Spanish America. But for the viceregal era (1492–1824), when historians discuss what they usually call “prostitution,” they often emphasize misogynistic rhetoric against women and repressive control, despite the widely acknowledged evidence of Iberian and American women’s effective use of their economic and legal rights in all other settings.48 The loud, commanding voices of prescriptive sources drown out the evasive language and denying stance of female defendants. Our valid appreciation of the struggles of Spain’s female colonial subjects against the repressive patriarchy of their era has resulted in avoiding the morally complex and controversial story of their voluntary participation in selling sex for money or gifts or brokering relationships for less prosperous, younger women.49 The only full-length monograph in Spanish or English is by Ana María Atondo Rodríguez, entitled El Amor Venal y la Condición Femenina en el México Colonial, published in 1992. This topic remains “peripheral to the colonial stories [historians] have chosen to tell” and is one of the “histories suspended from received historiographies.”50
However, many histories document an explicit, core assumption of sex as a form of exchange in this culture.51 In the act of sacramental marriage, young women in the viceroyalties converted their sexual capital into economic and social capital, generally within the context of their parents’ or guardians’ machinations. If they eloped with their own choice of husband, they risked losing all or part of their inheritance.52 Among the elite, women who were ensconced within a family support network brought dowries with them into marriage and received arras, or a significant gift of money from their grooms, to further bolster their financial stability. Lucky orphan girls who lacked the financial padding of a natal family received charitable donations to fund their dowries, making them more attractive potential wives.53 Unmarried Spanish American women could more directly convert sexual or erotic capital into currency by suing their lovers for defloration.54 Winning a defloration or breach-of-promise case rewarded women with money that they could use for child support or a dowry to marry another man. Often these women enjoyed family support and advocacy as they litigated their defloration compensation suits. And far along this spectrum, women labeled as “public,” or courtesans, whores, and prostitutes, most of whom worked in the company of their mothers, sisters, or husbands, commodified their sex acts by insisting on direct compensation (cash or gifts) before proceeding with an intimate relationship. These women did not require or demand a religious benediction before they had sex, although they generally did work within a conventional domestic setting, not unlike respectably married daughters.55
Day-to-day sexual norms in the New World did not conform to the gender ideals mandated by the Council of Trent (1545–1563).56 As a result, this book focuses on the textual tensions and evasions of political leaders, clerics, and moralizers who censured sexually entrepreneurial women while simultaneously tolerating them and only sporadically persecuting them. To introduce these cultural and juridical contradictions, chapter 1 details early-modern legal, literary, and popular understandings of the commonly used terms ramera and alcahueta, using fictional examples as well as court cases set in sixteenth-century Mexico City. Spanish law codes shaped the American experience of transactional sex to a degree, but lacking a documentary record, it is difficult to know if the important Spanish institution of the legal brothel became popular in the New World. Instead, the scant surviving texts testify to exchanges of money and gifts for sex and intimacy that took place within family homes. Chapter 1 explores several other distinctly New World interpretations of transactional sex, such as how, from the first decades of Spanish rule in Mexico, women of African and indigenous descent shaped Spanish American understandings of how to negotiate and carry out illicit relationships, especially in the familiar, popular, and sometimes lucrative occupation of bawdry.57
Chapter 2 examines the crown’s motivations for closing regulated brothels and investigates the negotiation of increasingly illegal sexual transactions in the seventeenth century. American tribunals of the Holy Office of the Spanish Inquisition targeted the erotic magic that often accompanied selling sex in this era. Bawds and sorceresses (including women of African and indigenous descent) merged as a conjoined threat. Although brothel manageresses still enjoyed an elite clientele, simultaneously they faced suppression due to royal mandates to close their houses. Despite the patronage of viceregal officials, these women endured increasing stigmatization after this first step in criminalization. Even with their growing illegality and vilification, in seventeenth-century cities women offered a multilayered range of sex for sale, racially and socially diverse, in a variety of settings. However, archival evidence remains sparse until the eighteenth century, when, under the reforms of the Bourbon dynasty, documented prosecutions picked up significantly as more modern mechanisms for urban policing developed.58
The first two chapters provide the early-modern historical and juridical background required to understand the new categorization of women as “prostitutes” in the 1700s, the topic of chapters 3, 4, and 5. In the eighteenth century, a substantial paper trail records how streetwalkers, middle-class mistresses, and elite courtesans endured more frequent judicial encounters than in previous centuries.59 But in a typically viceregal paradox, increasing surveillance tended toward a benign paternalism for certain kinds of women, especially kept women (chapter 3) and elite courtesans (chapter 4). These chapters narrate the lives of several women who lived in comfort and respectability with their families, or were supported by their lovers, but who withstood neighborly gossip or official campaigns against them due to their suspicious wealth and noisy social lives.
Chapter 4 examines the pinnacles of the Spanish American demimonde, where transactional sex and professional theater and dance intersected.60 These women wrote themselves into the archives due to their self-promotion and their own materialism, libertinism, and social ambition. Starting in the seventeenth century, these courtesans drew attention to themselves as they flaunted sumptuary laws in their triumphantly opulent clothes, housing, and lifestyle, underwritten by rich and courtly lovers. Courtesans could call on powerful men to sprint to their aid at a moment’s notice, but despite their personal power, their benefactors cherished them as delicate creatures needing their protection. These legendary symbols of viceregal decadence continue to fascinate us to the present through their portrayals in popular culture.
At the other end of the spectrum, chapter 5 turns to poor women recorded into the nightly logs because late-colonial reformers made a concerted effort to clear the streets of drunks, street solicitors, and vagrants. The police dockets for the 1790s preserve traces of the interactions between patrolmen and women working on the street.61 This extensive documentation allows for statistical analysis of women arrested for solicitation or public lewd acts. The authorities reacted by attempting to force these women back into their family homes or jobs as servants, the very situations that compelled them to sell sex in the first place. Although hundreds of women appear in the police notations, still their actual crimes often remain very vague.
Chapter 6, set in the early nineteenth century, remains in this plebeian milieu but concentrates on two women’s complex efforts to self-fashion themselves as respectable ladies. In the context of an increasingly “modern” idea of regulating prostitutes and brothels, these two women consistently denied accusations made by nosy neighbors as well as ineffective street policing by the weakening imperial state. With trial-based performances, they rejected efforts made by men, their families, and even law enforcement to confine them inside of more traditional partnered arrangements. The woman known as La Sargenta (“Sergeant Lady” or “the Sergeant’s Woman”) assumed the character of a quiet servant, even while her accusers portrayed her as a drunken streetwalker. Around the same time, a brothel manager and clothes dealer also carried out an elaborate manipulation of multiple identities in her trial.
Perhaps
