Despite their denials and efforts to evade textual traces, over the centuries of viceregal history, women sold sex on the street, or independently solicited men on the street or in taverns to take back to their humble accommodations, or worked in taverns for a male or female panderer. Some women lived discreetly as servants or mistresses in long-term compensated sexual relationships. In New Spain, patrolmen on the city streets, the local justices, and even the Catholic Church chose to leave most of these exchanges and relationships alone, probably because they were enmeshed in commercial sex themselves, saw its value, or agreed with the general population that tolerated it. Usually they followed a policy of avoiding unnecessary disruption of the status quo and “ignor[ed] all but the most scandalous and public of sexual activities,” such as when a woman’s “behavior caused problems in the wider community,” “drew attention” to law breaking, or caused public disorder.66 The authorities preferred to let all concerned go about their business as usual, without leaving much of a paper trail. Any intervention that took place probably served its purpose in convincing those involved to moderate their public activities, at least temporarily.
Although La Lozana’s lover saw whores everywhere, the women under investigation in this book, seeking to keep their sex lives private to the degree possible, evasively prevented the creation of written documentation of their status as “public women.” Today, our laws allow for the prosecution of women for a verifiable (even recorded) act of offering or exchanging money for sex, but in the past, church and state targeted women more broadly for their immoral reputations, using labels such as whore to juridically besmirch their status as good women. It follows that viceregal judicial conventions demanded that those subject to these labels always pleaded innocent. A woman would never openly admit her moral stigma in court, even though she might say that she made a few unfortunate mistakes due to her “fragility,” or that men or procuresses had victimized her.67 Not wishing to inscribe her alleged disrespectability, the defendant always made an effort to find witnesses to back up the fact that she had a good reputation.68 During this process, women performed a gendered manipulation of emotions, honor, public reputation, morality, and victimization in their testimonies. This “performance . . . mitigate[d] the whore stigma, offering some prostitutes ways to distance themselves from traditional [oppression].”69 But when the idea of a victimized prostitute began to take hold, prosecuted women had an identity that they could sustain while still holding onto respectability and even desirability as an honorable wife.
The women in this book prove that, whenever and wherever the words whore and prostitute are considered insults, women have to constantly defend their reputation and verbally dissimulate to avoid the dangers and shame of negative categorizations or to fit into a dehumanized, pity-provoking role. Meanwhile, the very existence of women labeled “whores” or “prostitutes” allows other “good” women to enjoy the social benefits of sexual respectability.70 There remain so many reasons for these scribal seductions.
1
Bawds and Brothels
Now as for the go-between, this should be some woman who is kin to you and who will be loyal to you. . . . Make sure that your go-between is skilled and subtle in her speech; she must be able to lie with ease and to understand the lady’s reactions. . . . If you have no such relative, find one of those old crones that frequent the churches and know all the back alleys—the ones with the huge rosaries dangling from their necks.
“Archpriest,” she said, “one makes the old woman trot if he needs her, and you must do the same because you have no other. You must treat this old woman well, for she can help you. . . . Never call me vile or ugly names. Call me ‘Good Love’ and I will be loyal; people are pleased by pleasing names, and good names cost no more than bad ones.”
For the old woman’s sake and to speak the truth, I have called my book Good Love, and so do I call her always. Because I treated her well, she was a real asset to me.
Again being alone, without a sweetheart, I sent for my old woman and she said, “What now?” Then she laughed, saying: “Greetings, my good sir. Here comes good love, as good as a trusted friend could hope to find.” 1
Juan Ruiz, known as the Archpriest of Hita, wrote his humorous and devout Book of Good Love around 1320 and endowed his character Trotaconventos with great verbal skill and flexibility in dealing with her clientele. Ruiz depicts her as a crafty old woman but also names her “good love,” in honor of what she provides him through her talent with words. The narrator both fears and trusts Trotaconventos with all his emotional and sexual happiness.2 Women labeled whores and bawds produced an enormous textual record in Spain, in the form of legal, political, and literary sources that document the complexities and nuances of working in this trade. However, in New Spain, more subtle scribal seductions took place. Clients, officials, and male and female purveyors purposefully obscured the sexual marketplace. As observed by Josefina Muriel, “prostitution [sic] had a perfectly clear place and was peacefully tolerated by the authorities.”3 Especially for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, highly legible peninsular literature, law codes, and the history of increasing regulation and eventually suppression underscore transactional sex’s textual erasure and its hidden prevalence in New Spain.
Three kinds of written expressions of Iberian commercial sex prefaced the elusiveness of American interpretations. First, in Spain, jurists, poets, dramatists, and moral/religious commentators recorded a wide range of understandings of disreputable women that did not clearly define what constitutes a woman who sells sex acts, versus a promiscuous woman who makes no money off her behavior, versus a woman simply known as having an immoral reputation.4 A second aspect highlighted in written documentation was the crafty and sly male or female bawd—rufianes and alcahuetas (or masculine, alcahuetes) like Trotaconventos—who caused the most official worry from the medieval era until well into the seventeenth century.5 Lastly, from the 1200s to the 1600s, increasing crown and municipal control of legal brothels (mancebías)6 dominated the Iberian legal discourse, leading to a large body of regulations that the viceregal authorities did not leave a record of enforcing. Sixteenth-century Spaniards brought these late-medieval laws and customs to the New World, where participants apparently veered away into a more informal street- and home-based practice that left only the slightest traces of its existence.
The first half of this chapter mines the prolific files of Iberian brothels and pandering. The second half of the chapter draws from a much smaller transactional-sex archive for sixteenth-century Mexico City. In the new viceregal capital, the crown-regulated brothels could not displace the older tradition of male and female go-betweens who masterminded sexual relationships, often in a hospitable setting.7 This more domestic milieu for engaging in sex for gifts or money did not limit its entrepreneurial nature but obscured it from surviving scribal annotations. Both procurers and their clientele used their time before the courts to disguise their reputations, tactics that further obfuscate how women in Mexico transacted in sex. Sex for sale in the sixteenth-century viceroyalties operated on the fringes of legality and surveillance. In an effort to clarify some of the subtleties of writing transactional sex, throughout this section of the chapter I will point out the terminology that led me to a particular case—that is, how the case was verbally catalogued within Mexico’s national archive.
LEGAL DEFINITIONS
To begin with the legal context, sex for sale existed in various forms in Roman and Visigothic Spain, as well as when Muslim rule dominated the peninsula, because from ancient times, gendered social