A hunched-over white man, limbs chained, is being led by two jaguar warriors brandishing war club and shield across a crowded square. Great Aztec idols survey the tableau of what is surely the prelude to bloody sacrifice neath.
This is the cover of the November 1924 issue of Weird Tales magazine, boasting a “complete novelette by Ramon de las Cuevas.”
A few pages later, the banner image of this novelette titled “Teoquitla the Golden” shows the reader what appears to be a white woman bedecked in jewelry (with a particularly notable septum ring) staring determinedly into the distance, gossamer veils blowing in the breeze against a backdrop of Mesoamerican pyramids.
One could then perhaps reasonably have expected the tale of an explorer encountering a lost city and falling under the spell of a white jungle queen in the manner of H. Rider Haggard’s Ayesha, or Edgar Rice Burroughs’ La of Opar.
However, de las Cuevas—a pseudonym of early 20th century archaeologist Mark Raymond Harrington—had rather a different turn in store.
“Teoquitla” opens on an ocean steamer around the Eastern cape of Cuba, carrying two American academics: Branson, a medical doctor, and Lewis. The sight of a cave system sends them to musing on indigenous rituals. Lewis reveals himself to be en route to Guatemala to study the Mayan pyramids there, and will soon be joined by his wife (though her focus is on Aztec rather than Mayan culture). They exchange tall tales of indigenous magic: spurned women slipping white lovers a potion turning their skin black, sorcerers who could change men into women…
This causes Branson to reveal an incident that befell him and his wife some years ago when they were living in Veracruz. The doctor’s tale begins with an old mendicant wrapped in filthy rags, collapsing on the Bransons’ porch in search of “the white doctor”. This turns out to be the beautiful woman from the story’s image banner. Confused and desperate, she stumblingly introduces herself as Maria Dorada de Rey, and relays that she’s been on the run for days, since her husband Juan was murdered shortly after their wedding.
Maria claims to be an American who has lived among the Aztecs in the jungle for years after a mysterious illness robbed her of her identity—Maria is a name she chose herself, “Teoquitla” (or “la Dorada” in Spanish, the golden one) being a nickname she was given due to her complexion. She is loath to recount her story, but assures the couple she has it all written down in a diary among her meager belongings.
She inquires about Robert Sanderson, a name Branson recalls: a young American adventurer who stayed at his house years before. Sanderson hid a cache of gold nearby before he set off into the jungle, the location of which Maria is privy to. It is here that Branson notices Maria might very well be Sanderson’s twin sister.
They retrieve the cache and make ready for Maria’s repatriation stateside. During these preparations, Maria writes down the final part of her story, impressing upon the Bransons only to read it after she’s left.
Simultaneously, Mrs. Branson takes Maria under her wing as, despite her lovely looks, the poor dear seems to have forgotten how to clothe and groom herself in the fashionable mid-10s manner, having spent so many years in the jungle.
After Maria’s departure, the Bransons set upon the two-fold narrative of Teoquitla the Golden—one part painted with a brush on native maguey paper, the second on stationery provided by Mrs. Branson.
Any pretense at ambiguity is instantly dropped: the author is Teoquitla, once Robert Sanderson. Playboy adventurer Sanderson used to despise women, embarking upon affairs willy nilly, ghosting them once he got bored.
Upon one fact university-sponsored expedition in the Mexican jungle, trying to ascertain the whereabouts of a rumored settlement of Nahua, Aztecs of old, he strikes up with Conchita, daughter of the couple where he is boarding. After telling her he is absolutely not planning to take her with him back to America, Conchita hangs herself.
Fleeing the village under cover of night, he is set upon by men dressed as warriors of Montezuma, who shackle him with the ancient fetters of the conquistadors. After days in a solitary jungle hut, Sanderson is brought to the lost city of Nahuatlan.
There, he is given a choice by the king Montezuma: he can be sacrificed to the goddess Centeotl for the dishonoring of an Aztec woman, or to the war god Huitzilopochtli for causing the death of an Aztec. From descriptions given, Sanderson deduces that the sacrifice to Centeotl does not end in death, so that is his choice.
After being garbed in the dress of the goddess, Sanderson is told his word will be law until the ritual. For a solid month, the American is an incarnation of Centeotl on earth, advising citizens who seek Centeotl’s audience on agricultural and even legal matters. During this period, Sanderson witnesses a gruesome sacrifice to Huitzilopochtli and notices a select group of white-clad women who bear golden septum rings that arouse a particular disgust in the prisoner.
When the trial period is up, Sanderson is brought to an altar in front of the steps of Centeotl’s pyramid and subjected to an elaborate ritual where strange liquids are injected into him via gourds and cane tubes, wielded by temple women, causing the prisoner to faint in agony.
The recuperative period is one of fevers and dolors, sloughed skin and wild deliriums. When the American wakes up, she finds herself transformed and given the name Teoquitla. To her great disgust, the temple woman’s nose ring is forced upon her. While she briefly ponders the possibility of being changed back, she is told this is impossible. Giving in to life as a temple woman, she finds it is actually quite gratifying. Over time, she comes to the conclusion that this punishment is hardly one at all.
Time passes—in the frame story, we learn it’s been four years in total— and Montezuma falls in love with her. While initially reluctant to become romantically entangled with a man, Teoquitla returns his affections.
It is here that the narrative jumps to Mrs. Branson’s stationery. Teoquitla demands Montezuma wed her in a white man’s ceremony to keep her an upright woman, and they sneak out of the valley to fulfill her request. They are married by a Protestant minister, under the names Juan de Rey and Maria Dorada. Their marital bliss is short-lived, however, as a bandit raid claims the life of “Juan.”
Dissuaded by her dying husband from returning to the valley, as the Nahuatl will blame her for his death, she strikes out as a beggar until one day she hears of an American doctor near Veracruz. Signing off, thanking the Bransons, Maria ends her tale by confiding in the reader she wishes she had the nerve to call herself Roberta Sanderson de Montezuma, Queen of Mexico—her rightful title.
A deathly pale Lewis confides to Branson that he has realized that Maria Rey is none other than his Aztec specialist wife. He tosses the bundle with her story into the ocean, and the two men shake hands.
“Teoquitla the Golden” is a surprisingly open-minded and accepting version of what we would today call a trans narrative.
Published only a few years after the earliest medical gender affirmation procedures at Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in Berlin, “Teoquitla” is surprisingly sympathetic to its heroine, and indeed the very concept of transitioning.
While a darkly ironic punishment is hubristically visited upon the protagonist, the behavior that requires such vengeance is misogyny, not gender nonconformity. Once she’s accepted her lot in life, Teoquitla muses that this isn’t much of a punishment at all: she is content, but poor Conchita is still dead. The transition itself is seen as a form of restorative justice.
Instead of a rotting corpse, we have a useful and good-looking human being as ready to take on life as before, just in a different capacity.
In fact, there’s a bit of the old romance novel to this: a sexy vampire or fae lord or billionaire CEO forces our heroine into all these kinky scenarios, so that our intended reader can maintain plausible deniability for enjoying them. Here too, our heroine simply hates all of this:
Most boys have masqueraded in their sister’s petticoats, at some time or other, but I had always so disliked women that this kind of fun never appealed to me. To be obliged to wear woman’s dress was a bitter pill.
This layer of “lady protesting too much” might have been useful in 1924 (and possibly even necessary to get past the Weird Tales editors), it did serve to push me away a bit. The first unqualified instance of gender euphoria comes very near the end:
We had been married under the names, assumed on a moment’s notice, of Juan Rey and Maria Dorada, so as I rode my heart was singing, “Now I am Señora Maria Dorada de Rey! Or, if I only dared tell it, I am Roberta de Montezuma, Queen of Nahuatlan and rightful Queen of Mexico!”
Still, the fact that we do get this turn in her is nothing to sniff at. Even with the tragedy that would soon befall this happy couple, Maria still gets a happy ending. On top of that, when her second husband finds out, he simply decides to bury the truth. Considering it was only meant for the Bransons, what’s the harm?
Teoquitla’s instant and deep revulsion over the nose rings is somewhat inexplicable. In fact, she is portrayed during her captivity as Sanderson to be amazed and fascinated at artifacts she is confronted with, even in her terror. After the transformation ritual, she is horrified at having become the thing she hates most—a woman. The ultimate degradation is the fastening of the septum ring, the one thing she had witnessed in Nahuatl that disgusted her.
And yet, this is a different form of bondage than the conquistador fetters placed on Sanderson upon first capture:
The first white men that came to this country bound our chiefs with such things; and we give every white man who falls a prisoner in our hands a dose of his own medicine. But these chains are the only works of the invader you will see in this valley, for here we live our own life, free in the last unconquered domain of the Montezumas.
Maria is entirely sympathetic to this, seeing as in the opening paragraph of her missive, she writes:
I could tell exactly where [the lost city of Nahuatl] lies, but I dare not, for fear that this manuscript may find its way outside someday, and might lead strangers into the happy valley to the destruction of this splendid people, whose only outstanding fault, so far as I can discover, is their addiction to human sacrifice.
It reads as a dark joke, but she had just recently learned about the Great War being ongoing, so the occasional human sacrifice may indeed have sounded like a minor peccadillo compared to what was going on at the Somme.
The nose ring is a perfect microcosm of the text’s ambiguity towards Aztec culture: a general sense of admiration and respect, which must instantly be subordinated to personal preferences. Take, for instance, the fact that, though Teoquitla is happy to marry an indigenous man, she demands a Christian wedding—religiosity at no point having been part of her character up until then. Montezuma indeed even acquiesces, so taken is he with this white woman’s beauty, to his doom.
Was Harrington, scholar of pre-Columbian civilizations, publishing anonymously, exorcising some personal demons? Or was he merely being a prurient exploitation artist? Either way, I’m glad Maria Lewis got into academia. Pretty rough for a woman in the 20s.
“Teoquitla the Golden” may be read for free at the Internet Archive.
Luana Saitta (she/her) is a Belgian-Italian pulp enthusiast and sword and sorcery author. You can find her short stories of dashing adventure, including the popular “Zeynep & Kawtar” series, at https://luanawrites.carrd.co/ . She is also the co-host of Defend Your Trash Movie, wherever you find your podcasts.
Copyright 2026 Luana Saitta.
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