Breathe
By Lorena Pérez Hernández
Wendy Guevara has come to remind us of what our ancestors already knew: all categorization of the world is linguistic and the limits of these categories are cultural. There are cultures that divide the world into two genders (male and female), giving rise to strict categories that marginalize and exclude anyone who does not fit into one of them. But there are also cultures that do not have this linguistic and conceptual barrier, which allows them to recognize and accept without problem the existence of those whose identity does not correspond to their biology. These cultures are ours. They are here, among us. Wendy's success, her enormous popular support, is not accidental. She, with her charisma, has simply been the catalyst that has made this people reconnect with the folk wisdom of their roots. The one it should never have forgotten.
It is not true that what is not named does not exist. It continues to exist, but remains invisible. The Zapotecs belong to a small group of cultures scattered throughout the wide world, whose languages are capable of naming the reality that Wendy Guevara has brought to our homes on the back of her naturalness and her bonhomie.In the indigenous people who live in Juchitán, the Zapotecs call them muxes to those people that having been born men have women's thoughts and identify themselves as such. Their condition does not generate scorn, nor marginalization. They are accepted by their families and by the society in which they are integrated and are valued for their contribution to it and not for their gender identity. The normality of the natural embodied in their language avoids their marginalization.
There are other cultures that, like the Zapotec, name and accept what we currently marginalize as different. In India, the existence of a third gender was traditionally accepted. Like the muxesthe hijras are people of dissident gender, men who identify as women, and who had been culturally accepted and even enjoyed a certain social status and respect in Hindu society. British colonization came to destroy this inclusive view of human beings with a Criminal Tribes Act that from 1871 classified them as a danger to society. Once again, the Western worldview based on the existence of only two genders was imposed.
Wendy Guevara, with her sense of humor, her honesty and her transparency, has made us reconcile ourselves with this ancestral knowledge that globalization has taken away from us without us being aware of it. She has invited us to look back to our own popular wisdom and embrace her knowledge of human reality, much more realistic than the strict marginalizing binomial in which a large part of our society continues to navigate. Wendy has made the difficult easy, she has taken us by the hand to reconnect with a knowledge and a humanity that have deep roots in our own culture and that we should never have lost.
*Lorena Pérez Hernández studied English Philology at the Universities of Zaragoza and Manchester (UK). She did two research stays at the University of Berkeley (USA) and received her PhD in Linguistics from the University of La Rioja in 1999. Her doctoral thesis was awarded the Extraordinary Doctoral Prize and received the Research Award of the Spanish Association of Applied Linguistics in 2001. She is currently a full professor and researcher at the University of La Rioja and since 2015 she has been a linguistic consultant. She has written two books and more than 60 scientific articles.
The opinions expressed are the responsibility of the authors and are absolutely independent of the position and editorial line of Opinion 51.
More than 150 opinions from 100 columnists await you for less than one book per month.
Comments ()