did not use the term prostitution as we currently understand it, the unlawful selling of sex acts or “the in-person physical exchange of sexual services for money or goods,” before the eighteenth century.35 By 1800, law codes in Spain and the Americas had not specifically criminalized prostitution, but the term came into general use in court records. Part of the imperial power of the term prostitution resides in its vagueness, its availability for application to any suspect woman. Even in the early twentieth century, British imperialists still did not have a clear definition in mind when writing laws against prostitution or arresting women for the crime. Unlike the present, when law enforcement sets up hotel and street “stings” to entrap sex workers, late-nineteenth-century authorities noted that, in terms of catching someone in the act of prostitution, “direct proof is for obvious reasons unattainable.”36 Therefore, both the whore and prostitute labels function very well within the context of obfuscating texts with confusing uses of evidence.
The origins of a broad understanding of the term prostitute go back at least as far in history to a sixteenth-century Latin-English dictionary. Sir Thomas Elyot translates prostituere pudiciriam in a way similar to the common Spanish phrase mujer publica (public woman), without implying any illegal status: “to be a commune harlot . . . to be commune to al men or women in the acte of lechery.”37 In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, “prostituting” oneself referred to corrupting one’s own endeavors (broadly conceived, not just sexually) for monetary gain. My cases do not use the terms prostituta or prostitución until the eighteenth century, so I do not use this term either, and when I do, only as a direct quote from my sources. Although the early twenty-first century remains caught in the regulatory and criminalizing era that began in the nineteenth century, historians should not project this criminalization back to centuries when it did not exist.38
While much more historically accurate than prostitute for the centuries before 1800, the word whore still sparks controversy, although I use it throughout this book as a translation of the Spanish words ramera and puta. Within the sex industry, the debate continues about whether or not to reclaim it in a parallel gesture to the reappropriation of queer.39 Whore “may be the original intersectional insult” because calling someone a whore implies an array of personal traits that our society deplores, including: poverty, of a nonwhite race, unmarried, nonmonogamous, victimized by violence, drug-addicted, uneducated, of a lower class, diseased, homeless, emotionally duplicitous, and sexually deviant. Any “stigmatized woman or feminized man” can suffer the label whore, as long as it remains a shameful word, tied to the negative traits listed above. “Whore solidarity” in part means working toward a time when women, upon hearing this word said in their vicinity, will not react with fear or shame or quickly correct the speaker for their mislabeling. A defiant reclaiming of whore and the complex history of whores presents an opportunity to analyze and reshape the negative, shaming implication of this word, without falling into discursive traps such as using prostitute instead.40
Obviously, the phrase sex work lacks the primeval shaming intention of whore. A critical goal of sex-work activism since the 1970s has been to recognize that selling sex is a job, not a criminal fulltime occupation (prostitution) or a permanent immoral status (whore). While sometimes a broad term is required while discussing this topic, I avoid using sex work extensively while discussing my case studies because it has a modern connotation of labor rights and does not effectively convey the subtler and changing terms in common use when Spain reigned in the Americas. However, in line with its use by activists and allies, it is preferable to say and write “sex work” instead of “prostitution,” when an overarching term is necessary, even for eras before the twentieth century, because sex work lacks prostitution’s anachronistic implication of social and familial marginalization and illegality. Recent writings by sex workers confirm that the word prostitution is used only by “anti-prostitution” groups.41 Of course, in daily life, sex workers call themselves providers, girls, ladies, entertainers, escorts, or any number of other specific labels pointing to their areas of specialization, but never self-refer as prostitutes. Over the centuries, stigmatization has necessitated creating several identities, while the performative nature of sex work transforms necessity into a creative challenge.
Vaguer, condescending terms for sex work imply moral condemnation and obscure what exactly goes on when sexual acts or other kinds of intimacy are exchanged for gifts, cash, or protection. When one speaks of women “selling themselves” or “selling their bodies” or uses such phrases as “they served with their own bodies,” what do “themselves” or “their bodies” really mean in these comments, if not a woman’s genitals?42 Using kitschy, evasive phrases such as “selling one’s charms” does not water down this grotesque implication.43 These terms equate an act of potential contact with a woman’s genitals as a purchase of her whole self, her entire body, even her soul. Those who use these synecdoches are not offering humor, pity, or protectiveness but instead exhibit an extreme form of misogyny that sees women as nothing more than genitalia for men to buy. Their phrasing is not even accurate. In a paid sexual transaction of any kind, sellers never exchange or trade on “their selves” or their bodies. Sex workers over the course of many eras and on a range of continents may have avoided physical contact between bodies; instead, they may have just talked to, eaten with, performed domestic tasks for, entertained, played music for, danced with, or attended events with their clientele. Whatever bodily contact they allowed formed part of a larger performance that may have involved sex acts or may have focused more on other kinds of intimacy, companionship, and communication. What sex workers sell now and throughout history is a performance that may include such elements as the sellers’ disguised or costumed physical appearance, a range of personalities and roles, intimacy, and perhaps sexual release.44
I identified the records in this book by searching for terms that I knew were used before 1825, including specific words (and all of their possible derivations) such as mujer pública, casa publica, ramera, alcahueta, puta, and prostituta, but also very vague concepts such as escandalosa or even simply mujer mala. This book does not deal with other transactional situations such as long-term concubinage but purposefully concentrates on women labeled as engaged in public, commercialized sexual exchange.45 The archival inscription of these labels. of course, does not prove that women fit their definitions. Assuming that they did accepts that the authorities applied correct labels to them and reuses “colonial categories” as “analytical vocabulary,” as opposed to “transient, provisional objects of historical inquiry.”46 Due to their evasiveness and the ambiguity in the paperwork of the time, we cannot assume penetrative sex took place unless witnesses in the documents specifically state it, and even in that case they might have lied in their sworn statements. If eyewitnesses admitted to seeing or participating in a sex act, the scribes recorded it in generalized, euphemistic terms. Creating either a libertine or sentimental narrative from these fragments hides the incoherencies of the files themselves.
THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF TRANSACTIONAL SEX IN
NEW SPAIN: HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT?
In his study of the early Christian debate over sex for sale, Harper argues that “prostitution is important, even central, to the history of sex.” This generalization applies well to the Spanish-speaking world, as Eukene Lacarra Lanz observes that “prostitution” was not “marginal in Iberian society, considering the cultural, economic, political, and social import it reached in medieval and early modern Spain.”47 Historians of Spain prove Lanz’s point in their prolific scholarly investigations into the history of brothels, bawdry, courtesans, and streetwalkers from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries and beyond.
In contrast, historians of the viceroyalties have not taken intensive interest in this topic but have given it only sidelong glances. It could even be argued that they have contributed to its erasure by either ignoring it or exaggerating its suppression. Many popular and highly regarded monographs explore government regulation and
