Qué significa 'habituamiento carnal'?

Question

The context is the Spaniards colonizing México. This is part of the sentence in which I found it:

No podían crear habituamiento carnal con esclavas mayas al no estar evangelizadas.

Debe ser "habitualmente" no? - lagartijaverde, Aug 21, 2011

No lo creo. El texto dice 'habituamiento' dos veces. - S1r_Wakka, Aug 21, 2011

Answer 1

Of course, they couldn't have sexual relations with Mayan slaves who had not been converted, so they baptised everyone in order to be able to have sexual relations.

I like it. (except for the British "misspellings", of course.) - 0074b507, Aug 21, 2011

Having gone to school in both the US and Australia, that is one of my weakest points in English. . .especially grey vs. gray. - lorenzo9, Aug 21, 2011

What misspellings do you mean? In the Spanish text on Lingq? Or in the translations to English? - S1r_Wakka, Aug 21, 2011

baptised instead of baptized - lorenzo9, Aug 22, 2011

Answer 2

Just in case:

link text

while you are there, lookup "carnal" also.

Will this be "carnal knowledge"

all this has to do with cohabitation.

Enlightening. Alters the translation somewhat giving more meaning. - 0074b507, Aug 21, 2011

Answer 3

source of citation

Claro, ellos no podían crear habituamiento carnal con esclavas mayas al no estar evangelizadas, así que deciden bautizarlas a todas, para poder hacer el habituamiento carnal.

Answer 4

I'll take a shot at the general meaning, although habituamiento is not in this dictionary, at least, and the construction "al no estar evangelizada" is hard to translate.

So,

They couldn't create carnal relations with mayan slaves upon not being envangelists,

which I infer to mean,

They couldn't create carnal relations with mayan slaves even though they weren't trying to convert them (to Catholocism).

Maybe a larger context is needed for a non-fluent spanish student to get this.

Lorenzo9 seems to have gotten the correct meaning. If you take evangelizadas to mean "converted", it makes complete sense. Literally:

No podían crear habituamiento carnal con esclavas mayas al no estar evangelizadas.

They couldn't have carnal relations with Mayan slaves who were not converted.