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From Whores to Prostitutes

I conjure you, gloomy Pluto, lord of the depths of hell; emperor of the court of the damned. . . . I, Celestina, am the best known of those who summon you, I conjure you . . . through the powerful serpents’ venom from which this oil was compounded, and with which I anoint this thread. Come in all haste to obey my will, wrap yourself within its loops. . . .

I have everything anyone might want. Because wherever my voice is heard, I want to be prepared to set out my bait and set things in motion on my first visit.

Put your arms around each other and kiss, for I have nothing left but to enjoy watching. As long as you are at table, everything from the waist up is allowed. When you move away from it, I will set no limits because the King sets none.¹

Before royal decrees mandated brothel closures, the fictional Celestina did it all: consulting women on their beauty regimes, running a brothel where she entertained many couples, and weaving seductive spells into ensorcelled thread, leading lovers to their tragic ends. Her powers revolved around her constant and persuasive talk, her use of dark magical conjurations, and the fact that the crown had not yet made selling sex illegal. This chapter is about how words eventually destroyed alcahuetas such as Celestina, as well as the new terminology for (and thus status of) public women, sometimes known as whores. During the seventeenth century, a significant shift took place in the conceptual history of transactional sex in the Iberian world, a movement toward the creation of the diseased, criminalized, and/or victimized prostitute, who, by the early eighteenth century, began to fill the shoes of the still-working sinful and immoral whore. However, this wording and the new kinds scribal seductions that it generated did not end the exchange of sex for cash, as rich and powerful men (as well as their poorer fellow clients) continued to want it and willingly pay for it. In fact, transforming women from morally corrupt and sinning whores to pity-inducing prostitutes may have even increased their eroticism for their wealthy patrons and the scribes who described them (who may have been at times one and the same person).

Throughout the seventeenth century, the traditional vocabulary of procuring (alcahueta, consentidora) predominates in the available cases, although the word puta also appears both in marriage disputes and Holy Office investigations, especially when the scribes wrote the precise wording of insults exchanged between litigants.² When the authorities of this era assume a more elevated tone in their pronouncements, they used vaguer terminology such as “worldly women [mujeres mundanas]” or “women who lead evil lives.”³ A transition occurred when the term prostitute, after 1700, started to become a common label applied with disdain and censure or pity and objectification. The new use of this word explicitly signified trading money for services and put a greater emphasis on greed for rewards, or victimization by a panderer, while both the older and ongoing use of “whore” more vaguely referred (and refers) to a woman with a publicly sexual reputation, who may or may not make an income off her sex acts.⁴

Although bilingual Spanish dictionaries mentioned the word prostituir and its translations into French, Italian, German, and English, dating back to the early seventeenth century, the words prostituta and prostitución do not appear in a Spanish monolingual dictionary until the end of the eighteenth century. Before then, French/Spanish bilingual dictionaries translate prostitution simply as abandonnement. The English translation offered is “debauched, exposed to common life.” In 1783, the Spanish definition takes on a more sexual tone: “abandoned to all types of lewdness and sensuality.” In 1788, Esteban de Terreros y Pando defines it as “abandonment to licentious lewdness, infamy,” hearkening back to the traditional understanding of a whore. His definition for prostituta includes references to medieval terms such as “ramera [whore],” as well as the general idea of a prostitute as a lost or public woman, but he also significantly brings greed into the picture, mentioning “intereses” or gain.⁵ Terreros y Pando also explains prostituir as a metaphorical insult in reference to corrupt, bribable judges or authors.

Coinciding with the gradual increase in the use of the term prostitution was the slow decline in stature of the medieval bawd. While the fourteenth-century Ruiz presented Trotaconventos (aka “Good Love”—a name that also had a religious resonance in this work) as an appealing, helpful, and funny character (chapter 1), in contrast, Celestina’s erotic black magic caused both murder and suicide in Fernando de Rojas’s 1499 work entitled Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea.⁶ Rojas may have interpreted such a loquacious woman who operated in the public sphere as a horrifying contrast to the moral female, who ideally closed herself off in both her sex and her speech.⁷ Every character in the Tragicomedy understood Celestina as a slick talker who could trick innocent women into committing sinful acts. The fact that she talked for a living defined Celestina as a disgraced woman and a danger to others. With his tale of Celestina’s negative influence on the lives of her clients, Rojas warns readers to avoid old women who profit from their immense experience in the sexual realm. While she communicated great confidence in her function, other characters viewed her as notorious and infamous, or worse, a greedy witch who deserved a brutal, violent death.

Although she causes multiple tragedies, this early-modern bawd still speaks at times as a very sympathetic character. Celestina’s soliloquies and persuasive discussions with her clients reveal her understanding of the cruel nature of love and sexual desire in her historic context. Humans crave sex like beasts, according to Celestina, and without a mediator’s help, they would have no way to verbalize and thus satisfy their needs. She organizes sexual encounters in a perilous setting where people lose their health to unrequited passions and speak their affections and emotions painfully, because no licit sexual communication or fulfillment exists. Despite her proud self-assertions, Celestina also plaintively explains that, without inherited wealth or land, plotting affairs and selling potions provide her with the only way that she can earn an income.⁸

In this chapter, investigations of three Mexico City celestinas document both their traditional association with sorcery and the highly domestic and distinctly African and indigenous culture of seventeenth-century transactional sex. Framed by these cases in Mexico City, here I also discuss King Phillip IV’s two decrees that banned brothels in his territories, tracing the seventeenth-century transition from an open and widespread tolerance of bawds and brothels to the gradual criminalization of the occupation that became known, by the early eighteenth century, as “prostitution.” In this era, the crown forbade brothels, but this mandate was an empty rhetorical gesture with no practical application within the Mexican criminal justice system. Although Phillip IV and his advisors inscribed brothels and public women as important and widespread moral concerns, their judicial functionaries in the New World did not carry through on the mandates with effective policing and suppression. Why would they, when many of them wanted to continue to patronize these women? In response to these hidden scribal seductions, the archives of transactional sex did not expand in the seventeenth century. If they did, they have since disappeared.

Arguably, crown regulations created a paradoxical juridical quagmire for viceregal judicial officials. Sanctions against transactional sex led to sparser documentation, which did not increase until well into the eighteenth century, an era when crown reformers prized written reports and statistics. To acknowledge that sex for sale still existed, which would happen if anyone started a secular court case against a brothel manager, meant that local law enforcement had to admit that, up to that point, it had disregarded the king’s decrees. Additionally, a case from 1621 demonstrates that high-ranking bureaucrats comprised the brothels’ key clientele. Within the complicated legal setting of overlapping imperial jurisdictions, hypocrisy, and subjects’ need to show their obedience to the crown, instead of more criminal cases against brothels, a new group of royal functionaries found their niche in the indirect prosecution of bawds for African- and indigenous-influenced sorcery, a goal that fit more comfortably within the imperial mindset than writing limitations on male sexual proclivities. The American Holy Office Tribunal of the Spanish Inquisition investigated the popular practice of love magic, fueled by a European perception of indigenous and African colonial subjects as allied with the devil, and as potential sexual corrupters of Spanish women. In an urban, plebeian context, the authorities also worried about how the practice of seventeenth-century erotic magic disregarded official viceregal racial identities by bringing women together to cooperate in their goals of finding well-paying male patrons.⁹

Rojas’s multitalented literary creation anticipated two bawds prosecuted by the Mexican tribunal of the Holy Office: Isabel de San Miguel, a procuress, con artist, and love-magic practitioner investigated by the Mexico City Inquisition tribunal in 1617; and the early-eighteenth-century innkeeper Doña Nicolasa de Guzman, who is discussed at the end of this chapter. These cases demonstrate both continuities and change over time in the archives of transactional sex. Both bawds found themselves involved in a Holy Office case due to their erotic magic rituals. Because their jurisdiction concerned heretical religious practices as opposed to lesser moral “sin-crimes” such as adultery, the inquisitors did not take a great interest in the details of the affairs that these women promoted but focused instead on the words, rituals, and objects that they used to influence the sex lives of their clientele. The inquisitors demonstrated an almost anthropological curiosity in recording spells that suggested the presence of African or indigenous healing practices.¹⁰ Due to this scrutiny of their presumed non-European enchantments, Guzman and San Miguel faced Holy Office prosecution for sorcery not bawdry, despite the continuing illegality of procuring and, in the later case, the crown’s decrees prohibiting brothels and establishing the policing of public women. Popular erotic rituals refused to die out, even as the vocabulary for transactional sex began to transform into more familiar criminalizing terms. Although her magical practices represented a Mexican version of Celestina’s late-medieval swindles and tricks, Doña Nicolasa de Guzman also managed a very modern scam, making money off of what the authorities of the era had just begun to label “prostitution.” After the criminalization of brothels, which only added to the longstanding disdain for bawds, the eighteenth-century inquisitors had more sympathy for Guzman’s employees, who assumed a stance as victims in the written records.

A 1617 Holy Office investigation made an explicit connection between sorcery and earning money off sex with men.¹¹ A constable denounced Isabel de San Miguel, also known as Isabel Guixarro, a mestiza, to the inquisitors as a bawd and a trickster or embustera, who used magic to drive men mad with irrational desire for certain women. Witnesses labeled San Miguel as a renowned alcahueta, although they did not refer to her business as a brothel. It certainly seemed like it had this function: men confessed that they gathered at her house to socialize and eat with a variety of women before outings to the theater.¹² As well as offering this congenial hospitality, San Miguel organized and helped maintain illicit sexual relationships. Once she made the male partners smitten through her sorcery, San Miguel would offer the couples food, drink, and a bed in her house, hiding their affairs.

San Miguel derived her income from the relationships that she masterminded. As a poor woman who did not live with her working-class husband, she had already suffered imprisonment, banishment, and lashings at the hands of secular justice.¹³ All of this probably resulted from her lack of elite clientele—she had no one to effectively protect her from judicial repercussions. The Holy Office inquiry questioned two of her humble female employees: two slaves, the thirty-year-old black woman Gerónima de Mendoza and the thirty-three-year-old mulatta Francisca Negrete. These women did not live with the bawd but with their own respective masters. Allegedly, San Miguel commanded Negrete to seek out men at various houses in order to seduce them into “desiring her” and rewarding her. San Miguel also organized a relationship between Mendoza and her nephew, a blacksmith. Her matchmaking efforts took place after San Miguel complained to her nephew about her dire poverty.¹⁴

When the affair between the blacksmith and Mendoza broke up, the enslaved woman felt very melancholic and jealous of her ex-lover’s new companion. After consulting with another sorceress who lived in the barrio of Santiago Tlatelolco, San Miguel tried to sell Mendoza a spell to seduce the blacksmith again. The spell involved using a tecomate or jug filled with clean water in Isabel’s room. The two women made cuts in each corner of the room with a knife and extracted some dirt, which they placed in the tecomate. San Miguel took a small insect or reptile from her breast and mixed it with some dust or dried herbs and stirred the mixture inside the tecomate. She then raised the jug to her ceiling then down to her floor, and beat it with her hands. After carrying out this ritual, the bawd ordered Mendoza to bathe her genitals and underarms with the mixture. San Miguel also directed her to mix it into her lover’s hot chocolate. The blacksmith nephew confirmed that his aunt commonly did this kind of spell as part of her work to bring lovers together in her house. The inquisitors ordered San Miguel to jail and questioned her, but the case record ends at this point, with the accused affirming her innocence. This case demonstrates the popularity of indigenous spells and the diverse sexual milieu where Afro-descended women worked for Spanish or possibly mestiza bawds to have affairs with plebeian men. At this moment, written documentation of transactional sex survives only due to its affiliation with non-European magic and the inquisitors’ desire to record such practices.

Another case also highlights a multiracial milieu for transactional sex and the domestic, intimate tone that prevailed in the sixteenth century. Just two years before the royal decree that banned brothels, a Spanish woman ran a kind of early-modern love hotel or house of assignation in Mexico City. In this case, aided by her rich and powerful clientele, the bawd, matchmaker, and innkeeper Ana Bautista received quite a lenient judgment after an investigation by the archdiocesan court for the crimes of procuring and concubinage.¹⁵ Like Catalina García in chapter 1, Bautista enjoyed the support of men who were very likely her clients and eager to defend her excellent character in court. This trial reveals that negotiated sexual philandering among both men and women extended far into the highest ranks of Spanish society, even involving viceregal courtiers, and that a respectable woman might have success as a bawd while retaining her good reputation, aided by elite male protection.

As the forty-five-year-old widow of a high court attorney (procurador), Bautista enjoyed long-term social contact across viceregal race and class hierarchies. She owned two different entertainment/hospitality venues and reportedly had at least two lovers since becoming a widow. Despite her husband’s elevated bureaucratic rank, she did not enjoy the honorific title doña and thus came from plebeian origins. Although labeled a Spaniard in the trial records, Bautista in the past had owned a lodging house/pulquería known as the “meson de la negra,” or the “black woman’s inn,” conveniently located adjacent to the house of female seclusion on the Calle de Jesus de la Penitencia.¹⁶ The name of her business suggests that her nonwhite ancestry played a role in her inability to attain the status of doña. At the time of her arrest, Bautista operated a different inn/pulquería near Mexico City’s slaughterhouse. At both locations, she convinced several women to have affairs with her guests and provided them with the food and lodgings that they needed to maintain their illicit relationships.¹⁷ Bautista was clearly an excellent businesswoman and knew how to manipulate her patrons’ support to protect her social and legal status at a level far above the efforts of her sixteenth-century predecessor Catalina García. However, neither of these women appears to have suffered extreme poverty, and both worked hard to cushion themselves with wealth and prosperity.¹⁸

Bautista procured for a wide range of men and women, allegedly persuading them into illicit acts that they would not have committed without her efforts. Witnesses listed a total of thirteen women and seventeen men, including widows and married and single individuals, who formed relationships due to her machinations and found an oasis for their affairs in her hospitable establishments. The hostess and bawd frequently coordinated liaisons between both male and female guests in her lodgings, both for residents or as a way to bring in more income in room rentals, food consumption, and, of course, pulque. When she suffered prosecution for her illegal sale of alcohol, one of her clients, an alguacil (a law enforcement functionary), protected her while continuing his affair with a married woman. If the couples argued or fought, Bautista counseled them to return to reunite peacefully and continue their liaisons. She received gifts, services, money, and protection for her bawdry and from her own lovers, one of whom confessed that he wasted a “great quantity of gold pesos” on her.¹⁹

During her trial process, the inquisitors confiscated and inventoried her belongings, which was standard procedure for the tribunal and was how this institution funded itself. Although Bautista did not possess a huge number of goods, her rooms in the calle de la carnicería mayor had quite a luxurious feel, as did her dress. This was appropriate for a woman who ran a successful “casa publica” or brothel hosting wealthy men, even if these royal officials and their servants claimed to live there only as legitimate boarders.²⁰ Brothel-managers usually decorated their businesses to cater to at least the material standards of their intended clientele, if not with greater opulence than these men enjoyed in their own homes, in order to create and maintain an environment of fantasy and pleasure.²¹ Appropriate domestic comfort in this era required religious art, imports from Asia, and furniture or bedding that offered places for guests to sit or lie down. Bautista decorated her lodgings with numerous religious retablos, chairs, cushions (including nine made of “Chinese velvet”), and a gilded wooden bed with a canopy. All of her furnishings suggest the bawd’s ability to host several seated or lounging guests in relaxing comfort, especially in this era when many did not own a bed. Her clothes were all of imported fabrics in shades of black and brown, and she wore an elaborate black and gold velvet mantilla. Bautista’s accusers testified that her lovers gave her gifts of clothing as well as money.

Married men and women committing adultery had a safe meeting place in Bautista’s comfortable rooms, and some, including the bawd herself, enjoyed long-term illicit relationships. Most of her clients were labeled Spaniards, but she also procured lovers for two mulatas (both of whom were her servants and had affairs with Spanish men, including a cleric), a mulatto man, and a mestizo man. Over a period of time, Bautista’s male clients ranged from laborers to priests and royal bureaucrats.²²

Her elite clientele mitigated Bautista’s treatment during both her trial and sentencing. Instead of imprisonment during the trial, she endured only house arrest.²³ Despite the fact that Bautista herself had lovers, her defense formulated a case that solidified her reputation as an honest, secluded, and devoutly Christian innkeeper who made a small income by providing room and board for important, honorable men, even up to the level of an associate of the viceroy, the Marquis de Guadalcazar.²⁴ The fact that she had lodgers suggested that she could easily make money as a moral landlady, with no need to procure for her boarders. According to statements in defense of her character, including from an official affiliated with the local high court (audiencia), her accuser nursed a violent passion for her that led to attempts to seduce her, break into her house, shame her and her guests by calling Bautista a “whore [puta]” and her guests “cornudos [cuckolds],” and finally bring her up on charges.²⁵

The bawd and her defense team reformulated her bad reputation into a respectable one and created a victim out of an alleged evildoer in order to gain paternalistic sympathy from the judges.²⁶ Bautista denied all sexual misdeeds, and several useful witnesses, including the high court official, a notary, and two friars, backed up her claims to innocence. As a result of this appropriate script with approved characters for the judicial theater, the court absolved her of all accusations, requesting only that she sever all ties and contact with her alleged current lover.²⁷ This lenient outcome symbolizes the general presuppression viceregal tolerance for bawds and brothels. Closing brothels clearly clashed with viceregal popular practices, necessitating the erasure of bawds like Bautista from the surviving records until the late eighteenth century.

CRIMINALIZING BROTHELS

In 1623, Phillip IV (1621–1665) issued a royal decree to shut all brothels in his entire empire, from Spain to the Americas. This proclamation did little to curb sexual commerce. In fact, brothel closure only encouraged more sex work in the streets, taverns, or private homes, but with even less judicial control and regulation.²⁸ After the 1623 decree and another crown mandate seeking to enclose “worldly women” in 1661, the identities of so-called “public” women in Spanish America took on an increasing duality, as did this society’s approach to transactional sex overall. Brothel closure meant that sex for sale became an ever more open secret, a very common illicit act, but something that crown bureaucrats could not admit happened as a regular part of daily life. Regardless of the royal decrees, most unmarried women still needed male financial assistance to survive and prosper. They continued to support themselves by exchanging sex acts and extended sexual relationships for money and gifts from men. In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, regulation and illegality created opportunities for many women to pursue “kept woman” relationship status, sometimes with the help of erotic magic. Men, of course including various authorities, benefited from this illicit practice, and thus it remained undocumented.

Until after the mid-sixteenth century, no one debated public brothels’ legality or suggested closing them. They generated a large income for municipalities in Spain, and some of this profit funded charitable Catholic institutions.²⁹ Hints of future repression emerge in the 1560s, when Phillip II began to mandate stricter sanctions against bawds and ruffians, which led to their prosecution in New Spain, under the jurisdiction of the archbishop of Mexico (chapter 1). However, enforcing laws against independent procurers might have served not to suppress selling sex in general but instead to protect the licit income of crown or municipal brothels. The tide began to turn definitively against legal brothels when devastating syphilis outbreaks inspired preachers and clerics to interpret this plague as a divine punishment for lechery. Iberians understood syphilis as a new sexually transmitted disease in the late fifteenth century. It spread rampantly in the context of the Italian wars (where men and women of various nations gathered for both battles and sex) in the 1490s and continued to debilitate armies over the course of the sixteenth century and beyond.³⁰

Spanish brothels enjoyed their greatest prosperity in the mid-sixteenth century, but the ongoing incidence of syphilis led Phillip II to compose and enforce more intrusive regulations in 1570.³¹ After this point, on some kind of regular basis, brothel workers endured periodic medical inspections and had to leave the brothel for treatment if doctors found any trace of the pox. These reforms also warned against clandestine whores as destructive disease vectors, but this condemnation did not limit their clientele. Instead, by the late sixteenth century, working outside the brothel allowed elite concubines to avoid crown-mandated venereal-disease inspections.³² Despite increasing regulations, most men apparently did not understand how they might catch syphilis. And even if rudimentary condoms existed in this era, they would have been very expensive for many public women. Instead of fearing syphilis, as clerics suggested, clients took a blasé attitude toward the physical and mental devastation that this disease could cause.³³ A late-fifteenth-century doctor warned that men could safely “sleep with a sick woman” if she only had bubas (sores and rashes) in her mouth, as long as he did not kiss her. Some courtly, libertine men even bragged about their sores, rejecting any notion of shame for this alleged divine punishment for their sins. A humorous poem observed that all men, even friars, prelates, and the king, enjoyed membership in the “brotherhood of bubas.”³⁴ In the 1520s, observers still spoke of La Lozana’s beauty, and she continued to attract many paying lovers, despite the fact that “she couldn’t wear glasses if she wanted to” because “the pox” had “eaten away part of her nose.”³⁵

Cognizant of syphilis’s rampant spread, Spanish municipalities began founding hospitals to treat and quarantine syphilitics by the early sixteenth century. Mexico City had an institution that treated syphilitics by 1539, called the Hospital del Amor de Dios, although no archives record if the viceroyalties mandated health inspections among those marked as selling sex.³⁶ In Valencia, Spain, around one hundred people a year entered the syphilis hospital. Later, the annual total increased to several hundred men and women. By the end of the century, three or four individuals slept in every available bed.³⁷ The inmates were not all brothel workers, but only these women had to endure exams due to their occupation. Seville also converted a plague hospital to a “hospital de bubas” in 1586.³⁸

As syphilis provoked fears of divine retribution, Jesuit preachers started to speak against the corruptive influences of brothels in Seville. First, the Jesuits demanded the closure of Granada’s brothel, and then they turned their attention to Seville. They rejected the historic justification of legal brothels as a “lesser evil” that prevented widespread sodomy or adultery.³⁹ Jesuits began “invading” the Seville brothel after 1616, and their desire to preach sermons in these legal businesses greatly disrupted the trade. Enthusiasm increased for “reforming” women, and clerical moralizers heartily embraced a familiar discourse of female brothel workers as victims in desperate need of redemption. This rhetoric also led to the opening of homes for so-called “repentant” women. Seville’s city government devoted a great deal of time and effort to Jesuit proposals to reform the brothels, but by 1619, with the proclamation of strict new regulations, the brothel had declined precipitously. Women chose to abandon it for clandestine work, in a conscious choice to avoid the proposed frequent medical exams, sermons, and forced religious holidays that prevented them from earning a living.⁴⁰ By 1620, only eighteen women lived in Seville’s once prosperous and large brothel. The fate of Seville’s brothel may have had an influence on the almost invisible American brothels, as most Spanish immigrants passed through or spent time in this port.

Philip IV’s motivation for decreeing brothel closure derived from the overpowering influence of his favorite, the Count Duke of Olivares, the members of the Jesuit order, as well as writers who argued that legal whoring opened the door to the devil’s influence and who held that earthly law must acknowledge divine law and not promote sin.⁴¹ Some Spaniards expressed an understanding of the reign of his father, Philip III (1578–1621), as an era of moral laxity and felt that Spain would prosper if the land returned to a time that they perceived as more virtuous.⁴² In response to these pressures, on February 10, 1623, the young king made the following ruling:

Prohibition of brothels and public houses of women in all the towns of these kingdoms. We order and command, that from here forward, that in no villa, or settlement in these kingdoms, will be allowed or permitted, a brothel or public house, where women earn money with their bodies . . . we command that all be closed. ⁴³

The king charged his counselors and judicial officials to take particular care to carry out this order, with the threat of losing their offices and paying substantial fines. Many believed that in practice the criminalization of brothels increased social chaos. In 1631, Seville’s municipal authorities observed that their city suffered from far more street violence and disorder since the 1623 decree. They begged the king to allow a legal brothel again.⁴⁴

Mourned and mocked in songs and poems, including Francisco de Quevedo’s “Feelings of a jaque on the closing of the brothel,” this ruling did not slow down transactional sex. Instead, public women appeared ever more frequently on the streets, and some observers claimed that several hundred brothels remained open in Madrid.⁴⁵ These women provided ongoing inspiration for the poems, novellas, and plays composed by literary masters including Cervantes, Ruiz de Alarcon, and Lope de Vega, as well as anonymous songs. Travelers to Spain in the seventeenth century described a widespread disregard for marriage and monogamy and believed that Madrid hosted thirty thousand public women, more than any other city in the world.⁴⁶

Late in life, Philip IV noticed that his mandates had not decreased the number of “lost women” in his kingdoms. In 1661, he discerned that whores proliferated in the streets, plazas, and even up to the doors of his own palace. Their numbers “grew every day.”⁴⁷ The king still believed that the lack of morals in his kingdoms caused his own personal misfortunes as well as national disasters. Both national and family calamities peaked around this time, with the death of two male heirs to the throne and the defeat of the Spanish army at Dunkirk. In desperation, Philip ordered law enforcement to identify the sexually active single women living in their jurisdictions, to visit their lodgings, and if the authorities found that they had no licit occupation, to incarcerate them in the women’s jail.⁴⁸ Although these reforms coincided with the fact that Queen Isabel had a son late in 1661, ultimately Carlos II’s profound mental and physical deficiencies ended the Spanish Hapsburg dynasty with his death in 1700. As an indication of the ongoing ineffectiveness of these decrees in terms of suppressing public women, Louis XIV’s grandson, Philip V of Spain (1700–1724), repeated a very similar command in 1704: that officials should round up the “worldly women” who caused scandal in the public thoroughfares.⁴⁹ Regardless of the utter failure of these royal decrees in ending street solicitation and more private indoor transactional sex, the reforming and moralizing tone that the crown adopted reinforced efforts in cities and towns across the Spanish Empire to enclose women perceived as dangerously licentious. For example, in 1692, a new house for female seclusion and punishment opened in Mexico City. Its name, Santa Maria Magdalena, indicated its goal of enclosing public women.⁵⁰

Seventeenth-century fears of scandal, social upheaval caused by immoral materialism, and marital infidelity—concerns that led to brothel closures, attempts to incarcerate public women, and royal decrees against “worldly women”—extended to every corner of the empire, even the remote outpost of the diocese of Guadalajara, New Spain. In this large territory, from the 1660s to the early eighteenth century, religious and secular authorities struggled with the same compulsion to enclose and suppress women’s sexual activities. Repeated official pronouncements in these decades indicate the ineffectiveness of their efforts and why selling sex continued to have an ambiguous place in written documentation.

A new campaign began in 1664, when the president of the Guadalajara high court proposed a new prison to “punish women of scandalous life.”⁵¹ King Philip IV, with only months to live, rejected the petition. However, for the next two decades, high court officials and the bishop left a record of exchanges regarding their worries about “public sins [pecados publicos],” an oblique way of referring to the general toleration of adultery, concubinage, and transactional sex. In 1679, the high court asked for the cooperation of lower-level law enforcement to carry out the bishop’s “remedies” to “avoid” public sins, in line with royal pronouncements on the ongoing issue.⁵² In a suggestion eerily similar to twenty-first–century rehabilitative programs, the bishop proposed inaugurating a wool- and cotton-weaving workshop or even sending the poor to work as day laborers in the countryside, to “remedy the needs” of the multitude of poverty-stricken men and women and prevent their exposure to “vice.” On a tour of inspection, Bishop Juan de Santiago de León Garabito reported that the perceived problem of “public sins” extended as far north as Sonora and Zacatecas, but his observations had little effect. Decades later, the bishop of Durango begged permission to open a house of reclusion due to the “high number of women found in this city that go around lost and in scandalous and pitiful nudity.”⁵³ As the official complaints and suggestions for workhouses continued, the high court tried with little success to suppress the “bad life” of four sisters known as “Las Zayuletas.” Several times in the 1680s, the justices banished these women from the city and tried to force them back to their husbands, their mother, or any “honorable house,” where they would live “honestly and secluded,” but failed to prevent Las Zayuletas from promenading around Guadalajara at odd hours of the night with married men. The sisters ignored orders of banishment.⁵⁴ This attempted crackdown coincided with a similarly ineffective investigation of the lives of over two dozen courtesans in Mexico City, who also evaded banishment, through their lovers’ protection and their successful appeal to the authorities’ patronage (chapter 4). Of course, from the 1670s to the 1690s, elite men living in sin (including an important functionary of the Guadalajara high court itself) also avoided repercussions, much to the frustration of the judiciary and the bishop.⁵⁵

Shortly after these attempts at reform in the peripheries of New Spain, a woman called Doña Nicolasa de Guzman continued the medieval tradition of employing sorcery to lure men into paying for sex, leading to a Mexico City Holy Office investigation in 1711 that labeled her an “alcahueta supersticiosa [superstitious bawd].”⁵⁶ Again, a court run by clerics investigated what the Siete Partidas viewed as a criminal offense, indicating the ongoing confusion of sin and secular justice. This transitional case mixes the older understanding of celestinas and their “simple superstitious” practices with hints of modern “prostitution,” an early use of this word in Mexican archives.⁵⁷ However, the inquisitors did not represent Guzman’s employees (the so-called prostitutes) as greedy or criminal but, instead, following medieval understandings of the root of the transgression, focused on defaming the procuress as nefarious, impious, lewd, and deceptive.⁵⁸

Tipped off by a girl in her employ who complained to secular law enforcement, the inquisitors accused Guzman of tricking women into “the impious occupation of earning their living with the prostitution and sale of their bodies.”⁵⁹ Doña Nicolasa de Guzman operated a sophisticated mediation organization, in which she managed and housed these women and girls, but she did not actually directly arrange or escort them to their sexual liaisons. Not surprisingly, this clever bawd did not testify in the surviving preliminary Holy Office investigation, but four women described her procuring methods in detail, and their statements reveal the accused’s high status and organizational skills. Guzman cooperated in her schemes with two colleagues: another alleged Spaniard known as “Chomba,” and a woman called “La India Ángela,” apparently Doña Nicolasa’s mother.⁶⁰ Although one witness, a young midwife, testified that Doña Nicolasa had a good reputation and that her painter husband devoutly participated in the Third Order of Saint Augustine, other testimonies portray her as a bawd who targeted vulnerable teenage runaways.⁶¹

Statements made by a fifteen-year-old orphan named Bernarda de Lara and her relatives reveal that Doña Nicolasa de Guzman balanced her respectable marriage to a pious man and her reputation as a procuress, even to the extent that she ran a kind of premodern outcall business. Young women willingly came to Guzman’s house to escape their homes. Bernarda and her young relative Gertrudis explained that Bernarda had come from the countryside to Mexico City and moved in with Gertrudis’s mother after the death of her own mother when Bernarda was about ten years old. Suffering as a charity case in her relatives’ house, the orphaned Bernarda ran away one night after receiving a physical punishment from Gertrudis’s mother. Bernarda made the choice to run to Doña Nicolasa’s house, perhaps with full knowledge of how Guzman made her income, rather than endure more bad treatment from her relatives. After a month, Doña Nicolasa sent her to live with Chomba, who carried out the plan for Bernarda’s violent defloration by the governor of the palace guard, an exchange worth three hundred pesos. Guzman and Chomba negotiated the exchange and arranged for Bernarda (accompanied by Chomba) to meet a forlón (a closed carriage with four seats; a luxurious conveyance in this era) one afternoon just before siesta. This lavish vehicle transported her to her deflowerer’s bedroom, where the afternoon sex act with Bernarda cost him the price of an orphan’s dowry, an exchange that highlights the monetization of virginity and marriage that permeated this society. Bernarda then returned to Doña Nicolasa’s house to live with other young women also sent out to “earn their income with their bodies,” which they did every night and some days.⁶²

Spanish law traditionally adjudicated severe punishments for inducing virgins or otherwise honest women into whoring (chapter 1), but the early-eighteenth-century Mexican inquisitors did not follow up on this secular crime, instead interrogating the witnesses to discuss Doña Nicolasa de Guzman’s use of love magic. Their accounts record that Guzman called on her mother, La India Ángela, to give powders to young women so that “men would desire them,” as well as to “stupefy” their husbands so that married women could have affairs. Guzman gave the girls who lived in her house a yellow powder to carry with them at all times, tucked into their stockings. She also had them use incense smoke on their hands and faces for the same purpose. Bernarda received a small bag that Guzman told her to hide in her stockings so she could enchant men to desire her. The inquisitors found it to contain a few roots of an unknown plant.⁶³ Bernarda declared that she did not believe in the power of the bag of roots to attract men because she sometimes forgot to wear the stockings that contained it on her assignations with men. Presumably, this had no effect on their sexual interest in her.

While indulging in these arcane practices, Doña Nicolasa de Guzman managed a lucrative, efficient business, housing young women who had brief sexual encounters with men, not the more longstanding relationships that the previously discussed bawds organized with their clients. In a typically entrepreneurial American fashion of combining Old and New World practices, she took on the role of the traditional Spanish go-between, mixing indigenous magic and a business sense for negotiating sexual transactions for the richest and most powerful bidders. No record exists for Guzman’s reactions to the accusations or for her defense or sentencing. The inquisitors may very well have dropped both of the cases involving Mexican bawds who used erotic magic, after these brief initial investigations, because they did not view these practices as worthy of too much investigatory attention or punitive action. But apparently, they saw value in recording indigenous and African-influenced love-magic practices. The young women who chose to live and work with her suffered no penalties or written censure whatsoever. Instead, the clerical judges recorded them as pitiful, vulnerable victims of Guzman’s cons. They labeled their occupation “prostitution,” but they did not treat them as criminals, at least not yet.