ABSTRACT
In the era of Bourbon reforms, Spanish officials created a new police force for the streets of Mexico City. These men were known as guardafaroleros because their first duty was to ignite and maintain the recently installed urban illumination. They also functioned as trash collectors, but ultimately, spent most of their time removing indigenous bodies from public spaces and attempting (unsuccessfully) to clear the streets of plebeian sexuality, embodiment, and sociability, in line with contemporary elite disgust for poor, non-white physicality. Nightly police dockets tersely recorded the patrolmen’s sometimes violent interactions and observations of solicitation, sex acts, and nudity as they walked their city beat. Scholars can currently access over 7,000 short reports in several “Libros de Reos” that survive for the 1790s. Using these sources, this chapter posits two nodes as disguised expressions/verbalizations of sexual desire: 1) the guardas’ own voyeuristic desire to observe scatological street activities and their sadistic responses to them; and 2) the telling and recording of explicit sex acts as a form of pornography.
