Literary portraits of whores and bawds such as La Lozana Andaluza, The Book of Good Love, Santa, and the Tragicomedy of Calisto and Melibea add more imaginary detail to the elusive, ambiguous documentary records.21 Written records of all kinds relating to this topic contain familiar fictional plots, including those written on the pages of viceregal court cases. Inside these files, officials and deponents create stories that fit accepted narratives. To highlight how trial narratives intertwine with fictional imaginings, each chapter in this book introduces its topics via a work of literature in Spanish but follows through on the chapter’s themes with analysis of legal codes, government decrees, and records from a variety of juridical settings, including criminal and ecclesiastical courts and the Holy Office of the Spanish Inquisition. Over the course of the book, these introductory passages shift to actual trial discourse, to suggest the blending of fictional and archival texts.22
Thinking about how artistic creations imagine sex work highlights the built-in dichotomies of literary narrations. Since ancient times, literature and, more recently, films about sex work almost always follow either a libertine or sentimental narrative. In other words, women written as whores end the story prosperous and free or punished (usually by a painful death) for their behavior.23 Sentimental stories have unwilling heroines forced into selling sex by villains or poverty, while libertine tales focus on success, personal agency, and empowerment. In the Spanish tradition, La Lozana falls into the libertine style because the heroine achieves wealth, redemption, and stability, while in contrast the more emotionally charged Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea (La Celestina) ends in suicide, murder, and tragedy. Both narratives fall into conventional Christian morality in their portrayals of redeemable, penitent whores who live and prosper, brave women who use their agency to remove themselves from a bad situation due to their utter innocence and the duping of an evil man, or immoral unrepentant sinners who die off at the end.24 In all of these scenarios, the overly dramatic, simplified fictional (but also highly erotic) versions of “fallen” women’s lives hide a variety of more complicated on-the-ground understandings of socially appropriate sexual behavior, especially those that operate outside the bonds of monogamous heterosexual matrimony.25
Case files including women litigants and defendants in the Spanish viceroyalties sometimes offer more ambiguity than the opposing poles common in literature: female passive victimization versus criminal deviance.26 But deponents also did borrow from literature to tell their autobiographies to fit these “enforced narrations.”27 So how can a historian narrate the archival traces of women labeled “whores,” “public women,” and “prostitutes” in Mexican archives without either glorifying their sexual agency or representing them as nothing more than pitiful victims of gendered injustice?28 Does life itself have narratives, or are they only a result of judicial and archival structures, which we reinforce in our scholarly historiography? Stoler and Kathryn Burns, drawing from the massive literature of the “archival turn,” encourage historians of colonialism to attempt an ethnography of the archive itself, resisting organizing its incoherencies, ambivalences, and ambiguities into familiar stories.29
Sex-worker activism also provides a number of key theoretical structures that help avoid narrative simplicity. First, as an overarching goal, sex-worker activists emphasize inclusivity and intersectionality within the occupation in terms of race, gender, and sexuality and stress the complexity of the sex-work experience. Following this fundamental dictate, this book encompasses rich and poor women of European, African, and indigenous ancestry.30 Sex workers’ writings instruct readers that the sex act is not the essence of the lives of those in the sex industry but obsesses only those moralizers and reformers who seek to control or criminalize selling sex.31 Most viceregal court documentation does not refer to explicit sex acts but, instead, reveals very familiar contemporary concerns about honor, family, racial difference, material wealth, violence, and the negotiation of the authorities’ involvement in private life.32 Lastly, writings from twentieth- and twenty-first–century sex workers emphasize the performative and practical nature of their occupations, stressing that they work within the social, racial, economic, and cultural realities of today’s world. To take a stand as an ally against the mislabeling, criminalizing, stigmatizing, and daily violence against sex workers that continues to the present day, the writings of recent and current sex-industry workers frame my understandings of what is at stake in my own contribution to the history of transactional sex.
THE TEMPTATIONS OF TERMINOLOGY
Throughout this book, I translate Spanish terms into English following bilingual dictionaries dating from the centuries under discussion, tracing the change over time in the judicial and popular use of these terms from the medieval era to the nineteenth century. Sometimes this means using unfamiliar words in English, such as bawd (explored in depth in chapter 1) and words that still raise our hackles, such as whore. As strange or offensive as these words sound to our ears, they do capture the uses during the eras presented in this book. But defendants inscribed in this way almost always used the judicial process to erase the writing on their bodies. This very purposeful denial obfuscates all evidence of viceregal transactional sex. To seek solid data confirming a definitive vision of women who took part in transactional sex would change my role from that of a curious historian enticed by scribal seductions, to that of a simulacrum of a viceregal bureaucrat who believed that categorization meant control over the uncontrollable, an ideology that “sustain[s] the fantasy of the colonial panopticon.”33
To explain why the word whore has such a longstanding negative connotation, we must look back to the origins of Christian sexual moral ideologies and even to the pre-Christian era. Kyle Harper argues that ancient pagan Romans depended on a ubiquitous sex trade to distinguish and protect the boundaries between “good” and “bad” women, labels that derived from marital status and social reputation (public honor). Early Christians took a stand against pagan sexuality and based their own distinct group identity around a much more restricted notion of sexual activity. For Christians in the early centuries, virginity represented the ultimate exercise in free choice, an ideal behavior available to only the most moral, spiritual humans. Christians transformed sex that happened outside of heterosexual procreation and monogamous marriage into private sin, a sign of an individual’s personal choice to succumb to the temptations of the flesh and the devil, together with a lingering taint of public dishonor. Added to these ideas from early Christianity, moralizers point to a lust for luxuries as a critical factor in moral, social, and sexual “falls.” The label of “whore” and its equivalents in other European languages denigrated a woman’s greed for luxuries and her reputation for nonmonogamy, much as it does today, but did not necessarily refer to a specific occupation subject to legal sanctions.34 Over time, the concept of whore has functioned as an insult to both a woman’s public honor and her private sins.
While whore was and remains a broad insult to morality, prostitute usually designates a somewhat more specific behavior or occupation. Spanish-speakers 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