From this time on, humor and satire replace shock. El País stated that among the consigned, “there are young men who walk up and down the boulevards every day showing off their stylish dresses, closely fitted to perfection, wearing expensive jewelry.” “The first twelve individuals who were at the notorious dance were called up in turn. When the thirteenth, a riffraff, heard his name, he answered: Presente mi capitán; pero hago constar que yo voy consignado por ratero; pero no soy de esos, [Present, my captain, but, for the record, I am being consigned as a petty thief; I’m not one of them], pointing to the group of dancers.” During the Porfirio Díaz administration, any press references to sexual heterogeneity were veiled. But starting in 1901, due to a scandalous raid on a clandestine dance where forty-two men were detained, many of them dressed as women, that the subject assumed importance. From that night on, in Mexican culture, to say “forty-one” was both a reference to homosexuality and [an indicator of] intolerance.Through portraits and caricatures, artists such as Diego Rivera (1886-1957), José Clemente Orozco (1883-1949) and Antonio Ruiz (1897-1964) ridiculed and attacked the feminization of a certain sector of Mexican culture.
