Meet the muxes of Juchitán, Mexico’s Indigenous third gender

Mística Sánchez Gómez sashays through the fragrant labyrinthine alleys of Juchitán market, in Mexico’s southern state of Oaxaca, with a tray full of sticky homemade desserts including gelatina and flan under her arm ready to flog.

She stops by stalls to greet friends and to coquettishly tease men; her large hooped earrings, floral top, and immaculate mascara drawing attention everywhere she goes.

But the 45-year-old Gómez, despite her overtly feminine appearance, is not a woman, nor a man. She is a muxe.

“I’m free to be whatever I want to be here in Juchitán,” says Gómez, with a beaming grin, as we pause with traditional chocolatey champurrado drinks along the edge of the town’s Central Park. “There’s nowhere else like it.”

Muxes like Gómez are a so-called “third gender” in Mexico, a gender nonconforming community that is part of the pre-colonial culture of Indigenous Zapotecs in Oaxaca State. Amid growing backlash and hate towards LGBTQ+ communities globally, they are an example of societal acceptance of gender fluidity, challenging the West’s fixed binary of men and women – even if their fight for rights and recognition by the state and outsiders goes on.

There is much variation and fluidity in how exactly muxes live, but broadly they are Zapotec people who are assigned as male at birth, yet who for the most part, choose to adopt roles and identities traditionally associated with women.

In fact, if Zapotec boys act effeminately, their mothers often will help to train them in traditional female roles and responsibilities. In Gómez’s case, that realisation came as early as the age of two. For others, the moment arrives at school or later in life.

Muxes cook and clean, they care for elderly relatives and for children, they work as hairdressers and embroiderers (the floral, Zapotec huipil garments heavily inspired Frida Kahlo’s style). Crucially, muxes do not identify as either male or female, nor necessarily as trans. They define themselves outside these restrictive Western terms.

“They occupy a third space,” says Jacobo Ramírez, a researcher whose family comes from the region of muxes, the Isthmus de Tehuantepec. “It’s not about sexuality. It’s about their way of life, not wanting to be defined by the Western typology of gender.”

In fact, many Indigenous communities around the world do not conflate gender and sex, instead recognising a third or more genders, such as the mapuche of Chile, the Fa’afafine and Fa’afatama of Samoa, the hijras in India and the Filipino bakla.

Some muxes wear feminine clothes all the time, but others wear masculine clothing at work. Some like to dress up extravagantly, like drag queens, while others simply paint their nails. Some are fervent political activists; others live their lives quietly. Some take the virginities of hetero Zapotec men; some are even married with kids.

But despite external wariness of their existence, instead of being rejected for their nontraditional identities, locally, muxes are embraced and respected by the people of Juchitán and are seen as having an important social role, particularly by families. Gómez, for example, still cares for her elderly parents.

“This is what we muxes do, it’s our responsibility,” she explains.

Gubidxa Guerrero Luis, who works for the Juchitán-based Indigenous rights group Comité Melendre, estimates that there are about 5,000 muxes in the region, and says that they form a “fundamental” part of the Indigenous Zapotec culture.

Perhaps the epitome of their societal acceptance is the Vigil for the Authentic and Fearless Seekers of Danger, an annual carnival that was launched in the ’70s to celebrate their culture over three wild days full of dancing, drinking and dressing up.

“Before, 50 years ago, it was more closed and conservative, but now us muxes can be how we want to be, there’s more liberty,” explains Felina Santiago Valdivieso, who was president of the vigil in 2023. “We don’t want to occupy the space of men or of women. We want our own space. We want to participate in politics, religion, all life.”

And there have been some notable landmarks over the years. In 2019, the Mexican (and British) editions of Vogue Magazine featured a muxe – Estrella Vazqueza, wearing a traditional huipil – on its cover. More recently, the story of the muxes was the centre of the Netflix series, The Secret of the River, which aired in October 2024. Meanwhile, Amaranta Gómez Regalado had previously become the first muxe to run for elections at the Mexican Congress, even though she wasn’t eventually elected.

However, it’s far from a utopia in the world of muxes. They often must work hard, sometimes several jobs, to get by – even if that is the norm in Juchitán, a city with high levels of poverty and crime linked to smuggling of people and drugs to the US.

They can still face discrimination at school and the workplace, as well as inadequate access to public health services, according to research, which has seen rates of HIV rocket among the muxes. A survey of 128 muxes published October 2022 found that 58% of the respondents experienced “social, institutional, religious, and cultural discrimination.”

“They say Juchitán is paradise, but it’s not,” says Manuel López Zavaleta, a 37-year-old muxe. “There is still prejudice, especially from [non-Zapotec] outsiders who migrate here. Some muxes still don’t come out of the closet.”

Luis of Comité Melendre adds that Indigenous communities in rural Mexico like the Zapotecs, including the muxes, face attacks on their cultures to this day, and that they are typically provided with minimal access to government support.

“In theory we have rights,” says Luis. “But our cultures are being displaced. We are losing our local languages in place of Spanish. And Indigenous peoples are relegated to the bottom of Mexico’s public systems. We receive the worst care.”

And the threats faced by gender nonconforming communities like the muxes remain deadly.

In 2019, the founder of the vela, Óscar Cazorla, was stabbed to death at home, with police finding evidence of torture. In 2023, the first openly nonbinary magistrate in Latin America, Jesús Ociel Baena, was murdered at home in Aguascalientes, central Mexico. According to the Trans Murder Monitoring project, 350 trans and gender diverse people were murdered in the last year, which researchers said was due to “concerted efforts of anti-gender and anti-rights movements that instrumentalise and vilify trans people to push wider anti-democratic political agendas.”

But the muxes refuse to give up in their struggle for rights and support.

Pedro Enrique Godinez Gutiérrez aka “Kike”, a muxe activist and former director of Juchitán's Office of Sexual Diversity, has sought to raise awareness for their plight through protests and lobbying and worked to improve sexual health support through training sessions with both muxes and police.

“This is not a game,” says Godinez. “The situation has to improve. We need real support from public institutions.”

And that campaigning has borne some fruit. The Congress of Oaxaca has modified local laws to give the people the right to modify the gender on their birth certificate. And the organisation TRANSformandome has been set up to support around 150 muxes with HIV living in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec area.

“There is a fight, a process of survival,” says researcher Ramírez. “By organising and being activists, the muxes are decolonising.”

According to Ramírez, who has studied the muxes since 2013, they are fighting a wider battle to preserve their identity that began with the arrival of Catholic colonisers, who have attempted to wipe out gender nonconformity.

“Historical records show gender fluidity existed across Mexico before [Christopher] Columbus arrived [in the late 1400s],” he says. “It was only after the Europeans arrived that this was treated as something abnormal.”

There are, Ramírez says, accounts of cross-dressing among Aztec and Zapotec priests and Mayan gods who were described as simultaneously male and female. Even in the Zapotec language, there are no grammatical genders – only one form for all people – unlike the gendered nouns and pronouns of the Spanish language.

For now, the community is dreaming big: they are currently gathering funds to buy a two-hectare plot of land to build housing, socialising spaces, a health facility and a library of muxe artefacts. They are in talks with a Swiss NGO to supply the money.

The muxes believe only then that this age-old Indigenous culture in a little-visited corner of Mexico – in the face of forces attempting to wipe it out – will be preserved in the modern world for years to come.

“We need a place of our own,” adds Godinez. “I won’t die before this is achieved.”

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