Conclusion

The conclusion surveys how in nineteenth-century Mexico, Europe, and regions around the world under European colonial rule, sex work took place in an environment of increasing government intervention, a phase in the history of sexuality that extends into the twenty-first century. The concern about disease control took on a more scientific, sanitary tone in the eighteenth century. This discourse remained critical to sex work law, as it does to the present day. Through prolific regulations, scientific studies, works of literature, and statements made by sex workers themselves, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw an enormous increase in the archiving and inscribing of women who sold sex. But their roles remained the same: either pathetic victims (usually of non-whites or non-Christians or other feared populations), lascivious and scandalous disturbers of the peace, or dehumanized and horrific threats to public health. Imperialism and international conceptions of race/gender difference led to increasing government regulation in locations as dispersed as the disappearing Spanish American viceroyalties, extending outwards to Europe, Asia, and Oceania.

Selling Sex, Saving the Family

This chapter presents a controversial issue within the history of sexuality. It documents several case studies of sex work done within home-based brothels, where mothers, sisters, and father figures procured younger women and children. These examples would be interpreted today as sexual abuse, given that they involved girls under the age of sixteen, forced or manipulated into prostitution by more powerful individuals. The chapter tries to contextualize these cases within the contemporary domestic economy and culture of family life during the struggle for Mexican independence from Spain.Young women in fact betrayed filial loyalty and domestic hierarchies when they spoke as plaintiffs to denounce their sisters, mothers, or fathers for involving them in selling sex.In response to the complaints (the daughters’ disobedience to their familial superiors), the late viceregal state exercised paternalism as it stepped in to preserve traditional ideas of family as a sexual sanctuary for protected daughters.

Respectable Mistresses

This chapter begins with a quote from the celebrated seventeenth-century Mexico City Poet, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, highlighting the hypocritical intersection between gender and sexuality in this era. The focus here is on the legal history of eighteenth-century middle class women who retained a degree of public honor as they took part in sex work inside their homes.The confused eighteenth-century reactions by church, state, and neighbors to sexually active women often derived from increased opportunities for permitted or at least tolerated socializing between the sexes. These new social spaces challenged official ideas of public order and permissible gender interaction.

Bawds and Brothels

Chapter 1 begins with a quote from El Libro de Buen Amor, a fourteenth-century work of Spanish literature which praises the complex role of the medieval alcahueta, a kind of professional sexual matchmaker, often an older woman. The word alcahueta is loosely translated as a “bawd.” The chapter focuses on the legal history of sex work in Spain. First it discusses the role of the bawd in Spanish law codes, especially the thirteenth-century siete partidas, which influenced the viceregal judicial system. Along with bawds, Spaniards also participated in sex work by visiting or working at legal brothels, which had royal and municipal approval until 1623. Lastly, men, commonly known as “ruffians” also procured their wives, although all legal codes and courts penalized this moneymaking scheme. The second half of the chapter presents several case studies from Mexico City, which illustrate how the Spanish legal traditions mentioned earlier in the chapter changed and adapted according to New World situations and conditions.

From Whores to Prostitutes

This chapter begins with quotations from the Renaissance Spanish work of literature entitled The Tragicomedy of Calisto and Melibea, popularly known as La Celestina. This chapter is about the new terminology for (and thus status of) public women, sometimes known as whores. During the seventeenth century a significant shift took place in the conceptual history of transactional sex in the Iberian world, a movement towards the creation of the diseased, criminalized and/or victimized prostitute, who, by the early eighteenth century, began to fill the shoes of the still- working sinful and immoral whore. In this chapter, investigations of three Mexico City procuresses document both their traditional association with sorcery and the highly domestic and distinctly African and indigenous culture of seventeenth-century transactional sex. In this era, the crown forbade brothels, but this mandate was an empty rhetorical gesture with no practical application within the criminal justice system.

Multiple Prostitute Identities

In a milieu of increasing militarization, early nineteenth century Mexico City archives frequently evoke the word prostitution, as deponents on all sides of judicial inquiries manipulated its deprecatory tone. The use of this word strengthened sex work accusations and denials by recording allegedly depraved professionally sexual women. In response to this hardening scribal category, the women in this chapter reacted by multiplying their identities when they came before the police or courts court accused of prostitution or running a brothel. Trial documents do not capture all of the roles that these two defendants played, as the goal of their statements was simply to write themselves as moral, respected, and financially independent women. We can read nothing more than an enticing hint of the multiplicity of changeable identities embodied by sexually active women such as these in the final decades of the Viceroyalty of New Spain. The label of prostitute emerged as an ever more solid opponent to their shifting personas, even as they reaffirmed it with their denials of its applicability to themselves. Meanwhile, notaries and judges began to inscribe a new and very seductive label in this era: the “prostituted girl,” an innocent victim of corrupting and evil influences.

Streetwalkers and the Police

In the late eighteenth-century, a new police force began to patrol the streets of Mexico City. While their first goal was to maintain street illumination, they also policed sanitation, plebeian bodies, public sexuality, and prostitution, creating new archives in the form of their nightly log books. This new and more quantitative documentation actually caused more evasiveness on the part of both those under arrest and those doing the arresting. In the 1790s, law enforcement inscribed only a handful of women arrested for working in brothels and a few dozen public sex acts. Despite nightly entries, many official pronouncements regarding changing plebeian street culture, and a greater presence of authority figures on the street, law enforcement, judicial notaries, and the women taken into custody made a conscious effort to avoid recording transactional sex.

Introduction

The introduction begins with a quote from a work of Renaissance Spanish literature entitled La Lozana Andaluza. This quote describes the world of sex work and prostitution in the sixteenth century. Much of the introduction discusses the historiography of gender and sexuality in Spanish America and Spain, the use of literary sources to contextualize archival documentation, as well as theory related to historians’ use of archives, the idea of agency, and sex work in a global context. The introduction positions the book as unique in terms of presenting an in-depth history of sex work in the viceroyalties.

Courtesans and Their Lovers

This chapter turns to the rarefied world of the elite courtesan in Enlightenment Mexico City. Many of these famous women acted in the theater, and gained fame and celebrity through their artistry as well as their sexuality.Courtesans began the process of writing themselves into the archives as they promenaded on the city streets, with their brash materialism violating the privileges of the hereditary nobility. These public and presumptuous displays set into motion accusations of their disregard of sumptuary laws. Their driving desire to publicize their own sexual capital enraged their contemporaries and prompted scribes to write hundreds of pages of petitions, denunciations, and complaints.