ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with a brief examination of Indigenous sexual ideas and norms before going on to discuss changes that accompanied the introduction and institutionalization of Christianity. To the 1760s or 1770s the church had complete legal control over marital issues in all parts of Spanish and Portuguese Latin America. The earliest royal instructions (in 1501, 1504, and 1514) encouraged marriage between European men and Indian women in the Caribbean, with governors instructed to “make sure that some Christian men marry some Indian women and Christian women marry Indian men, so that they will communicate with and teach each other. The Spanish military conquest of what became Latin America was remarkably swift, and the church was nearly as swift in establishing ecclesiastical structures modeled on those of Europe. The issue of same-sex relations in precolonial Latin America is complicated and contentious. Latin American Christianity became part of a new shared culture, though a culture with many local differences.
