(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
