to Jesuit proposals to reform the brothels, but by 1619, with the proclamation of strict new regulations, the brothel had declined precipitously. Women chose to abandon it for clandestine work, in a conscious choice to avoid the proposed frequent medical exams, sermons, and forced religious holidays that prevented them from earning a living.40 By 1620, only eighteen women lived in Seville’s once prosperous and large brothel. The fate of Seville’s brothel may have had an influence on the almost invisible American brothels, as most Spanish immigrants passed through or spent time in this port.
Philip IV’s motivation for decreeing brothel closure derived from the overpowering influence of his favorite, the Count Duke of Olivares, the members of the Jesuit order, as well as writers who argued that legal whoring opened the door to the devil’s influence and who held that earthly law must acknowledge divine law and not promote sin.41 Some Spaniards expressed an understanding of the reign of his father, Philip III (1578–1621), as an era of moral laxity and felt that Spain would prosper if the land returned to a time that they perceived as more virtuous.42 In response to these pressures, on February 10, 1623, the young king made the following ruling:
Prohibition of brothels and public houses of women in all the towns of these kingdoms. We order and command, that from here forward, that in no villa, or settlement in these kingdoms, will be allowed or permitted, a brothel or public house, where women earn money with their bodies . . . we command that all be closed. 43
The king charged his counselors and judicial officials to take particular care to carry out this order, with the threat of losing their offices and paying substantial fines. Many believed that in practice the criminalization of brothels increased social chaos. In 1631, Seville’s municipal authorities observed that their city suffered from far more street violence and disorder since the 1623 decree. They begged the king to allow a legal brothel again.44
Mourned and mocked in songs and poems, including Francisco de Quevedo’s “Feelings of a jaque on the closing of the brothel,” this ruling did not slow down transactional sex. Instead, public women appeared ever more frequently on the streets, and some observers claimed that several hundred brothels remained open in Madrid.45 These women provided ongoing inspiration for the poems, novellas, and plays composed by literary masters including Cervantes, Ruiz de Alarcon, and Lope de Vega, as well as anonymous songs. Travelers to Spain in the seventeenth century described a widespread disregard for marriage and monogamy and believed that Madrid hosted thirty thousand public women, more than any other city in the world.46
Late in life, Philip IV noticed that his mandates had not decreased the number of “lost women” in his kingdoms. In 1661, he discerned that whores proliferated in the streets, plazas, and even up to the doors of his own palace. Their numbers “grew every day.”47 The king still believed that the lack of morals in his kingdoms caused his own personal misfortunes as well as national disasters. Both national and family calamities peaked around this time, with the death of two male heirs to the throne and the defeat of the Spanish army at Dunkirk. In desperation, Philip ordered law enforcement to identify the sexually active single women living in their jurisdictions, to visit their lodgings, and if the authorities found that they had no licit occupation, to incarcerate them in the women’s jail.48 Although these reforms coincided with the fact that Queen Isabel had a son late in 1661, ultimately Carlos II’s profound mental and physical deficiencies ended the Spanish Hapsburg dynasty with his death in 1700. As an indication of the ongoing ineffectiveness of these decrees in terms of suppressing public women, Louis XIV’s grandson, Philip V of Spain (1700–1724), repeated a very similar command in 1704: that officials should round up the “worldly women” who caused scandal in the public thoroughfares.49 Regardless of the utter failure of these royal decrees in ending street solicitation and more private indoor transactional sex, the reforming and moralizing tone that the crown adopted reinforced efforts in cities and towns across the Spanish Empire to enclose women perceived as dangerously licentious. For example, in 1692, a new house for female seclusion and punishment opened in Mexico City. Its name, Santa Maria Magdalena, indicated its goal of enclosing public women.50
Seventeenth-century fears of scandal, social upheaval caused by immoral materialism, and marital infidelity—concerns that led to brothel closures, attempts to incarcerate public women, and royal decrees against “worldly women”—extended to every corner of the empire, even the remote outpost of the diocese of Guadalajara, New Spain. In this large territory, from the 1660s to the early eighteenth century, religious and secular authorities struggled with the same compulsion to enclose and suppress women’s sexual activities. Repeated official pronouncements in these decades indicate the ineffectiveness of their efforts and why selling sex continued to have an ambiguous place in written documentation.
A new campaign began in 1664, when the president of the Guadalajara high court proposed a new prison to “punish women of scandalous life.”51 King Philip IV, with only months to live, rejected the petition. However, for the next two decades, high court officials and the bishop left a record of exchanges regarding their worries about “public sins [pecados publicos],” an oblique way of referring to the general toleration of adultery, concubinage, and transactional sex. In 1679, the high court asked for the cooperation of lower-level law enforcement to carry out the bishop’s “remedies” to “avoid” public sins, in line with royal pronouncements on the ongoing issue.52 In a suggestion eerily similar to twenty-first–century rehabilitative programs, the bishop proposed inaugurating a wool- and cotton-weaving workshop or even sending the poor to work as day laborers in the countryside, to “remedy the needs” of the multitude of poverty-stricken men and women and prevent their exposure to “vice.” On a tour of inspection, Bishop Juan de Santiago de León Garabito reported that the perceived problem of “public sins” extended as far north as Sonora and Zacatecas, but his observations had little effect. Decades later, the bishop of Durango begged permission to open a house of reclusion due to the “high number of women found in this city that go around lost and in scandalous and pitiful nudity.”53 As the official complaints and suggestions for workhouses continued, the high court tried with little success to suppress the “bad life” of four sisters known as “Las Zayuletas.” Several times in the 1680s, the justices banished these women from the city and tried to force them back to their husbands, their mother, or any “honorable house,” where they would live “honestly and secluded,” but failed to prevent Las Zayuletas from promenading around Guadalajara at odd hours of the night with married men. The sisters ignored orders of banishment.54 This attempted crackdown coincided with a similarly ineffective investigation of the lives of over two dozen courtesans in Mexico City, who also evaded banishment, through their lovers’ protection and their successful appeal to the authorities’ patronage (chapter 4). Of course, from the 1670s to the 1690s, elite men living in sin (including an important functionary of the Guadalajara high court itself) also avoided repercussions, much to the frustration of the judiciary and the bishop.55
Shortly after these attempts at reform in the peripheries of New Spain, a woman called Doña Nicolasa de Guzman continued the medieval tradition of employing sorcery to lure men into paying for sex, leading to a Mexico City Holy Office investigation in 1711 that labeled her an “alcahueta supersticiosa [superstitious bawd].”56 Again, a court run by clerics investigated what the Siete Partidas viewed as a criminal offense, indicating the ongoing confusion of sin and secular justice. This transitional case mixes the older understanding of celestinas and their “simple superstitious” practices with hints of modern “prostitution,” an early use of this word in Mexican archives.57 However, the inquisitors did not represent Guzman’s employees (the so-called prostitutes) as greedy or criminal but, instead, following medieval understandings of the root of the transgression, focused on defaming the procuress as nefarious, impious, lewd, and deceptive.58
Tipped off by a girl in her employ who complained to secular law enforcement, the inquisitors accused Guzman of tricking women into “the impious occupation of earning their living with the prostitution
