LITMIR.BIZ

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Terreros y Pando also explains prostituir as a metaphorical insult in reference to corrupt, bribable judges or authors.

      Coinciding with the gradual increase in the use of the term prostitution was the slow decline in stature of the medieval bawd. While the fourteenth-century Ruiz presented Trotaconventos (aka “Good Love”—a name that also had a religious resonance in this work) as an appealing, helpful, and funny character (chapter 1), in contrast, Celestina’s erotic black magic caused both murder and suicide in Fernando de Rojas’s 1499 work entitled Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea.⁶ Rojas may have interpreted such a loquacious woman who operated in the public sphere as a horrifying contrast to the moral female, who ideally closed herself off in both her sex and her speech.⁷ Every character in the Tragicomedy understood Celestina as a slick talker who could trick innocent women into committing sinful acts. The fact that she talked for a living defined Celestina as a disgraced woman and a danger to others. With his tale of Celestina’s negative influence on the lives of her clients, Rojas warns readers to avoid old women who profit from their immense experience in the sexual realm. While she communicated great confidence in her function, other characters viewed her as notorious and infamous, or worse, a greedy witch who deserved a brutal, violent death.

      Although she causes multiple tragedies, this early-modern bawd still speaks at times as a very sympathetic character. Celestina’s soliloquies and persuasive discussions with her clients reveal her understanding of the cruel nature of love and sexual desire in her historic context. Humans crave sex like beasts, according to Celestina, and without a mediator’s help, they would have no way to verbalize and thus satisfy their needs. She organizes sexual encounters in a perilous setting where people lose their health to unrequited passions and speak their affections and emotions painfully, because no licit sexual communication or fulfillment exists. Despite her proud self-assertions, Celestina also plaintively explains that, without inherited wealth or land, plotting affairs and selling potions provide her with the only way that she can earn an income.⁸

      In this chapter, investigations of three Mexico City celestinas document both their traditional association with sorcery and the highly domestic and distinctly African and indigenous culture of seventeenth-century transactional sex. Framed by these cases in Mexico City, here I also discuss King Phillip IV’s two decrees that banned brothels in his territories, tracing the seventeenth-century transition from an open and widespread tolerance of bawds and brothels to the gradual criminalization of the occupation that became known, by the early eighteenth century, as “prostitution.” In this era, the crown forbade brothels, but this mandate was an empty rhetorical gesture with no practical application within the Mexican criminal justice system. Although Phillip IV and his advisors inscribed brothels and public women as important and widespread moral concerns, their judicial functionaries in the New World did not carry through on the mandates with effective policing and suppression. Why would they, when many of them wanted to continue to patronize these women? In response to these hidden scribal seductions, the archives of transactional sex did not expand in the seventeenth century. If they did, they have since disappeared.

      Arguably, crown regulations created a paradoxical juridical quagmire for viceregal judicial officials. Sanctions against transactional sex led to sparser documentation, which did not increase until well into the eighteenth century, an era when crown reformers prized written reports and statistics. To acknowledge that sex for sale still existed, which would happen if anyone started a secular court case against a brothel manager, meant that local law enforcement had to admit that, up to that point, it had disregarded the king’s decrees. Additionally, a case from 1621 demonstrates that high-ranking bureaucrats comprised the brothels’ key clientele. Within the complicated legal setting of overlapping imperial jurisdictions, hypocrisy, and subjects’ need to show their obedience to the crown, instead of more criminal cases against brothels, a new group of royal functionaries found their niche in the indirect prosecution of bawds for African- and indigenous-influenced sorcery, a goal that fit more comfortably within the imperial mindset than writing limitations on male sexual proclivities. The American Holy Office Tribunal of the Spanish Inquisition investigated the popular practice of love magic, fueled by a European perception of indigenous and African colonial subjects as allied with the devil, and as potential sexual corrupters of Spanish women. In an urban, plebeian context, the authorities also worried about how the practice of seventeenth-century erotic magic disregarded official viceregal racial identities by bringing women together to cooperate in their goals of finding well-paying male patrons.⁹

      Rojas’s multitalented literary creation anticipated two bawds prosecuted by the Mexican tribunal of the Holy Office: Isabel de San Miguel, a procuress, con artist, and love-magic practitioner investigated by the Mexico City Inquisition tribunal in 1617; and the early-eighteenth-century innkeeper Doña Nicolasa de Guzman, who is discussed at the end of this chapter. These cases demonstrate both continuities and change over time in the archives of transactional sex. Both bawds found themselves involved in a Holy Office case due to their erotic magic rituals. Because their jurisdiction concerned heretical religious practices as opposed to lesser moral “sin-crimes” such as adultery, the inquisitors did not take a great interest in the details of the affairs that these women promoted but focused instead on the words, rituals, and objects that they used to influence the sex lives of their clientele. The inquisitors demonstrated an almost anthropological curiosity in recording spells that suggested the presence of African or indigenous healing practices.¹⁰ Due to this scrutiny of their presumed non-European enchantments, Guzman and San Miguel faced Holy Office prosecution for sorcery not bawdry, despite the continuing illegality of procuring and, in the later case, the crown’s decrees prohibiting brothels and establishing the policing of public women. Popular erotic rituals refused to die out, even as the vocabulary for transactional sex began to transform into more familiar criminalizing terms. Although her magical practices represented a Mexican version of Celestina’s late-medieval swindles and tricks, Doña Nicolasa de Guzman also managed a very modern scam, making money off of what the authorities of the era had just begun to label “prostitution.” After the criminalization of brothels, which only added to the longstanding disdain for bawds, the eighteenth-century inquisitors had more sympathy for Guzman’s employees, who assumed a stance as victims in the written records.

      A 1617 Holy Office investigation made an explicit connection between sorcery and earning money off sex with men.¹¹ A constable denounced Isabel de San Miguel, also known as Isabel Guixarro, a mestiza, to the inquisitors as a bawd and a trickster or embustera, who used magic to drive men mad with irrational desire for certain women. Witnesses labeled San Miguel as a renowned alcahueta, although they did not refer to her business as a brothel. It certainly seemed like it had this function: men confessed that they gathered at her house to socialize and eat with a variety of women before outings to the theater.¹² As well as offering this congenial hospitality, San Miguel organized and helped maintain illicit sexual relationships. Once she made the male partners smitten through her sorcery, San Miguel would offer the couples food, drink, and a bed in her house, hiding their affairs.

      San Miguel derived her income from the relationships that she masterminded. As a poor woman who did not live with her working-class husband, she had already suffered imprisonment, banishment, and lashings at the hands of secular justice.¹³ All of this probably resulted from her lack of elite clientele—she had no one to effectively protect her from judicial repercussions. The Holy Office inquiry questioned two of her humble female employees: two slaves, the thirty-year-old black woman Gerónima de Mendoza and the thirty-three-year-old mulatta Francisca Negrete. These women did not live with the bawd but with their own respective masters. Allegedly, San Miguel commanded Negrete to seek out men at various houses in order to seduce them into “desiring her” and rewarding her. San Miguel also organized a relationship between Mendoza and her nephew, a blacksmith. Her matchmaking efforts took place after San Miguel complained to her nephew about her dire poverty.¹⁴

      When the affair between the blacksmith and Mendoza broke up, the enslaved woman felt very melancholic and jealous of her ex-lover’s new companion. After consulting with another sorceress who lived in the barrio of Santiago Tlatelolco, San Miguel tried to sell Mendoza a spell to seduce the blacksmith again.

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