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...