Amancebado Landscapes: Women, Scandal, and Moral Worlds Beyond Marriage in New Spain

This paper examines amancebamiento—unmarried unions—as a key practice through which women in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Mexico City navigated intimacy, mobility, and moral belonging. In a dense, multiethnic capital where informal unions were widely known and often tolerated, such relationships entered the legal record when they produced public scandal. Drawing on records from the Ecclesiastical Court of the Archbishopric of Mexico, or Provisorato de México, it analyzes cases in which women living in nonmarital relationships became visible to authorities through neighborhood scandal, denunciations, and conflicts unfolding in the street. These cases trace movement across interconnected spaces—houses, streets, and workplaces—where intimate relationships became matters of communal concern. While much scholarship has approached amancebamiento primarily as a form of moral deviance or institutional discipline, this paper shifts the focus to what I call moral callejera: a community-produced moral order through which neighbors translate intimate life into public judgment. Focusing on disputes involving unmarried women, the paper shows how moral callejera shaped negotiations over reputation, cohabitation, and violence across households and jurisdictions. Testimonies of intimacy and scandal reveal how women and their families transformed private life into public evidence, illuminating how moral authority emerged through the circulation of bodies, rumors, and reputations in urban space. As part of an ongoing doctoral dissertation, this paper foregrounds amancebamiento as a contested form of family life beyond marriage.