Violent Delights, Violent Ends: Sex, Race, and Honor in Colonial Cartagena de Indias

by Nicole von Germeten

How did women fulfill their needs and desires in the seventeenth century? This book takes readers into the witches' sabbaths and spell-casting of Cartagena de Indias, a vibrant Caribbean port city. Women from Africa, Spain, Portugal and indigenous women from Colombia bought and sold love magic potions and remedies as the tried to find lovers and husbands. They risked the dangers of violent men and cruel inquisitors to satisfy their need for love ... and money.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Audiobook

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Nicole von Germeten has a lifelong passion for history and writing. She received her PhD in history from the University of California at Berkeley. She also has degrees from Boston University and the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Her research has taken her to over thirty historic archives in Colombia, Spain, and Mexico. She held a post doctoral fellowship at Princeton University, was a visiting scholar at Stanford University, and currently teaches on the History faculty of Oregon State University in Corvallis.

Reviews

[Affad Shaikh · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was staring out over the worn out bricked plaza under the Torre de Reloj as the summer sun was setting and the cool sea breeze began blowing into the Cartagena streets. With the breeze came a sense of relief to the residents, workers, and visitors of the old city; and the attitude shifted drastically.

The breeze brought with it new people, a new electric feel and for the next few hours I would come back to my balcony overlooking the plaza where slaves were bought and sold some 100 years ago to watch desperate woman sell their bodies. There was Stiped-dress and Ballgown-Red, there was Businesssuit Brunet and her friends Too-Tight-Jeans-Shorts and Tubes, and countless other women, who would walk up and down the plaza casually placing their hands on a man here and there, engaging in conversation with groups of men, and walking with an intent to close the deal only to falter and separate ways. At first I had to refrain from admitting what was taking place. My notion of "don't just a woman by the clothes she wore" was based on the very-USA-feminist-notions of women's personal agency; this however did not translate over to what I was observing and try as hard as I could I just couldn't move myself away from the reality of the situation I witnessed.

Prior to my 2017 trip to Colombia and Panama, I wasn't aware that prostitution was allowed or even legal in parts of Latin America. I wouldn't give the idea of what acceptable prostitution might even look like a thought because that was not a world that was of immediate concern to me. But, like Cartagena, Panama proved just as disturbing to observe and experience with the world of prostitution so openly part of everyday life. I suppose I have to admit my own lack of being put in a situation where I was exposed to the sale of womens bodies for such an extended period of time and on such a large scale. Its easy to avoid those types of areas in US cities, if you put your mind to it, you could technically avoid even interacting with people from other races through self-segregation. So, yes, my experience was a bit of a shock.

It didn't help that there were some assumptions I had carried with about Latin American culture. Such as in a world view that places machismo and honor at its core, I was incredibly lost to make sense of the way prostitution fit into all of this, but then again, that indicates how little I know about gender, sexual agency, and the history of Spanish colonial rule, and the economic/social/political factors at play specifically in regards to prostitution, human trafficking, and sexual exploitation.

Violent Delights, Violent Ends is a masterful read on the gender, sexual agency, and the history of Spanish colonial rule, through its legal system. That may seem boring, court cases, but its actually done in a very engaging way. Nicole von Germeten takes special pains to lay out what she has been able to ferret out of the historical record and contrast it to the existing scholarship on Spanish colonial rule and the place of woman, especially the non-white women. Her focus on Cartagena was especially meaningful for me because I could imagine of the places these woman walked being that I had just walked those same streets.

I found that the historical contextualizing was helpful to my gaining an understanding of the society and cultures I had just visited. I had not gotten the book to understand prostitution contemporarily, nor had I high expectations, simply a curiosity to know more about the internal observations I had, the challenges to my assumptions I experienced, and how to better manage these experiences, if at all figure out a way to talk about them in an informed and advocative way.

While I appreciate von Germeten, I would not recommend this book to everyone. Its an academic work, which, through von Germetens prose and narrative style is not difficult to read, still presented for an audience that has some background with the theories and concepts that are being discussed. If you can get over your lack of sophistication in the academic matter and possibly even some of the historical context, then this book will not be difficult to read. Just be ready to Google some of the theoretical and historical events to get a deeper understanding of the implications that von Germeten may be assuming the reader is aware of.

[Kelsey · Rating 3 out of 5]

I appreciate the argument that "women have historically had more power than you would think" exists, but I can't necessarily agree with it. Plus there were some missing sources, and this was a bit dry. Not bad, though.