Thomas A. Abercrombie's historiography is an impressive tome tracing gender roles, expression, and fluidity from the metropole through the Spanish colonies in the eighteenth century. Abercrombie spent the better part of a decade piecing together the story of the book's protagonist, Yta, to explain the layers of fashion and fashioning that would make a transatlantic gender journey possible. Abercrombie draws largely from primary documents, namely, the court transcriptions of Yta's divorce filings, which priests and lawyers later label a confession of Yta's sex assigned at birth. The author handedly paints a picture of what life would be like for someone of Yta's station and gender expression existing in places ranging from convents to mines, occasionally weaving in a discussion about the development and deployment of race in the colonies.
Abercrombie makes clear that he is not here to label Yta with “the terms represented in the acronym LGBTQIA” (8), arguing...
