Diego Rivera was clearly fascinated by the riches of the Aztec market at Tlaltelolco. His mural, painted in , visible today on the second floor of the Palacio Nacional in Mexico City, glories in the vibrancy of an imperial economy. Vendors hawk while merchants bicker, counting with upright fingers. Nearby, slave-traders examine the teeth of human stock. Tortillas are there, too, close to belly-up frogs. Dogs, deer, iguana, and fish lie in good order or, like a fat little xolo dog, they mewl and squirmโall soon to be purchased, cooked, and eaten.
Figure 1. The most arresting figure, however, is a woman in white Figure 1. Central to the composition, she hikes her skirt and invites the attention of several leering men. One of them, to upper left, looks like a Rockefeller! Her bright red lipstick, elaborate costume, and long loose hair, described and illustrated in Aztec sources, heighten the wanton allure. Figure 2. Prostitutes in the Florentine Codex, Book 10, f39v. A peculiarity, drawn to my attention by Karl Taube, is that depictions of young and older harlots in the Florentine Codex show them standing on water, grasping flowers in one hand and, curiously, the glyph for water in the other Figure 2.
Underfoot, gripped in the hand, the symbols hint at deeper and more complex meaning. For a Mayanist, this evidence raises an obvious question. Did such women exist in the Classic period? And, if so, what ambivalences, if any, surround such commercialization of the female body? Most treatments of female identity among the ancient or Colonial Maya do not mention prostitutes e.
Colonial Yukatek Bolles : associated with agouti or hares tzub , the latter a well-known attribute of the Moon Goddess and a symbol of procreation. It could be that these words express a purely colonial preoccupation, a priestly concern for rooting out vice and controlling sexuality. By that view, little prostitution existed before the Spaniards. Such words merely reflected the prurience of missionary minds. But this cannot be the whole story. Possibly, as some suggest for the Aztec evidence, the Colonial sources conflated a more accepted Pre-Columbian practice of marketable sex with later versions seen in negative light Arvey ; McCafferty and McCafferty To put this in perspective, buying a slave was only 10 times that much ibid.
In all likelihood, sex work was a lucrative business throughout Mesoamerica. Figure 3. For the Maya, a key piece of evidence came to light with the discovery of the Chiik Nahb murals at Calakmul, most of which date to the 7 th century AD Carrasco Vargas and Cordeiro Baqueiro ; Martin Concerned with trade, these paintings appear within what must have been a market facility built at the height of competition between the great cities of Calakmul and Tikal Carrasco Vargas and Cordeiro Baqueiro Figure 2; for the standard source on this conflict, see Martin and Grube The viewer wonders at the erotic beauty of the serving ladies, their body paint, their jade jewelry.
