in which an alternative reading of Gabriela Mistral's personal archive serves as a subversion and questioning of the Chilean state's official narrative against gender dissidence. While González-Rivera's encyclopedic project serves as a useful reference for other researchers, it could have been more theoretical. Similarly to how Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2003) teaches us how a careful, or “reparative,” reading of Victorian fiction allows us to perceive hidden queer messages, what does this Nicaraguan archive open in terms of analytical practices?