My Chilean Catholic education, infused with colonial perceptions, had not prepared me to question the "natural" relationship between sex, gender, and sexuality. Like most Chilean academics, I was blind to the ethnic, political, and power implications in the sodomy labels hurled at indigenous people by colonial agents. Colonial assumptions and modern Chilean misreadings of colonial texts had distorted Reche gender epistemologies and machi weye subjectivities. In the pages that follow, I reread machi gender identities in the colonial period by taking colonial power dynamics into consideration. I contrast Reche perceptions of machi with those of Spanish and criollo soldiers and Jesuit priests and explore the process by which the two groups´ categories gradually merged.