regions under Spanish influence) as an era when whores proliferated, offering their clients almost endless options in terms of age, looks, experience, methods, and attitudes. Seduced by this fictional pillow talk, this book tells the history of women labeled public women, whores, and prostitutes in New Spain’s archival records, embracing the complexity of “all the characters who populate the prostitute imaginary,” as well as the ambiguities and limitations of documenting the history of sexuality via written sources.3
This book takes for granted that Spanish and Spanish American literary and legal understandings of gender and sexuality have vital importance in the context of the rise of global imperialism. Spain’s New World viceroyalties, especially the geographic region that is now Mexico (a section of the Viceroyalty of New Spain), dominated in terms of population and wealth across four centuries of American history. The Spanish viceroyalties and the nations that emerged from their legacy in the nineteenth century have been envisioned for too long as marginalized, “borderland,” violent, bloody, dystopic, tragic, and, in a word, failed. Jorge Cañizares Esguerra and James E. Sanders eloquently argue for decentering this patriotic tale and remembering the Spanish Empire as the prevailing and foremost power in the Atlantic World from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries.4 The Spanish American historic trajectory is normative, not a curious marginal note about a “minority” population. By tracing the textual history of transactional sex in New Spain, this book builds a bridge between medieval sexuality and the twenty-first–century surveillance and bureaucratization of private lives, from the perspective that sexuality is “at the center of the colonial archive, rather than at its margins.”5
To return to La Lozana Andaluza, this woman represents more than an item available in the bountiful street catalogue described in the opening quote. On the contrary, her fictional personality brings up the question of sexual agency for women in the past. The tale of her life revolves around her shaping her own destiny by traveling from Spain to Italy. “What I want,” she declares, “is for [men] to need me, not for me to need them. I want to live by my own labor. . . . I only want to live by my profession.” To that end, La Lozana puts a green branch behind her ear to indicate that she is a ramera (“whore,” from the Spanish word ramo or “branch”) and displays herself at a lattice window, but she shows only her hands. She manages to make a living off her lovers, in the form of fine meals, gifts, and cash. She also helps other couples come together in the classic medieval occupation of bawdry (alcahuetería), prospering financially even though, with a shocking lack of conventional femininity, she claims that she has forgotten how to spin.6 Male characters observe that “[La] Lozana wants something better” than any other woman in Rome, “to be independent.” She succeeds in these ambitions because she knows “how to use her wiles” and is “always spoken to with respect.” The women she meets on her journeys describe her as beautiful, “bold and loquacious.” Knowing her own needs and maintaining her standards, she “insists on getting her share” and “nothing but the best for her.”7
Inspired by these quotes, this book could celebrate the personal agency of La Lozana and her Mexican peers, seducing readers with their tenacious survival skills and courageous resistance to oppressive viceregal gender hierarchies. But Ann Laura Stoler warns historians against “charmed accounts” that “seduce and comfort.” She instead suggests a “rough and charmless colonial history track . . . [that] might dispense with heroes—subaltern or otherwise.” She proposes good and evil as “historical rather than transcendent categories.”8 Along these same lines, Walter Johnson cautions scholars to avoid a simplistic, self-congratulatory tone derived from unfounded pride in their own understanding of historic individuals as conscious actors in their own lives.9 The process of writing archives itself complicates agency. My use of the term scribal underscores the notaries—escribanos—who physically created all of the cases, with their act of writing testimonies. We do not actually know whose “voice” emerges from these written texts, who is the “I,” other than the penman himself, a kind of shadowy ventriloquist, “someone who could give other people an official voice.” Spanish aphorisms linked escribanos to putas, in that both occupations worked off of verbal cons.10 Hearing and sharing these projected voices, making “ink on parchment speak,” may represent nothing more than a social historian’s fantasy.11
The various written words used in this book inscribe labels of immorality, difference, and disease on women’s bodies. It is open to question if these differences are “biological or universal,” but they do require “cultural marking” within a specific historical and social context. In her work on inscribing and reading inscriptions on bodies, Elizabeth Grosz argues that the “real material body” does not exist but that “representations and cultural inscriptions quite literally constitute bodies.” The body and writing intersect, creating objects that read as various past and present “systems of social coercion, legal inscription, and sexual and economic exchange.”12 Textualizing the body involves several people who contributed to the writing of every paper file: the women under discussion, other deponents, the scribe and court officials present, and, of course, the historian herself. However, what remains for the historian to read and re-narrate is the paper where these individuals inscribed their own and others’ bodies, not the inscribed body itself.
But archives may not represent as clear an assertion of state power and ways of knowing as some theorists once thought. They instead contain “mad fragmentations . . . that just ended up there” and piecemeal “records of uncertainty and doubt,” as anxious officials tried to catch their paper trails up with colonial situations that had exceeded their comprehension and control.13 Even as they appear efficient and organized due to their repetitiveness or controlled structure, criminal archives record disorder because “out of the darkness [the archive] snatches breathless, disjointed beings, summoned to explain themselves before the court . . . mixing lies and the truth, hatred and cunning.”14 Zeb Tortorici notes that scholars write the history of sexuality based on the most illegible tracings, which historians seduce into our own “affective engagements” to produce our historiographical narratives. Scribes wrote testimonies according to their own “submerged” but “specific scripts” that preserved illegibilities in the archives of transactional sex.15 But similar to when we first fall in love, we seek in archival documents a scribal mirror of ourselves, which gives us pleasure by reflecting back our desires, our dreams, and our “sense of self,” but we actually are reading vestiges not intended for us, “fragmented written traces of something else.”16
Spain’s and Mexico’s archives inscribe certain early modern women as “whores [putas, rameras]” or “public women [mujeres públicas],” much later writing them as “prostitutes,” as well as male and female panderers (rufianes and alcahuetas). These references exist in files that are not consistent over time and, in terms of details provided, vary in both quality and quantity. Sources for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries include prescriptive royal decrees, law codes, and short court cases. Much of the history of Mexican commercial sex was “unwritten” in this era, either due to its commonness, “because it could not yet be articulated,” because “it could not be said,” or because a choice was made to ignore it or remain inattentive to it.17 In the eighteenth century, some of the cases grew longer and more detailed, allowing for more complicated characters to emerge from the accounts that women gave of their lives. The late viceregal state also created shorter and much more plentiful records with a modern statistical bent.18 The archive consists of a growing quantity of documentation over the centuries. The changing terminology for prosecuted women, voiced by kings, jurists, magistrates, inquisitors, and bishops, as well as disgruntled husbands and neighbors, foreshadowed the increasing regulation, criminalization, and polarizing politics of modern global transactional sex.19
Language within the documents outlines a story of how the judicial identity of women changed over time. In the sixteenth century, prosecuted women in the Americas began to testify in court by asserting their good reputations because their accusers framed them as sinful,
