The Emergence of a Social “Problem”: Prostitution in Mexico City

Prostitution in the Colonial Era

What we do know is that western cities developed various forms of prostitution; hence, since very early times, both the municipal authorities and the Catholic Church tried to control it. The durability of Saint Augustine’s statement “if prostitution were to be suppressed, capricious lusts would then overthrow society” proves how difficult it has been for western culture to restrain male sexuality and this is a testament to its need to route it to specific places where women served men’s sexual desires.

Because New Spain entered very early into the same Judeo-Christian cultural model as its metropolis and as the various society-regulating institutions were established, the crown granted the municipal authority of Mexico City a permit to open and control the first “concubinary house” in 1538. It was thought that the existence of these houses, if properly supervised and controlled by the authorities, would be useful for the kingdom’s morale, health, and well-being, just as it had been since the Middle Ages in Spain, in spite of the church’s continuous disapproval and condemnation of lust and fornication. ³

Although we do not know for sure if that state-authorised brothel ever actually opened, that does not mean venal love did not proliferate in the incipient colonial society of New Spain. It was inevitable given that society consisted largely of white males, most of whom were celibate and little inclined to marriage. The destruction of the existing society, as well as several epidemics, facilitated white men’s sexual access to indigenous women and to the few white women who had migrated there alone.

The conquest was a male enterprise led by men who left their women and children behind and who sought to reinvent themselves by setting sail to America. In spite of royal orders issued on the matter, during the early period of the conquest very few married women joined their husbands, leading to a unique society. Although colonial legislation was in essence the same as in Spain, its practice was more lenient in New Spain. The carnal relations between white males and indigenous women or women from the various castes ⁴ that emerged, whether stable or not, were an acceptable standard. Widows and orphans, as well as women who were alone, poor, or had been abandoned, lacked job opportunities and hence found a means to support themselves by selling sex.

In order to safeguard “the honour” of such impoverished white women and to prevent others from falling again prey to prostitution, charity institutions known as recogimientos (“seclusion institutions”) were established. It is known that by the end of the seventeenth century, Recogimiento Jesus de la Penitencia for instance sheltered a hundred “Spanish” women and rejected many others due to lack of space; this can give us a glimpse of the extent of the problem faced by white women who didn’t have a male figure to look after them. ⁵ Women from the lower castes could not access these types of establishments.

Unlawful sexual relations between white men of “high” status and women of the different castes was so common that it affected the priests and even the bailiffs involved in the Inquisition, becoming an informally accepted standard. This standard coexisted with the traditional value of family honour linked to feminine virtue which prevailed throughout the Hispanic world.

One of the difficulties we have in understanding the phenomenon of prostitution as practised in the New World has to do with concepts; as in Spain, the words “prostitute” or “prostitution” were not used until the eighteenth century. Scholars have concluded that there was a certain parallel between women “living in sin”, or concubines, and “public” or “low-life” women or “whores”, as prostitutes were also called. Both could keep long-term relationships with their lovers or clients, received money or means of sustenance in exchange for sexual favours, and they even had children with their male partners. ⁶

Another problem has been that the sources have not proved to be very eloquent in detailing what prostitution was like, which and how many women practised it, who their clients were, and if there were any intermediaries acting between them. The lack of legal interest in prosecuting these kinds of supposedly deviant behaviour suggests that in reality colonial society was very tolerant of these extra-marital sexual practices.

It seems that “favours” from public women, mainly the few white ones, were generously remunerated by their clients. They bought them clothes, gave them jewellery, and paid them well, so much so that both “honourable” society and the crown dictated measures to halt the “scandals” and “excesses” in which these women participated publicly. They were forbidden from going out in public wearing fine clothing, riding in carriages, and taking cushions and rugs to church, nor were they allowed to be escorted by their maids, as was common among cavaliers’ wives. This gives us an idea of both how booming the business was, and how it drove these women’s social success.

There are criminal and inquisitorial records which make it possible for us to re-think what could have been taking place in such a society, and they point to the existence of a great range of activities that today we could call “prostitutional”. Women of all ethnic categories sold their “charms” according to their own social status in brothels, private houses, inns, pubs, the sweat-chamber baths known as temazcales, and even on the streets.

There were black slaves who were forced by their masters, generally traders, to prostitute themselves to compensate for the bad sales of the day. And there was the seductive Bernarda de la Encarnacion, the slave of a judge who bought back her freedom thanks to the proceeds she made through prostitution (which she practised into old age), which made it possible for her to take on the habit in the Recogimiento de San Miguel de Belen, where she passed away at the end of the seventeenth century. It seems that other “licentious” women in that century made the same choice when their good looks were diminished by age. ⁷

If we look at the abundant records relating to witchery and superstition during the Inquisition, we find an unexpected window onto the activities of many of these women. These documents reveal that many of the black slaves and mulatto women who were on trial were engaging in prostitution as a way of life; apparently, men appreciated their skills and were willing to pay for them. There is much less information regarding the prostitution of indigenous women, who, because of their subordinated situation, suffered the most sexual violence. In addition, it was no sin for Spaniards to abuse Indians, as was openly declared in several inquisitorial records. ⁸

It seems that the Spanish provisions aiming at the repression of prostitution that reached New Spain in the seventeenth century did not affect the practice in Mexico City, because men were still finding solace in the arms of public women from different categories corresponding to their budgets. It was not until the end of the eighteenth century that a more repressive attitude was adopted against these “scandalous” women and the pimps whom they supported with their labours. Some recogimientos, which tried to safeguard women from a “life of sin”, were transformed into prisons to punish those practicing public prostitution. Prisons and sweatshops became places where incarcerated madams and pimps coexisted with thieves and other criminals.

However, once again, the few cases of convictions give us an idea about the indulgence of both the crown and the church regarding the “loose” sexual practices which were widespread in society. Well-known cases against female entertainers and women with “loose” lifestyles having relations with high officers, some of them married and not only from the municipality but also from the church, reveal a very ancien régime form of sociability that was quite festive and had a taste for ostentation in which women played an important role.

State Regulation in the Nineteenth Century

The phenomenon of prostitution spread throughout Mexico City and endured through the first part of the nineteenth century, which was inaugurated with the War of Independence and decades of political turbulence. It was not until the end of the 1860s that something fundamentally new began to appear: public prostitution stopped being linked to the quite elastic notion of sin and became a medical and public hygiene issue to be handled by the state.

We begin to find in the city archives traces of alarm caused by the propagation of venereal disease spread by the “swarm of public women” linked since then to the “immorality of lower classes”. The necessity of sanitizing and cleaning up a city of 200,000 inhabitants—the largest in Latin America at the time—led social observers to study what was being done in other countries in order to find solutions for Mexico. Many of them were doctors but there were also lawyers, journalists, and writers who left a vast body of documentation which makes it possible for us to point out two clearly differentiated moments in the approach to the “problem” of prostitution. ⁹

The first period of official tolerance came about with the implementation of the “French” or regulatory system, which lasted from 1865 until the beginning of the Mexican Revolution in 1910. At this point, “modern” scientists, with clear Lombrosian influences who saw official tolerance as a “license to licentiousness”, began to endorse “abolitionism”. In spite of these discussions, Mexico regulated prostitution until 1940. This section will describe the first period.

Emperor Maximilian of Habsburg brought the French system to Mexico in the ephemeral period known as the Second Empire. On 17 February 1865, the first register of public women in Mexico City was initiated. Once the republic was restored in 1867, a bylaw to standardize its practice was passed, and it was progressively promulgated in several states of the country, undergoing some modifications.

For that system to work as enacted by hygienist Parent du Châtelet in France in the 1830s two institutions had to be founded and they were to be in charge of its implementation. One was a medical examination department which had doctors responsible for recording, classifying, and checking on a weekly basis all the women who were registered, as well as the brothels where they worked. Policemen were responsible for bringing, by force if necessary, all women suspected of prostitution to the medical examination department and to prosecute clandestine prostitutes. The other institution was a special section of the San Juan de Dios Hospital ¹⁰ which treated women who had syphilis or other venereal diseases, and they had to stay there, forcefully secluded, “kidnapped” until they were cured. Syphilis was perceived to be a modern plague, a danger that threatened not only the individual but also the human species as a whole; its prevention and eradication was the reason behind the implementation of the regulatory system. Frías y Soto, the head of the municipality of Mexico City and an expert on the subject, explained in 1873 that “prostitution is a wound that cannot be suppressed without damaging the noblest organ of the people, which is family; that is why all enlightened governments try, through tolerance, not to extirpate it, but to regulate it.” ¹¹

It was thought that even benign venereal diseases exercised “an ill-fated action upon the fecundity of marriage”, ¹² and the fear of syphilis increased in this period due to the perception that it had the power to annihilate the human race. Prostitutes were seen as the vector of contagion of “decent” families, innocent wives, and children, as they were visited without reservations by ardent youngsters and incontinent husbands, and in the government’s eyes it had to be sanitized and controlled at all costs. The ideal of this system was that all prostitutes would practise their profession at controlled brothels but this soon proved to be an impossible dream. The doctors maintained that there was an increasing number of women practicing prostitution individually who were known as “isolated” or non-registered prostitutes, and they were called “clandestines”.

According to the Reglamento de la Prostitución issued in 1872, ¹³ a prostitute was a woman over 14 years old who was no longer a virgin and had regular sexual relations with more than one man, and also willingly expressed her desire to engage in this profession. For many doctors, however, “looking like” a prostitute, being caught in “low-life” places that prostitutes frequented or hanging out with various men who did not vouch for them, was proof enough of being a prostitute. Others didn’t even realize there were differences between those who had sexual relations with many men to survive and those who charged for it, which led inspectors to seize women with these characteristics on the streets at night. ¹⁴

Women who were willing to enter the prostitution business, whether at brothels or working alone, had to register with the medical inspection department—or be forcefully registered—and they received a passbook (a form of identity) which contained information about their weekly medical examinations. As a protective measure, those who were under the age of 14 had to submit documentation of their parent’s permission and married women had to prove that they had their husbands’ permission in order to be registered. Most of the women registered in 1865 (584 in total) were single and claimed to be between 16 and 22 years old. The doctors were convinced that prostitutes were lying about their age, and because of that women could be registered starting at the age of 14, although some looked even younger. On the other hand, only one confessed to being 35 years old. The doctors in those times reported that after that age women were considered to be “old” and hence became madams who ran brothels. In several cases, the doctors reported about prostitutes’ pregnancies, deliveries, miscarriages and death; in others, they complained that in spite of the express prohibition against keeping their children in the brothels, many of them continued to do so. We also know that the “isolated” women actually lived in groups in patios de vecindad (courtyards) ¹⁵ which were also home to midwives, ¹⁶ who surely helped them with remedies to solve problems of “menstrual unpunctuality”.

In spite of the general disapproval of the activity of pimps and hoodlums who were known as “vile men”, some of whom were former policemen who made a living by sexually exploiting women, no specific cases against them can be found in the records. Also, we did not discover cases of men selling sex to other men on the streets, yet their “repulsive” existence was referred to. The regulatory discourse mainly dealt with women, and they were generally impoverished young women from other villages or the countryside, evidence of the gender and class ideology that formed Mexican society in the nineteenth century.

Once registered, they were classified by an inspector according to their physical attributes and clothing into first, second, third, and even “lowest” classes. Some doctors even classified them as beautiful, plain, or ugly. This categorization was used to charge a tax that was used to cover the expenses of examination, but many women refused to pay it. Brothels and “assignation houses” ¹⁷ were similarly divided into categories.

The hospital played an important role in this idealistic system. Apart from curing prostitutes physically, it intended goal was to cleanse their souls and moralize them. Taking advantage of the long stays that were required, the workers there tried to ingrain in the women principles of Christian and bourgeois morality. Moreover, sick or pregnant prostitutes were used as subjects by medical and obstetric students who could not practise anywhere else. It was thought that because of their profession such women had no modesty and hence could openly be examined by men.

Mercury treatments for syphilis were very long, and as dangerous as the disease itself; their side effects were serious and painful. Mexican doctors studied the issue, wrote about it, and used the same products that were used at the time in the us and Europe. Doctors wrote about the difficulties of curing women in the hospital. They thought that by constructing a special room for “prominent” women they would convince those of the “better class”—women who could not bear the idea of mixing with the poor—to stay there; although the project was not a success, it is evidence that doctors and their clients reproduced class prejudices that existed in society at that time.

There were several riots in the hospital; furious prostitutes burnt mattresses and destroyed the items in their rooms to protest the conditions which had been imposed upon them. Life in the hospital was not very different from life in prison; in fact, sick prisoners were treated there. Jailbreaks were frequent, and several times requests were made for bars to be put on the windows and means of locking up the women.

All of this, along with a general fear of hospitals, led many women to resist being “subjected” to sanitary control. When they could, both they and the madams of the brothels paid private doctors for the examinations, and they figured out ways to apply make up on their wounds so they could avoid spending long terms in the syphilitic room. That was another weak spot of the system because the authorities never managed to register all the prostitutes, many of whom escaped this system of surveillance, and as such there were always more clandestine or “rebellious” prostitutes than known ones. Also, the authorities were also unable to properly cure women infected with diseases and keep them sexually inactive while infected.

The Prostitute Population

For the first time in the history of Mexico, the first Record of Public Women used photographs for police purposes. These are accessible in the archives and hence we can find out about their names, nicknames, ages, categories, and former occupations, as well as the names of the madams and the addresses of the sixty-six registered brothels in the city. The 584 women in that first record stated that they had the following occupations: 167 seamstresses and 151 domestic servants, while 138 did not declare a profession. The rest took up the job opportunities available to poor women at the time: shoe-shiners, butchers, match girls, cigarette girls, mattress sellers, candy and flower merchants, cooks, newsstand sellers, rebozo (shawl) makers, tobacco and tortilla sellers, hemmers, braiders, and shoe makers.

Several reports issued between 1868 and 1909 mentioned the same proportions in the professions of women; more than half of them stated that they were or had been a maid, washerwoman, or seamstress; the rest were engaged in manual labour and the craft activities made available by the city or did not declare a profession. ¹⁸

Out of the 584 women registered in 1865, 125 said they were from Mexico City and its surrounding areas, while the rest were from other states in the republic; there was also one woman of German nationality. In later registries there were some foreign women from Spain, Cuba and France but it is quite likely that foreign women, who were more highly valued, could evade the authorities.

There were women who were classified as first-class, and many observers referred to beautiful, well-dressed clandestine prostitutes who lived among “respectable” members of society. Yet, the ones of concern were “the maids, labourers, and married women who brought their lovers into their houses when their husbands left for work”, ¹⁹ as they were thought to be the ones spreading disease. Observers also mentioned the loathing and envy that existed among the various classes of prostitutes and the quarrels that broke out when they all gathered for the health examinations. To remedy this, the times and dates of the examinations were set at different times for the various categories of women.

Nineteenth-century Working Women

Indigenous or mestizo women from the lower social classes had always worked, in spite of the social stigma and deviation from the ideal of standard femininity. Given the scarcity of working opportunities for women and the very low wages these opportunities offered, the fact that they had to go out and make a living was seen as proof of their “loose” morals. Nineteenth-century society in Mexico was convinced that a “decent” woman was a wife and a mother, and that she should remain in her “natural” environment, the home. As in other western countries in the same period, gender relations explained the sexual segregation at work and the wage difference between genders.

In the first census of 1811, women represented more than a third of the workforce in Mexico City, most of whom were employed in domestic service. Having maids and not having to work was a distinctive mark of class and social status. The ideal of society was having several maids with specific tasks at home; but even middle and lower class families had at least one maid that did all the work in exchange for shelter, food, and sometimes a small amount of remuneration. In spite of that stigma, throughout the century more “respectable” working opportunities became available to middle-class women at schools and businesses, in stores, in textile production, and, by the end of the period, at offices and in the state bureaucracy. ²⁰

When Porfirio Díaz became president in 1876 there was an expansion of industrial production, mainly in the last decade of the century. On its way to modernity, Mexico City underwent major changes in terms of demographics, urban spaces, politics and economics. Although women had always been present on the streets of the city since the colonial era, their public visibility increased as more factories opened their doors to them. Between 1870 and 1920 women comprised one third of the industrial work force. Cigarette factories employed over 1,000 cigarette makers and established differentiated shifts and spaces for each gender with the aim of “safeguarding” women’s honour. For that reason, this was an “ideal” job for working women; even though they earned less than men, it allowed them not only to avoid prostitution, but to maintain their reputation. Also, large clothing and silk factories hired a large percentage of women and reserved special spaces for them. Other women continued working at home, or worked long shifts at small manufacturing workshops; they were also involved in various tasks outside factories, sharing the public space with peddlers and prostitutes, and they occasionally resorted to prostitution in order to complement the meagre earnings of the day.

Social observers linked honour, respectability, and sexual morality with the type of work performed. For them, it was completely “natural” for men to earn more for the same work because they were supposedly the heads of households. The work of women was always seen as complementary, even though women were often responsible for supporting their families or their partners. In spite of the entrance of the female workforce into industrial and manufacturing workplaces, in 1940 one out of three working women still worked in domestic service. ²¹ Many of the prostitutes registered between 1865 and 1910 claimed that they worked in domestic service, for which no special training was required; for this reason, the notion that they were illiterate and “uncultured” was constantly emphasized.

Specialists wrote about the “lack of morality” of the “dangerous” classes to which supposedly all prostitutes belonged; they complained about their drinking habits, illiteracy, the low number of legal marriages, “hordes” of illegitimate children, and single mothers living in “promiscuous” circumstances. However, they also noted that some prostitutes wanted to officialise their removal from the registries because, even though the specialists could not believe it, there were men willing to marry those women and to give them any guarantee required. This suggests that honour and respectability were also a matter of class. Even though there were extraordinary cases in which a good-looking prostitute could be chosen as a lover by a man from a higher class, in general prostitutes developed informal relationships or even got married and had children with workers from their own social class.

During this period, the agencies involved in controlling prostitution came into conflict, each blaming the other for the failure of the system. The Higher Council of Public Health and the Medical Examination Department were staffed by doctors whose prestige and power was growing in society, and they were genuinely preoccupied with controlling prostitution, introducing hygiene to the popular classes, stopping syphilis, and lowering mortality rates (while lacking the coercive power to achieve those goals). Both of those institutions accused the government of the federal district of not helping them. Indeed, the political logic of each agency was different, and their lack of interest in tackling issues that had always existed in the city was self-evident. Doctors often accused the government of having arrangements with the prostitutes and “protecting” them, cancelling registrations, letting them be treated by private doctors, or, still worse, of being their clients, lovers, or even their pimps.

By the end of the nineteenth century there were some voices pleading for the end of the atmosphere of tolerance which they argued didn’t do any good because there were always more clandestine than registered prostitutes, and syphilis continued to ruin lives. They demanded that prostitution be considered a felony and be prosecuted and punished as such.

Regardless of how “advanced” the abolitionist position might appear—by comparing tolerated prostitution to slavery—most of the doctors kept writing about the ineffectiveness of prohibiting an unavoidably needed activity, at least until men learned to control their impulses and chastely wait for marriage to have sex. ²²

Some Conclusions about Registered Prostitution

Our sources indicate that such remarks were true; while in 1865 there were 584 women registered, by 1890 only 287 prostitutes were regularly examined. The French system could not control the women involved in prostitution nor could it eradicate syphilis. The heads of the agencies themselves complained about this situation in various reports which were sent to the authorities, and in those reports they offered up analyses of this “huge” social problem.

Through discursive analysis we can see that there was a certain amount of compassion and a genuine preoccupation among doctors regarding the fate of these “poor unfortunate” women that were so necessary in society. They thought of ways of protecting them from exploitation at the hands of madams and pimps and devised ways to “rescue” them while preventing pubescent girls from registering.

However, they could not understand that most of those women who resorted to prostitution in that first period of state regulation only did so temporarily. The mobility of those recorded in the initial registry revealed that they stayed briefly at the brothels where they were first registered or at the addresses provided; doctors often noted, “She fled”, and they were never heard from again. The brothels themselves often closed and reopened elsewhere.

Although “registered prostitution” can be linked to limited work opportunities, low wages, and the difficulties poor women and young immigrants faced in finding other jobs outside domestic service, we should not forget this warning issued by the doctors: there was an unknown number of women from higher social classes engaging in the same profession. The doctors commented that the situation resembled a French novel; there were attractive, gallant women who moved from one lover to another because their purpose in life was “to satisfy the desires for luxury and coquetry that are inherent to women.” ²³ The outbreak of the Mexican revolution ushered in a new period.

Prostitution in the Twentieth Century

In the twentieth century, Mexico City underwent several transformations that changed the urban landscape completely. The centralization of political power, as well as the concentration of social and cultural life in the capital city from the 1940s onwards, attracted millions of migrants that have made the federal district and its metropolitan area one of the most densely populated regions all over the world. ²⁴

The last century also witnessed radical changes in relation to prostitution. The end of the regulation system in combination with other factors such as corruption prompted gender changes in the administration of sexual commerce as well as a rise in the rates of violence against women engaged in sexual commerce. Decades later, feminists and some prostitutes joined forces in a struggle for the recognition of prostitution as work. While some goals were accomplished, sex workers have not been fully recognized as subjects with labour rights and obligations. Moreover, the alarming increase of human trafficking in the country and the horror brought on by criminal organizations involved in sex commerce-related activities have blurred the lines between voluntarism and coercion. As a result, at the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century various social actors are redefining the borders between sexual commerce and forced prostitution. At the same time, a heated debate about the best possible system (abolitionist, prohibitionist, regulationist) that can be used to ameliorate the current situation of sex workers and victims of sexual exploitation is currently taking place.

The Mexican Revolution

General Porfirio Díaz ruled the country between 1876 and 1911 with the aid of a group of consultants who banded together under the motto “order and progress”. This circle of advisors was called “the scientists” because the programme they designed to modernize the country was inspired by positivist ideas, as well as the theories of organicism and social Darwinism. ²⁵ This governing elite maintained the rules for supervising prostitution proposed in the French system. It was never considered proper to regulate the behaviour of the men visiting brothels nor to submit them to state medical supervision, ²⁶ and there was no questioning about whether they had anything to do with the contagion of social or venereal diseases. Parents and husbands were in charge of making sure that their women behaved properly; namely, to stay a virgin until marriage and not engage in inappropriate sexual behaviour.

In keeping with the logic of the nineteenth century, brothels were divided into different classes based on the level of luxury, facilities, contributions paid to the government, and the women working there. In first-class brothels, clients could enjoy private, comfortable, luxuriously decorated rooms, while in low-class ones the prostitutes and their clients had only cots or mats with only old sheets hung up for privacy. Legally, the owners of these places were responsible for containing the spread of the social and venereal diseases that could pose a risk for the general population and the city itself. ²⁷

Although the revolutionary movement of 1910 delayed debates about prostitution, some of the main arguments were first outlined in the early years of the twentieth century. Among the most respected abolitionists at the end of the Porfiriato period was Dr Luis Lara y Pardo, a well-known intellectual at the time who wrote a sociological essay in 1908 for the general public entitled Prostitution in Mexico. Its main objective was to make information regarding venereal diseases available to the largest number of people possible. ²⁸

The arguments of Lara y Pardo were based on sources obtained from courts, hospitals, and official statistics, and he tried to model social criteria based on the ideology of the regime; thus, his ideas were strongly influenced by organicism and positivism. The essay begins with a discussion about what should be understood by “prostitution” and “prostitute”, because, according to the author, the legal definitions of the terms did not embrace the nuances of many women’s sexual activities and excluded women who could also be considered prostitutes based on their behaviour. According to Lara y Pardo, receiving money in exchange for sexual services was an insufficient description and he proposed the following one: “Prostitution is a common act by which a person has indiscriminate transient sexual relations with many persons.” ²⁹ Love, selectivity, and fidelity could result in a woman’s sensibilities being offended if a man who was not their partner proposed a romantic or sexual relationship. In this way of thinking, women who had sexual intercourse regardless of monetary exchange, without sentimental connections or simply for pleasure with men they knew nothing or almost nothing about should be considered prostitutes.

The perception that elites had about the madams owning brothels is related to their ability to survive in and even dominate certain sectors of the underworld of the dangerous social classes. These women were defined by Lara y Pardo as prostitutes with experience, women “who had the guts and attitude to pass from the exploited class to the exploiting class in that overprotected industry.” ³⁰ These women’s ability to stand out from the rest and take the reins of a business permitted by the state was harshly criticized by the author, as they were argued to be the result of a twisted ingenuity used in the fields of vice, perversion, and weakness that characterized prostitution. ³¹

The author described madams as “old, cruel, greedy, and despotic”, women in their late 30s, or maybe older, whose best years have long gone and whose only motivation was greed. Cunningness and shrewdness were not only two of the few abilities attributed to madams, but their only sign of intelligence, which was of little value as it was in the service of ambition and social decay.

The sex business in Mexico City in the early twentieth century was mostly in women’s hands. That is not just because of the number of women who traded their bodies—the lack of data on male prostitution does not allow for an accurate comparison—but also because the interaction between prostitutes and the authorities was a task legally assigned to madams. Legislation exclusively targeted the owners of brothels and houses of assignation, and they had to be responsible for their “personnel” in negotiating—either by regarding or disregarding the law—with government agents (public health inspectors, doctors, and police officers).

Nonetheless, in the pages of Prostitution in Mexico one can find (although as a very brief reference) details concerning the relationships prostitutes had with the men who lived off their profits. Those men, who several decades later would take control of the sex business as the result of the banning of brothels in the city, can be classified into four categories: agents instructed by the madams to seek out new prostitutes outside the brothel; relatives, for example parents, who depended on the sexual trade of their daughters; souteneurs or “fancy men” who had love affair with prostitutes, sometimes the same men who had taken their virginity and lived off the woman’s income; and pimps, who kept an eye on clandestine prostitutes while they worked at hotels or rooms in tenement houses. ³²

The interest in the abolition of laws regulating prostitution was not only concerned with the inefficiency of the regulations in the reduction of venereal disease but a desire to put an end to the popularity brothels enjoyed as “social centres” facilitating corruption. However, the start of the revolution in 1910 not only postponed the debates about the regulation of prostitution but also strengthened the role of brothels as ideal places for the development of relationships going beyond sexual services.

In spite of the fact that some of the major political leaders of the revolution tried to concentrate brothels as well as gambling houses in restricted areas, the war increased the number of women working in the sex trade, especially those who practised prostitution outside the brothel and without the authorization of the state. For some of those women, prostitution was an opportunity to receive as payment money or goods that had been stolen during the battles by both federal army soldiers and revolutionaries, even though on other occasions they had to “work” for free under the threat of physical violence. ³³

During the war, both the physical characteristics of the women working in brothels and the condition of the establishments themselves continued to determine the division of classes. In the poorest neighbourhoods in areas where the government relocated some of the houses of prostitution to create a tolerance zone, prostitutes (the majority of whom did not meet the ideals of beauty and youth) worked with or without authorization on unpaved, mosquito-infested streets with no sewage system and had to deal with neighbours who wanted them far from “honourable homes”. ³⁴ In the meantime, in the first-class brothels madams made sure that the most attractive women pleased their influential clientele in elegant houses with all kinds of amenities and services.

The Start of a New Era

The authorities reported that by the late 1910s there were 114 houses of prostitution in the city. ³⁵ These brothels were used to plan military conspiracies, and sometimes they served as select clubs where high-ranking military officers gathered to make political alliances which would define their political future. Additionally, during and after the armed stage of the revolution (1910–1917) military members of all ranks invested money in brothels, gambling houses, and cabarets, which contributed to the continuation of the regulated prostitution system for many more years. In 1913, the regulations in effect since 1898 were replaced and in 1918, the Council of the Health Department was created. The task of this council was to plan and implement strategies to fight against venereal diseases, which increased during the war. The last regulations concerning prostitution were passed in 1926. The legislative changes maintained the main principles of registration, examinations, and incarceration but the state incorporated the idea of rehabilitating prostitutes through labour.

In the late 1930s, when the state emerging from the revolution was in full consolidation, international recognition became a priority for the Mexican government. In 1927, the League of Nations had pointed to Mexico as one of the main destinations for the sexual exploitation of women coming from Europe in the interwar period. In 1938, Mexico signed the International Convention for Suppression of the Traffic in Women of Full Age, approved by the League of Nations in 1933, and in 1940, the laws regulating prostitution were abolished. As a result, exploitation and human trafficking were deemed to be a crime and that triggered an intense campaign to shut down brothels of all types and to arrest people involved in the sex trade, most of them women who were making money from selling the sex of other women. ³⁶

Furthermore, in the context of World War ii the fight against venereal disease became an issue of national security and of bilateral concern between Mexico and the us. The first campaigns were implemented in the cities of northern Mexico to supposedly stop the increasing number of American soldiers who crossed the border looking for entertainment and pleasure and returned home with syphilis. Actions were taken to close down houses of prostitution, prevent the selling of alcohol, and stop admitting both American and Mexican soldiers to “centres of vice”. ³⁷

Out of all these provisions, maybe the most successful one was that of suppressing brothels. In the early 1940s all the governors of the states and territories of the Mexican Republic received a memorandum signed by the president in which he asked them to follow the example of Ciudad Juarez and double their efforts to eliminate houses of prostitution, close zones of tolerance, and eliminate “centres of vice” where dangerous antisocial activities were promoted. ³⁸ This memorandum also stated that venereal diseases caused the greatest number of disabilities, which made the state’s task of defending the nation more difficult both in military and in civil life.

While commercial sex in Mexico City was not considered to be a crime and the main goal in closing down brothels was eliminating exploitation, both madams and prostitutes implemented various strategies to stop the disappearance of the organized prostitution system in establishments; one such strategy was to shift business activities to restaurant-bars. After police raids, the “workers” declared to the judge that although they were picked up in what was thought to be a brothel, they were just having drinks with potential clients (sex was had in hotels), and they paid no money to the owner for spending time there. Sometimes prostitutes admitted they had paid some money but they were very careful to assure the judge that it was for lodgings, as they had no place to live and no support from their families. ³⁹

The most spectacular strategy used by brothel owners in Mexico City was the formation of a union, which, following the promises of the revolution, would defend their rights as working people. In spite of the assistance of the former attorney general of Mexico City and the secretary general of the Mexican Federation of Work, their claims were dismissed by the authorities. In 1941, the press in Mexico City reported the onerous amounts of money that politicians requested from madams for protection. In this way, the careers of these men in the government came to an end, as did the hope for the comeback of state-regulated prostitution. Few brothels survived this aggressive campaign. One of them was the house of the Bandida, the most exclusive and famous brothel in Mexico City in the 1940s and ‘50s. ⁴⁰

By 1945, five years after the abolition of regulation, government statistics showed that the number of cases of syphilis had decreased. In fact, this was not because of government actions but because of the introduction and availability of penicillin in the mid-1940s which decreased the rate of venereal diseases. That was not the only change; in those years, both the urban landscape and the dynamics of prostitution differed from the state of affairs in the early twentieth century. The city witnessed an unprecedented population increase, and processes of urbanization displaced prostitutes from areas where prostitution had been most concentrated. ⁴¹ The efforts of the Mexican state against pimping focused on closing brothels. For several years the authorities prosecuted madams and the staff that worked for them, but they paid no attention to pimps on the streets. Cabarets, bars, and cheap hotels were not subject to the same measures as brothels. Consequently, many prostitutes started to look for clients on the streets and their protection was taken over by pimps who began to strengthen their presence in prostitution.

In 1972, Salvador Novo, one of the most important chroniclers of Mexico City, recalled the days when prostitution was an activity largely controlled by women. In his essay “Brothels and the Decay of Conversation” he compared the brothels and madams of Mexico City with department stores and managers. At the same time, the writer criticized the role that the Mexican government played in the disappearance of brothels from the streets of the nation’s capital.

Novo’s reflections on brothels focused on two main aspects: the zero benefits that the revolution brought for prostitutes and the importance that brothels had as social spaces and private areas that promoted education and conversation, as well as acting as sources of inspiration for writers. According to Novo, while the post-revolutionary state boasted about improvements in labour rights, prostitutes lost all the social guarantees that the government could have offered them as workers, making these women “the disinherited of the Revolution”. The chronicler lamented the situation of sex workers after the ban on brothels in Mexico City and the “sad fate of these self-employed workers who now work without a title and guarantees […] scattered, persecuted. […] [T]he noble service which once flourished, fully organized in brothels [is now gone].” ⁴²

Social Activism and New Challenges

The 1980s brought a new epidemic that had a direct impact on the dynamics of prostitution. In Mexico, the first aids case was recorded in 1983 and in 1988 the government called for the creation of the National Council for the Prevention and Control of aids. In the same year, some prostitutes contacted governmental and feminist organizations with the aim of forming working groups that would establish services for information about and the detection of hiv, as well as campaigns to raise awareness about the disease.

Towards the 1990s the physical characteristics of women who could be hired for sex and the condition of their workplaces were marked by social and class differences. Wealthier customers used credit cards to pay for beautiful models or virgin teens chosen from a catalogue. These sexual encounters took place in elegant apartments and a waiter/barman served both as a guard and money collector. In middle-class areas there could be found street prostitutes who took their clients to hotels, women working in brothels disguised as massage or beauty parlours, and call girls who advertised in the newspapers’ classified ads section. Many of the clandestine brothels were located in the poorest areas of the city. There, women with limited resources, usually rural immigrants with basic or no education, worked for men who asked for 50 per cent of their profits. Usually they had to go looking for men in areas close to the brothel, which was nothing more than a large room with spaces divided by curtains. ⁴³

Currently, in certain areas of the city the authorities tolerate street prostitution. The people responsible for overseeing sex workers there and negotiating with the authorities are usually men called “representatives” and they are responsible for groups of ten to forty women. The women usually have to have sex with their representatives and some of the representatives are both pimps and the lovers of the women under their control. There are some madams (mostly former prostitutes, although we also find relatives of prostitutes) who exercise control differently; they often force prostitutes to consume goods and services offered by their contacts and friends, thereby ensuring a permanent workforce of women who are in debt to them. ⁴⁴

One of the most visible areas of prostitution is La Merced. Dedicated to commercial activities since the early colonial years, La Merced remained the largest marketplace of Mexico City until the 1990s. In this neighbourhood a large number of street solicitors coexist with shopkeepers, hotel owners, peddlers, and inhabitants classified as lower and lower-lower class. According to a census provided by organized groups of sex workers, around 2,000 prostitutes worked in the area in 2006. ⁴⁵ Although there are some independent sex workers, most belong to organized groups controlled by men dedicated to human trafficking in complicity with the authorities (some of whom are former police officers). According to several sex workers interviewed by social researchers, these criminal organizations kidnap or deceive young women in order to exploit them. On other occasions their own parents or other relatives sell the girls to these men, a common phenomenon in rural areas where indigenous young girls are the most common victims. ⁴⁶ The vast majority of women forced into prostitution come from other provinces, particularly from impoverished rural areas or small towns and cities.

Sex workers are well aware of the way ageing affects their earnings. Purchasing the virginity of a girl between 10 and 13 years old can cost up to 2,000 dollars, which is delivered to the madam. Procurers look after young girls very closely, because they know they can get the best money with them. In the hours or days following the first sexual intercourse they can charge their clients a little over 200 dollars for every additional sexual encounter. When sex workers are around 15 years old, the price for every act is 30 dollars, while a woman closer to 20 earns from 10 to 20 dollars. Younger sex workers are very selective about their customers because they know they need to save money for the future. They know that with each year that passes their value decreases in the eyes of their costumers and procurers. For instance, women in their 30s, if they are attractive, charge every client up to 10 dollars while older women charge 2 dollars or less. ⁴⁷

Some women begin to work in prostitution after the age of 40 because they lost their husbands by separation or death, or because they failed to find another job after facing extreme economic situations. Young women may say that they fled from a very troubled home. In the street, hunger prevails and their bodies become their instrument for survival. Sex workers have told interviewers that they were initiated “by chance” because another friend that already worked in prostitution invited them into the business. Some others declared that they had been deceived by professional pimps and madams. ⁴⁸

When street solicitors remember their first days as sex workers, they experience mixed emotions. On the one hand, they say that the street gives them “freedom”, saying, “Here nobody tells you what to do. You can go wherever you want.” On the other hand, they accept that it is extremely difficult to deal with such a hostile environment by themselves without a sense of belonging: “After a while you feel terrible because you sleep wherever you can, and it is cold and you are hungry.” ⁴⁹ That is one of the main reasons why women join groups controlled by pimps.

Money is the element that allows sex workers to put their occupations on the same level as other economic activities. In this respect, their self-descriptions shed light on the way they live out the moral contradictions of being involved in prostitution. On the one hand, they speak of a “regular job” and even social clichés are used to define it, such as the phrase “the oldest profession in the world.” On the other hand, they talk about the existence of their work as “a necessary evil” that has always involved persecution, using the following adjectives to describe it: “ugly”, “horrible”, “the worst thing in life”, “bad”, and “shameful”. ⁵⁰ In addition, they are fully aware that their job is full of risks, not just because of the sexual and physical violence they experience on a regular basis but also because of the threat of contracting venereal diseases.

Despite the efforts of some sex workers to prevent the spread of aids among their colleagues through the use of condoms, research has shown that the campaigns were only partially successful. Most clients refuse to use condoms and they offer extra payment to women who are willing to have sex without condoms. According to some reports, the competition between women and the increasing number of transgender individuals working on the streets of the city has made many prostitutes choose to risk their health in order to get more clients. ⁵¹

Perhaps the greatest legacy of the 1980s and ‘90s has been an accumulation of knowledge concerning the organization and social mobilization of sex workers, which has allowed some of them to negotiate with government representatives, make alliances with feminists and intellectuals, talk about prostitution as an option for making a living, and speak about prostitutes as women with rights. As a result, an organized group of women established a shelter for more than twenty senior prostitutes in 2006 after several talks with the leftist government of the city.

That same year marked the beginning of the government’s war against drugs in the country. One of the most serious consequences of this complex phenomenon has been the rapid growth of human trafficking in Mexico. Men, women, children, indigenous persons, and undocumented migrants have been (and still are) victims of sex trafficking and forced labour. In this process, geography plays a major role. Lured by false promises of employment or love, and under the threat of having their personal documents taken away or being tipped off to migration officers, Mexicans as well as others (mainly from Central and South America), are exploited by organized criminal groups in Mexico and the United States. ⁵²

The number of victims of severe forms of sexual exploitation has significantly increased from 2006 onwards. Federal and local governments have made some efforts to bring themselves into compliance with international standards dictated by the United Nations or the us Department of State. ⁵³ In 2013, the authorities approved a national anti-trafficking law that increased the legal punishment for trafficking offenders on a federal level. However, Mexico still does not fully comply with the minimum international requirements to eliminate sexual exploitation, which includes forced prostitution. Problems still to be solved include the complicity of the authorities in all levels of the justice system, threats of violence from criminal organizations, poor coordination between local and national agencies, and a lack of adequate attention and protection for victims. ⁵⁴

In Mexico City, the authorities as well as ngos have been engaged in a debate on how to eradicate sexual exploitation in both the capital city and the country. Since 2007, the Criminal Code of the Federal District has stipulated that human trafficking is a criminal offense. ⁵⁵ Unlike other states in the country, Mexico City provides some specialized services and has shelters and active campaigns in order to help victims of forced prostitution. Academics, ngos, international agencies, and foreign governments have joined in active campaigns to raise awareness, particularly among the most vulnerable groups such as young and indigenous people. However, all of these efforts are still under way and there is a lot to do before we can claim that significant results have been achieved. ⁵⁶

A major concern is corruption among policemen, judges, and officials who do not apply the law, put victims in danger, and otherwise fail to ensure that adequate legal processes are put into place. There is no official data about the number of victims of sexual exploitation in the city, nor a consensus on the steps that should be followed to remedy the problem. In 2013, the Women’s National Institute, in collaboration with the Coalition against Trafficking in Women and Girls in Latin America and the Caribbean, presented an assessment on the structural causes of sexual exploitation in Mexico City and a plan of action. According to this study (which is based on neo-abolitionist ideas), there are around 250,000 women engaged in sexual commerce. Of those, 88 per cent are immigrants, and 99 per cent are exploited by criminal organizations in areas like La Merced. ⁵⁷ During the first months of the same year, the authorities in Mexico City launched police raids on establishments offering lap dances, looking for victims of sexual exploitation and closing down such business, but they did not find many culprits.

Several social organizations that work close to the city government share the point of view that most of the women engaged in sexual commerce are victims, either because they were deceived or captured by pimps or criminal organizations or because the existing “patriarchal culture” obliges women to engage in sexual activities for money. ⁵⁸ As a consequence of the arrest of some table dancers as well as sex workers, some have protested on the streets, arguing that they are not exploited, nor are they victims of coercion. Some of them have claimed that the figures and arguments presented by some ngos are inaccurate and that some sex workers have been forced by the authorities to sign written statements against the owners and workers at their former places of employment. ⁵⁹

The debate is still ongoing. Several organizations have addressed the harsh life stories told by victims of sexual exploitation and been able to make their voices (as well as victims’ voices) heard in the media, academia, and legislative spaces like never before. However, there is a major risk of erasing their agency in this way, as well as taking a step back from the achievements that some sex workers have made in recent years. Unfortunately, the undeniable horror lived by the victims of forced prostitution is not only casting a shadow on the incipient activism of sex workers but also puts at risk the goal that one day they could be considered as labourers with rights. Based on our historical research and observations of the current debates in academia, mass media, and legislation, we have noticed that several factors are reducing the space of action for those voluntarily engaged in sexual commerce, and their actions are getting lost under the weight of the discussions going on around them, discussions that do not incorporate the possibility of free will in prostitution.