Читать книгу Profit and Passion - Nicole von Germeten - Страница 9

1

Bawds and Brothels

Now as for the go-between, this should be some woman who is kin to you and who will be loyal to you. . . . Make sure that your go-between is skilled and subtle in her speech; she must be able to lie with ease and to understand the lady’s reactions. . . . If you have no such relative, find one of those old crones that frequent the churches and know all the back alleys—the ones with the huge rosaries dangling from their necks.

“Archpriest,” she said, “one makes the old woman trot if he needs her, and you must do the same because you have no other. You must treat this old woman well, for she can help you. . . . Never call me vile or ugly names. Call me ‘Good Love’ and I will be loyal; people are pleased by pleasing names, and good names cost no more than bad ones.”

For the old woman’s sake and to speak the truth, I have called my book Good Love, and so do I call her always. Because I treated her well, she was a real asset to me.

Again being alone, without a sweetheart, I sent for my old woman and she said, “What now?” Then she laughed, saying: “Greetings, my good sir. Here comes good love, as good as a trusted friend could hope to find.” ¹

Juan Ruiz, known as the Archpriest of Hita, wrote his humorous and devout Book of Good Love around 1320 and endowed his character Trotaconventos with great verbal skill and flexibility in dealing with her clientele. Ruiz depicts her as a crafty old woman but also names her “good love,” in honor of what she provides him through her talent with words. The narrator both fears and trusts Trotaconventos with all his emotional and sexual happiness.² Women labeled whores and bawds produced an enormous textual record in Spain, in the form of legal, political, and literary sources that document the complexities and nuances of working in this trade. However, in New Spain, more subtle scribal seductions took place. Clients, officials, and male and female purveyors purposefully obscured the sexual marketplace. As observed by Josefina Muriel, “prostitution [sic] had a perfectly clear place and was peacefully tolerated by the authorities.”³ Especially for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, highly legible peninsular literature, law codes, and the history of increasing regulation and eventually suppression underscore transactional sex’s textual erasure and its hidden prevalence in New Spain.

Three kinds of written expressions of Iberian commercial sex prefaced the elusiveness of American interpretations. First, in Spain, jurists, poets, dramatists, and moral/religious commentators recorded a wide range of understandings of disreputable women that did not clearly define what constitutes a woman who sells sex acts, versus a promiscuous woman who makes no money off her behavior, versus a woman simply known as having an immoral reputation.⁴ A second aspect highlighted in written documentation was the crafty and sly male or female bawd—rufianes and alcahuetas (or masculine, alcahuetes) like Trotaconventos—who caused the most official worry from the medieval era until well into the seventeenth century.⁵ Lastly, from the 1200s to the 1600s, increasing crown and municipal control of legal brothels (mancebías)⁶ dominated the Iberian legal discourse, leading to a large body of regulations that the viceregal authorities did not leave a record of enforcing. Sixteenth-century Spaniards brought these late-medieval laws and customs to the New World, where participants apparently veered away into a more informal street- and home-based practice that left only the slightest traces of its existence.

The first half of this chapter mines the prolific files of Iberian brothels and pandering. The second half of the chapter draws from a much smaller transactional-sex archive for sixteenth-century Mexico City. In the new viceregal capital, the crown-regulated brothels could not displace the older tradition of male and female go-betweens who masterminded sexual relationships, often in a hospitable setting.⁷ This more domestic milieu for engaging in sex for gifts or money did not limit its entrepreneurial nature but obscured it from surviving scribal annotations. Both procurers and their clientele used their time before the courts to disguise their reputations, tactics that further obfuscate how women in Mexico transacted in sex. Sex for sale in the sixteenth-century viceroyalties operated on the fringes of legality and surveillance. In an effort to clarify some of the subtleties of writing transactional sex, throughout this section of the chapter I will point out the terminology that led me to a particular case—that is, how the case was verbally catalogued within Mexico’s national archive.

LEGAL DEFINITIONS

To begin with the legal context, sex for sale existed in various forms in Roman and Visigothic Spain, as well as when Muslim rule dominated the peninsula, because from ancient times, gendered social hierarchies created an idea that men needed an easily accessible sexual outlet to protect women born to elite, protected status.⁸ The laws that most affected the American viceroyalties emerged out of medieval monarchs’ efforts to consolidate their authority through promulgating legal codes.⁹ In the second half of the thirteenth century, the Siete Partidas or “Seven Sections” of the Castilian King Alfonso X (known as “the Wise”) put in place the judicial understanding of selling sex, drawing from Roman jurisprudence, canon law, and the fueros, or customary Iberian laws.¹⁰ However, the naming or categorization of an act or status within the Siete Partidas did not necessarily assign a punitive function to the given act or status. Legal texts could define nonmarital or nonmonogamous sexual statuses without criminalizing them.¹¹

For example, the Siete Partidas did not elaborate regulations against women who made an income off their own sex acts, although Alfonso X and his compilers/jurists did use the word putería (“whoring”). Putería comes up in the fourth Partida, which discusses family relationships broadly, including those between servants and vassals and their masters. This official acknowledgment of the institution’s legal existence without specifying judicial repercussions for working in the brothel served to grant these women a legal identity or status.¹² While not criminalizing women who sold sex with a specific judicial sentence, the Siete Partidas burdened their children with a heavy load of moral condemnation due to their maternal lineage. Of course, the Partidas, with the purpose of strengthening crown justice, operated from a hierarchical, patriarchal frame of reference, valorizing male-led families and states. This was the emphasis in this law code’s legal use of putería.¹³

Marriage and children occupy much of the content of Partida Four, including Title Fifteen, Law One, which discusses illegitimate children. This section comprises just one of the many legal categories for the various permutations of children born out of wedlock. Iberian law codes had to deal with a wide variety of birth patterns for heirs due to the essentially polygamous practices of the high nobility and others in medieval and early-modern Spain.¹⁴ An obsession with lineage and property inheritance overcame any regard for adhering to monogamy within the relatively new institution of sacramental Christian marriage—marriage having become a sacrament only at the Fourth Lateran council in 1215.¹⁵ According to the Siete Partidas, children born of women who “estan en la putería [are involved in whoring]” should be known as mánceres, a reference to their sinful birth and to the fact that, according to Alfonso X and his jurists, these children could not know who to claim as their father, due to the assumption of multiple sex partners on the part of their mothers.¹⁶ This statement served to protect men from women who might claim that their children had inheritance rights. If the man could paint the woman as a whore, he could easily reject her claims, based on this section. The law further adds that these children were engendered in evil and born to vile status.

In contrast, other titles (especially Title Fourteen) in the Fourth Partida discuss barraganas, or legal, recognized concubines, with much less disdain. These concubines’ status as protected by one man probably made them a more palatable option for the Partidas’s compilers. Barraganas could legally draw up contracts with their male partners, in a similar fashion to the way a tradesman’s apprentice or a domestic servant negotiated their employment.¹⁷ This suggests that women who operated outside male control most intimidated the medieval lawmakers, as they represented a threat to patriarchal moral codes.¹⁸

The Seventh Partida deals with acts considered evil and deserving of punishment—what we would call criminal law, as opposed to the family law discussed above. Title Six, Law Four discusses “los infamados” or reprobates known as “lenones” or “alcahuetes” (elsewhere called ruffians),¹⁹ starting with a definition from the Roman context: “‘Leno’ in Latin means the same as alcahuete; a man such as this has his female servants or other free women in his house, commanding them to do evil with their bodies for money . . . he is reprobate for this.”²⁰ Despite the very strong literary and grassroots tradition of female procuresses (alcahuetas), further explored below, here the Siete Partidas defines them as men only.²¹

Male and female panderers took a variety of forms. Ruffians in early-modern Spain offered protection from violence and helped when women faced law enforcement. They collected a certain amount of money from women who sold sex, sometimes also interacting with them in the role of a boyfriend. In contrast, male and female procurers (alcahuetas and alcahuetes) received money directly from male clients in exchange for setting up meetings and arranging safe locations for these encounters. This second category seems to fit best with common early-modern use of the word alcahueta. In terms of working as sexual intermediaries, the word tercera (third) also covers this kind of activity. Lawmakers and moralizers hated procurers because they allegedly drew men and women into sexual commerce through their legendary clever and subtle verbal ploys.²²

Title Twenty of the Siete Partidas contains two laws that deal with alcahuetes/as in more detail. Here, the first lines of the title seem to treat what would more commonly be called ruffians—violent panderers—as opposed to the more sophisticated female intermediaries (alcahuetas). This title breaks alcahuetes (loosely interpreted) down into five categories:

evil rogues who guard whores that are publically in putería, taking part of what they earn; secondly those that go about as panderers for those seeking them; thirdly, when men raise in their houses captives or other servants knowing that they do evil with their bodies; the fourth is a man so vile that he panders his own wife; the fifth is if someone consents that a married or other well-placed woman fornicates in his house, for something that she gives to him, although he does not go about procuring for them.²³

Only the last two categories discuss the intermediary tradition. The Siete Partidas go on to say that alcahuetes/as do great evil by convincing good women to do evil and by pushing those who are just starting to commit errors into becoming much worse. These men cause women dishonor by the evil done with their bodies. In punishment, the Siete Partidas say that alcahuetes should be brought before judges, and if they are proven to be rogues, they should be ejected from the town along with their whores (putas). Those procurers who rent rooms to “evil women” involved in putería should lose their houses and pay ten pounds of gold. Any slave woman having sex for money and giving some of it to her master should be freed, and if she is a free woman, she should receive money for her dowry. Men who pander their own wives, other married women, virgins, nuns, or widows with a good reputation deserve the death penalty. This title ends with the note that all of these laws also apply to women: procuresses or alcahuetas. The next title moves on to sorcerers and diviners, crimes closely connected to alcahuetería (see chapter 2).

As these complex medieval legal definitions show, procuring encompassed a broad range of activities. The Siete Partidas blended together what archival court cases show to be the very different functions of male and female procurers. Across Europe, grammarians used Latin terms to define alcahuetería and demonstrated confusion about gender roles within this profession. In a Castilian dictionary dating from 1516, alcahuete is simply defined as lenocino. In 1570, alcahuetería is equated with rufianismo in Italian. A Spanish-English dictionary from 1591 translates alcahueta as a bawd or lena.²⁴ In their interactions with litigators, courts viewed procurers as criminals.

In contrast to procurers, the Siete Partidas do not provide a simple definition for the women who made their income from sexual commerce. While they are written and, therefore, acknowledged as a category, their legal status is ambiguous and obscured, even in this most basic, fundamental Spanish law code. While making them indecipherable as actual criminals, this semi-erasure also suggests the importance of a grassroots social or moral understanding of these women’s acts and reputations, which may or may not show up in the surviving documentation. Specific case studies underscore their illegible textual identity.

Even the terminology used in legal codes, royal decrees, court cases, and witness statements varies widely and often contradicts itself. Castilian King Enrique III in the 1398 Cortes de Toro made a distinction between “putas públicas [public whores],” clarifying that rameras were on the other hand “encubiertas [secret whores].”²⁵ As private concubines, rameras had to pay a larger tax because they were thought to make more money working with a select clientele outside the public brothel.²⁶ The first time this word appears in a Spanish dictionary was in Antonio de Nebrija’s 1495 vocabulary of Spanish and Latin words, where interestingly Nebrija defines ramera as a “puta onesta [honest whore]” or, in Latin, meretrix. The same definition continued in the 1505 and 1516 dictionaries, where the entries for puta continue to equate this word with ramera or meretrix.²⁷ Therefore, if a public whore equates to an honest whore, the definitions of ramera had changed from the late fourteenth century to the sixteenth century. Despite the unstable terminology, a classification emerges: public women and brothel workers (implying sexual accessibility to all men) contrasted with secret or semimonogamous concubines. Of course, this distinction matters only when everyone could publicly acknowledge the existence and functioning of the legal brothel. In the more ambiguous American context, Spanish officials in the New World frequently applied the term mujeres públicas to a wide variety of women.

While panderers had a clear punitive threat applied to their actions, public women and concubines did not—their crimes faced moral not criminal sanction. The authorities attempted to legislate over women’s clothes, hair, jewelry, and other markers to make a clear public distinction between sexually controlled women and women perceived as promiscuous.²⁸ For example, in this society only young virgin girls traditionally wore their hair uncovered and displayed its beauty. A covered head signified a sexually active adult woman. But women labeled whores also took pride in showing off their beautiful loose hair, rejecting the standard expectations for a secluded married woman’s appearance.²⁹ The crown often failed in enforcing sumptuary laws or policing fashion. The fact that early-modern women with virtuous reputations imitated the official dress designated for whores has confounded historians since the nineteenth century. Historians, assuming that all women in the past also bought into the official condemnations of non–sexually conforming women, could not grasp why some honorable women actually wanted to emulate scandalous women’s appearance and dress.³⁰ In fact, literary sources such as La Lozana Andaluza (introduction) and La Celestina (chapter 2) portray sixteenth-century courtesans as the cosmetologists of their day, helping women in the arts of hair dye, makeup, facial hair removal, care of their hands, and even dental health.

One fascinating medieval definition does a better job than the sumptuary laws in defining these women, even if it probably misunderstands their lives completely: rameras were “women who don’t spin,” a definition perhaps inspired by La Lozana’s rejection of this feminine task.³¹ In other words, whores, unlike all other women, neither made their living nor just passed their time by doing needlework. They rejected the essential task of a genteel or hardworking woman.

BROTHELS IN SPAIN

The Siete Partidas’s harsh condemnation of panderers and procuresses may derive from royal patronage of legal brothels, even in this early era of Spanish history. Independent mediators competed with the municipal, crown, and even church ambitions to capitalize on sex for sale.³² Preceding the opening of legal brothels, licensed sex workers operated in Seville and Cordoba and paid taxes to the Islamic rulers.³³ Under Christian rule, crown or municipalities or even religious institutions tended toward owning brothels instead of taxing independent women. From approximately 1300 until the late sixteenth century, regulated legal brothels flourished throughout the re-Christianized Iberian Peninsula. Valencia and Barcelona had documented brothels from the early fourteenth century, while Castilian monarchs regulated this institution at least from the mid-fifteenth century.³⁴ They viewed legal brothels as an opportunity to enclose male violence and competitiveness into a bounded area.³⁵ Street-level commercial sex led medieval urban dwellers to make legal complaints mainly because it caused neighborhood violence.³⁶ Brothel regulations stipulated that men had to surrender their weapons upon entering, and thus this separated space served as a possible deterrent to street battles.

Politically, the grant of a brothel license helped unstable or contestable monarchs (including Ferdinand and Isabella) reward those subjects who served them loyally. Those who received monopolistic access to the bounteous brothel revenue could hand down this privilege to their heirs, and thus the recipients of these privileges jealously defended the institution.³⁷ Access to prized crown brothel monopolies actually predated the Christian reconquest. For example, the great “whoremonger” Alonso Yáñez Fajardo received enormous benefits from a royal grant to the brothel monopoly for numerous cities, including all of Granada, six years before its official conquest by the Catholic monarchs.³⁸

Financially, regulating sex work by legalizing only one official brothel in each town or city created many opportunities for the judiciary to collect a huge income in fines, even beyond the steady taxed income brothels generated as successful businesses.³⁹ Iberian brothels made their large profits not for their residents but for their managers, the monarchs, and the municipalities that later received their revenue.⁴⁰ Collecting fines on all possible minor infractions against the strict brothel regulations generated enough income to fund public offices. Overall, regulated sex work allowed late-medieval and early-modern Iberian authorities to attain the perfect balance between an apparently benign paternalistic tolerance and the possibility of harsher but lucrative enforcement of laws at any whim.⁴¹ Legal brothels extended the reach of both Iberian monarchs and town governments and helped consolidate their authority in this era of growth in crown legal institutions. Looking ahead to the second half of this chapter, apparently the Spanish crown either could not or did not want to extend this reach effectively to the Americas.

Despite the tradition of philosophical and theological writings that encouraged humans to control their baser passions, and the view of sexuality as an opposing force to spirituality, in medieval and early-modern Iberia and across Europe, the general population, church, and state voiced a discourse of brothels as a public good, especially from the mid-fourteenth century to the early sixteenth century.⁴² As a result, clients who visited legal state or municipal brothels received sexual services at a reasonable cost. This society viewed nonmonogamous, transactional sex as a right that all men should have and as a benefit for everyone, not a luxury for the privileged. For centuries, many Spaniards rejected the concept that simple fornication between two consenting unmarried adults was a moral wrong, despite Christian and later Catholic attempts to enforce chastity more and more through campaigns celebrating the Immaculate Conception.⁴³ The common man logically questioned why the king would license brothels if there were something wrong with enjoying “no strings attached” sex.⁴⁴ Even some women whose husbands frequented brothels seemed open minded about this activity, although many others argued that visiting whores justified financial reparations for the wife. Apparently, one late-medieval wife described her husband with great love and affection, noting that other than the fact that “era putanero mucho de mujeres [loosely translated: he was a real whorehound],” he was as good and pious as Saint Francis, and she would lay beside him for eternity in adjoining coffins.⁴⁵

What was it like for a man to visit a legal brothel in medieval or early-modern Iberia? Different descriptions survive from male visitors, especially for the highly successful Valencian mancebía, giving the twenty-first–century reader the impression of a pleasurable outing, and the promise of an illusion or fantasy world of illicit sexual excitement operating under fully legal conditions with very strict rules.⁴⁶ Most municipal brothels, including Valencia’s, operated on the edge or just outside of the central city. In Valencia, the brothel was a small walled quarter containing two to three hundred women, working out of rooms organized along three or four streets. Men entered the brothel via one entrance only, interacting with a guard. The guard would ask men to surrender their weapons and even promise to safely watch over their cash. Once inside the brothel, men observed and admired beautifully dressed, elegant women sitting under bright lanterns in front of their rooms, or they could enter taverns and inns. Spending time with the female residents had a fixed, standard cost.⁴⁷ In Seville, by contrast, municipal officials rented out simple huts by the Guadalquivir River, and these clustered dwellings functioned as the brothel. The town took care to repair and maintain the buildings.⁴⁸ Brothels forbade the entrance of non-Christians, so Islamic or Jewish men who snuck in with assumed false identities risked severe judicial consequences.⁴⁹

How did women experience life in the legal brothels? We know very few specific details from the female point of view, beyond the regulations. Women who worked in brothels were supposed to be officially registered by giving their names, ages, parents, and places of origin to municipal authorities. Every brothel worker had an alias that she also provided in the registration process.⁵⁰ The women had to be nonlocals and nonnoblewomen over the age of twenty. They paid fees to the brothel managers but received linens, clothing, and housing in return. Some historians view brothel work as a desperate recourse for poor women victimized by the countless natural and manmade disasters of their male-dominated era. However, in 1553, King Phillip II noted in frustration that many brothel women illegally left their places of work in the evenings to live in their “palaces,” where they met with male clients. Even worse, in Phillip’s view, they acted like honorable women.⁵¹

Through legalizing and regulating brothels, Iberian monarchs and municipal governments hoped to impose centralized control over the endemic violence in their society, an era of internal conflicts, independent warlords, and busy ports full of transient men. Monarchs such as Ferdinand and Isabella, along with their predecessors earlier in the fifteenth century, spent decades trying to tamp down the power of powerful grandees who dominated both cities and the countryside. These nobles gathered delinquents, ruffians, and rogues around them as their own personal bodyguards or entourages and encouraged them to foment urban disorder. The aristocratic strongmen, objecting to the monarchs’ efforts to centralize power and authority, also willingly protected these “evil doers” from nascent crown justice.⁵² Ruffians roamed the streets, provoking brawls with little fear of judicial retribution because “those in charge of prosecuting them were often the ones who gave protection to law breakers.”⁵³ Monarchs and some royal justices viewed these men as vagabonds and “men who lived by evil arts” and equated them with ruffians, often banishing them from residing inside any given town.⁵⁴ Ruffians faced severe penalties for managing women, according to a decree issued by Enrique IV in 1469, in continuation of the antipandering tone of the Siete Partidas.⁵⁵ The crown and municipal authorities hoped that regulated brothels would decrease street fighting and even the grandees’ ability to foment general societal violence. For the purposes of controlling street-level violence, criminal vagabonds, and overweening aristocrats, one might assume that the crown also would want legal brothels in their American viceroyalties, but in fact this invasive, regulatory approach did not come to fruition in the New World.

TRANSACTIONAL SEX OUTSIDE THE BROTHEL—

CLANDESTINAS AND ALCAHUETAS

The opportunities for nonbrothel paid sex unfolded in the Spanish viceroyalties following centuries’ old peninsular patterns for clandestinas who sold sex outside of the licensed brothels. Back in Iberia, ruffians found many female collaborators despite regulated, legal brothels and the serious punishments for selling sex outside these approved institutions. These sexual entrepreneurs took advantage of location and opportunity. In and around brothels, taverns and inns prospered. These places employed female servants, jobs taken on by both brothel workers and clandestinas. Men, including the innkeepers themselves, illegally procured one or several female servants who might host clients in rooms for entire nights. A lesser number had female managers or worked for their own husbands. Since non-Christian men who entered the legal brothels risked extreme punishments, Jewish and Islamic or Morisco men offered clandestinas a booming business. Criminal records prove that clandestinas flourished alongside the brothel. In late-medieval Valencia, on average around 115 clandestinas faced prosecution annually, representing almost one-third of all local criminal trials. Street ruffians still caused public violence, but they also helped towns make a great deal of money in punitive fines.⁵⁶ In some cases, cruel slurs captured in documents suggest that clandestinas were too old, dirty, sick, ugly, or all of the above, for working in the public brothel. Women perceived as too scandalous or loud had to leave the public brothel, which suggests that clandestinas lacked some of the characteristics perceived as sexually attractive to men.⁵⁷ In fact, some clandestinas offered their potential clients the opposite end of the spectrum: discretion, secrecy, exclusivity, wealth, social prominence, and sophistication, outside of the common “sewer” of the brothel.⁵⁸

Some clandestinas in Spain and the viceroyalties relied on bawds to arrange their liaisons. The literary figure of the alcahueta has a much more complex and even sympathetic history than the universally disrespected male ruffian. Law codes including the Siete Partidas codified harsh punishments for bawds, but many classics of Castilian literature humanized this figure. The title of their occupation derives from the Hispanic Arabic term alqawwád.⁵⁹ From before the Christian reconquest of Spain, Islamic literary treatises acknowledged the essential role of the bawd in setting up illicit liaisons. This genre of literature explored the phenomenon of nonmarital affairs that required a mediator. In these tales, sexual encounters were in a sense love triangles or even squares. The fact that women socialized separately from men did not stand in the way, but affairs required a subtle mediator, a witty verbal interlocutor to bridge gender communication gaps. Stories depicted how both the bawd and the female lover cooperated to entrap a man and dupe a husband, showing off their intelligence and sophistication. To have the skills to move in men’s and women’s worlds, the bawd had to possess the wisdom of age. Some of these portrayals even imply that she redirected her own desires into organizing other people’s trysts.⁶⁰ In the fourteenth century, Ruiz immortalized this Islamic literary tradition for Christian readers with the enduring bawdy character of Trotaconventos, a sly old woman who added more complexity to the non-Christian portrayals from early eras. In other medieval Christian writings, the bawd figure assumes a very maternal role, sometimes actually procuring her own daughters’ lovers. This terminology and personality characterization perhaps connects to the fact that brothel manageresses in medieval and early-modern Spain carried the official occupational title of “mother.”⁶¹ Sixteenth-century poetry also represents the bawd as an essential guide for the novice courtesan.⁶² Although Trotaconventos, Lozana, and Celestina (chapter 2) are fictional creations, their literary portrayals flesh out the ephemeral traces of nonfictional bawds found in archival documentation.

SELLING SEX IN THE NEW WORLD

Beginning in the 1520s, the Spanish crown initially extended the policy of licensing brothels from Spain to its American viceroyalties. In 1526, Bartolome Conejo received a license to found a royal brothel, or “casa de mujeres públicas,” in San Juan, Puerto Rico.⁶³ The license stated that this foundation was “necessary” to avoid “inconveniences.” A similar arrangement was made the same year with Juan Sanchez Sarmiento, in the city of Santo Domingo.⁶⁴ By 1538, Queen Isabel of Portugal had approved the foundation of a whorehouse in Mexico City, although in this case a specific individual did not make the request.⁶⁵ The Mexico City cabildo chose a location for it behind the Hospital de Jesus Nazareno on the Calle de Mesones (known as “whores’ street” or “la calle de Las Gayas”). Cartagena also had a brothel in the late sixteenth century, according to a Holy Office sorcery investigation.⁶⁶

These Spanish American legal brothels did not leave a great deal of evidence of their existence, in contrast to the extensive paper trail in Spain, which records many petty infractions. We can speculate that perhaps the viceroyalties lacked officials with the time or interest to enforce the ever increasing rules, even if it meant a good income in fines. Without a lucrative brothel monopoly in place, American judicial authorities had no motivation to prosecute clandestinas, so these women, as well as their ruffians and bawds, completely took over the trade in sex.⁶⁷ Viceregal sexual commerce moved permanently to street solicitation, or private houses where bawds managed their servants and family members or rented out their rooms and procured clients for women. Spanish, Indian, and casta women worked out of unofficial brothels as well as in taverns, pulquerías, gaming houses, public baths, temescales, and luxurious rooms.⁶⁸

Crown regulation picked up from the 1560s to the 1580s, foreshadowing suppression in the seventeenth century (chapter 2). Phillip II imposed new and more serious penalties on ruffians in a 1566 decree, an extension of his father’s policies noted above. The king also commanded that husbands who consented to their wives’ “doing evil with their bodies” for money should receive the same harsh punishments as did any other ruffian: public shaming on the first offense, along with ten years of rowing in the galleys, and one hundred lashes (individual strokes with a whip of a varying degree of intensity) and a perpetual sentence of galley slavery for the second offense. One surviving document indicates that the sentence of galley slavery might actually bring ruffians to the Caribbean, where they possibly could restart their occupation in a new locale.⁶⁹ The crown also began issuing a long series of recurring decrees against “pecados publicos” (public sins including adultery, concubinage, and pandering) in this era. For example, a 1570 royal cedula promulgated by the viceroy of Peru demanded that the viceroy of New Spain and the high courts of all Spanish American territories punish public sins as a gesture of mourning for the death of Phillip II’s wife, Ana of Austria.⁷⁰ A similar decree came out of Madrid in 1583, due to the death of the infante Diego, heir to the throne.⁷¹ Spanish monarchs repetitively propagated these decrees into the next century.⁷²

This general trend of increasing strictness against ruffians and bawds produced more written records of the offense. In Mexico City, the national archive preserves clerical cases against two men, four women, and one couple for the crime of procuring, dating from 1555 to 1585. Given the way that Phillip II had begun to repeatedly proclaim his moralizing bent, other prosecutions may have taken place, but the archival traces have not survived. These seven cases represent all the court cases that I could find dealing with sixteenth-century commercial sex in the viceregal capital. I was able to locate these files because the case descriptions used the term alcahueta, as well as consentidor (procuress) and tercera.⁷³ In terms of racial designations, they involve a broad spectrum of Mexico City’s residents, bringing in individuals of African, indigenous, and Spanish descent to testify before the ecclesiastical and inquisitorial courts. All of the accused had plebeian status, even the Spaniards. Although the evidence gives a brief glimpse into how procurers worked on the street level or in taverns, paid sex generally took place within family homes.

In the oldest case, dating from 1555, Francisco Saavedra, an alguacil for the archbishop of Mexico City, accused a forty-year-old indigenous women, addressed as both Ana and María Tepe, of making money as an “alcahueta” for “Indians, Spaniards, Blacks, and mestizos.”⁷⁴ The accused denied all of the accusations, claiming that she made her income by selling her tortillas. The eight male Spanish witnesses for the prosecution backed up Saavedra, although their statements refined the racial parameters of Tepe’s business model. In a canny exploitation of postconquest sexual opportunities, this woman, who may have remembered the early years of the Spanish invasion of Mexico, allegedly made money by carrying messages between india and mestiza women and Spaniards, leading to carnal access. Seeing an opportunity for profit based on her customers’ expectations, Tepe seems to have quickly learned and adapted herself to the Spanish alcahueta tradition. In line with the Siete Partidas’s traditional penalties (ejecting bawds from their towns of residence), Tepe received a sentence of two years’ banishment two leagues outside the archdiocese of Mexico. If she violated these terms, she risked two hundred lashings and four years’ banishment.

Two of the alcahuetas accused in the 1560s and 1570s allegedly arranged for their own daughters to have sex for their mothers’ (or, more broadly, their entire households’) monetary gain. In 1567, Mexico City archdiocesan officials accused a married Afro-descended woman (labeled a negra but without reference to enslaved status) named Luisa de Espinosa of procuring in her house for her own daughter as well as two indigenous women and possibly one Spanish woman.⁷⁵ We can speculate that Espinosa’s year of birth was approximately 1530, and that she perhaps came from Spain or the Caribbean because she apparently lived as an acculturated Afro-Spaniard. Bawdry featured among the Spanish traditions she personally helped propagate in Mexico City. Six witnesses (five men and one mestiza) testified that Espinosa allowed men to have carnal access with her daughter (a mulata named María Pérez) and two indias who lived in their house, in return for money or other gifts. All of the witnesses lived nearby and had known Espinosa over a period of years. They claimed that they saw mulatto and mestizo men entering the house frequently for sexual purposes. Some of the witnesses testified that Luisa had approached them as potential clients. All of these testimonies suggest a home brothel. This case ends with a demand for Espinosa’s imprisonment and does not include her reaction to the accusations.

In 1577, the fiscal of the archdiocese of Mexico accused María de Ávila of allowing men to fornicate with both of her daughters for personal gain or intereses, causing scandal and whispering among her neighbors.⁷⁶ He warned her that she should live in Christian seclusion, protecting her daughters. In this case, no further information exists other than a call for witnesses. This scanty documentation sounds like the start of a case against Ávila for brothel keeping, not an example of matchmaking that did not quite lead to marriage, which seems to be the situation in the next family investigation.

In 1582, although the archbishop’s court used the term alcahueta in an accusation against the parents of sixteen-year-old Ana de Alameda, the details suggest not sex for pay but long-term concubinage or amancebamiento.⁷⁷ Perhaps the court categorizing this situation as bawdry implied greater official moral outrage and a desire to crack down on common sexual practices in the family’s plebeian setting. Neighbors’ statements referred to the parents as encubridores (someone who hides something illegal) and consentidores, not alcahuetes. None of the litigants received any racial designations, suggesting that they all presented themselves to the court as Spaniards. However, the court labeled two of the witnesses as mestizas and another mulatto. The parents, thirty-six-year-old Juan Rollon, a platero de oro, and thirty-nine-year-old Isabel Martin, said they were both born in Mexico City, perhaps first-generation Creoles.⁷⁸

Witnesses said that Alameda and her parents willingly shared their home with Martin de la Herrería over a period of months and received money in exchange for tolerating this sinful cohabitation. All four allegedly ate together, and all slept in the same room, in three separate beds. The married couple slept apart due to illness, but Alameda slept with Herrería, according to the witnesses. The prosecuted litigants, when asked about how their daughter “comunicaba con mucha desenvoltura [had a shameless interaction]” with her lover, explicitly denied any sexual relationship between Herrería and Alameda, although the girl had given birth recently.⁷⁹ They claimed that all of the hostile witnesses were living in sin themselves and, therefore, could not be trusted to testify honestly, in an effort to erase the criminal label applied to their profitable domestic arrangement.⁸⁰ These scanty textual records of domestic alcahuetería faintly record the familial setting for transactional sex in the first few decades of the viceroyalty, inscribing it in a barely visible fashion onto the poor and/or nonwhite bodies inhabiting the new viceregal court.

A RUFFIAN

Two trials in 1570s Mexico City involved men accused of lenoncinio or procuring their own wives for other men. The sixteenth-century term frequently used in these cases is consentidor, implying that the men consented to and benefited from their wives’ affairs. These men apparently made a living by organizing or approving of their own wives’ multiple sexual partners. In the course of the first case, a very morally suspect couple formally inscribed their shared honor through statements made by character witnesses. By writing the accused ruffian as a man who worried about his wife’s honor, not as a panderer, the witnesses achieved the ultimate goal of sex-related trials: to assert, reformulate, or utterly transform a bad reputation into a respectable one.⁸¹

Antonio Temiño (age twenty-five) allegedly allowed his wife of four years, María de Guisas (age nineteen), to have sex with other men for gain, according to a 1571 investigation done by the archbishop’s court.⁸² Public scandal inspired the church authorities to question witnesses about this plebeian couple (they did not state a race label), probably in response to the 1570 decree against public sins. Testimonies create a character for Temiño that fits every medieval and early-modern negative assumption about ruffians. This man’s character clarifies why Phillip II voiced moral outrage against pandering husbands. According to witnesses, everyone in their neighborhood knew that Temiño regularly took Guisas to a tavern run by Melchior de los Reyes around midnight or 1:00 a.m. and that they often returned drunk. While there, as his gainful employment, Temiño arranged for her to have sex for pay with different men. A witness stated that the tavern keeper gave Temiño a cuartilla of wine during these negotiations, and he took it with him as he left the tavern. This venue for Guisas’s trade in sex follows the Spanish model of clandestine sex in taverns outside the legal brothel.

Guisas’s clientele included a mestizo tailor named Juan Mallorquin. This man supposedly had open access to the couple’s house, and on a recent occasion he had injured Guisas’s arm with his sword in a drunken argument. Witnesses spoke of at least four other men who had paid for carnal access with Guisas with the full knowledge and consent of her husband. A mulatto called Juan de Perillo (who was also imprisoned in the archbishop’s jail) claimed that he had heard a revealing conversation between the husband and wife. Allegedly, Guisas, in a drunken rage, had called Temiño a “knave, a great scoundrel and cuckold because . . . you sent me to earn with my body so that you would have some money [bellaco bien bellaco cornudo porque . . . me enviaba de ganar con mi cuerpo para que os tuviese dinero].” Temiño responded in kind, saying María de Guisas “lied, like a knave [bellaca].⁸³

It appeared to both these witnesses and the provisor that Temiño made a living by hustling his wife, but when questioned, both spouses denied every accusation. Both claimed that they were honorable people, with Guisas adamantly asserting her monogamous wifely virtue. The couple used this opportunity in court to redeem their reputation by not letting a single aspect of the accusations pass without denouncing them as false. In addition, Temiño made several petitions asking why he was suffering such a long imprisonment (a month) and especially why he had to endure a thick chain and irons on his legs.⁸⁴ If we understand his denials as written rhetorical stances and trust the witnesses for the prosecution, as the court did, this harsh treatment makes sense in terms of traditional Spanish censorious attitudes toward ruffians, dating back at least to the Siete Partidas.

Despite the claims made by hostile witnesses, ten plebeian Spanish men (ranging in age from mid-twenties to over sixty) denied that Temiño “consented” to his wife’s having sex with other men. The evidence that they offered highlights Temiño’s violent and jealous character. During the course of his defense, the witnesses created a written record of his honorable character for him, even though outside the court he preferred to use violence to shape his reputation.

Statements about Temiño take both a formulaic and more individualistic shape, both as the expected responses of character witnesses and glimpses of the real Temiño. Beginning on a positive note, most of the witnesses spoke of Temiño and his wife as good Christians. One witness affirmed that Temiño would never allow his wife to associate with dishonorable people, a confirmation of his honor. But his possessiveness went too far, beyond the honor code’s dictates regarding men’s roles as protectors of the sexuality of dependent women. Several of the witnesses stated that it was unlikely that such a suspicious and jealous man would allow his wife to have sex with other men. But his character emerges as worse than jealous: Temiño frequently beat María de Guisas, according to six witnesses, so much so that she appeared with a bloody face and feared for her life. One man claimed that he had stepped in to break up their fights. The court testimonies wrote Guisas as a victim of domestic violence, not a dishonorable woman.⁸⁵ While the witnesses for the defense redirected the investigation away from Guisas’s alleged sexual improprieties, they also erased the evidence that Temiño worked as her panderer.

Although the deponents expressed the opinion that making an income off procuring did not suit a jealous, violent husband like Temiño, in fact, the persona they created for him sounds like that of a typical ruffian. If nothing else, Temiño’s character witnesses certainly did not convince the court that he was a good husband. Guisas apparently received no sentence and probably did not remain imprisoned for very long during the trial, given that, at this time, royal law did not define her as a criminal. If a legal whorehouse did not exist in 1571 Mexico City, in theory she did not disregard brothel regulations by operating as a clandestina. On the other hand, procuring certainly was punishable, especially when a husband pandered his wife. Even those who spoke in Temiño’s favor suggested that he certainly deserved some form of penance. The ecclesiastical court agreed with them and sentenced him to march to a mass on foot, carrying a candle. He also received a sentence of banishment from the archdiocese of Mexico for two years and admonishment to treat his wife more appropriately within the bonds of matrimony. Because his prosecutors were churchmen not secular judges, Temiño avoided the sentence of ten years’ galley slavery, as Phillip’s laws decreed. Temiño’s ecclesiastical prosecution differs from crown intent regarding ruffians, but it carried out royal decrees against public sin.

A BAWD

If they wished to avoid ruffians like Temiño, potential illicit lovers in sixteenth-century Mexico City could call on bawds to arrange their affairs. Following in the medieval tradition, these slightly older women mediated between men and women by carrying persuasive messages and sometimes providing accommodations for compensation. A Spanish woman named Catalina García helped bring the previous centuries’ mediator traditions to New Spain. In 1570, García came before the archbishop’s court for allegedly helping to organize her friend María de Rojas’s encounters with at least three men.⁸⁶

García knew how to convince her clients with words; she was persistent and aggressive, and she masterminded locations for lovers to meet. In return for arranging the affairs, carrying messages, and hosting the encounters, she received a few pesos in compensation and, in one case, some sugar. García, at age thirty-eight, had twelve more years of life experience than Rojas. Born in Castile and living in New Spain since 1557, García also enjoyed a slightly higher social status than Rojas did, claiming a tradesman husband and the ability to write and sign her name very confidently. She may have even written convincing petitions in her own hand.⁸⁷ In contrast, the court labeled Rojas (of unknown origins) a soltera (sexually active single woman), and she could not sign her name. The official accusations branded García not only as an alcahueta “for fornicating men and women,” but also an encubridora and a tercera, an accessory to fornication and a mediator.⁸⁸ Rojas may have sought to clear her own name through the intervention of the court, while García intoned the expected rhetoric, using the legal formulas to inscribe her good reputation against the accusations.

According to Rojas and three of her clients, García solicited each of the men as they innocently (as the four accusers portrayed it) strolled past her house at various hours of the night and day. García called to them from her window or stood in the doorway, alone and on occasion with her friend Rojas in the door with her. The targeted men, age twenty, twenty-six, and thirty, were also plebeians, one described as a mestizo and another working as a tailor. In classic bawd style, allegedly García ignored all of their hesitation over engaging in “carnal access” with Rojas and aggressively “persuaded” the four potential fornicators to submit with her persistent verbiage. When Rojas at first refused to have sex with the men, García asked her over and over again (“tantas veces” or “so many times”), promising that each man would “do very well” for her.⁸⁹ García convinced the men, on some occasions instantly or otherwise over a period of time, to meet Rojas either at their shared house or at the men’s accommodations.⁹⁰

While Rojas and her lovers risked compromising their reputations by making these detailed accusations, sex exchanged for money and simple fornication between unmarried adults carried no criminal penalty at this time, so García had the most to fear in terms of legal sanctions. The clerical court took seriously and disliked what they heard about García from hostile witnesses, so an official called for her arrest and incarceration in the archdiocesan jail. When questioned directly about accusations of pandering, García (already described as an effective verbal persuader) refuted everything other than the fact that Rojas had lived with her for a few months. She justified this as an act of charity to help a sick friend.⁹¹

García built her own case by asserting her superb reputation as an honest married woman while simultaneously tearing down the trustworthiness of the testimonies. According to García, Rojas’s accusations had no value because she was a “public whore [ramera]” who slept with many men for money. García denied any responsibility for either pandering her friend or controlling her “evil living [mal vivir].” Rojas was over twenty-five, unmarried, and did not seem to have a father, uncle, brother, or other relative in the area who might fear that her reputation degraded their honor. García denied any responsibility for her friend’s behavior, maintaining that Rojas was “a free woman and she can go out wherever she wants at night [mujer libre y pudiendo salir donde quiso de noche].”⁹²

Usually the word ramera was used in Spain for a clandestina, while “public” as a descriptor implied that a woman worked in the brothel, and everyone in the community knew it. Rojas could work publicly without violating brothel regulations, as they did not exist, and she was not subject to penal retribution or fines. Her occupation weakened her trustworthiness as a good witness in court, but it was not illegal. Therefore, it behooved García to verbally fit Rojas to the patterns of a bad woman through her immorality, not her criminality, in order to prove that García herself was a good woman.

A group of young Spanish plebeian men who appeared to be García’s close friends (often visiting her house) attested to her good character. These men also confirmed the bad reputations of Rojas and her lovers in contrast to the perfectly respectable García. The witnesses for the defense answered the following series of typically leading questions:

[Was García] a good Christian who lived in seclusion in fear of god and her reputation, providing a good example everywhere she went? Was María de Rojas a public woman, a whore that earned her money publicly with her body, for any price that they give her, and for this should it be understood that the witnesses lied in saying that [she used] an alcahueta? Were Rojas and García enemies because Rojas said that García had a bad marriage?

Lastly, the witnesses had to provide their character judgments of Rojas’s three lovers, by definition lascivious and vile men who had lived in sin with Rojas. These questions solidified García’s reputation and established that her accusers were sinful people and not good witnesses.⁹³ The defense claimed that Rojas had sex with lewd, libidinous men who carried on illicit affairs. They were apasionado, men enflamed by their baser passions to commit acts of lust while neglecting to call on reason to control their instincts.⁹⁴

Every witness for the defense agreed that García had a good reputation and Christian character, in contrast to María de Rojas’s. In describing Rojas, the men inscribed her body with her sexual sins: her indiscriminate and evil exchange of money for sex. They denounced her because she openly monetized her body.⁹⁵ While García lived a discreet and secluded life as a woman of honor, Rojas walked the streets alone, “wrapped in a sheet” like a common woman. A witness called her a public woman and a puta. She received money “with her body” from anybody and everybody who would pay. Two men testified that Rojas, a public woman and a whore (ramera), “sold her body” in order to eat.⁹⁶ The witnesses interpreted her lack of selectivity to mean that Rojas did not require the services of a bawd. They opined that given her sexual proclivities, a mediator simply was not necessary. In other words, Rojas took the initiative in sexual aggressiveness, and she did not require persuading and the subtle communication arts of a bawd. This interpretation recalls the age-old Islamic and Spanish definition of alcahuetas as subtle, sophisticated go-betweens for discreet lovers, not crass high-volume ruffians of the kind that an alleged whore such as Rojas might use.

This case, because of how it recorded a fight between former friends, records the most extreme verbiage available to denounce a woman’s character. The animosity of all involved created a boldly written documentation of transactional sex. However, even with all of its specificity, some ambiguity remains. The testimonies made in her favor described García as a woman who lived an exemplary, secluded life, but at the same time she received male visitors.⁹⁷ Despite the witnesses’ assertions that García was a reputable Christian, their statements leave room to consider that a respectable woman like her, who often conversed with young men at her house, men very willing to stand up for her in court, would make an excellent procuress. The witnesses never explicitly denied that García might have this occupation. They only refuted that Rojas needed help organizing her paying clients. If these young men did use García as their mediator in sexual liaisons, they would certainly wish to speak well of her in court, in order to continue enjoying her bawdy talents.

DOMESTIC PROCURING

The above cases demonstrate that without a thriving brothel, sixteenth-century male residents of Mexico City had several options for partaking in transactional sex. They could seek out women who pandered their servants or their daughters in a domestic setting, in a sense visiting informal family brothels. They could go to taverns, looking for women who had ruffians who took money in exchange for sex with their women, sometimes even their wives. This option could result in violent encounters with ruffians such as Antonio Temiño. Lastly, while walking the streets, they could look out for women selling sex (allegedly, what María de Rojas did) or contact a bawd like Catalina García. All of the above options suggest a lack of exclusivity, a level of somewhat indiscriminating sex that compared roughly with the legal brothels in Spain, aimed at a plebeian clientele satisfied to meet with “public women.”

Men who chose a more discreet path had another very appealing option that fits with the most common understandings of nonmarital sex in the viceroyalties: the servant/master relationship.⁹⁸ This popular arrangement raised few eyebrows, other than when a husband openly marketed his wife as her go-between, mediator, host, and all the other third-party matchmaking roles that church and state had sought to stamp out for centuries. The archbishop’s court had to take a second look at a case labeled “lenocinio [pandering]” in 1577, when the married couple Martin de Vildosola and Juana Rodríguez openly ignored Vildosola’s previous sentence of banishment, scandalously continuing their polyamorous affairs for money.⁹⁹ Nosy neighbors inscribed the tale of this couple through their testimonies. Through this written evidence, we learn both the appropriate terms for this transactional arrangement and what the neighborhood viewed as offenses worth memorializing in a file. Testimony says that Vildosola encouraged Rodríguez to entertain at least three different men in their house, serving them meals, washing their clothes, and having physical contact with them on a regular basis for extended periods.¹⁰⁰ Rodríguez and Vildosola cultivated extramarital relationships for her that might last for years. Rodríguez’s lovers included a cleric named Miranda, a notary named Miguel de la Zaragoza, and a blacksmith by the name of Hernando de Orgaz, good earners who could afford to compensate the couple for Rodríguez’s attentions. The first two men perhaps even exerted useful power and influence to help maintain the couple’s good fortunes.

Witnesses claimed to see Vildosola asking the men for money, complaining that the couple was poor and did not have enough to eat, and observers saw him receiving it directly from the patrons’ hands to his. The deponents stated that this income provided the couple with the simple luxuries of fresh meat and chicken for their meals, as well as for Indigenous labor to make improvements on their properties.¹⁰¹ Despite noting the money exchanged, the neighbors did not name Rodríguez as a whore or use any other negative terms describing her sexuality. Instead, the testimonies focused on the details that showed an intimate connection between Juana Rodríguez and her clientele, and how her husband “consented to his wife’s carnal access and communication” with different men.¹⁰² The witnesses only spoke of her as amancebada, or the concubine of her visitors, using no other labels. Vildosola does not appear to have the characteristics of a ruffian, and the witnesses did not refer to him as such, nor did they use any forms of the word leno. Vildosola instead acted more like a genteel alcahuete, a sociable man out for profit but disinterested in honor or marital fidelity.

This case does not include the couple’s statements—most likely, following the pattern of all other cases of this kind, they would take the form of complete denials and excuses for all of the accusations of intimacy. But onlookers claimed that they saw very suggestive scenes between Rodríguez and Orgaz. Their nosiness narrates a story of the couple’s private activities. An open door allowed neighbors to peer inside, including two spies in the form of children, ages thirteen and fourteen.¹⁰³ These children and other observers knew that Rodríguez openly committed adultery with the consent of her husband, which they proved by reports of loving personal gestures instead of sex acts or lewd behavior. The neighbors claimed that Orgaz often stayed with Rodríguez alone in the evening, in various states of undress, almost always without his shoes on and sometimes even completely barefoot, a clear sign of informality and intimacy. Bystanders alleged that Orgaz would lay in one bed with Rodríguez, while her husband slept in another, even while their son was present. Reportedly, an Indian man hosted the married couple, Orgaz, and another woman on the feast day of San Juan. Apparently, the group ate together in the house while Orgaz and Rodríguez touched each other openly in front of her husband: Orgaz allegedly lying propped up and surrounded by her skirts while Rodríguez combed and cleaned the dandruff out of his hair. Another deponent claimed that once, while chatting with the husband in the couples’ doorway at 3:00 p.m., he saw the notary Zaragoza enter their house, eating a walnut. When Rodríguez entered, the notary began embracing and hugging her, putting the walnut from his mouth to hers. The lovers then sat down together very intimately.¹⁰⁴ The notary was heard to brag that Rodríguez was his concubine and praised her for her “buenas carnes [loosely: attractive flesh],” a rare archival verbalization of a woman’s private sexual appeal.¹⁰⁵

The lover who seemed most attached to Rodríguez, the blacksmith Hernando Orgaz, showed some agitation in the face of the couples’ disregard of the banishment conditions and their spying neighbors. Allegedly, Vildosola told Orgaz that he should not worry; even though “rogues” tried to disturb them, he should always “come to my house and enjoy yourself with me and with my woman.” Although at times he flaunted his public displays of affection, at other moments Orgaz feared detection and punishment after Vildosola’s initial but ignored sentence of banishment. Since he did not want to stop visiting Rodríguez, he allegedly snuck in and out of the couple’s house under the cover of darkness many times, even going so far as to disguise himself by dressing in an habito de indio.¹⁰⁶

While their neighbors spied on and reported on these nonmonogamous scenes in response to the investigation into Vildosola and Rodríguez’s disregard of the banishment sentence, the couple seemed unconcerned about secular and religious authorities, monogamy within marriage, sin, and even the laws against pandering.¹⁰⁷ Of course, two of Rodríguez’s lovers represented church and state through their occupations as a notary and a cleric. Not only did these men disregard the sacrament of marriage openly, as well as a husband’s claim to his wife’s sexual fidelity, but they supported the couple when they suffered from fears of official surveillance and during their imprisonment.¹⁰⁸ Perhaps the couple believed that their discerning clientele and the domesticity of their transactional relationships would protect them from any judicial repercussions. However, many people, even children, living in their vicinity embraced their roles as voyeurs and sought to become contributors to the developing viceregal archive of sexual transgressions. I could argue that the couple carelessly publicized their domestic sex work and thus wrote themselves into the surviving documentation, but I think instead that their neighbors wanted to report their offenses as decipherable and legible to the religious authorities. However, exercising some restraint, the surrounding residents and the scribes they spoke to chose to name this as multiple simultaneous concubinage arrangements, not whoring.

In contrast to the voluminous legal and literary records for transactional sex in early-modern Spain, only fragmentary evidence records sex for sale in the first century of the Spanish viceroyalties. The cases presented in the second half of this chapter stress its domestic, even familial, context. This faint paper trail contrasts with the documenting of intensive brothel inspections and the prosecution of ruffians and clandestinas that took place in some parts of late-medieval and early-modern Iberia, a much more concerted effort to put in writing sexual control and official supervision. In the early decades of the sixteenth century, settlers first followed the fifteenth-century Spanish trend of founding legal brothels, but this pattern soon died off in favor of even older, perhaps more familiar, traditions such as family brothels, independent street solicitation, and liaisons organized by bawds or complicit husbands, often in a domestic setting. Within this urban, plebeian milieu, indigenous and Afro-descended bawds played a role in how sex was sold. All of the individuals mentioned in this chapter named and documented certain specific kinds of exchanges, both creating a New World sexual culture and writing the paperwork that would affect the archives of transactional sex for centuries to come.