LITMIR.BIZ

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water in Isabel’s room. The two women made cuts in each corner of the room with a knife and extracted some dirt, which they placed in the tecomate. San Miguel took a small insect or reptile from her breast and mixed it with some dust or dried herbs and stirred the mixture inside the tecomate. She then raised the jug to her ceiling then down to her floor, and beat it with her hands. After carrying out this ritual, the bawd ordered Mendoza to bathe her genitals and underarms with the mixture. San Miguel also directed her to mix it into her lover’s hot chocolate. The blacksmith nephew confirmed that his aunt commonly did this kind of spell as part of her work to bring lovers together in her house. The inquisitors ordered San Miguel to jail and questioned her, but the case record ends at this point, with the accused affirming her innocence. This case demonstrates the popularity of indigenous spells and the diverse sexual milieu where Afro-descended women worked for Spanish or possibly mestiza bawds to have affairs with plebeian men. At this moment, written documentation of transactional sex survives only due to its affiliation with non-European magic and the inquisitors’ desire to record such practices.

      Another case also highlights a multiracial milieu for transactional sex and the domestic, intimate tone that prevailed in the sixteenth century. Just two years before the royal decree that banned brothels, a Spanish woman ran a kind of early-modern love hotel or house of assignation in Mexico City. In this case, aided by her rich and powerful clientele, the bawd, matchmaker, and innkeeper Ana Bautista received quite a lenient judgment after an investigation by the archdiocesan court for the crimes of procuring and concubinage.¹⁵ Like Catalina García in chapter 1, Bautista enjoyed the support of men who were very likely her clients and eager to defend her excellent character in court. This trial reveals that negotiated sexual philandering among both men and women extended far into the highest ranks of Spanish society, even involving viceregal courtiers, and that a respectable woman might have success as a bawd while retaining her good reputation, aided by elite male protection.

      As the forty-five-year-old widow of a high court attorney (procurador), Bautista enjoyed long-term social contact across viceregal race and class hierarchies. She owned two different entertainment/hospitality venues and reportedly had at least two lovers since becoming a widow. Despite her husband’s elevated bureaucratic rank, she did not enjoy the honorific title doña and thus came from plebeian origins. Although labeled a Spaniard in the trial records, Bautista in the past had owned a lodging house/pulquería known as the “meson de la negra,” or the “black woman’s inn,” conveniently located adjacent to the house of female seclusion on the Calle de Jesus de la Penitencia.¹⁶ The name of her business suggests that her nonwhite ancestry played a role in her inability to attain the status of doña. At the time of her arrest, Bautista operated a different inn/pulquería near Mexico City’s slaughterhouse. At both locations, she convinced several women to have affairs with her guests and provided them with the food and lodgings that they needed to maintain their illicit relationships.¹⁷ Bautista was clearly an excellent businesswoman and knew how to manipulate her patrons’ support to protect her social and legal status at a level far above the efforts of her sixteenth-century predecessor Catalina García. However, neither of these women appears to have suffered extreme poverty, and both worked hard to cushion themselves with wealth and prosperity.¹⁸

      Bautista procured for a wide range of men and women, allegedly persuading them into illicit acts that they would not have committed without her efforts. Witnesses listed a total of thirteen women and seventeen men, including widows and married and single individuals, who formed relationships due to her machinations and found an oasis for their affairs in her hospitable establishments. The hostess and bawd frequently coordinated liaisons between both male and female guests in her lodgings, both for residents or as a way to bring in more income in room rentals, food consumption, and, of course, pulque. When she suffered prosecution for her illegal sale of alcohol, one of her clients, an alguacil (a law enforcement functionary), protected her while continuing his affair with a married woman. If the couples argued or fought, Bautista counseled them to return to reunite peacefully and continue their liaisons. She received gifts, services, money, and protection for her bawdry and from her own lovers, one of whom confessed that he wasted a “great quantity of gold pesos” on her.¹⁹

      During her trial process, the inquisitors confiscated and inventoried her belongings, which was standard procedure for the tribunal and was how this institution funded itself. Although Bautista did not possess a huge number of goods, her rooms in the calle de la carnicería mayor had quite a luxurious feel, as did her dress. This was appropriate for a woman who ran a successful “casa publica” or brothel hosting wealthy men, even if these royal officials and their servants claimed to live there only as legitimate boarders.²⁰ Brothel-managers usually decorated their businesses to cater to at least the material standards of their intended clientele, if not with greater opulence than these men enjoyed in their own homes, in order to create and maintain an environment of fantasy and pleasure.²¹ Appropriate domestic comfort in this era required religious art, imports from Asia, and furniture or bedding that offered places for guests to sit or lie down. Bautista decorated her lodgings with numerous religious retablos, chairs, cushions (including nine made of “Chinese velvet”), and a gilded wooden bed with a canopy. All of her furnishings suggest the bawd’s ability to host several seated or lounging guests in relaxing comfort, especially in this era when many did not own a bed. Her clothes were all of imported fabrics in shades of black and brown, and she wore an elaborate black and gold velvet mantilla. Bautista’s accusers testified that her lovers gave her gifts of clothing as well as money.

      Married men and women committing adultery had a safe meeting place in Bautista’s comfortable rooms, and some, including the bawd herself, enjoyed long-term illicit relationships. Most of her clients were labeled Spaniards, but she also procured lovers for two mulatas (both of whom were her servants and had affairs with Spanish men, including a cleric), a mulatto man, and a mestizo man. Over a period of time, Bautista’s male clients ranged from laborers to priests and royal bureaucrats.²²

      Her elite clientele mitigated Bautista’s treatment during both her trial and sentencing. Instead of imprisonment during the trial, she endured only house arrest.²³ Despite the fact that Bautista herself had lovers, her defense formulated a case that solidified her reputation as an honest, secluded, and devoutly Christian innkeeper who made a small income by providing room and board for important, honorable men, even up to the level of an associate of the viceroy, the Marquis de Guadalcazar.²⁴ The fact that she had lodgers suggested that she could easily make money as a moral landlady, with no need to procure for her boarders. According to statements in defense of her character, including from an official affiliated with the local high court (audiencia), her accuser nursed a violent passion for her that led to attempts to seduce her, break into her house, shame her and her guests by calling Bautista a “whore [puta]” and her guests “cornudos [cuckolds],” and finally bring her up on charges.²⁵

      The bawd and her defense team reformulated her bad reputation into a respectable one and created a victim out of an alleged evildoer in order to gain paternalistic sympathy from the judges.²⁶ Bautista denied all sexual misdeeds, and several useful witnesses, including the high court official, a notary, and two friars, backed up her claims to innocence. As a result of this appropriate script with approved characters for the judicial theater, the court absolved her of all accusations, requesting only that she sever all ties and contact with her alleged current lover.²⁷ This lenient outcome symbolizes the general presuppression viceregal tolerance for bawds and brothels. Closing brothels clearly clashed with viceregal popular practices, necessitating the erasure of bawds like Bautista from the surviving records until the late eighteenth century.

      CRIMINALIZING BROTHELS

      In 1623, Phillip IV (1621–1665) issued a royal decree to shut all brothels in his entire empire, from Spain to the Americas. This proclamation did little to curb sexual commerce. In fact, brothel closure only encouraged more sex work in the streets, taverns, or private homes, but with even less judicial control and regulation.²⁸ After the 1623 decree and another crown mandate seeking to enclose “worldly women” in 1661, the identities of so-called “public” women in Spanish America

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