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Accessing Brill Products. Corporate Social Responsibility. Sales Contacts. Ordering from Brill. Editorial Contacts. Offices Worlwide. Course Adoption. Contact Form. Given the absence of reliable historical information, we do not want to reproduce what the academic doxa insists on repeating, that is, descriptions of pre-Hispanic societies using documents produced during the sixteenth-century Spanish conquest and redefined by the nationalist anthropology of the late twentieth and the early twenty-first centuries.
We know very little about the extinct pre-Hispanic world and their sexuality, nor do we know much about the ways by which the pre-Hispanic people fulfilled their erotic fantasies and sexual physicality, and even less about the existence of what we now call prostitution. The beautiful statuettes exhibited at anthropology museums all over the country bear silent witness to the greatness of a society whose interpretative clues are still quite unknown to us.
Osseous remains showing successful surgical procedures, ceramic figures of detailed bodies that are scarified, tattooed, and painted are all evidence of bodies that are different from western ones, bodies which were not led by the notion of sin and therefore had guiltless sex.
What we do know is that western cities developed various forms of prostitution; hence, since very early times, both the municipal authorities and the Catholic Church tried to control it. Although we do not know for sure if that state-authorised brothel ever actually opened, that does not mean venal love did not proliferate in the incipient colonial society of New Spain. It was inevitable given that society consisted largely of white males, most of whom were celibate and little inclined to marriage.
