The Criminal Case of Juana Aguilar

In 1792 in rural San Salvador, Juana Aguilar was accused of committing what the authorities called a “heinous” crime. Aguilar was suspected of being a “hermaphrodite,” and while this in and of itself was not a crime, determining Aguilar’s sex would resolve whether the relationships Aguilar had with women were criminal. Aguilar’s possessions were confiscated, the accused was placed in jail, and a long criminal case ensued. Over the course of this case, almost a dozen medical experts examined Aguilar’s person, and Aguilar escaped imprisonment twice before finally being apprehended in distant Guatemala City. In an age when medicine and science were gaining ever more authority in the process of construing identity, the legal authorities of colonial Central America relied heavily on doctors and midwives to determine what Aguilar “really was.”

For decades, Aguilar’s case fell out of view, and scholars believed the only extant source was the examination notes of a medical expert who testified for the court. With this volume, the entire case—with testimony from the defendant, depositions and witness statements, inventories of Aguilar’s belongings, and new details about Aguilar’s intrepid escapes from prison—is made available in English. Sellers-García translates and contextualizes Aguilar’s account and brings to the forefront issues and problems that we wrestle with today: the policing of supposed sexual deviance, the reliance on medicine for the creation of identity categories, and the criminalization of gender difference.

While Aguilar’s experience was unique, it reveals broad and surprising truths about how the institutions of colonial Central America confronted difference. The volume offers readers an opportunity to engage with rare primary sources and will be especially valuable to students of gender and sexuality studies, the history of medicine, legal history, and the history of Latin America.

Opens a window onto the attempts of colonial officials to grapple with gender ambiguity in a world steeped in gender binary and equation of sex with gender.

The story of Aguilar brings to the forefront questions and problems that we wrestle with today in our own culture: the policing of supposed sexual deviance, the reliance on medicine for the creation of categories of identity, and the criminalization of gender difference.

This volume will be valuable to students of gender and sexuality studies, the history of medicine, legal history, and the history of Latin America.

Sylvia Sellers-García is a Professor of History at Boston College. She is also the author of The Woman on the Windowsill: A Tale of Mystery in Several Parts, Distance and Documents at the Spanish Empire's Periphery, and When the Ground Turns in Its Sleep, and coeditor of Imagining Histories of Colonial Latin America.