December 2021. Cuauhtémoc, Mexico City
When Winston Churchill spoke to the House of Lords in 1943, insisting the recently bombed out House of Commons be rebuilt exactly as it was before the war, he made an emphatic point: “we shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us”. In shaping Mexico City the Spaniards consumed and regurgitated the Aztec empire’s capital using porous volcanic rock from the rubble of destroyed Mixac temples to construct Catholic cathedrals and redirect inhabitants into new ideological spaces. Ever since, this city built over a lake has seen the past reach out to touch the present. Streets split in half, cobbled pavements undulate and buried buildings re-emerge as the watery undergrowth clings enthusiastically onto its new disguise. In the mid 16th Century, in one such architectural-spiritual move, the Church ordered the construction of a building in the Cuauhtémoc district they hoped would concretely hem in a force threatening to swamp and uproot the evolving city: the cardinal sin of lust.
I arrive at this building after being evicted by a furious taxi driver frustrated by the traffic and wade through frantic streets to discover it is now a popular Lebanese restaurant. Entering through a wide, thick-walled doorway leads to a small cobbled courtyard crowned by a mezzanine second floor. Knowing the context of this space brings about a distinct feeling of being watched from the walkway circling above. Tall, kidney red and set squatly midway down Calle de Las Gallas (‘The Street of the Merry’) this ‘house of tolerance’ was the first officially recognised brothel to be built in Mexico City. With wives and children left at home, the Church took note of Saint Augustine’s warning that “were prostitution to be suppressed, capricious lusts would overthrow society” and decided to formalise sinful outlets for Spanish sailors newly based in Mexico to avoid a “greater evil”. Thus Casa de las Gallas was born in 1538, seventeen years after the conquest, with only three sets of criteria required to live and work there: a sex worker must have no immediate family, she must have prior sexual experience, she must be no younger than twelve years old.
In soaking up the sins of the city these women and girls were performing a peculiar blend of a civil and religious service. This was a mission deigned by the royal Spanish family and God to form the beating heart of New Spain. Since women were considered to be solely responsible for passing on absorbed virtues and blemishes to their offspring, it made sense to keep in line with what was expected and required to form a functional family and, by proxy, a successful microcosm of the holy kingdom. It was also self-serving to be saturated by male fluid. According to laws of the humours, the four liquid elements believed up until the 18th Century to make up the delicate physiological and medical balance of humans, women - who were predominantly ‘cold’, ’wet’ and overfilled with blood (sanguinity) and thus lacking adequate cognitive judgement - could have equilibrium partially restored through sex with a ‘hot’, ’dry’ cerebral male.
I’m told all this by Genevieve Galán, a professor from the UNAM (Universidad National Autónoma de México) and expert on on the history of female anatomy, who holds a brilliant walking tour through the sites of Mexico City’s history of prostitution. To steal Elizabeth Freeman’s term, Galán prefers to teach via haptic historiography - “negotiating with the past and producing historical knowledge through visceral sensations” - moving through the very spaces the events took place in, rather than relaying the facts in a classroom.
It’s a red-hot shopping day in the run up to Christmas. As Galán and I stand on the pavement, taking time to take in Casa de las Gallas from outside, flushed pedestrians stream around and about us across the stamp-baked pavement. Galán points out a small, single window high up the wall and shuttered by iron bars - the advertisement used to promote the building’s services to passing trade. The use of tree branches once hung as a sign above brothel doors has disappeared, though their presence has been immortalised in the nickname still used to refer to prostitutes: ‘rameras’, which translate to ‘branches’ or ‘limbs’. A little further up the street we unnerve a man selling face masks by peering behind his stall. Mary Magdalene is planted firmly into an alcove in the painted limestone, perfectly preserved and holding her tongue from behind the masks as she surveys all those who continue to enter and exit the street. The seller seems appreciative and somewhat proud to have this part of his street pointed out. He nods along as Galán tells us that the colloquial phrase “ir de picos pardos” - literally ‘go to the brown skirts’ but really meaning to go out partying - comes from this era, when sex workers could be identified by their uniform of brown skirts.
From from shade of a tree in the muddle of a Mexican roundabout, we squint across the traffic at a Metrobus station that was once the site of the chapel into which workers from Casa de las Gallas would retire to spend the rest of their lives in repentance. In later years, the chapel expanded to include the whole spectrum of fallen women including alcoholics, dementia patients, separated spouses, and, most commonly, those who had committed the crime of ‘stealing’ husbands. Moving closer towards the heaving Historic Centre a detour is taken into an ornate church once dominated by a powerful sect of self-sufficient nuns who lived a contrastingly safe and prosperous way of life in a nunnery. Here, the the well-protected wives of God would observe and ignore the devil as he transformed into hoards of rabbits hopping about the aisles in an attempt to distract worshippers during services. The image brought me to think about of a modern reincarnation of rabbits similarly designed for devilish distraction: Heffner’s bunnies.
The tour is illuminating, fascinating, draining. Learning about regressions that took place in the 18th and 19th centuries, when marriage changed expectations of women to be presentable and educated rather than sexually available, though no less free. But as we stand on a rooftop looking out at a view of the Historical Centre that remains exactly as someone in the mid 19th Century would have seen it, Galán tells me about one subtle example of subversion taking place. When the Austrian archduke Maximiliano arrived to be the short-lived Emperor of Mexico in 1864, he brought with him the Napoleonic regulating system devised to mediate and facilitate prostitution in France. From 1865 onwards Mexican sex workers had to produce identity cards for clients that displayed medical reports, a section of biographical information, and photographic identification. With photography an art form still reserved for the rich, the sessions must have felt like a God-given opportunity. The resulting cards show the women knowingly seizing the moment to let their inner lives emerge from beneath the well- structured surfaces: one proudly holds up a guitar, another has fashioned a complicated hairdo and clutches a pair of scissors, another is dressed and posed as a ballet dancer. With the women in control of their own image, their calling cards presented them not as others expected or desired them to be but as they saw themselves, as well as in the way they wanted to be - and now are - remembered and preserved.
In 1629, the city gave way to water. As rain fell, the city submerged, and the people accepted that this was a form of mass punishment. To counter the eternal damp, action was taken to reinforce the city; after two years, waterways reappeared and civilians returned to using canoes; walls became thicker to hem in human frailty; people moved to upper floors and rooftops so as to be able to hear God’s threats and advice more clearly. The men, dry and warm, and the women, cold and wet, were ordered to protect their city with more voracity. Today in Mexico, where prostitution is legal under Federal Law, sex work is regulated in only 18 of the country’s 32 states. Things remain the same albeit in different forms for a long time. This uninterrupted undercurrent, however controlled and adapted, will always find a way to come to the surface.