sophisticated mediation organization, in which she managed and housed these women and girls, but she did not actually directly arrange or escort them to their sexual liaisons. Not surprisingly, this clever bawd did not testify in the surviving preliminary Holy Office investigation, but four women described her procuring methods in detail, and their statements reveal the accused’s high status and organizational skills. Guzman cooperated in her schemes with two colleagues: another alleged Spaniard known as “Chomba,” and a woman called “La India Ángela,” apparently Doña Nicolasa’s mother.60 Although one witness, a young midwife, testified that Doña Nicolasa had a good reputation and that her painter husband devoutly participated in the Third Order of Saint Augustine, other testimonies portray her as a bawd who targeted vulnerable teenage runaways.61
Statements made by a fifteen-year-old orphan named Bernarda de Lara and her relatives reveal that Doña Nicolasa de Guzman balanced her respectable marriage to a pious man and her reputation as a procuress, even to the extent that she ran a kind of premodern outcall business. Young women willingly came to Guzman’s house to escape their homes. Bernarda and her young relative Gertrudis explained that Bernarda had come from the countryside to Mexico City and moved in with Gertrudis’s mother after the death of her own mother when Bernarda was about ten years old. Suffering as a charity case in her relatives’ house, the orphaned Bernarda ran away one night after receiving a physical punishment from Gertrudis’s mother. Bernarda made the choice to run to Doña Nicolasa’s house, perhaps with full knowledge of how Guzman made her income, rather than endure more bad treatment from her relatives. After a month, Doña Nicolasa sent her to live with Chomba, who carried out the plan for Bernarda’s violent defloration by the governor of the palace guard, an exchange worth three hundred pesos. Guzman and Chomba negotiated the exchange and arranged for Bernarda (accompanied by Chomba) to meet a forlón (a closed carriage with four seats; a luxurious conveyance in this era) one afternoon just before siesta. This lavish vehicle transported her to her deflowerer’s bedroom, where the afternoon sex act with Bernarda cost him the price of an orphan’s dowry, an exchange that highlights the monetization of virginity and marriage that permeated this society. Bernarda then returned to Doña Nicolasa’s house to live with other young women also sent out to “earn their income with their bodies,” which they did every night and some days.62
Spanish law traditionally adjudicated severe punishments for inducing virgins or otherwise honest women into whoring (chapter 1), but the early-eighteenth-century Mexican inquisitors did not follow up on this secular crime, instead interrogating the witnesses to discuss Doña Nicolasa de Guzman’s use of love magic. Their accounts record that Guzman called on her mother, La India Ángela, to give powders to young women so that “men would desire them,” as well as to “stupefy” their husbands so that married women could have affairs. Guzman gave the girls who lived in her house a yellow powder to carry with them at all times, tucked into their stockings. She also had them use incense smoke on their hands and faces for the same purpose. Bernarda received a small bag that Guzman told her to hide in her stockings so she could enchant men to desire her. The inquisitors found it to contain a few roots of an unknown plant.63 Bernarda declared that she did not believe in the power of the bag of roots to attract men because she sometimes forgot to wear the stockings that contained it on her assignations with men. Presumably, this had no effect on their sexual interest in her.
While indulging in these arcane practices, Doña Nicolasa de Guzman managed a lucrative, efficient business, housing young women who had brief sexual encounters with men, not the more longstanding relationships that the previously discussed bawds organized with their clients. In a typically entrepreneurial American fashion of combining Old and New World practices, she took on the role of the traditional Spanish go-between, mixing indigenous magic and a business sense for negotiating sexual transactions for the richest and most powerful bidders. No record exists for Guzman’s reactions to the accusations or for her defense or sentencing. The inquisitors may very well have dropped both of the cases involving Mexican bawds who used erotic magic, after these brief initial investigations, because they did not view these practices as worthy of too much investigatory attention or punitive action. But apparently, they saw value in recording indigenous and African-influenced love-magic practices. The young women who chose to live and work with her suffered no penalties or written censure whatsoever. Instead, the clerical judges recorded them as pitiful, vulnerable victims of Guzman’s cons. They labeled their occupation “prostitution,” but they did not treat them as criminals, at least not yet.
3
Respectable Mistresses
After you’ve won by urgent plea
the right to tarnish her good name,
you still expect her to behave—
you, that coaxed her into shame.
You batter her resistance down
and then, all righteousness, proclaim
that feminine frivolity,
not your persistence, is to blame.
Or which is more to be blamed—
Though both will have cause for chagrin:
the woman who sins for money
or the man who pays money to sin? 1
Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz’s poem observes the insincerity of late-seventeenth-century criticisms of transactional sex. Scribes recorded this late-baroque duplicity in their files when investigating women who asserted their “good name[s]” as they faced accusations of “feminine frivolity.” Sor Juana eloquently criticizes the hypocrisy of male moralizing. But other than her voice, we do not know if and how other women, the women she discusses as the victims of the hombres necios, wrote themselves into this sexually hypocritical milieu—until we read the stories of the elusive kept women of the eighteenth century.
The inscription of certain doñas into the archives began when observant neighbors complained to officials about them. In response, the authorities listened and took notes as the plaintiffs told elaborate tales of their innocence, with supporting evidence added by favorable witnesses. The accused fashioned themselves as modest and reputable workingwomen or even pitiable ladies, making a living in decent jobs as servants to elite men or living at home in seclusion with their families. But servitude or paltry inheritances could not support their spending habits, nor did working as cigarette rollers.2 Instead, they took advantage of the petty favors available from soldiers or salaried men or even more elite patrons, if possible. Their alleged sexual transactions and longer-term relationships took place inside homes, with funding for their housing provided by their clients. They clung to a vestige of recogimiento and reacted to denunciations by seducing the scribes into exploring their delicately balanced lives in depth to counter the writing of oral gossip about their immorality and scandal.
These women are the most ambiguous of any discussed in this book because they subtly and effectively integrated themselves into the lives of their clientele and, thus, had the patronage necessary to make their transgressions and disreputable labels illegible or even invisible in the written records of transactional sex. Church and state bureaucrats, along with low-ranking military officers, all generally Spaniards, patronized certain women as potential or real sex partners. These doñas did not entertain plebeian men and thus operated more like medieval and early-modern Spanish clandestinas, as opposed to the whores in brothels or the surrounding
