Learned and popular erotizations of the Orient have been central to what Rodinson called the “fascination” exercised by the Islamicate world on its Others, as Said noted in his analysis of European Orientalism and Alloula in his denunciation of colonial postcard pornography in Algeria. I will argue that the Orient was constructed and projected as a place of sexual license and erotic possibility not only through translation of erotic treatises and popular literature by male scholars and painters- what Foucault called the ars erotica of the East- but also in the ephemeral staging of an imagined Oriental in women’s performance and brothel settings during the first half of the twentieth century. Though anchored in the world of Belle Époque French brothel, café chantant and postcard pornography, where the cocottes displayed themselves in scant Orientalist regalia, the practice had a global reach, fed by the circulation of Middle Eastern and European performers in the early XXth century. Mexican stagings of the Orient were mediated by a Spanish circuit of popular stage figures, through the tiples genre and the visibility of particular performers such as Carmen Tortola Valencia (1882-1955), a specialist of “Oriental” dance acclaimed between 1920 and 1930 as “the personification of the Orient”. Peopling brothels and stage spectacles but also elite pastimes such as fiestas de fantasia (costume balls), the Oriental erotic was appropriated and consumed across genders in early twentieth century Mexico. I track the figures of the soothsayer, the magician, the dancer and the odalisque that recur in Middle American Hispanophone fantasies of Islamicate sexualities though Mexican brothel photography, memoirs, municipal and personal archives and interviews.