Sex Workers and Bodily Autonomy in Late Viceregal New Spain

This paper will discuss two case studies of physical resistance to law enforcement that took place in Mexico City around 1800. Both cases involve violence against sex workers who were detained by the new corps of paid night watchmen who patrolled the viceregal court city’s streets beginning in 1790. I argue that these two women self-defined their identities and what they allowed in terms of physical contact, especially in private settings. When these careful boundaries were violently violated by the night watchmen, the women reacted in kind, with both verbal attacks and physical resistance. During the investigations of these incidents, both women sustained respectable identities as they presented themselves within a court setting. These case studies resonate to the present in terms of the ongoing necessity of advocating for bodily autonomy and the persistence of different forms of resistance to law enforcement, a history which extends at least as far back as the eighteenth century.