Guillermo Núñez Noriega - Just Between Us: An Ethnography of Male Identity and Intimacy in Rural Communities of Northern Mexico

There is something I am very much interested in nowadays; it is the issue of friendship. Through the centuries that followed Antiquity, friendship was a very important relationship: a relationship where individuals had a certain freedom... which allowed them to have very intense affective relations.... One of my hypotheses... is that homosexuality (by which I understand the existence of sexual relations among men) became a problem since the 18th century.... As much as friendship was considered something important, as much as it was socially accepted, nobody was aware that men had sexual relations then... that they made love or kissed each other had no importance... the disappearance of friendship as a social relation and the fact that homosexuality was declared a social, political, and medical problem, are part of the same process.

FOUCAULT 2001, 15634

Questions Around a Photographic Image

According to a popular proverb, an image speaks louder than a thousand words. How convenient everything would be if this were true. If that were the case, then the scholarly need to know things and the anthropologists anguish over the desire to express in words the ethnographic experience (those details that Malinowski [1922] called the imponderables of everyday life) would be so much easier to resolve. If images could speak, then by exhibiting or introducing the right image, presumably one could summarize into simple, powerful arguments those aspects of anothers life that are otherwise obscure to us.

Unfortunately, this is not how it works. Images do not speak by themselves. It is true that images are ubiquitous, but most of the time they function as registers of actions performed in very specific moments and framed by specific contexts. Images derive their meanings from the cultural and historical realities in which they are embedded, and those realities in turn frame their production and interpretation. Those cultural and temporal specificities can in some instances become barriers for interpretation for those coming from another time or cultural context; they can represent hard-to-bridge gaps between the image and its observers. Sometimes, these gaps can even lead to deception: they induce us to see only what seems obvious. However, as another common proverb admonishes, we cannot forget that not all that shines is gold.

The image on the following page of Jos Pedro and Francisco tenderly holding hands seems to speak louder than words. After all, one could argue, it is evident that they are holding hands. Why should there be any difficulty involved in simply naming that which is plain to the eye? This nave belief in the capacity to name reality and to represent it truthfully is precisely what the philosopher and linguist Derrida (1976) calls, cryptically and critically, the metaphysics of presence. But as Derrida himself points out, the meaning of an action is hardly ever as transparent as it seems, and finding the right words to name what is happening can often be quite difficult. For instance, are we sure that we can know why these two men are holding hands? What was the meaning of this gesture to them? What was the social significance at the time this photo was taken of two men holding hands? Is it possible to attribute a sexual meaning to the gesture captured in this photograph? And if that were the case, what do we mean by sexual in this instance? What cultural contexts made possible the production of this image? What personal, familial, or social consequences followed from the circulation of this image at the time of its production? More than speaking louder than a thousand words, the image seems to provoke a thousand questions. In fact, assaulted by these interrogations, the image seems quite silentincapable of providing answers by itself.

Nonetheless, a belief in the transparency of the meaning of that which is seen is very common. For many, it is taken for granted. A brief exercise I conducted during fieldwork demonstrates this point. The exercise consisted of presenting the photo above to a random group of young people not familiar with anthropological methods or theories in the cities of Hermosillo, Sonora, and Tucson, Arizona. Most respondents expressed surprise at the fact that old photographs of gay people or of two lovers existed. The responses were uniform, regardless of which side of the US/Mexico border they were collected. Some gayyou find guys that strut their manhood but that in the end are more feminine than me. Other men tended to remark on the age or antiquity of the photograph. Others asked, Who are they? Upon noticing that the men were holding hands lightly, one man said, Geez, what is up with that? and another man said, How interesting... no? Was that common back then?

A quick analysis of the responses of these men suggests that for them the meaning of the image can be interpreted in relation to the play of various signifiers: gay, homosexual, mayate, joto, lovers, feminine, and so forth. These words are presumed to carry transparent meanings that are in turn applied transparently or obviously to the image. Even though the men interviewed varied in their reading of these signifiers, their comments reveal some points in common: first, the image of two men dressed in cowboy attire and holding hands seemed strange to almost everyone. Second, this sense of the strange in almost all cases is understood furthermore as an oddity (in Spanish, a rareza, which can be related to the English word queer). In this context, the term queer (raro) is intended to communicate sexual and gender dissidence.

Commonsense interpretations of the transparency of these signifiers begins to crumble when we learn that this photo of Jos Pedro and Francisco was framed and hung on the living room wall of a family home in a small town in the country side of Sonora, visible to the wife, children, relatives, neighbors, and visitors for decades. Commonsense interpretations shatter even further when we learn, after more than three years of anthropological fieldwork deep in the sierra of Sonora, that Jos Pedro and Franciscos image is not unique, that similar photographs can be found in select homes in the region. As a matter of fact, one of the men interviewed in the short exercise mentioned above commented that his own mother kept a similar photo in their family home depicting his grandfather in that way, holding the hand of his friend, his compadre.