LITMIR.BIZ

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severe judicial consequences.⁴⁹

      How did women experience life in the legal brothels? We know very few specific details from the female point of view, beyond the regulations. Women who worked in brothels were supposed to be officially registered by giving their names, ages, parents, and places of origin to municipal authorities. Every brothel worker had an alias that she also provided in the registration process.⁵⁰ The women had to be nonlocals and nonnoblewomen over the age of twenty. They paid fees to the brothel managers but received linens, clothing, and housing in return. Some historians view brothel work as a desperate recourse for poor women victimized by the countless natural and manmade disasters of their male-dominated era. However, in 1553, King Phillip II noted in frustration that many brothel women illegally left their places of work in the evenings to live in their “palaces,” where they met with male clients. Even worse, in Phillip’s view, they acted like honorable women.⁵¹

      Through legalizing and regulating brothels, Iberian monarchs and municipal governments hoped to impose centralized control over the endemic violence in their society, an era of internal conflicts, independent warlords, and busy ports full of transient men. Monarchs such as Ferdinand and Isabella, along with their predecessors earlier in the fifteenth century, spent decades trying to tamp down the power of powerful grandees who dominated both cities and the countryside. These nobles gathered delinquents, ruffians, and rogues around them as their own personal bodyguards or entourages and encouraged them to foment urban disorder. The aristocratic strongmen, objecting to the monarchs’ efforts to centralize power and authority, also willingly protected these “evil doers” from nascent crown justice.⁵² Ruffians roamed the streets, provoking brawls with little fear of judicial retribution because “those in charge of prosecuting them were often the ones who gave protection to law breakers.”⁵³ Monarchs and some royal justices viewed these men as vagabonds and “men who lived by evil arts” and equated them with ruffians, often banishing them from residing inside any given town.⁵⁴ Ruffians faced severe penalties for managing women, according to a decree issued by Enrique IV in 1469, in continuation of the antipandering tone of the Siete Partidas.⁵⁵ The crown and municipal authorities hoped that regulated brothels would decrease street fighting and even the grandees’ ability to foment general societal violence. For the purposes of controlling street-level violence, criminal vagabonds, and overweening aristocrats, one might assume that the crown also would want legal brothels in their American viceroyalties, but in fact this invasive, regulatory approach did not come to fruition in the New World.

      TRANSACTIONAL SEX OUTSIDE THE BROTHEL—

      CLANDESTINAS AND ALCAHUETAS

      The opportunities for nonbrothel paid sex unfolded in the Spanish viceroyalties following centuries’ old peninsular patterns for clandestinas who sold sex outside of the licensed brothels. Back in Iberia, ruffians found many female collaborators despite regulated, legal brothels and the serious punishments for selling sex outside these approved institutions. These sexual entrepreneurs took advantage of location and opportunity. In and around brothels, taverns and inns prospered. These places employed female servants, jobs taken on by both brothel workers and clandestinas. Men, including the innkeepers themselves, illegally procured one or several female servants who might host clients in rooms for entire nights. A lesser number had female managers or worked for their own husbands. Since non-Christian men who entered the legal brothels risked extreme punishments, Jewish and Islamic or Morisco men offered clandestinas a booming business. Criminal records prove that clandestinas flourished alongside the brothel. In late-medieval Valencia, on average around 115 clandestinas faced prosecution annually, representing almost one-third of all local criminal trials. Street ruffians still caused public violence, but they also helped towns make a great deal of money in punitive fines.⁵⁶ In some cases, cruel slurs captured in documents suggest that clandestinas were too old, dirty, sick, ugly, or all of the above, for working in the public brothel. Women perceived as too scandalous or loud had to leave the public brothel, which suggests that clandestinas lacked some of the characteristics perceived as sexually attractive to men.⁵⁷ In fact, some clandestinas offered their potential clients the opposite end of the spectrum: discretion, secrecy, exclusivity, wealth, social prominence, and sophistication, outside of the common “sewer” of the brothel.⁵⁸

      Some clandestinas in Spain and the viceroyalties relied on bawds to arrange their liaisons. The literary figure of the alcahueta has a much more complex and even sympathetic history than the universally disrespected male ruffian. Law codes including the Siete Partidas codified harsh punishments for bawds, but many classics of Castilian literature humanized this figure. The title of their occupation derives from the Hispanic Arabic term alqawwád.⁵⁹ From before the Christian reconquest of Spain, Islamic literary treatises acknowledged the essential role of the bawd in setting up illicit liaisons. This genre of literature explored the phenomenon of nonmarital affairs that required a mediator. In these tales, sexual encounters were in a sense love triangles or even squares. The fact that women socialized separately from men did not stand in the way, but affairs required a subtle mediator, a witty verbal interlocutor to bridge gender communication gaps. Stories depicted how both the bawd and the female lover cooperated to entrap a man and dupe a husband, showing off their intelligence and sophistication. To have the skills to move in men’s and women’s worlds, the bawd had to possess the wisdom of age. Some of these portrayals even imply that she redirected her own desires into organizing other people’s trysts.⁶⁰ In the fourteenth century, Ruiz immortalized this Islamic literary tradition for Christian readers with the enduring bawdy character of Trotaconventos, a sly old woman who added more complexity to the non-Christian portrayals from early eras. In other medieval Christian writings, the bawd figure assumes a very maternal role, sometimes actually procuring her own daughters’ lovers. This terminology and personality characterization perhaps connects to the fact that brothel manageresses in medieval and early-modern Spain carried the official occupational title of “mother.”⁶¹ Sixteenth-century poetry also represents the bawd as an essential guide for the novice courtesan.⁶² Although Trotaconventos, Lozana, and Celestina (chapter 2) are fictional creations, their literary portrayals flesh out the ephemeral traces of nonfictional bawds found in archival documentation.

      SELLING SEX IN THE NEW WORLD

      Beginning in the 1520s, the Spanish crown initially extended the policy of licensing brothels from Spain to its American viceroyalties. In 1526, Bartolome Conejo received a license to found a royal brothel, or “casa de mujeres públicas,” in San Juan, Puerto Rico.⁶³ The license stated that this foundation was “necessary” to avoid “inconveniences.” A similar arrangement was made the same year with Juan Sanchez Sarmiento, in the city of Santo Domingo.⁶⁴ By 1538, Queen Isabel of Portugal had approved the foundation of a whorehouse in Mexico City, although in this case a specific individual did not make the request.⁶⁵ The Mexico City cabildo chose a location for it behind the Hospital de Jesus Nazareno on the Calle de Mesones (known as “whores’ street” or “la calle de Las Gayas”). Cartagena also had a brothel in the late sixteenth century, according to a Holy Office sorcery investigation.⁶⁶

      These Spanish American legal brothels did not leave a great deal of evidence of their existence, in contrast to the extensive paper trail in Spain, which records many petty infractions. We can speculate that perhaps the viceroyalties lacked officials with the time or interest to enforce the ever increasing rules, even if it meant a good income in fines. Without a lucrative brothel monopoly in place, American judicial authorities had no motivation to prosecute clandestinas, so these women, as well as their ruffians and bawds, completely took over the trade in sex.⁶⁷ Viceregal sexual commerce moved permanently to street solicitation, or private houses where bawds managed their servants and family members or rented out their rooms and procured clients for women. Spanish, Indian, and casta women worked out of unofficial brothels as well as in taverns, pulquerías, gaming houses, public baths, temescales, and luxurious rooms.⁶⁸

      Crown regulation picked up from the 1560s to the 1580s, foreshadowing suppression in the seventeenth century (chapter 2).

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