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
