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 and sale of their bodies.”59 Doña Nicolasa de Guzman operated a 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