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 of municipal regulation. In fact, throughout the first half of the twentieth century prostitution was intrinsically linked to various aspects of public debates about national cultural identity that were taking place in Buenos Aires. Prostitutes occupied an important role in national literature and theatre plays; they were part of popular sociability and took centre stage in stories about broken hearts, as told through the lyrics of tangos. ¹ Narratives about the white slave trade, particularly those identifying Buenos Aires as one of the main receiving centres of European prostitutes at the turn of the twentieth century, were also widespread in literature, plays, and films.

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. ² 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 on tensions arising from the commercialization of social relationships. From a local perspective, the (foreign) prostitute embodied the effects of money circulation and of the “otherness” that was invading Argentina. ³

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. ⁶ 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 effects in terms of the definition of the limitations of citizenship. Her research underpins a large part of what is now known about the social organization of the sex trade in Buenos Aires. In particular, it has shed light on the disputes that occurred between the municipal authorities, police, and doctors about the social control of the sex trade, as well as on the local meanings of the global dissemination of stories about the trafficking of women. Attention was especially paid to the overrepresentation in the contemporary official and literary registers of European women, particularly Jewish women, in stark contrast to the significant and enduring silence about native prostitutes.

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. ⁸ The scarce available references suggest that from that moment on a long period began in which prostitution came under police control within an abolitionist framework. ⁹ Backed up by the code of contraventions and police edicts (Código de Faltas y Edictos Contravencionales), the police acted in order to create a sphere of legitimacy for moralizing measures in public spaces, which coexisted with a more or less veiled acceptance of cabarets, night clubs, and hotels that rent out rooms by the hour. ¹⁰

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. ¹¹ 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 of new ideas and life styles, and the standards of respectability that involved variations of sexual relationships, couples, and intimacy. ¹²

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, but it would improve our knowledge of strategies for survival and negotiations between prostitutes and the public authorities. ¹⁵

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 colonial society recognized “varying degrees of illicit (sexual) activity”, similar to the way colonial Latin American societies viewed race relations. ¹⁷ In fact, the same author suggests that a “creative ambiguity” existed in the complex connection between illicit sexual relations and honour. There were multiple ways to regain honour that was lost.

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 mobility, and wars of independence. Mark Szuchman has linked contemporary preoccupations with the sex trade to evidence of a greater participation by women in public life throughout the early decades of the nineteenth century. ²⁰ In this context of major social and political uncertainty and shifts in behaviour, narratives on prostitution served to express social anxieties in the face of larger social changes.

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. ²² 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 business in the city. In a society in which women working in the sex trade often shared the same spaces and performed the same jobs as most other female workers, ordinances that regulated prostitution were repeatedly reformed without ever managing to reduce the numbers of women involved in various forms of “clandestine” activities. This expression would continue to be used by public officials throughout the twentieth century, both during periods of regulation and during predominantly “abolitionist” phases, stigmatizing a range of women who worked in places where men socialized in contexts loaded with class and gender tensions. ²³

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 renounced her honesty and, by the same token, state protection of it. Public intervention in prostitution, therefore, was justified in order to protect public health and public order. The failure of municipal regulation to separate situations of “free will” from “coercion” became evident over the years. Particularly embarrassing was the widely-known registration of minors who could not legally consent. Nevertheless, “everybody knew”, as a deputy stated, that any minor could register herself in the municipality even though she could not get married. ²⁵

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.

Actually, every time an amendment to the regulation was discussed, legislators had to tackle this legal fiction and the definition of prostitution that it encompassed. As early as in 1887, nearly a decade after the first ordinance came into force, Doctor Eugenio Ramirez, enthusiastic about A. Fournier’s neo-regulationist ideas, found it important to explain in his reform proposals, that “no woman may remain in a brothel against her will and she will only have to mention this to the visiting inspector in order to have her request attended by the police.” ²⁷ Besides hinting at the increasing criticism raining down on regulationists, that statement suggests that there were increasing social difficulties in accepting coercive practices as being relevant in defining who was a prostitute.

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 specifically outlawed brothels. ²⁹ The law banned “the creation of houses or places in which prostitution is exercised or incited” and punished those who “sustained, administered, or managed houses of ill-repute whether in an explicit or covert way.” Presidential Decree number 10.638 of 1944 reformed the prophylaxis law, accepting the existence of regulated brothels near barracks on the grounds that they would help tackle what was viewed as the threat of male homosexuality. That decree also consolidated the interpretation that the 1936 law did not ban the exercise of prostitution but the “houses of ill-repute” in which many women gathered. It set out that the “mere exercise of prostitution by a woman in her home, individually or independently, does not constitute an offence.” From that point onwards, whilst prostitution began to be discussed publicly as an antidote to homosexuality, especially male homosexuality, it was not deemed necessary to define “prostitution” or “brothel” any further. ³⁰

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 power which could be unleashed against women “soliciting” in the street. ³³ In this new era, the notion that most prostitutes operated alone in their apartments or picked up clients in the street gave rise to police actions against a variety of women, mostly Argentinian, who were often identified as “servants” or “employees”, and this brought about a practice that would endure into the second half of the twentieth century. ³⁴ At the same time, an international debate was taking place about the hitherto undefined boundaries between consent and coercion in the course of attempts to define the idea of sexual exploitation itself. ³⁵ Thus, in Buenos Aires the definitions of prostitution, prostitute, and brothel were negotiated with the public authorities throughout the twentieth century in multiple social relations that were typically at the edge of legality.

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 recorded preponderance of foreign women at least in the early years, and those lists usually referred to the owners of the houses rather than to the tenants, among whom there were many more Argentinians. ³⁶

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 total number of prostitutes. ⁴⁰ Yarfitz has pointed out that there was a particular concentration of registered brothels in the Once neighbourhood where the Jewish population gradually converged in this period. This showed that there was a link between prostitution and other types of business, and this helps to contextualize the preoccupation of members of the Jewish community with those involved in the sex trade. ⁴¹

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.” ⁴⁴ 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 municipal documentation, there are also more accounts of the life experiences and pathways of Jewish women who were the main focus of anti-trafficking organizations in the early twentieth century.

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 regulation houses with many residents were more convenient as they offset the high cost of the licence that had to be purchased, the ordinances passed from 1903 onwards legislated a reduction in the number of women per house and abolished the defined areas for brothels. This gave way to the opening of brothels in many more quarters of the city. ⁴⁸ At the same time, new ordinances began to regulate the work of café waitresses, the main source of clandestine prostitution according to the doctors of the time. The strictness of the new rules seems to have increased clandestine prostitution. ⁴⁹ In 1908 there was a return to a system of a dedicated zone for brothels located away from the city centre. This new situation of spatial segregation contributed to a division between the “pure” and the “impure” Jewish communities.

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.

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.

The adoption of the Palacios Law in 1913, a law that criminalized for the first time the exploitation of women over 21 years of age, was widely criticized for its ineffectiveness. General police corruption and the contradictions between the law and the regulatory system were the main factors that contemporaries stressed as causes for its failure. In a revealing remark, another contemporary observer, Ernesto Bott, commented that the law was “contrary to the customs of Buenos Aires”, which suggested the reach of a “regulatory culture”, albeit increasingly challenged. ⁵⁵ Bott’s observation allows us to add “internal conditions” to the internationally established association between regulation and trafficking. These included the naturalization of licenced brothels and cultural tensions generated by a major increase in European immigration; the flourishing of anti-liberal, nationalist, and conservative currents of ideas tinged with anti-Semitism; and, finally, the actions of the Jewish community itself which were organized against the stigma of prostitution.

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. Yarfitz has argued that the association actually fulfilled religious and mutual aid duties among its members.

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 unanticipated ways that the prostitutes used this body of norms. From 1887 onwards, regulated brothels had to display a notice that stated that women were “free to stay or not to stay there”. The forces that led them to stay, however, were not always linked to the mythical figure of the pimp nor to the organization of pimps that benefited from the regulation but rather to a myriad of complex factors including economic and cultural motivations. Indeed, the madamas carried on several of these factors, such as, for example, Madam Blanca, who had set up a brothel in La Boca at the start of the twentieth century and bragged about having sway with the local police; she bound her women to the brothel via everlasting debts that were never paid. ⁶¹ As a law student, writer Manuel Galvez also identified and described multiple forms of oppression of foreign prostitutes in regulated brothels in 1905. Some years later however, he offered up a different portrait of the world of prostitution in his novel Nacha Regules (1918) whose main character was an Argentinian prostitute who was a prisoner not of regulations or pimps but her own story of impossible love. ⁶²

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 predominance at the time of reports on the white slave trade), Tallón outlines the operation of these houses which displayed similarities with many other employment agencies for women seeking work as domestic servants or wet-nurses, mirroring the pattern of female employment at the beginning of the century. ⁶⁴ According to this author, it was a form of “legal white slavery” of which very little was known at the time, involving women who “came from afar without a protector, and stayed there, paying for their lodging. For them these houses were something akin to an employment agency.” ⁶⁵ In this way, some women waited for “a job inland” to materialize, whilst others waited for a job in the capital. The “comisionista”, or agent, made arrangements with “the inland boss requiring staff” and the “rentistas” or “rentiers” who left the women in their care while the women tended to remain trapped in these circuits through debts that were impossible to repay. In this peculiar organization of the sex work market, the disruptive element was, according to Tallón, men identified as “cafishos” or “pimps” and even tango musicians who took the women with them to other places.

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 many hours of rehearsal, many hours on stage, and other unwritten conditions such as having to live in particular “artists’ boarding houses” and accept visits from men who would pay their bills in return for their company. In this respect, any male companion who occasionally prevented women artists from carrying out some of these activities came to be viewed as a threat by entrepreneurs, directors, and managers. Oddly, it was usually at this point that the local police accused these young men of being pimps whilst the entrepreneurs, directors, and managers who more directly benefited financially from the sexual, social, and artistic activities of the women were never investigated. ⁶⁷

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 that they involved young and inexperienced women (“greenies”) who were seduced and induced into prostitution. However, their vision was repeatedly questioned and broadened by their interlocutors from the “underworld”. The interviewed women often told stories in which they cast out their husbands or lovers for being virtual parasites. A Turkish woman at the Casino Theatre summarized it thus: “That’s all the men here are good for! They won’t work and they want money! I kicked him out!” At the same time, a male informant explained over and over again that the best women for a sex market like Buenos Aires were not the inexperienced young women but “business girls”, experienced girls who were willing to give oral sex. ⁶⁹

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 increasingly eugenic perspective was spreading through Argentina. Giménez himself was a member of the Argentinian Society of Biotypology, Eugenics, and Social Medicine. The 1936 law made provisions for coercive mechanisms aimed at preventing the spread of venereal diseases. It made prenuptial medical certificates compulsory for young men, with medical treatment and obligatory medical interment for those found to be sick, along with sex education. ⁷¹

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 between the Peronist government and the Catholic Church. ⁷⁵ The argument in evidence from the mid-twentieth century onwards that the regulation of prostitution might be an effective response to male homosexuality and to what continued to be called “clandestine prostitution” (in reference to women working as prostitutes in a covert form in bars and cafés) offers hints about the impact in subsequent public debates of the five decades of regulation between 1875 and 1936.

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 for syphilis, which very often was brought about through violent police intervention.

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 through promises of work, indebtedness, and the kidnapping of women who are then obliged to live and work in brothels. These stories conceal a range of arrangements “featuring varying levels of autonomy” for the women, and also the varying conditions of the sex trade involving the street, cabarets, and apartments. The spread of trafficking narratives from 2005 onwards has occurred in parallel with criticisms of the existing legal framework, which was said only to cover up the international dimension of trafficking without acknowledging the existence of internal networks. Abolitionist feminist organizations therefore began to call for the creation of legal policies for trafficking, even in the case of women of legal age who consent to be prostitutes. ⁷⁹

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.