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.
2
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
