Profit and Passion: Transactional Sex in Colonial Mexico by Nicole von Germeten (review)

Despite the ubiquitousness of prostitution, the history of prostitution can be elusive; literary and archival sources that record transactional sex can be ambiguous and slippery to interpret. Von Germeten argues that despite the effacement of written records regarding transactional sex in the early Latin American colonial archives of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, sexuality and gender lay at the heart of the Spanish imperial enterprise, and indeed of the rise of global imperialism. By the eighteenth century, legal records in the Spanish viceroyalties became more extensive with the growth of the bureaucratic apparatus. Yet in contrast to historians' research of Spain, the interrogation of records of women accused of commercial sex in Mexico's viceregal era (1492–1824) has been marginalized, or even suppressed, by historians in favor of repeating the repressive rhetoric of prescriptive sources.

Von Germeten proposes to restore women's voices to the historical record and to trace the evolution of discourses in the colonial archives regarding "public women"—whores, bawds, and prostitutes (mujer pública, ramera, alcahueta, puta, prostituta, escandalosa, and mujer mala). She examines these terms in pre-1824 legal proceedings in which accused women attempted to defend themselves and their dignity and to characterize their behaviors rhetorically. Von Germeten takes an interdisciplinary approach by comparing literary discourses of bawds, panderers, and whores from the Middle Ages through the early modern era in such foundational texts of Spanish literature as El libro de Buen Amor (1330, 1343), La Celestina (1499), and La Lozana andaluza (1528) with the legal discourses of prosecutions of women engaged in public sexual commerce and to official decrees and regulations of brothels. She observes that not even the shift during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from regarding commercial sex as a moral sin to its being considered a criminal offense could remove the stigma from the term whore (puta or ramera).

Methodologically, von Germeten claims that the composition and politics of the archives must be examined and the mediated nature of the records taken into account just as in the interpretation of literary sources. After all, both the accusations against the women and the women's legal defenses entered the record through the mediation of scribes. The records merely represent an inexact echo of a voice, and the "textualizing of the body" involved several people (3). Rather than attempting to narrate a coherent, definitive story for these women's self-characterizations and defenses, von Germeten highlights the elusive nature of their meaning, self-consciously resisting the alluring closure suggested by narrative trajectories of these women's stories as either triumphant self-determination or tragic victimization.

After discussing her methodological concerns in the introduction, von Germeten lays out the legal and historical background of the category "prostitute" in the first two chapters. Each of the five following chapters analyzes a different set of legal discourses in roughly chronological order: mistresses or "kept women" in Chapter 3; courtesans in Chapter 4; poor, disruptive women in Chapter 5; poor women characterizing themselves as respectable ladies in Chapter 6; and late-viceregal cases of mothers prostituting their daughters and family-run brothels that cast young women as innocent victims in Chapter 7. In the conclusion, von Germeten broadens her perspective, placing these cases in the context of the history of prostitution on a global scale from the nineteenth century to the present.

Profit and Passion offers a fascinating glimpse into the colonial archives that is useful and informative for historians and literary scholars alike. Von Germeten restores these women's voices to historical accounts of their identity, and her nuanced approach to the mediated nature of the discourses will help to bring much-needed caution to our reading of these types of records.