The Town With Three Genders: The Muxes of Juchitán

Tonight, we're traveling to the far south of Mexico, to the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, the narrow waist of land where the Gulf and the Pacific come closest to touching, to a market that opens before the sun, to a wind that never fully stops, to marigolds in a plastic bucket, and gold earrings catching the light, and a brass band warming up somewhere out of sight, to a needle pulling red thread through white cotton one stitch at a time, the way it has been pulled for longer than anyone can count.

This is the story of a town that has always had three kinds of people and never once thought that was strange.

Imagine, if you will, Juchitán de Zaragoza in the state of Oaxaca on a morning in November.

It is not yet six.

The air is already warm.

The wind is coming in off the lagoons, the way it does here almost every day of the year, moving the palms and the laundry and the strings of paper flags left over from the last fiesta.

On a corner near the center of town, the market is opening.

It is the women who open it.

This is a Zapotec town, and in Zapotec towns of the Isthmus, the market belongs to women.

They arrive with baskets on their heads and set out the day: tomatoes and tamarind, shrimp dried in the sun, totopos, the wide toasted tortillas of the Isthmus stacked like plates, cheese, chocolate, flowers for the saints, and flowers for the dead.

The women wear long skirts with a band of white lace at the hem, and over them, the huipil, a square blouse of dark velvet or bright cotton embroidered so densely with flowers that the cloth underneath almost disappears.

Among the women at the stalls, selling and joking and counting change, are the muxes.

That word is pronounced moosh-eh.

It is Zapotec, though many people think it came a long time ago from the Spanish word for woman.

A muxe is a person who was called a boy at birth and who grew up instead into something the town already had a name for.

Some muxes wear the huipil and the long skirt and the flowers in their hair.

Some wear trousers and a man's embroidered shirt with a little makeup and a great deal of gold.

Some are somewhere in between and always have been.

Nobody at the market looks twice.

In Juchitán, this is simply Tuesday.

To understand how a town comes to be like this, we have to go back a long way.

So let's step back now gently past the market, past the town, into the deep history of this land The Zapotec people have lived in what is now Oaxaca for more than two and a half thousand years.

Long before the Aztecs, they built a city on a leveled mountaintop called Monte Albán, with plazas and ball courts and a calendar of their own.

They had a written language when much of the world did not.

Their descendants still speak Zapotec today in dozens of forms across the valleys and the mountains and down here on the hot, flat isthmus.