Historiography, Methodology, and Sources
Established in 1580 as a minor commercial and administrative Spanish settlement, the city of Buenos Aires began to experience a certain amount of economic and political development in the eighteenth century. In the beginning of the nineteenth century, it became the centre for the demand for autonomy from Spain, which was finally obtained in 1816. Its population grew from 14,000 in 1750 to 25,000 in 1780, and to 40,000 by the end of the century. In 1880, after decades of political instability, the city was federalized, thereby concentrating the political power of the Argentine Republic. From then on, massive influxes of Europeans changed the city’s demographics, paving the way for its transformation into a major world port and metropolis with a population of 1,300,000 by 1910 and around 3,000,000 as the twentieth century wore on.
The study of prostitution in Buenos Aires has attracted the attention of researchers from various fields such as social history and cultural and literary studies, and more recently urban history and the social sciences, especially anthropology. Although the topic has been addressed in its symbolic dimension, much less attention has been devoted to the social organization of the sex trade, its changes, the social profiles of prostitutes, and their relationships with other types of workers and social groups. Similarly, the importance granted to the period of the municipal regulation of prostitution (1875–1936) and to stories about the trafficking of European women stands in stark contrast to the scarcity of studies on the long period since 1936, especially as regards issues aside from public policies implemented to fight venereal diseases. In the last decade, the unionization of prostitutes and the reappearance of narratives about trafficked women in public debates have captured the interest of social scientists.
The centrality of prostitution in popular culture and public debates about the nation in Buenos Aires at the end of the nineteenth century were major factors that may explain the profusion of historical research about the period
While in some European cities narratives of this kind served as a morality tale for young female migrants going to the Americas and gave voice to the gendered social fears of diverse European reformist and nationalist groups, such stories took on particular connotations in Buenos Aires, a city undergoing a process of rapid urbanization at that time and an important port of arrival for European immigration starting in the last decades of the nineteenth century.
References to prostitutes, particularly foreign ones, fulfilled a range of discursive purposes in turn-of-the-century Buenos Aires. In essence, they strengthened the link between female honour and national honour; the symbolic centrality of foreign prostitutes from this period onwards, combined with their notorious over-representation in the municipal regulation registers, generated a debate in which domestic prostitutes were relegated to the background. In literature, Argentinian women generally were not involved in prostitution; rather, they were ascribed values of authenticity and purity, and were tasked with facing the challenges of modernity, such as consumerism, fashion, and presence in the public space.
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The negative—or at the very least, ambiguous—connotations of social changes at the turn of the twentieth century were therefore focused on the foreign prostitute, a figure that enabled writers to elaborate
At the same time, hygienist physicians saw prostitutes as part of their wider interest in “marginality”. Such interest was evidenced by their obsession with observing different subjects who, in their minds at least, represented the dangers of disorder resulting from the growing cultural heterogeneity that characterized the city in those years. 4
The most significant historiographical research about the period of regulated prostitution in Buenos Aires (1875–1936) was written by Donna Guy, a North American historian, and it was published in 1991. Her time frame partly overlaps with the period of consolidation of the nation-state (1880–1910), a time characterized by economic growth, the mass immigration of European workers, and the establishment of a national plan of organization following the long period of instability that had characterized most of the nineteenth century. This period has come to be seen as a foundational time in the history of a modern, prosperous, and cosmopolitan Argentina, and it has also been seen as indicative of its contradictions, social tensions, and authoritarian practices. The policies that were implemented to control the sex trade can also be included under this heading. Thus, it is commonplace in the diverse literary and historiographical productions on the subject to find reiterations of rapid urban changes, massive European immigration, and the high number of men among immigrants as factors that drove prostitution. 5
Influenced by Foucauldian and gender-based approaches to social history, Guy sought to study prostitution in connection with debates about definitions of family, nation, and citizenship.
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Among the wide variety of primary sources she used, Guy privileged the contributions of politically active professional men and women to public debates about the regulation of prostitution and their
Recent debates about the unionization of prostitutes attracted the attention of scholars in the social sciences. In the last few years, several scholars have focused on the meanings and implications of the Argentinean Female Sex Workers Organization, ammar (Asociación de Mujeres Meretrices de la Argentina), and they have studied its trajectory, relationships with other workers’ organizations, and its fight for the derogation of Article 81 of the Code of Contraventions (Código Contravencional/Código de Convivencia Urbana), in addition to the political identity of its members and its conflicts and divisions. 7 Thus, the period of regulation (1875–1936) and the period initiated in 1994 have received the most attention, leaving the majority of the twentieth century understudied.
The period that opens with Law 12.331 (1936), which abolished regulated prostitution nationwide, has been relatively understudied with regard to the dynamics of the sex trade. The implications of the law itself, especially in the medical debates, have, however, been the subject of a few studies.
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The scarce
In the mid-twentieth century, the moralizing police campaign and periodic raids not only affected prostitutes but eventually cast vast sectors of the young “porteño” citizens and a variety of groups of women under broad moral suspicion.
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The more recent historiographical work that has looked into the impacts of sexuality on definitions of social identities since the mid-twentieth century has contributed to our understandings of those times. With an emphasis on the middle social sectors and specifically on the young, these works indicate the forms and movements of a mass consumer market, its relationship with the expansion of new gendered spheres of sociability, the circulation
Andrés Carretero, a traditional historian of prostitution, studied police actions regarding meeting places such as bars, artistic spaces like the Di Tella Institute, long-haired young men, and women in miniskirts by looking through police documents dating from the 1960s. More recently, Valeria Manzano found scattered references to the dangers of the traffic in women in the same period which in her interpretation may have served to express moral fears about young women leaving their homes or acting against paternal and maternal mandates. 13 The shift in focus from prostitution to a much broader range of moral behaviour, both by the police and historians, has left us with scarce information about the social organization of the sex trade in this period, which included two strongly moralistic military dictatorships: the Onganía dictatorship (1966–1970) and the last Military Dictatorship (1976–1983).
The question as to how the social and cultural changes in the field of sexuality in Argentina specifically affected the exercise and the organization of prostitution cannot be explored yet, as there is a lack of more detailed research into not only the living and working conditions of prostitutes, but also the links between the moralizing campaigns by democratic and authoritarian governments over the course of the twentieth century.
The sources most frequently consulted by researchers consist of medical and public authority reports which show the privileged position occupied by public health opinions focused on social reform in Buenos Aires. Historians have also consulted works of fiction, newspapers, and works of popular culture. Overall, historians combined a wide range of documents, including tango lyrics, plays, memoirs, travel writings, and even brothel plans.
14
Legal documentation, both civil and criminal, has not yet been examined in detail,
Finally, another source used in research on prostitution are the reports produced by international observers. In fact, in international reports on the traffic of women, Buenos Aires is represented as the epitome of a destination for European prostitutes in the early decades of the twentieth century. The widespread existence of more or less sensationalist white slave trade stories frequently involving the Argentinian capital attracted the attention of various observers. Particularly worthy of note are reports produced by reformist organizations, especially Jewish ones, and the documentation produced by the League of Nations Body of Experts, plus those of independent observers. In this documentation, prostitution carried out by Jewish women and the activities of groups of Jewish pimps were given a central and far more visible position than other protagonists in the Buenos Aires sex trade. 16
Definitions
As was the case in other societies that were part of the Spanish Empire, female sexuality was an important issue for the Catholic Church—formally at least—in Buenos Aires throughout the colonial period until 1810. In contrast with the central position occupied by virginity in the Catholic view, the diversity of affective arrangements and sexual relations that actually existed in colonial society led to a large number of women being likened to the image of a prostitute, the symbol of a disorderly woman, in the rhetoric present in many social settings. In practice, however, as Ann Twinman has suggested, it is most likely that
Towards the end of the eighteenth century, the city of Buenos Aires underwent major changes that reflected the crisis in colonial dominance, which also represented a shift towards local expansion and modernization. For the first time, the city began to take a distinct position in the economy and administration of the region, culminating in the 1810 crisis that led to independence. In her survey of crimes involving women in the last decades of the colonial era, Susan Socolow describes a society dominated by men, in which most of the offences committed against women were sexual in nature. Married women, or those under the protection of a man, were most often the victims of violence committed by men known to them, and the vulnerability of single women to violent sexual advances suggests that unprotected women were largely at risk of being considered to be sexually available. 18 Single women and slaves were able to take legal action against men who committed violence against them; qualitative evidence from criminal courts suggests that women in some social groups had a certain amount of sexual autonomy. 19 Nevertheless, their ability to act did not override what the author identifies as a generalized perception that women were naturally subject to sexual excess and violent acts.
In post-revolutionary Buenos Aires, contemporary commentators noted that there was an increase in prostitution, which they believed was related to the broader context of political changes and social instability, geographical
During the second half of the nineteenth century, political stability increased and public debates began to focus on the municipal regulation of prostitution, which came into force in Buenos Aires in 1875. A few years earlier, in the 1869 National Census 361 people identified their occupation as “pimp” or “prostitute”. Of 301 prostitutes, 198 worked in Buenos Aires while the others were spread throughout the country. In 1889, the number of prostitutes registered in the municipality rose as high as 2,007 for the first and only time. That was the first year in which regulation statistics were published. In the following years, persecution by the police and the closure of houses located outside the area stipulated for prostitution also led to a decrease in the number of registered houses. Historian Mirta Lobato has noted that there were disparities in the numbers which were certainly related to differences in the organization of the sex trade but chiefly expressed the preoccupations of those counting the prostitutes. Despite the fact that the information was obtained through the declarations of women, what those figures did not register was the power relationships that led women to identify themselves as prostitutes. Moreover, they did not register “the fragile line separating the work of bringing pleasure with that of other female work related to the ideal of domesticity, such as sewing and cleaning.” 21
The 1875 municipal ordinance considered women to be prostitutes if they sold sexual favours to more than one man.
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However, it soon became clear that the diversity of short-term sexual arrangements could never be socially isolated as laid down in the ordinance. Public officials and doctors resorted to a broader category of “clandestine prostitution” which included various types of occupations, such as actresses, waitresses in cafés and taverns, and a multitude of other types of activities carried out by female workers who went about their
Successive municipal ordinances regulating public prostitution from 1875 to 1936 were based on public health arguments, namely protecting the health of customers and safeguarding the future of the Argentinian nation against the menace of syphilis, and they were also based on moral arguments quite familiar to contemporary commentators. As was the case in other countries that implemented regulations concerning prostitution, the municipality of Buenos Aires created a separate legal status for prostitutes, stipulated that registered prostitutes had to get compulsory medical examinations, established the hours which they could be on the streets, and defined the outer appearance of brothels and their location in relation to places of worship, theatres, and educational establishments. In other words, it regulated their living and working conditions. Of course, such controls suggested that there were serious difficulties in implementation of the law and tremendous challenges in defining who was a prostitute. Guy points out that those suspected of being clandestine prostitutes had to pay a fine to the municipality but were not obliged to register; those who registered had to submit to regular medical examinations and pay taxes besides being treated like “part-time jail inmates”. 24 Thus, in one sense the ordinance for regulating prostitution attempted to create mechanisms in order to separate prostitutes from “honest women” both spatially and legally while at the same time it had the practical effect of encouraging avoidance, which meant an increase of the “clandestine” sex trade.
The 1875 ordinance was also based on a peculiar legal fiction aimed at avoiding another point that was difficult to define: coercion. In the municipal regulation, it was assumed that, in order to be registered, a prostitute had to be a free person of legal age who spontaneously decided to submit herself to the municipal laws. The idea was that a registered woman freely and voluntarily
The general attitude of the authorities regarding the issues of minors and coercion in regulated prostitution is evident in a case about the corruption of youths who were taken to court in 1877. Through it, we also have access to some basic aspects of prostitution that Donna Guy argues had remained invisible during the regulatory period. 26 Two girls from the Argentinian provinces of Santa Fe and Tucumán were found in a (licensed) brothel in the port area of Paseo de Julio. Due to uncertainty about whether they were minors, police officers investigated their previous lives. Both women had not come directly from their provinces to become prostitutes in Buenos Aires but had been working in local brothels in the port city of Rosario. One of them stated that she had previously worked in “houses of ill-repute” in small villages in rural areas, such as Pergamino and San Pedro. The girl told the police chief that she had decided to go to Buenos Aires because the owner of the brothel “whom she had met in Santa Fe” had come to San Pedro and “told her that he was going around looking for girls to bring to this city.” All the people involved seemed to agree that the dispute over their ability to give full and spontaneous consent to live in that brothel was, in practice, more related to their previous experience in prostitution than to their ages. Besides this, their story inadvertently made a record of an internal circuit in Argentina which involved native young women who made contacts and travelled in search of better working conditions. Through this glimpse into a specific moment of their lives, we can imagine that the legal definition of consent and corruption did not match their daily decisions.
For this reason, during the 1890s municipal legislators once again returned to the subject of how to define a prostitute while debating reforms to increase the effectiveness of the regulations and overcome their many failings. In subsequent years, national and municipal legislators would return to the discussion of the legal status of prostitutes several times when reforming municipal regulations and when drawing up definitions of offences such as the corruption of minors. From 1913 onwards, at the time of the adoption of the so-called Palacios Law against the trafficking of women, the offence of procurement came under scrutiny. Although it recognized that adult women could be forced into prostitution, the Palacios Law was seen more as a “national” response to the increasingly negative international reputation that Buenos Aires was acquiring and less as a way of protecting the victims of sexual exploitation. 28 The notion that prostitutes were a vector for venereal diseases was invoked as a justification for state regulation of the sex trade and it would not be strongly challenged again until the 1920s. From 1921 onwards, the Argentine Penal Code incorporated some features of the Palacios Law, and reforms of the municipal regulation focused more on sexual exploitation.
In 1936, a social prophylaxis law was passed, giving rise to a broader debate about whether this law ceased to regulate prostitution or whether it
The absence of a new vocabulary to describe the abolitionist context, the blaming of “clandestine prostitutes” (also at this point meaning “women who worked in dance halls or boarding houses”) for the rise in venereal diseases towards the end of the 1940s, and even the brief return to regulated prostitution between 1954 and 1955 in the final days of the second Perón government, are all factors suggesting that the community of Buenos Aires had been profoundly marked by the experience of regulation that had left in its wake a particular way of approaching and organizing the sex trade within the urban environment. 31 In fact, throughout the second half of the twentieth century municipal debates about where prostitution should be carried out continued to suggest the idea that known prostitutes would voluntarily submit to an exceptional order at first managed by the municipality and then by the police; that “order”, however, was not written down. 32
Once the social prophylaxis law of 1936 had shifted public debates to the topic of venereal diseases, the problems associated with monitoring and locating prostitutes were also progressively removed from public debate, and ultimately they were left in the hands of the police and their discretionary
The Labour Market: Regulated Prostitution
One of the main effects of the regulation of prostitution in Buenos Aires between 1875 and 1936 was the production of information about regulated prostitutes to the detriment of the unregulated sex trade that was registered only in an indirect manner. The data available about registered women represent a relevant source of information for historians as regards the characteristics of the trade—that is, once its partiality in relation to the complexity of the sex trade has been taken into account.
It is crucial to ponder over some of these indicators in light of other available documents. The over-representation of foreign prostitutes in the municipal registers is arguably the one feature that has attracted the most attention from contemporary commentators and historians. Donna Guy points out that foreign observers were likely to misinterpret the official lists of houses due to
The brothel licensing system that came into force in 1875 seems, at least in the early years, to have encouraged the development of regulated brothels with numerous inmates and that made it much easier for owners to pay the fees requested by the municipality. As a matter of fact, regulating prostitution became a mechanism for transferring revenues generated by prostitution into municipal coffers. Thus, multiple interests converged in the regulation of prostitution, which helps us understand why this was one of the main causes of conflicts between the municipal authorities, the police, brothel owners, and the prostitutes themselves.
The number of registered women rose from around 600 early in the twentieth century to 1,128 in 1910. 37 In 1910, Argentinian women represented just 14.2 per cent of the total number of registered women. Of the foreign women, 22.3 per cent were identified as Russian, 20 per cent as French, and almost the same proportion, 20.4 per cent, as Uruguayan (although these were probably European women). Spanish women represented 8 per cent and Italians 6.7 per cent. The demographic profile remained roughly constant after the end of the nineteenth century; registered prostitutes were mostly 18 to 25 years old, with a literacy rate of 40 per cent. 38 Although around one third of the women seem to have had children or dependant relatives, the young age at which women were registered might suggest a prevailing profile of women who had recently arrived and had no local connection, and there were thereby more vulnerable to being registered. This was the opinion of many contemporaries, such as for example Doctor Looyer, who commented that trafficked women “are poor, miserable women who do not know the language and who, despite earning 20 pesos a day, are content to receive only 3 pesos for themselves.” 39
Throughout this period, the proportion of Jewish women among the owners of licensed brothels was much higher than the overall proportion of the Jewish population in Buenos Aires. Furthermore, in 1930, Jewish prostitutes were estimated to represent around 30 per cent of registered prostitutes, while Jews as a whole represented no more than 5 per cent of the population, and French and Argentinian prostitutes each constituted approximately 22 per cent of the
All of the authors working on this issue observed that those figures became increasingly unreliable not only because they were influenced by the interests of those producing them but also because they may reveal the efforts of the women themselves to appear as being from the nationalities most valued by customers. In fact, there are many references to Argentinian men having a predilection for French women, as they were seen as being synonymous with “civilized” sex, and Jewish women for their sexual and racial “otherness”. 42
Likewise, Guy has argued that the figures produced by the regulatory system were used by foreign observers as proof that legalized prostitution in Buenos Aires sustained the traffic of women. Besides taking no account of the local female employment market, anti-trafficking organizations pulled a veil over Argentinian-born prostitutes who were not registered in Buenos Aires but who nonetheless were far more visible and active in inland cities such as Tandil and Rosario. 43
Local and foreign observers ascribed different meanings to the various nationalities of the prostitutes they saw. Indirectly, those meanings revealed fragmentary aspects of the prostitutes’ work experiences and life after prostitution. In 1907, for instance, criminologist Eusebio Gómez referred to native “creole” prostitutes’ expectation that they would eventually return to their “place of birth to live out a life of rest and relative honesty.”
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Although his observations were designed to differentiate native women from foreign ones, it is possible to find evidence, also among the European prostitutes, of expectations or hopes for a chance to retire and move back to be with their families. As with the overrepresentation of eastern European and Jewish prostitutes in official
That was the case of a Russian woman named Raquel Liberman, whose story has endured because of her fame in denouncing the Jewish mutual aid society Zwi Migdal as a white slavery organization that was trafficking Jewish women. Her story became paradigmatic of the cause-effect connection between regulation and traffic that was sustained by abolitionists internationally. Although she was portrayed as a typical victim of traffickers, more recent information brings to light aspects of her life that were not covered in the various reports. Liberman arrived in a village in the province of Buenos Aires in the early 1920s with her two young sons to live with her husband, who very soon afterwards died of tuberculosis. 45 Only then did she leave her family and go to Buenos Aires to work as a prostitute. Neither Zwi Migdal nor the police ever knew either that Liberman had been legally married in Warsaw or that she had two sons who had stayed in the province in the care of family members. 46 With her silence and her decision to protect certain aspects of her life, she herself helped perpetuate the stereotype of the Jewish prostitute who was tricked and forced into prostitution. Likewise, whilst her decision to denounce her exploiters to the police in Buenos Aires may be viewed as a courageous and exceptional one, it can be put in context by evidence that many other women from a similar background in different parts of South America denounced their former partners and other men as pimps in certain circumstances. 47
Frequent amendments to the municipal ordinances that regulated prostitution affected the organization of brothels. Whilst in the early years of
In practice, throughout the whole period of regulation police officials repeatedly complained that municipal officials limited their freedom to act both in terms of tackling the sex trade and in persecuting pimps. Meanwhile, accusations of police corruption were on the rise in line with reports on the trafficking of women.
Narratives of the White Slave Trade
Narratives on the traffic of European women who might have been tricked and enslaved in Buenos Aires brothels thanks to the wide scope for action made possible via regulation by pimps and house owners and police corruption were widespread in Argentina during the years of regulation. Buenos Aires also gained an international reputation as a centre for the trafficking of women in newspapers, League of Nations documents, and other reports produced outside Argentina. This reputation should be seen in light of a confluence of factors, among which stands out international abolitionist militancy in the context of the persistence of licensed brothels in various forms during the first decades of the twentieth century.
Gómez’s and others’ ideas about trafficking indicate a distrust in the massive waves of immigrants disembarking in Buenos Aires; for this reason, the international character of the sex trade was attributed to the cultural characteristics of the recently-arrived unknown foreigners in terms of “a spirit of vassalage and sensual corruption”. Some pages later, however, Gómez argued that there was a “perverse” system that prevented women from changing their lives: when they left the control of one exploiter, it was said that they fell straight into the hands of another.It is not exactly a question of the sale and purchase of women, as is widely thought; nor did wily trickery, devious seduction, or violent sequestration
play a part; no. The trade of white women in its truest form was nothing more than the recruitment of women aware of their future fate and who with a certain degree of freedom accepted the terms of a service hire contract, whose iron regime was bearable and possibly even comfortable to them […]. 50
A few years later in 1913, as the tarnished reputation of Buenos Aires worsened still more, Samuel Cohen, the Secretary General of the London-based Jewish Association for the Protection of Girls and Women, visited the city and found reason to doubt the outlines and dimensions of the stories circulating in Europe. 51 The registered women with whom he spoke told him that they had already worked as prostitutes in Europe and that they had gone to Buenos Aires expecting that they would continue to work in the sex trade. 52 There was a similar expectation when immigration resumed after the First World War. At the beginning of the 1920s, a researcher working for the League of Nations was told by a brothel owner in Europe, “They keep on going [to Buenos Aires] as if they expected to find gold in the streets. It must be good as they say because they won’t come back.” 53 In a way, that is not so different from the expectations of many other European migrants at the time who had gone in the hope of finding a better life in the Americas. 54 However, for the League of Nations, this was further proof of the existence of the traffic.
In a detailed study of the many Jewish voluntary organizations and individuals involved in the fight against the trafficking of women, Edward Bristow was of the opinion that the high visibility of Jews in Buenos Aires could partly be an unintended consequence of the intervention in public debates by the Jewish community through its reformist and rescue organizations. Because of its preoccupation with the differentiation between “pure” and “impure” people and with safeguarding the public image of the community in an increasingly anti-Semitic context, its public actions in segregating the “impure” sectors of the community ended up working against it by granting higher visibility to the part of the community involved in the international sex trade. 56
Coexistence in the same urban spaces and economic activities among Jewish groups connected to white slavery and those who weren’t was made more difficult by the reaction to the creation of the Mutual Aid Society Varsovia (formally organized in 1906 and called Zwi Migdal after 1927), which in 1930 was accused of covering for an organization of Jewish traffickers. As happened in other places that received Jewish immigrants, the “impure” (t’meiim) in Argentina faced discrimination from both their host society and from the Jewish community. And as happened in other cities, Jewish men and women involved in the sex trade were the first to acquire land to build a cemetery (1904) and a synagogue before the formal community was organized. The organization performed burials and religious ceremonies in their own temple.
The legal case against Zwi Migdal came about during the rise to power of a conservative government and at a time of economic crisis and increasing nationalism. 57 The evidence that Zwi Migdal was essentially an organization of pimps operating under the guise of a mutual aid association was mainly produced by police officer Julio Alsogaray. The main accusation against the Zwi Migdal was about illegal association, not trafficking, which suggests that there was a lack of legal proof. 58 In fact, the case ended with the application of the Ley de Residencia, as the law for the expulsion of foreigners was called. This law, which was implemented in 1902, gave the Executive Branch Authority the power to expel “undesirable” aliens without judicial proceedings. 59 Alsogaray’s book, La Trilogía de la trata de blancas, has been the main source for research on the topic. However, some recent works have posited that there is a serious need to further study the case in connection with other aspects of ethnic and immigration experiences. 60
The Labour Market: The World beyond Regulation
Authors who wrote on the topic of prostitution in Buenos Aires were unanimous in acknowledging that the formal terms underpinning the municipal regulations did not correspond to a complex and contradictory reality. Few authors, however, made progress in identifying the scope for action and the
Perhaps the most visible form of prostitution away from the regulated brothels was the so-called “casas de citas” or call houses (they also flourished in the centre of Rio de Janeiro at the time to evade the vigilance of a police force that lacked municipal ordinances). Descriptions from the time characterize them as places where clandestine prostitutes worked, adulteresses could meet up with their lovers, and minors ended up being seduced. According to Goldar, the women who frequented these houses (but never lived there) were “newly initiated into the life or pretended to be.” 63 Descriptions like his suggest that an increase in the number of these places of a more or less distinguished kind gave rise to a wide variety of affective and sexual encounters. Classified by doctors and police officers as acts of “clandestine prostitution”, these encounters may better be understood as part of the changes in urban nightlife and entertainment, the increased circulation of women in the urban environment, and the possibilities for the sex trade that were very different from the stereotypes of pimp and slave.
Also highly revealing are observations by the poet Sebastián Tallón about the so-called “casas de comisionistas” or “agent houses”, a kind of intermediary between city and rural brothels. Besides suggesting the existence of national sex work circuits linking small villages to the city (overshadowed by the
That was how Tallón contextualizes prostitution in the female labour market at the time. He points to the existence of women who lived in relative autonomy and portrays the pimp not as an agent of coercion, but precisely the opposite: as a break in the circuits set up by these employment agencies. Finally, he notes the importance of prostitution as a setting for male and popular socializing. Around it, diverse elements of the informal economy flourished. In these “agent houses”, for instance, there was non-stop dancing, which created work opportunities for many creole tango orchestras. 66
Similarly, a few cases of men who were expelled from Brazil and travelled from Buenos Aires with young “artists” on tour further distinguishes the men identified in police documents as “pimps”, “procurers”, or “cáftenes” from the stereotypical coercive exploiter. An analysis of the police investigations upon which the expulsions were based in light of the organization of a labour market in the variety theatre in South American cities reveals the existence of transnational employment circuits and sheds light on the conflicts between the “artists” and entrepreneurs. This was a market in which young female singers and dancers travelled under employment contracts that imposed on them
This is evidence that suggests that regulated prostitution coexisted with multiple forms of work. Both worlds did not seem so radically separated. Many foreign women arrived within the framework of dependency relationships with the owners of the licenced houses who paid for their tickets, and eventually those women changed houses and dependency relationships. Others set out as independent workers with the expectation of finding an opening in licensed houses. In order to define the “real” characteristics of traffic, the League of Nations sent a team of North American undercover agents to Buenos Aires (followed by Montevideo and Rio de Janeiro, in the South American part of the research) in 1924. The agents observed that many of the women working on the streets in the port area solicited discretely, taking their clients to flats or hotel rooms. They also found women who solicited in certain restaurants and at the Casino Theatre. During interviews made with some of these women, they confirmed what an owner of licenced houses had told them: if prostitutes specialized in oral sex (the “French way” or “perversion”), they could make between 10 and 20 pesos per client, while at an “honest” job they would not make more than 4 pesos a day. A girl could see an average of 15 men per day, as one informant explained. Even if they had to give half the money obtained to the house owner, “they can get a nice few dollars together in a few years.” 68
Thus, even having to pay high percentages to different people, such as the owner of the hotel or the brothel they frequented, those women expected to make enough to save up and increase their margin of autonomy in the market. The exploratory trips made by the League of Nations’ agents in Buenos Aires show a diverse universe of possibilities of dependency relationships. Their questions revealed a preconceived idea about such relationships, such as
They could work on their own, with or without a steady partner; however, the informant stressed, probably trying to make himself sound important, that they still needed “a man” to negotiate working conditions with the owners of the houses, municipal officials, and the police. 70 Nevertheless, the pathways of some of the women who were identified as members of Zwi Migdal in Yarfitz’s study, some of whom prosperous house owners, former prostitutes, and madamas, demonstrate that for some women, such accumulations of profit and degrees of autonomy were carefully brought into being.
The Abolitionist Period
Initial resistance to the regulation of prostitution was replaced at the beginning of the twentieth century by a widely extended vision that the coercive aspects of the system were in accordance with Argentinian “customs” and “nature”. Nevertheless, critics of the regulation system, such as feminists and socialists, went about denouncing the limits and inefficiencies of the system, even as it was repeatedly reformed. In 1934, licensed brothels were abolished in the federal capital, and in 1936 the regulatory system was abolished nationally through the adoption of the social prophylaxis law which was based on a draft law project by socialist deputy Angel Giménez. This was a time when an
At the time, people disputed whether prostitution practised outside of houses of ill-repute, basically individual prostitution, was prohibited or not under this law. Its adoption heralded a long period in which the police appear to have acquired more routine discretion to act in terms of monitoring brothels and prostitutes who carried out their business in the streets. In the beginning, for example, Manuel Fresco, governor of the province of Buenos Aires, closed some of the brothels until they complied with the new rules of the General Office of Hygiene. 72 In subsequent years, the uncertainty surrounding this legal framework seems to have fostered greater police monitoring, repression, and probably even involvement in running brothels from apartments in the vein of the old regulated brothels, along with action against women who picked up their clients on the streets, or in cafés or bars in various parts of the city, but especially in areas near the river. From the 1950s onwards, women waited for clients at different times in cafés in the city centre. 73
Although the bibliography for this period focuses on official policies on the topic and mostly on the legislation and conditions of anti-venereal disease campaigns, there is evidence that various “regulationist” practices were retained, such as the closure of particular brothels, medical interventions, and the acceptance of legal brothels in military areas and national territories.
74
In fact, between 1954 and 1955 there was a brief return to regulation in response to a sex scandal involving young soldiers which occurred in the midst of a conflict
Recent Trends
Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, the control and monitoring of prostitution was carried out through the discretionary activities of police officers, which led to the police becoming increasingly involved in organizing the sex trade in the city. This was evident in the periodical outlining of red zones, but also in their participation as organizing agents in the sex business. Prostitution thereby became yet another activity that contributed to the financial autonomy of the police. 76 Because of this, debates about prostitution began to reflect the tensions and broader public debates about the limits and scope of police powers in the city and about constitutional and human rights. Although there are no substantial studies on the period from the 1950s to the 1990s, there is scope for further investigations into whether the ensuing periods of the military dictatorship (1966–1970 and 1976–1983) had a legitimizing effect on police activities in the sex trade.
The scarce information and knowledge about this period, which reflects a particular view that associated prostitution with cultural and behavioural shifts in Buenos Aires society during this period. Throughout the decades following the 1930s, the police practice of imprisoning people to interrogate them became generalized, giving rise to a wide range of abuse. Statistics available for the period usually refer to women interned in hospitals to be treated
In 1994, ten years after the 1983 return to democracy, the city of Buenos Aires became autonomous. One of the first effects of this was that in 1998 the police lost its power to arrest prostitutes as a way of controlling and monitoring the sex trade. In turn, a reform of the contravention code was debated once the municipal government was back in the hands of politically conservative groups. The debate once again turned to determining the advantages and disadvantages of drawing up a red zone, and to stipulating a minimum required distance from places of worship and educational establishments.
At the beginning of 1994, women prostitutes founded ammar, Asociación de Mujeres Meretrices de la Argentina (Association of Prostitute Women of Argentina). Today there are two basic trains of thought regarding prostitution: one trend has been influenced by radical feminist groups, which see prostitutes as victims and prostitution as “sexual exploitation”, whilst the other tends to conceive of them as “sex workers” and pursues policies of de-victimization and acknowledgement of basic labour rights. 77
Recent anthropological scholarship has identified a wide variety of situations, working arrangements, and employment conditions behind the small clues left by sex trade advertising, such as the widespread practice of distributing small flyers in public spaces advertising sexual services in apartments. These small ads, which include photos of naked women and telephone numbers, may be a front for women working independently, either alone or with other women, or they may be managed by the police or pimps. On the whole, they reveal the existence of women seeking to leave street prostitution, whilst also hinting at a reality far more complex than the one-dimensional concept of the sexual exploitation view of prostitution espoused by the abolitionist feminist hegemony in Argentina. 78
For her part, Cecilia Varela explains the local, national and transnational connections involved in the strong resurgence of stories about the trafficking of women in the last decade in Argentina. Varela identifies a resurgence of trafficking stories about Dominican women based on reports in the popular press. There are remarkable similarities with the stories that circulated at the start of the twentieth century. The basic storylines emphasize trickery
On the whole, the history of sexual work in Buenos Aires is a good case for a reflection on the historical construction of certain legal frameworks and the meanings they acquire in the lives of different individuals. Between both extremes—that of the regulatory fiction, which assumes the existence of self-determined women, free from any coercion, and that of abolitionism, which tends to see all prostitutes through the prism of victimization (in as far as prostitution is always seen as a “form of violence against women”)—the women who have been involved in prostitution in Buenos Aires have shed light, through their livelihood strategies, on the contradictions, borders, and gaps in the diverse forms of the organization of sexual commerce over the last century.
I am very grateful to Eleanor Rylance and to Constanza Dotta for the work they put into translating and re-translating this text. The editors’ comments and suggestions made by Mir Yarfitz, María Luisa Mugica, Isabella Cosse, and Valeria Manzano also helped me improve this chapter.
Domingo Casadevall, El Tema de la mala vida en el teatro nacional (Buenos Aires, 1970); José Sebastián Tallón, El Tango en sus etapas de música prohibida (Buenos Aires, 1959); Sirena Pellarolo, Sainetes, cabaret, minas y tangos (Buenos Aires, 2010). For an analysis of photographs of male sociability in an Argentinian brothel, see Dora Barrancos, “Sexo-s en el lupanar: Un documento fotográfico (circa 1940)”, Cadernos Pagu, 25 (2005), pp. 357–390. See also Pablo Ben, “Plebeyan Masculinity and Sexual Comedy in Buenos Aires, 1880–1930”, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 16 (2007), pp. 436–458.
Donna Guy, El Sexo peligroso: La prostitución legal en Buenos Aires 1875–1955 (Buenos Aires, 1994); Francine Masiello, Entre civilización y barbarie: Mujer, nación y cultura literaria en la Argentina moderna (Rosario, 1997). For the changes that occurred in the 1920s, see Cecilia Toussonian, “Images of the Modern Girl: From the Flapper to the Joven Moderna (Buenos Aires, 1920–1940)”, Forum for Inter American Research, 6 (2013), available at: http://interamericaonline.org/volume-6-2/tossounian/#more-35; last accessed 7 July 2017.
Masiello, Entre civilización y barbarie, pp. 156–157.
Guy, El Sexo Peligroso, pp. 104–137; for more on contemporary scientific thinking about criminals (and prostitutes), see Lila Caimari, Apenas un delincuente: Crimen, castigo y cultura en la Argentina, 1880–1955 (Buenos Aires, 2004), pp. 75–99.
Ernesto Goldar, La “Mala Vida” (Buenos Aires, 1971); Guy, El Sexo peligroso; Yvette Trochon, La Ruta de Eros (Montevideo, 2006). For a global perspective, see Pablo Ben, “Historia global y prostitución porteña: El fenómeno de la prostitución moderna en Buenos Aires, 1880–1930”, Revista de Estudios Marítimos, 5/6 (2012/2013), pp. 13–26. Also see Lex Heerma van Voss, “The Worst Class of Workers: Migration, Labour Relations and Living Strategies of Prostitutes around 1900”, in Marcel van der Linden and Leo Lucassen (eds), Working on Labor: Essays in Honor of Jan Lucassen (Leiden, 2012), pp. 153–170, 162.
Guy, El Sexo peligroso, p. 11.
Mario Pecheny and Mónica Petracci, “Derechos humanos y sexualidad en la Argentina”, Horizontes Antropológicos, 12 (2006), pp. 43–69; Carolina Von Lurzer, “Putas, el estigma: aproximación a las representaciones y organización de las mujeres que ejercen la prostitución en la ciudad de Buenos Aires”, Question, 1 (2006), available at: http://perio.unlp.edu.ar/ojs/index.php/question/article/view/295/232; last accessed 10 July 2017; Silvana Gurrera and Juan Pablo Ferrero, “Prostitución, búsqueda de reconocimiento y reivindicación de derechos en la Ciudad de Buenos Aires”, in Gabriela Delamata (ed.), Movimientos sociales: ¿Nuevas ciudadanías? Reclamos, derechos, estado en Argentina, Bolivia y Brasil (Buenos Aires, 2009), pp. 85–108; Kate Hardy, “Incorporating Sex Workers into the Argentine Labor Movement”, International Labour and Working Class History, 77 (2010), pp. 89–108.
On the law of social prophylaxis, see, among others, Carolina Biernat, “Médicos, especialistas, políticos y funcionarios en la organización centralizada de la profilaxis de las enfermedades venéreas en la Argentina (1930–1954), Anuario de Estudios Americanos, 64 (2007), pp. 257–288; Marisa Miranda, “Buenos Aires, entre Eros y Tánatos: La prostitución como amenaza disgénica (1930–1955), Dynamis 32 (2012), pp. 93–113, available at: http://www.raco.cat/index.php/Dynamis/article/viewFile/257776/344970; last accessed 7 July 2017; Karin Grammático,“Obreras, prostitutas, y mal venéreo: El Estado en busca de la profilaxis”, in Valeria Pita et al., Historia de las mujeres en la Argentina (Buenos Aires, 2000), pp. 116–135. See also Maria Luisa Mugica, La ciudad de las Venus Impudicas: Rosario, historia y prostitución, 1874–1932 (Rosario, 2014).
There was a brief interruption at the end of the second Peronist government when prostitution was regulated again in 1954 within the context of an increasing conflict with the Catholic Church. Guy, El Sexo peligroso, pp. 213–239.
This picture also appears to be pertinent for the city of Rosario, a port near Buenos Aires that had regulated prostitution two years before the capital city (1873) and had abolished it in 1932, four years before the rest of Argentina. In the debates about the social prophylaxis law of Rosario, there was fear that the new legal framework would grant the police too much power and warnings were made about the risks of bribery. Mugica, La ciudad de las Venus. One of the few studies on the activities of the paramilitary organization “Triple A” in systematically persecuting prostitutes in the city of Mendoza in the 1970s was carried out by Laura Rodriguez Aguero, “Mujeres en situación de prostitución como blanco del accionar represivo: El caso del Comando Moralizador Pío xii, Mendoza, 1974–1976”, in Andrea Andujar et al., De Minifaldas, militancias y revoluciones (Buenos Aires, 2009), pp. 109–126. See also Santiago Morcillo and Carolina Justo Von Lurzer, “Mujeres públicas y sexo clandestino: Ambigüedades sobre la normativa legal sobre la prostitución en la Argentina”, in Daniel Jones et al., La producción de la sexualidad: Políticas y regulaciones sexuales en Argentina (Buenos Aires, 2012), pp. 89–121, 190–192.
Andrés Carretero, Prostitución en Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires, 1998), pp. 182–200; Valeria Manzano, “Sexualizing Youth: Morality Campaigns and Representations of Youth in Early 1960s Buenos Aires”, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 14 (2005), pp. 433–461.
Andrea Andújar et al., De Minifaldas, militancias y revoluciones; Isabella Cosse, Pareja, sexualidad y familia en Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires, 2010); Isabella Cosse et al., Los 60 de otra manera: Vida cotidiana, género y sexualidades en Argentina (Buenos Aires, 2010); Karina Felitti, La Revolución de la píldora: Sexualidad y política en los Sesenta (Buenos Aires, 2012); Valeria Manzano, The Age of Youth in Argentina: Culture, Politics and Sexuality from Peron to Videla (Chapel Hill, n.c., 2014).
Carretero, Prostitución en Buenos Aires, p. 182; Valeria Manzano, “Sexualizing Youth”, pp. 433–461.
Pablo Ben, “Historia global y prostitución”. Horacio Caride analysed municipal sources together with plans of prostibules found in the archives of the National Sanitary Works Agency (Dirección Nacional de Obras Sanitarias de la Nación), “Lugares de mal vivir: Una historia cultural de los prostíbulos de Buenos Aires, 1875–1936” (Unpublished Ph.D., University of Buenos Aires, 2014).
Mir Yarfitz uses the judicial reports in the Gaceta del Foro to trace the development of the case against the association of Jewish traffickers, the “infamous” Zwi Migdal. Mir Yarfitz, “Polacos, White Slaves and Stille Chuppahs: Organized Prostitution and the Jews in Buenos Aires, 1890–1939” (Unpublished Ph.D., University of California, 2012), pp. 145, 133, 224. See also Sandra McGee Deutsch, Crossing Borders, Claiming a Nation: A History of Argentine Jewish Women, 1880–1995 (Durham, 2010).
League of Nations, Report of the Special Body of Experts on Traffic in Women and Children (Geneva, 1927). Sandra McGee Deutsch also employed the registers from the Jewish Association for the Protection of Girls and Women, which worked “to maintain Jewish immigrants out of commercial sex”, particularly with “Ezras Noschim”, the Buenos Aires branch: Crossing Borders, pp. 107–108; Guy, El Sexo Peligroso; Yarfitz, “Polacos, White Slaves and Stille Chuppas”, pp. 53–110. The telling exception is Albert Londres’ journalistic research on the traffic in women in Buenos Aires which highlighted French pimps’ practices. Albert Londres, The Road to Buenos Aires (London, 1928).
Ann Twinman, “Honor, Sexuality and Illegitimacy in Colonial Spanish America”, in Asunción Lavrín (ed.), Sexuality and Marriage in Colonial Latin America (Lincoln [etc.], 1989), pp. 118–155, 148–149.
Susan Socolow, “Women and Crime: Buenos Aires, 1757–97”, in Lyman L. Johnson (ed.), The Problem of Order in Changing Societies: Essays on Crime and Policing in Argentina and Uruguay (Albuquerque, 1990), pp. 1–19, 8, 11.
Historian José Luis Moreno observes that towards the end of the colonial period, the Spanish justice system was receptive to claims made by members of lower social groups, including slaves. He analysed a judicial case in which a freedwoman accused a man of trying to re-enslave her and take over her gains made via prostitution. To achieve his aims, the accused apparently threatened to send her to the “prostitutes’ jail”. In this particular case, the freedwoman succeeded in mobilising her former owner and the Ombudsman (Defensor de Pobres) in her favour. José Luis Moreno, “Conflicto y violencia familiar en el Río de la Plata, 1770–1810”, Revista de Historia Social y de las Mentalidades, 6 (2002), pp. 13–38, 37.
Mark Szuchman, Order, Family and Community in Buenos Aires, 1810–1860 (Stanford, 1988), p. 119.
Mirta Lobato, Historia de las trabajadoras en la Argentina (1880–1960) (Buenos Aires, 2007), pp. 72–73; Cristiana Schettini, “Esclavitud en blanco y negro: Elementos para una historia del trabajo sexual femenino en Buenos Aires y en Río de Janeiro, a fines del siglo xix”, Entrepasados, 29 (2006), pp. 43–62.
Guy, El Sexo peligroso, p. 69.
Marcial Quiroga, “Aspecto actual de la prostitución”, Semana Médica, 3 (1962), p. 1785; Carretero, La Prostitución en Buenos Aires, p. 196; Sandra Gayol, Sociabilidad en Buenos Aires: Hombres, honor y cafés, 1862–1910 (Buenos Aires, 2000).
Guy, El Sexo peligroso, p. 69.
For more on records of the legislative debates on the minimum age for women to register themselves and the common knowledge that minors were working as prostitutes, see Enrique Feinmann, Policía Social: Estudio sobre las costumbres y la moralidad pública (Buenos Aires, 1913), pp. 38–76, esp. p. 48.
Colón or Alzarán, Cristobal, and Rosa Zabaleta for prostitution of minors. C, 12, A–F, Criminal Court, National Archive, 1877. For further analysis on this and similar cases, see María Dolores Quaglia, “Corrupción y prostitución infantil en Buenos Aires (1870–1904): Una aproximación al tema”; José Luis Moreno, La Política social antes de la política social (Caridad, beneficencia y política social en Buenos Aires, siglos xvii a xx) (Buenos Aires, 2000), pp. 205–223; Schettini, “Esclavitud en blanco y negro”, pp. 43–64.
By linking syphilis and degeneration, French doctor Alfred Fournier became the most important exponent of neo-regulationism and the redrafting of regulations in the face of abolitionist arguments. See Sergio Carrara, Tributo a Venus: A luta contra a sífilis no Brasil, da passagem do século aos anos 40 (Rio de Janeiro, 1996), pp. 61–64. The author of the 1887 proposal was Doctor Eugenio Ramirez, Profilaxis Pública de la Sífilis. Reformas urgente a la reglamentación de la prostitución (Estudios de higiene social) (Buenos Aires, 1887) (underlining as in the original).
Guy, El Sexo peligroso, pp. 41–42.
Biernat, “Médicos, especialistas, políticos y funcionarios en la organización centralizada de la profilaxis de las enfermedades venéreas en la Argentina (1930–1954)”, Anuario de Estudios Americanos, 64 (2007), pp. 257–288, 278. For Rosario, see Mugica, La ciudad de las Venus.
Guy, El sexo peligroso, p. 213. Horacio Caride argues that the regulation created the figure of the “prostibule” in a state of tension with other collective housing and forms of commerce. Caride, “Lugares de mal vivir”, pp. 89–249.
Biernat, “Médicos, especialistas, políticos y funcionarios”, p. 285.
Goldar, La Mala vida; Carretero, Prostitución en Buenos Aires, pp. 173–200.
Grammático, “Obreras, prostitutas y mal venéreo”, pp. 116–135.
Goldar, La Mala vida; Carretero, Prostitución en Buenos Aires, pp. 173–200; Omar Acha’s articles “Las sirvientas asesinas: Mal paso, delito y experiencia de clase en la Argentina peronista” and “Cuerpos y Sexualidades”, in Herramienta: Debate y crítica marxista (2013), discuss tensions over domestic workers’ sexuality in the context of the first Peronism.
Cecilia Varela, “Entre las demandas de protección y autodeterminación: Los procesos de judicialización de la trata de mujeres y niñas en la Argentina (2008–2011)”, in José Olivar et al. (ed.), La prostitución hoy en América Latina: Entre el trabajo, políticas y placer (Bogotá, 2011); Cecilia Varela, “La campaña antitrata en la Argentina y la agenda supranacional”, in Debora Daich and Mariana Sirimarco (eds), Género y violencia en el mercado del sexo: politica, policia y prostitucion (Buenos Aires, 2015), pp. 109–150.
Guy, El Sexo peligroso, p. 83.
Ibid., p. 92.
Ibid., p. 93.
Dr Carlos Looyer, Los Grandes misterios de la mala vida en Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires, 1911), p. 248.
McGee Deutsch, Crossing Borders, p. 110.
Yarfitz, “Polacos, White Slaves and Stille Chuppahs”, pp. 89–110.
McGee Deutsch, Crossing Borders, p. 106; Guy, El Sexo peligroso; Yarfitz, “Polacos, White Slaves and Stille Chuppahs”, p. 93.
Guy, El Sexo peligroso, p. 94; McGee Deutsch, Crossing Borders, p. 110. 41 per cent of Argentinian women were owners of brothels outside Buenos Aires; Yarfitz, “Polacos, White Slaves and Stille Chuppahs”, p. 93, found many women who were “native to Argentina” in census data for the year 1895.
Eusebio Gómez, La Mala vida en Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires, 2011 [1908]).
For different portrayals of Raquel Liberman and her image as the “typical victim of traffickers”, see Myrtha Shalom, La Polaca: Inmigrantes, rufianes y esclavas a comienzos del siglo xx (Buenos Aires, 2009); Patricia Suarez, Las Polacas: historias tártaras, casamentera, La Varsovia (Buenos Aires, 2002); Nora Glickman, The Jewish White Slave Trade and the Untold Story of Raquel Liberman (New York [etc.], 2000); Larry Levy, La Mancha de la Migdal (Buenos Aires, 2007); for a broad discussion, see Yarfitz, “Polacos, White Slaves and Stille Chuppahs”, pp. 111–149.
Glickman, The Jewish White Slave Trade, pp. 43–47.
Cristiana Schettini, “Viajando solas: prácticas de vigilancia policial y experiencias de prostitución en la América del Sur”, in Jorge Trujillo Bretón (ed.), En la Encrucijada. Historia, marginalidad y delito en América Latina y los Estados Unidos de Norteamérica, siglos xix y xx (Guadalajara, 2010), pp. 331–353. Yarfitz describes previous legal actions taken against Zwi Migdal, which contextualizes the impact of Liberman’s denunciation. Yarfitz, “Polacos, White Slaves and Stille Chuppahs”, pp. 115–116.
Guy, El Sexo peligroso, p. 83.
Ibid., p. 80.
Gómez, La Mala vida, p. 119.
On the subject of the worsening reputation of Buenos Aires, see Ernesto Bott, who tells how at the start of 1913 the Foreign Affairs Minister began to distribute a publication to Argentinian consulates and a memo to the press contradicting reports in the European publications about the white slave trade in Buenos Aires. Ernesto Bott, Las Condiciones de lucha contra la trata de blancas en Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires, 1916), p. 15.
McGee Deutsch, Crossing Borders, p. 111.
League of Nations, Report of the Special Body of Experts, p. 12.
A similar argument is developed by Yarfitz when he suggests that Zwi Migdal basically worked like any other mutual aids association of Jewish immigrants at the time; Yarfitz, “Polacos, White Slaves and Stille Chuppahs”, pp. 150–196.
Guy, El Sexo peligroso, p. 150; Bott, Las Condiciones.
Edward Bristow, Prostitution and Prejudice: The Jewish Fight against White Slavery 1870–1939 (Oxford, 1982).
The existence of a mutual aid society and its achievements, such as purchasing a cemetery and a synagogue, later brought to light in the midst of a public scandal that reinforced the association between the trafficking of women and the Jewish community, reflects and condenses the contradictions between the liberal principles that organised society and the spreading of nationalistic, conservative, and anti-Semitic thinking in Argentina. For more on this see among others McGee Deutsch, Crossing Borders and Daniel Lvovich, Nacionalismo y antisemitismo en la Argentina (Buenos Aires, 2003).
Julio Alsogaray, Trilogía de la trata de blancas (Buenos Aires, 1933); Levy, La Mancha de la Migdal, p. 243.
Levy asserts that, based on the law, the members of the organization were deported to the neighbouring country of Uruguay from where they had no difficulty in returning. Levy, La Mancha de la Migdal, p. 248.
Yvette Trochon, La Ruta de Eros (Montevideo, 2006); José Luis Scarsi, “Cómo y por qué se formó la Zwi Migdal”, Todo es historia, 482 (2007), pp. 6–22; McGee Deutsch, Crossing Borders; Yarfitz, “Polacos, White Slaves and Stille Chuppahs”.
Goldar, La Mala vida, pp. 34–35.
Manuel Gálvez, La trata de blancas (Buenos Aires, 1905); Manuel Gálvez, Nacha regules (Buenos Aires, 1919).
Goldar, La Mala vida, p. 39.
Cecilia Allemandi, “El servicio doméstico en el marco de la transformaciones de la ciudad de Buenos Aires, 1869–1914”, Diálogos, 16 (2012), pp. 385–415. For more on the Argentinian female labour market, see Lobato, Historia de las Trabajadoras en la Argentina.
Sebastián Tallón, El Tango en sus etapas de música prohibida (Buenos Aires, 1959), p. 42.
Tallón, El Tango en sus etapas, p. 44; Pellarolo, Sainetes, cabaret, minas y tangos.
Cristiana Schettini, “South American Tours: Work Relations in the Entertainment Market in South America”, International Review of Social History, 57 (2012), pp. 129–160.
“Clandestine Prostitution”, 24 June, 1924. League of Nations Archive [hereafter lna], box S 171.
Argentine Report. Appendix n.4: “Suspicious Case”. lna, box S 171. The extra value accorded to foreign and older prostitutes due to their greater experience in the trade was a recurrent theme among clients. In the mid-1930s, for instance, police officer Ernesto Pareja suggested that men from Buenos Aires preferred European prostitutes because they were seen as “veterans of the trade”. Ernesto Pareja, La Prostitución en Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires, 1937).
At one point, the informant told the undercover investigator: “A green girl is twice as much trouble as a wife. […] The girl must be an expert.” “Traffic in women and children”, pp. 7–9, June, 1924. lna, box S 171.
Miranda, “Buenos Aires, entre Eros y Tanatos”, p. 109.
Ibid., p. 110.
Carretero, Prostitución en Buenos Aires, p. 189.
María Luisa Mugica found that in the first months after the law of social prophylaxis was implemented some prostitutes in the city of Rosario tried to attract their clients by proudly exhibiting their health booklets. They used this document like the earlier official medical examination, unintendedly putting doctors in the awkward position of being their guarantors. In the doctors’ view, this was a regular medical certificate that had no resemblance to the previous official medical certificates issued under the system of regulation. Mugica, La ciudad de las Venus.
Guy, El Sexo peligroso, pp. 213–239.
Sofía Tiscornia (ed.), Burocracias y violencia. Estudios de antropología juridica (Buenos Aires, 2004), esp. pp. 89–125; Marcelo Sain, “La policía en las ciencias sociales: Ensayo sobre los obstáculos epistemológicos para el estudio de la institución policial en el campo de las ciencias sociales”, in Mariana Sirimarco (ed.), Estudiar la policía: La mirada de las ciencias sociales sobre la institución policial (Buenos Aires, 2010), pp. 27–56; and Debora Daich, “Contravenciones y prostitución: La producción burocrática-administrativa de estadísticas”, Papeles de Trabajo, 24 (2012), pp. 31–48; Deborah Daich and Mariana Sirimarco, “Policías y prostitutas en la Argentina: el control territorial en clave de género”, in Daich and Sirimarco, Género y violencia, pp. 61–84.
See note 7 and Mario Pecheny and Mónica Petracci, “Derechos humanos y sexualidad en la Argentina”, pp. 43–69.
Debora Daich, “Los Papelitos de la prostitución: Hacia una descripción feminista y densa de la prostitución en Buenos Aires”, in José Olivar et al. (eds), La prostitución hoy en América Latina: Entre el trabajo, políticas y placer (Bogotá, 2011).
Varela, “Entre las demandas de protección y autodeterminación”.