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
