Mariana Leonor. Leonor. Petronila. Juana Gabay. Maria Yslas. Juana Gonzalez. Luisa. Juana Casillas. Juana Josefa. María Micaela. Ana María. Nepomucena. María Josefa. Cecilia. Margarita.
On Ancestry.com, I find the names of fifteen generations of women in my family line. The website doesn’t tell me much about their lives, except the events that people back then chose to document: baptisms, marriages, the locations of their deaths.
A year before, I had come out to my parents, and thus began a two-year period of estrangement from some of my family. I spent the first twelve months doing what so many queer people have done: trying to create a chosen family, reassuring myself that could be enough. My new obsession with Ancestry.com therefore felt misguided. Queer people create our own ancestors. We don’t take blood too seriously, especially if our relatives are ashamed of us. We learn instead to honor new kinds of lineage.
But during that initial year of estrangement, I kept landing on the same conclusion: if I was going to build a chosen family, I first needed to know everything about my birth family. As a light-skinned Latinx person who had for years identified as “mestiza,” I knew my findings would be complicated, to say the least. Still, I didn’t want to let the fear of finding violence and erasure at the roots of my family tree deter me.
So I subscribe to Ancestry.com and get lost on the website for days. It’s the seventh month of the pandemic, but somehow, diligently performing archival research on a corporation’s website reassures me. I uncover records, click buttons, construct more and more branches, and enlarge my shelter. Every hour that I sink into the website feels like the only worthwhile thing I have ever done with my time. I imagine I am sleeping under the canopy of my growing tree each night.
It doesn’t take me long to uncover our family connection to genocide: on my mother’s side, my family line extends back to a woman named Mariana Leonor, daughter of Moctezuma, the ruler of the Aztec Empire. During his dealings with the Spanish, Moctezuma gave Mariana Leonor to the conquistador Hernán Cortés, either as a gift, as was custom, or for her own protection. Soon after, Moctezuma died under unclear circumstances while a prisoner of the Spanish. What’s certain is that Cortés later took over Tenochtitlan, destroying it and building Mexico City on its ruins.
If the records are accurate, my blood carries traces of the birth of Spanish colonization; mine was among the first families of mixed Indigenous and Spanish heritage. The fifteen women’s names are what I inherit from that violence.
1Whereas, the oppressor implants their DESIGN
into every h(a)unted bloodline —
this country: everyone’s
inheritance2By which you mean, the oppressor
runs through the bodies
their bullets miss?— George Abraham, “Inheritance”
On ancestry forums, heritage-obsessed users debate the facticity of Moctezuma’s supposed descendants. Some cite Margo Tamez’s dissertation on Indigenous women in Mexico, which posits that Petronila Moctezuma — my alleged great-grandmother, twelve generations back — may have been the daughter of Leonor, who was the daughter of Mariana Leonor, who was the daughter of Moctezuma and his wife Acatlan.
Acatlan. Mariana Leonor. Leonor. Petronila. Juana Gabay. Maria Yslas. Juana Gonzalez. Luisa. Juana Casillas. Juana Josefa. Micaela. Ana María. Nepomucena. Josefa. Cecilia. Margarita. Rosa. Me.
Others argue that Petronila may have never existed. They cite Donald E. Chipman’s book Moctezuma’s Children: Aztec Royalty under Spanish Rule, 1520–1700 and claim that no land or inheritance was ever left in Petronila’s name. Still others point out that it’s hardly unbelievable that a family in the 1500s excluded a woman’s name from legal documents of inheritance.
For hours, I spiral down the ancestry forums where these arguments take place: hundreds of people doing the same kind of research, asking the same kinds of questions, desperate to confirm their relationship to a king. One man swears he saw a document proving Petronila’s existence at a Mormon library on Santa Monica Boulevard, before the library closed for renovations. “I know it exists and that I had it in my hands,” the man writes. He even offers: “If you want, I will take a lie detector test as proof that I have seen the record.” This is the clientele I have joined: people frantically rifling through records for any sign of their indigeneity, laboring to learn the truth of their own blood.
In their article “Decolonization is not a metaphor,” Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang write about the way settlers — specifically white Americans — use discoveries from ancestry websites to “deflect a settler identity, while continuing to enjoy settler privilege and occupying stolen land” by using distant indigenous ancestors “to mark themselves as blameless in the attempted eradications of Indigenous peoples.” Tuck and Yang quote Vine Deloria Jr. on his concept of the “Indian Grandmother Complex”: “While a real Indian grandmother is probably the nicest thing that could happen to a child, why is a remote Indian princess grandmother so necessary for many white [people]? Is it because they are afraid of being classed as foreigners? Do they need some blood tie with the frontier and its dangers in order to experience what it means to be an American? Or is it an attempt to avoid facing the guilt they bear for the treatment of the Indians?”
Though I know this commentary cannot be wholly transposed to the Mexican-American
Indigenous context, the parallels still give me pause. If Petronila existed, and I am her descendant, do I believe that makes me any more “Mexican”? Or blameless? Am I on Ancestry.com attempting to deflect something? Attempting to find some easy archival escape from acknowledging my own whiteness? Attempting to assuage my own guilt? And now, after so many hours of careful research, I know that I may well be the progeny of “a remote Indian princess.” But why do I need her?
My kinship to Moctezuma aside, I hit dead ends when investigating other branches of my family tree. The people I do find have no documentation of their last names, their parents, their birthdays. Almost all the records I read derive from the Catholic Church, not the Mexican or Spanish governments. And yet even in the Catholic system — known for its meticulous record-keeping — so many family members are missing.
One person in a forum writes: “It’s been my experience that once you’ve identified through the records that your ancestor was designated as ‘Indio’ at some point it gets hard to trace them.” Another person tells of finding an ancestor through their Spanish wife: “She was listed as ‘española’ and it listed her last name as well as her parents. The groom, however, was listed as ‘Indio’ and there was no mention of his last name or the last name of his parents.”
I have spent months indulging my curiosity about the lineage of Moctezuma, this one powerful ancestor. But thousands of my descendants lived lives to which no record attests, lives not legitimized by any institution’s record-keeping. Those who didn’t belong to the nobility, those who never married a Spaniard, those whose lineage remained Indigenous, those whose lineage remained Black. Because the powerful did not legitimize their stories, it’s as if they never existed.
In colonial Mexico, the state endorsed marriages through the concept of limpieza de sangre — literally “a cleaning of blood.” Spanish conquistadors who married Indigenous women would then marry their daughters to other Spanish men in hopes that their grandchildren would be deemed Spanish — and white again. In his 1774 book, A Description of the Kingdom of New Spain, Pedro Alonso O’Crouley describes the rule:
If the mixed-blood is the offspring of a Spaniard and an Indian, the stigma [of race mixture] disappears at the third step in descent because it is held as systematic that a Spaniard and an Indian produce a mestizo; a mestizo and a Spaniard, a castizo; and a castizo and a Spaniard, a Spaniard.
In just three generations, with strategic marriage into Spanish families, Mexican/Indigenous blood could be “clean” again. To be clear, for Black folks, limpieza de sangre was not possible. No amount of strategic marriage could ever be enough. O’Crouley again: “From the union of a Spaniard and a Negro the mixed-blood retains the stigma for generations without losing the original quality of a mulato.”
In George Abraham’s poem “Inheritance,” they describe their Palestinian bloodline by writing: “THERE IS A ONE-IN-THREE CHANCE / THIS BODY SHARES / A CHROMOSOME WITH THE OPPRESSOR.” They refer to a Palestinian body as “practically an erasure of itself.”
Ever since Moctezuma’s defeat, my family has become an erasure of itself, its whiteness manufactured through strategic marriage and rape that disappeared our indigeneity at that “third step.” The fifteen generations of women whose names I know are simply women the Catholic Church deemed white enough to document. The names I discover are the names they wanted discoverable. As I search through Ancestry.com’s records, ancient birth certificates flash on screen, notifying me “Potential Mother Found” and offering a name that may have signified “mother” to one of my ancestors. Each instance registers as a reckoning with my whiteness. Each “Zero Results: No Record Found” scans as a confirmation of genocide.
Acatlan. Mariana Leonor. Leonor. Petronila. Juana Gabay. Maria Yslas. Juana Gonzalez. Luisa. Juana Casillas. Juana Josefa. María Micaela. Ana María. Nepomucena. María Josefa. Cecilia. Margarita.
At a meetup for writers of color, when I share these names with the group, a Black woman responds, “So lucky. So many names.”
On Ancestry.com, under the subheading “The Diversity That Is Hispanic Research,” I see the following text:
Through a colonial experience that began a century before the earliest Anglo-American colonies were established and that lasted 50 to 100 years longer, Spanish characteristics, language, and institutions interacted — sometimes peacefully, sometimes violently — with indigenous peoples to form new nations and cultures.
“A colonial experience.” The theft of Indigenous land: an “interaction.” The forced assimilation into white, Spanish, Catholic ideals: “new races and cultures.” Later, the website calls these new races created by colonization “dynamic.” The result of the five-hundred-year genocidal project of colonization becomes “The Diversity That Is Hispanic Research.”
As I read, I see my generational trauma — and that of so many others — rebranded, marketed, cleaned, and sold back to me.
After three weeks of this research, it dawns on me that I will never unearth any official documentation of queerness in my family line, that such documentation on a family tree became possible only in the last few decades with the legalization of gay marriage. And it is still impossible within the Catholic Church, the source of all my family records.
In my lineage, I am the first person living in a time when queerness can be documented with the act of marriage. I think about my family, our two-year-long estrangement. My relationships could be the first queer branches written into our family tree. But even now that we have reconciled, I wonder: In their minds, is it still too dangerous to document me?
All I can ascertain about Acatlan is that she married Moctezuma and bore their daughter Mariana Leonor. I never dig up anything more, except in one book by alt-historian Peter G. Tsouras, who claims her name meant “Besides the Reeds” because “her gentleness was like the swaying of reeds in the breeze.”
I also never locate any details about Mariana Leonor’s eventual marriage to a Spanish conquistador. In every source I encounter about Mariana Leonor, she is described as “given away” to Cortés by Moctezuma. According to Hugh Thomas’s Conquest: Montezuma, Cortés, and the Fall of Old Mexico, when Cortés first arrived in Tenochtitlan, Moctezuma offered Cortés jewels and one of his daughters as “a delicious fruit.” (“Montezuma” is an alternate spelling of “Moctezuma.”) In Gregory Rodriguez’s recounting of conquistador Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s first-person narrative, The Conquest of New Spain, he writes that even while imprisoned, Moctezuma “provided three hundred women to act as servants to his jailers.”
Gifting women to powerful men was an established tradition in Mesoamerican society. When Cortés first arrived in the Americas, even before meeting Moctezuma, he met with the Tlaxcalan chief Xicotencatl, who presented his daughter and told him, “She is unmarried and a virgin. Take her for yourself — and give the others to your captains.”
I never can determine if Mariana Leonor was the first daughter given away by Moctezuma as the “delicious fruit.” I spend hours trying to unlock the truth, the minute details of the transaction, the exact terms of her marriage. When I am honest with myself, I recognize I am looking for the word “rape.” But that word never appears in the stories about Mariana Leonor. What I do know: after the defeat of Moctezuma, the Spaniards married into the noble Aztec class, but they also raided Indigenous villages across Mexico, raping Indigenous women and taking them as slaves and concubines.
In both the Spanish and Indigenous branches of my family tree, the women were passed around among men. From every branch of my ever-growing family tree, my body inherits powerlessness.
even when the land was ours
it wasn’t.
(this is how I feel about my body sometimes)— George Abraham, “Inheritance”
In a workshop I attended, somatic therapist Resmaa Menakem told Black participants and people of color: “The white body is used to having full unfettered access to our bodies for hundreds of years. It is relatively new in history that we have even some control over our own body and what we do with it.” I relate most to this statement as a woman. In my family, as in so many others, men have had unfettered access to women’s bodies for hundreds of years. I am the first woman in the fifteen generations I have tracked to have real control over my body.
Acatlan. Mariana Leonor. Leonor. Petronila. Juana Gabay. Maria Yslas. Juana Gonzalez. Luisa. Juana Casillas. Juana Josefa. Micaela. Ana María. Nepomucena. Josefa. Cecilia. Margarita.
What did their bodies endure? How many assaults? How many acts of violence? How much unwanted touch did they suffer because they needed financial security? How much aggression did they tolerate because there was no way to escape? In fifteen generations, how many times did they just have to take it? How many times was “just taking it” the decision that kept them alive?
My body inherits their answers. I come from a lineage of nonconsent. I carry inside me fifteen generations of women unable to say “no” and survive.
It took years of being raped and assaulted to even apply those words to myself and my experiences. “Rape” and “assault” imply an unexpected intrusion, a violation we could have never seen coming. But what happened to me I had expected, consciously or unconsciously. For fifteen generations, my body had prepared itself. My inheritance is sexual assault as a woman’s rite of passage. We know how to ritualize it. We know when it’s time to tell the stories of our grandmothers, and their grandmothers, and back and back and back.
These days, I refer to myself as a “survivor,” even though I don’t totally identify with the term, since it seems to imply that sexual assault is a single, isolated incident. I think of survivors of natural disasters, or monumental accidents like the sinking of a ship. But is it the right term for someone who has survived what every other woman in her lineage has survived? The right term for someone who is still surviving violations, over and over again? Most days, I don’t feel like a “survivor” so much as I feel like I am still surviving.
When I am twenty-eight, the day after I am raped by a stranger at a party, I spend the morning in a café, writing in my journal. I begin by writing dozens of pages about everything from the party I loved: the music, the costumes, the hilarious flirting, the mesmerizing woman in a white jumpsuit I met and couldn’t stop thinking about.
After dozens of pages of this, I write: “And then, of course, there was the sexual assault.”
On the quincentennial of the Spanish conquest of Mexico, two living descendants of Moctezuma and Hernán Cortés meet. Federico Acosta, a light-skinned Mexican man, is a descendant of Moctezuma. Ascanio Pignatelli, a light-skinned Italian man, traces his ancestry back to Cortés’s daughter.
They meet in Mexico City and embrace. Pignatelli apologizes for the atrocities of colonization. Acosta claims no apology is necessary. He does not condemn the conquistador; he says he believes they should be judged by the standards of their long-ago day. “It’s not that there were good people and bad people; it’s that that’s the way things were done,” he tells reporters at the event. “In the end, we are all family now.”
My mother’s country has one of the highest rates of femicide in the world. In the last thirty-five years, more than fifty thousand Mexican women have been murdered — many by their own husbands. To this day, in nineteen Mexican states, statutory rape charges can be dropped if the rapist agrees to marry his victim. In Oaxaca, the criminal act of rapto — the practice of kidnapping a woman “with the intent of marrying her, or to satisfy his ‘erotic sexual desire’” — is still considered only a minor infraction. One legislator has called the practice “harmless and ‘romantic.’”
Maybe Acosta was right. We are all family now. In Latin America, this was part of colonization’s strategy: make the violence come from inside your own home, your own family, your own blood.
In an interview with The Atlas Review, George Abraham says that they believe “every poem is built out of a lineage,” that its existence owes to a long history of other poems, stories, and works of art.
The way I tell my family’s story will itself become an inheritance. The words I use and do not use, the names I know and do not know, my half-complete tree on a corporation’s website — these are the remaining survivors. This will become what is left.
Abraham writes: “WHAT IS NARRATIVE IF NOT THE BLOOD / IT CARRIES?”
Lately, the blood I carry feels like the story of everything: of my queerness, of my experience of assault. Regardless of the chosen family I have built and will continue building, I cannot ignore the reality of my bloodline, a bloodline that belongs to both those who were hunted by their oppressors and those who are haunted by their ancestors’ sins.
In “A Glossary of Haunting,” Eve Tuck and C. Ree write: “Haunting doesn’t hope to change people’s perceptions, nor does it hope for reconciliation. Haunting lies precisely in its refusal to stop.” And on the next page: “Haunting is the cost of subjugation. It is the price paid for violence, for genocide.” Later, she goes on: “With some crimes of humanity — the violence of colonization — there is no putting to rest.”
I am a settler on Indigenous land, and I am a body carrying blood that marked the beginning of Spanish colonization. I am the product of strategic rape. I am as white as my family has decided to be. My lineage began nonconsensually, and it has continued that way for generations. Nearly two years of ancestry research have passed, and I know there is no putting to rest. The hunting never stopped. The haunting shouldn’t either.