chapter 14 A Social History of Prostitution in Buenos Aires
Cristiana Schettini
Historiography, Methodology, and Sources
Established in 1580 as a minor commercial and administrative Spanish settle- ment, the city of Buenos Aires began to experience a certain amount of eco- nomic 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 transfor- mation 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 re- searchers 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 dimen- sion, 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 scar- city 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 traf- ficked 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
* I am very grateful to Eleanor Rylance and to Constanza Dotta for the work they put into translating and re-translating this text. The editors’ comments and suggestions made by Mir Yarfitz, María Luisa Mugica, Isabella Cosse, and Valeria Manzano also helped me improve this chapter.
© Cristiana Schettini, 2017 | doi 10.1163/9789004346253_015 Cristiana Schettini - 9789004346253 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-NDDownloaded 4.0 license. from Brill.com09/24/2021 02:40:47PM via free access 358 Schettini of municipal regulation. In fact, throughout the first half of the twentieth century prostitution was intrinsically linked to various aspects of public de- bates 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 re- ceiving 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 gen- dered 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 discur- sive purposes in turn-of-the-century Buenos Aires. In essence, they strength- ened 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 there- fore focused on the foreign prostitute, a figure that enabled writers to elaborate
1 Domingo Casadevall, El Tema de la mala vida en el teatro nacional (Buenos Aires, 1970); José Sebastián Tallón, El Tango en sus etapas de música prohibida (Buenos Aires, 1959); Sirena Pellarolo, Sainetes, cabaret, minas y tangos (Buenos Aires, 2010). For an analysis of photo- graphs of male sociability in an Argentinian brothel, see Dora Barrancos, “Sexo-s en el lupanar: Un documento fotográfico (circa 1940)”, Cadernos Pagu, 25 (2005), pp. 357–390. See also Pablo Ben, “Plebeyan Masculinity and Sexual Comedy in Buenos Aires, 1880–1930”, Jour- nal of the History of Sexuality, 16 (2007), pp. 436–458. 2 Donna Guy, El Sexo peligroso: La prostitución legal en Buenos Aires 1875–1955 (Buenos Aires, 1994); Francine Masiello, Entre civilización y barbarie: Mujer, nación y cultura literaria en la Argentina moderna (Rosario, 1997). For the changes that occurred in the 1920s, see Cecilia Toussonian, “Images of the Modern Girl: From the Flapper to the Joven Moderna (Bue- nos Aires, 1920–1940)”, Forum for Inter American Research, 6 (2013), available at: http:// interamericaonline.org/volume-6-2/tossounian/#more-35; last accessed 7 July 2017.
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3 Masiello, Entre civilización y barbarie, pp. 156–157. 4 Guy, El Sexo Peligroso, pp. 104–137; for more on contemporary scientific thinking about crimi- nals (and prostitutes), see Lila Caimari, Apenas un delincuente: Crimen, castigo y cultura en la Argentina, 1880–1955 (Buenos Aires, 2004), pp. 75–99. 5 Ernesto Goldar, La “Mala Vida” (Buenos Aires, 1971); Guy, El Sexo peligroso; Yvette Trochon, La Ruta de Eros (Montevideo, 2006). For a global perspective, see Pablo Ben, “Historia global y prostitución porteña: El fenómeno de la prostitución moderna en Buenos Aires, 1880–1930”, Revista de Estudios Marítimos, 5/6 (2012/2013), pp. 13–26. Also see Lex Heerma van Voss, “The Worst Class of Workers: Migration, Labour Relations and Living Strategies of Prostitutes around 1900”, in Marcel van der Linden and Leo Lucassen (eds), Working on Labor: Essays in Honor of Jan Lucassen (Leiden, 2012), pp. 153–170, 162. 6 Guy, El Sexo peligroso, p. 11.
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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 doct ors 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 espe- cially paid to the overrepresentation in the contemporary official and literary registers of European women, particularly Jewish women, in stark contr ast to the significant and enduring silence about native prostitutes. Recent debates about the unionization of prostitutes attracted the atten- tion 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 Ar- gentina), and they have studied its trajectory, relationships with other work- ers’ 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 divi- sions.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
7 Mario Pecheny and Mónica Petracci, “Derechos humanos y sexualidad en la Argentina”, Hori- zontes Antropológicos, 12 (2006), pp. 43–69; Carolina Von Lurzer, “Putas, el estigma: aproxi- mación a las representaciones y organización de las mujeres que ejercen la prostitución en la ciudad de Buenos Aires”, Question, 1 (2006), available at: http://perio.unlp.edu.ar/ojs/in- dex.php/question/article/view/295/232; last accessed 10 July 2017; Silvana Gurrera and Juan Pablo Ferrero, “Prostitución, búsqueda de reconocimiento y reivindicación de derechos en la Ciudad de Buenos Aires”, in Gabriela Delamata (ed.), Movimientos sociales: ¿Nuevas ciu- dadanías? Reclamos, derechos, estado en Argentina, Bolivia y Brasil (Buenos Aires, 2009), pp. 85–108; Kate Hardy, “Incorporating Sex Workers into the Argentine Labor Movement”, Inter- national Labour and Working Class History, 77 (2010), pp. 89–108. 8 On the law of social prophylaxis, see, among others, Carolina Biernat, “Médicos, especialistas, políticos y funcionarios en la organización centralizada de la profilaxis de las enfermedades venéreas en la Argentina (1930–1954), Anuario de Estudios Americanos, 64 (2007), pp. 257– 288; Marisa Miranda, “Buenos Aires, entre Eros y Tánatos: La prostitución como amenaza disgénica (1930–1955), Dynamis 32 (2012), pp. 93–113, available at: http://www.raco.cat/index. php/Dynamis/article/viewFile/257776/344970; last accessed 7 July 2017; Karin Grammático,
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“Obreras, prostitutas, y mal venéreo: El Estado en busca de la profilaxis”, in Valeria Pita et al., Historia de las mujeres en la Argentina (Buenos Aires, 2000), pp. 116–135. See also Maria Luisa Mugica, La ciudad de las Venus Impudicas: Rosario, historia y prostitución, 1874–1932 (Rosario, 2014). 9 There was a brief interruption at the end of the second Peronist government when pros- titution was regulated again in 1954 within the context of an increasing conflict with the Catholic Church. Guy, El Sexo peligroso, pp. 213–239. 10 This picture also appears to be pertinent for the city of Rosario, a port near Buenos Aires that had regulated prostitution two years before the capital city (1873) and had abolished it in 1932, four years before the rest of Argentina. In the debates about the social prophy- laxis law of Rosario, there was fear that the new legal framework would grant the police too much power and warnings were made about the risks of bribery. Mugica, La ciudad de las Venus. One of the few studies on the activities of the paramilitary organization “Triple A” in systematically persecuting prostitutes in the city of Mendoza in the 1970s was car- ried out by Laura Rodriguez Aguero, “Mujeres en situación de prostitución como blanco del accionar represivo: El caso del Comando Moralizador Pío xii, Mendoza, 1974–1976”, in Andrea Andujar et al., De Minifaldas, militancias y revoluciones (Buenos Aires, 2009), pp. 109–126. See also Santiago Morcillo and Carolina Justo Von Lurzer, “Mujeres públicas y sexo clandestino: Ambigüedades sobre la normativa legal sobre la prostitución en la Argentina”, in Daniel Jones et al., La producción de la sexualidad: Políticas y regulaciones sexuales en Argentina (Buenos Aires, 2012), pp. 89–121, 190–192. 11 Andrés Carretero, Prostitución en Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires, 1998), pp. 182–200; Valeria Manzano, “Sexualizing Youth: Morality Campaigns and Representations of Youth in Early 1960s Buenos Aires”, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 14 (2005), pp. 433–461.
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12 Andrea Andújar et al., De Minifaldas, militancias y revoluciones; Isabella Cosse, Pareja, sex- ualidad y familia en Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires, 2010); Isabella Cosse et al., Los 60 de otra manera: Vida cotidiana, género y sexualidades en Argentina (Buenos Aires, 2010); Karina Felitti, La Revolución de la píldora: Sexualidad y política en los Sesenta (Buenos Aires, 2012); Valeria Manzano, The Age of Youth in Argentina: Culture, Politics and Sexuality from Peron to Videla (Chapel Hill, n.c., 2014). 13 Carretero, Prostitución en Buenos Aires, p. 182; Valeria Manzano, “Sexualizing Youth”, pp. 433–461. 14 Pablo Ben, “Historia global y prostitución”. Horacio Caride analysed municipal sources together with plans of prostibules found in the archives of the National Sanitary Works Agency (Dirección Nacional de Obras Sanitarias de la Nación), “Lugares de mal vivir: Una historia cultural de los prostíbulos de Buenos Aires, 1875–1936” (Unpublished Ph.D., Uni- versity of Buenos Aires, 2014).
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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 af- fective arrangements and sexual relations that actually existed in colonial soci- ety 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 set- tings. In practice, however, as Ann Twinman has suggested, it is most likely that
15 Mir Yarfitz uses the judicial reports in the Gaceta del Foro to trace the development of the case against the association of Jewish traffickers, the “infamous” Zwi Migdal. Mir Yarfitz, “Polacos, White Slaves and Stille Chuppahs: Organized Prostitution and the Jews in Bue- nos Aires, 1890–1939” (Unpublished Ph.D., University of California, 2012), pp. 145, 133, 224. See also Sandra McGee Deutsch, Crossing Borders, Claiming a Nation: A History of Argen- tine Jewish Women, 1880–1995 (Durham, 2010). 16 League of Nations, Report of the Special Body of Experts on Traffic in Women and Chil- dren (Geneva, 1927). Sandra McGee Deutsch also employed the registers from the Jewish Association for the Protection of Girls and Women, which worked “to maintain Jewish immigrants out of commercial sex”, particularly with “Ezras Noschim”, the Buenos Ai- res branch: Crossing Borders, pp. 107–108; Guy, El Sexo Peligroso; Yarfitz, “Polacos, White Slaves and Stille Chuppas”, pp. 53–110. The telling exception is Albert Londres’ journalistic research on the traffic in women in Buenos Aires which highlighted French pimps’ prac- tices. Albert Londres, The Road to Buenos Aires (London, 1928).
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17 Ann Twinman, “Honor, Sexuality and Illegitimacy in Colonial Spanish America”, in Asun- ción Lavrín (ed.), Sexuality and Marriage in Colonial Latin America (Lincoln [etc.], 1989), pp. 118–155, 148–149. 18 Susan Socolow, “Women and Crime: Buenos Aires, 1757–97”, in Lyman L. Johnson (ed.), The Problem of Order in Changing Societies: Essays on Crime and Policing in Argentina and Uruguay (Albuquerque, 1990), pp. 1–19, 8, 11. 19 Historian José Luis Moreno observes that towards the end of the colonial period, the Spanish justice system was receptive to claims made by members of lower social groups, including slaves. He analysed a judicial case in which a freedwoman accused a man of trying to re-enslave her and take over her gains made via prostitution. To achieve his aims, the accused apparently threatened to send her to the “prostitutes’ jail”. In this particular case, the freedwoman succeeded in mobilising her former owner and the Ombudsman (Defensor de Pobres) in her favour. José Luis Moreno, “Conflicto y violencia familiar en el Río de la Plata, 1770–1810”, Revista de Historia Social y de las Mentalidades, 6 (2002), pp. 13–38, 37.
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20 Mark Szuchman, Order, Family and Community in Buenos Aires, 1810–1860 (Stanford, 1988), p. 119. 21 Mirta Lobato, Historia de las trabajadoras en la Argentina (1880–1960) (Buenos Aires, 2007), pp. 72–73; Cristiana Schettini, “Esclavitud en blanco y negro: Elementos para una historia del trabajo sexual femenino en Buenos Aires y en Río de Janeiro, a fines del siglo xix”, Entrepasados, 29 (2006), pp. 43–62. 22 Guy, El Sexo peligroso, p. 69.
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23 Marcial Quiroga, “Aspecto actual de la prostitución”, Semana Médica, 3 (1962), p. 1785; Carretero, La Prostitución en Buenos Aires, p. 196; Sandra Gayol, Sociabilidad en Buenos Aires: Hombres, honor y cafés, 1862–1910 (Buenos Aires, 2000). 24 Guy, El Sexo peligroso, p. 69.
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25 For more on records of the legislative debates on the minimum age for women to reg- ister themselves and the common knowledge that minors were working as prostitutes, see Enrique Feinmann, Policía Social: Estudio sobre las costumbres y la moralidad pública (Buenos Aires, 1913), pp. 38–76, esp. p. 48. 26 Colón or Alzarán, Cristobal, and Rosa Zabaleta for prostitution of minors. C, 12, A–F, Criminal Court, National Archive, 1877. For further analysis on this and similar cases, see María Dolores Quaglia, “Corrupción y prostitución infantil en Buenos Aires (1870–1904): Una aproximación al tema”; José Luis Moreno, La Política social antes de la política social (Caridad, beneficencia y política social en Buenos Aires, siglos xvii a xx) (Buenos Aires, 2000), pp. 205–223; Schettini, “Esclavitud en blanco y negro”, pp. 43–64.
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Actually, every time an amendment to the regulation was discussed, leg- islators 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 dif- ficulties 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 subse- quent years, national and municipal legislators would return to the discussion of the legal status of prostitutes several times when reforming municipal regu- lations 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 Pala- cios 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 acquir- ing 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 de- bate about whether this law ceased to regulate prostitution or whether it
27 By linking syphilis and degeneration, French doctor Alfred Fournier became the most important exponent of neo-regulationism and the redrafting of regulations in the face of abolitionist arguments. See Sergio Carrara, Tributo a Venus: A luta contra a sífilis no Brasil, da passagem do século aos anos 40 (Rio de Janeiro, 1996), pp. 61–64. The author of the 1887 proposal was Doctor Eugenio Ramirez, Profilaxis Pública de la Sífilis. Reformas urgente a la reglamentación de la prostitución (Estudios de higiene social) (Buenos Aires, 1887) (under- lining as in the original). 28 Guy, El Sexo peligroso, pp. 41–42.
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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 ex- plicit 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 to- wards 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 environ- ment.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 lo- cating prostitutes were also progressively removed from public debate, and ultimately they were left in the hands of the police and their discretionary
29 Biernat, “Médicos, especialistas, políticos y funcionarios en la organización centralizada de la profilaxis de las enfermedades venéreas en la Argentina (1930–1954)”, Anuario de Estudios Americanos, 64 (2007), pp. 257–288, 278. For Rosario, see Mugica, La ciudad de las Venus. 30 Guy, El sexo peligroso, p. 213. Horacio Caride argues that the regulation created the figure of the “prostibule” in a state of tension with other collective housing and forms of com- merce. Caride, “Lugares de mal vivir”, pp. 89–249. 31 Biernat, “Médicos, especialistas, políticos y funcionarios”, p. 285. 32 Goldar, La Mala vida; Carretero, Prostitución en Buenos Aires, pp. 173–200.
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The Labour Market: Regulated Prostitution
One of the main effects of the regulation of prostitution in Buenos Aires be- tween 1875 and 1936 was the production of information about regulated pros- titutes 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 avail- able documents. The over-representation of foreign prostitutes in the munici- pal 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
33 Grammático, “Obreras, prostitutas y mal venéreo”, pp. 116–135. 34 Goldar, La Mala vida; Carretero, Prostitución en Buenos Aires, pp. 173–200; Omar Acha’s articles “Las sirvientas asesinas: Mal paso, delito y experiencia de clase en la Ar- gentina peronista” and “Cuerpos y Sexualidades”, in Herramienta: Debate y crítica marxis- ta (2013), discuss tensions over domestic workers’ sexuality in the context of the first Peronism. 35 Cecilia Varela, “Entre las demandas de protección y autodeterminación: Los procesos de judicialización de la trata de mujeres y niñas en la Argentina (2008–2011)”, in José Olivar et al. (ed.), La prostitución hoy en América Latina: Entre el trabajo, políticas y placer (Bogotá, 2011); Cecilia Varela, “La campaña antitrata en la Argentina y la agenda supranacional”, in Debora Daich and Mariana Sirimarco (eds), Género y violencia en el mercado del sexo: politica, policia y prostitucion (Buenos Aires, 2015), pp. 109–150.
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36 Guy, El Sexo peligroso, p. 83. 37 Ibid., p. 92. 38 Ibid., p. 93. 39 Dr Carlos Looyer, Los Grandes misterios de la mala vida en Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires, 1911), p. 248.
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40 McGee Deutsch, Crossing Borders, p. 110. 41 Yarfitz, “Polacos, White Slaves and Stille Chuppahs”, pp. 89–110. 42 McGee Deutsch, Crossing Borders, p. 106; Guy, El Sexo peligroso; Yarfitz, “Polacos, White Slaves and Stille Chuppahs”, p. 93. 43 Guy, El Sexo peligroso, p. 94; McGee Deutsch, Crossing Borders, p. 110. 41 per cent of Argentinian women were owners of brothels outside Buenos Aires; Yarfitz, “Polacos, White Slaves and Stille Chuppahs”, p. 93, found many women who were “native to Argen- tina” in census data for the year 1895. 44 Eusebio Gómez, La Mala vida en Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires, 2011 [1908]).
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45 For different portrayals of Raquel Liberman and her image as the “typical victim of traf- fickers”, see Myrtha Shalom, La Polaca: Inmigrantes, rufianes y esclavas a comienzos del siglo xx (Buenos Aires, 2009); Patricia Suarez, Las Polacas: historias tártaras, casamentera, La Varsovia (Buenos Aires, 2002); Nora Glickman, The Jewish White Slave Trade and the Untold Story of Raquel Liberman (New York [etc.], 2000); Larry Levy, La Mancha de la Migdal (Buenos Aires, 2007); for a broad discussion, see Yarfitz, “Polacos, White Slaves and Stille Chuppahs”, pp. 111–149. 46 Glickman, The Jewish White Slave Trade, pp. 43–47. 47 Cristiana Schettini, “Viajando solas: prácticas de vigilancia policial y experiencias de pros- titución en la América del Sur”, in Jorge Trujillo Bretón (ed.), En la Encrucijada. Historia, marginalidad y delito en América Latina y los Estados Unidos de Norteamérica, siglos xix y xx (Guadalajara, 2010), pp. 331–353. Yarfitz describes previous legal actions taken against Zwi Migdal, which contextualizes the impact of Liberman’s denunciation. Yarfitz, “Pola- cos, White Slaves and Stille Chuppahs”, pp. 115–116.
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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. Locally, the existence of trafficking and its characteristics were the subject of public debate. In 1908, in contrast to the many sensationalist stories in cir- culation at the time, the young criminologist Eusebio Gómez stated in one of his many studies on the underworld:
It is not exactly a question of the sale and purchase of women, as is widely thought; nor did wily trickery, devious seduction, or violent sequestration
48 Guy, El Sexo peligroso, p. 83. 49 Ibid., p. 80.
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play a part; no. The trade of white women in its truest form was nothing more than the recruitment of women aware of their future fate and who with a certain degree of freedom accepted the terms of a service hire con- tract, whose iron regime was bearable and possibly even comfortable to them […].50
Gómez’s and others’ ideas about trafficking indicate a distrust in the massive waves of immigrants disembarking in Buenos Aires; for this reason, the inter- national character of the sex trade was attributed to the cultural characteristics of the recently-arrived unknown foreigners in terms of “a spirit of vassalage and sensual corruption”. Some pages later, however, Gómez argued that there was a “perverse” system that prevented women from changing their lives: when they left the control of one exploiter, it was said that they fell straight into the hands of another. A few years later in 1913, as the tarnished reputation of Buenos Aires wors- ened 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.
50 Gómez, La Mala vida, p. 119. 51 On the subject of the worsening reputation of Buenos Aires, see Ernesto Bott, who tells how at the start of 1913 the Foreign Affairs Minister began to distribute a publication to Argentinian consulates and a memo to the press contradicting reports in the European publications about the white slave trade in Buenos Aires. Ernesto Bott, Las Condiciones de lucha contra la trata de blancas en Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires, 1916), p. 15. 52 McGee Deutsch, Crossing Borders, p. 111. 53 League of Nations, Report of the Special Body of Experts, p. 12. 54 A similar argument is developed by Yarfitz when he suggests that Zwi Migdal basically worked like any other mutual aids association of Jewish immigrants at the time; Yarfitz, “Polacos, White Slaves and Stille Chuppahs”, pp. 150–196.
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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 condi- tions” 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 flourish- ing 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 indi- viduals 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 cem- etery (1904) and a synagogue before the formal community was organized. The organization performed burials and religious ceremonies in their own temple.
55 Guy, El Sexo peligroso, p. 150; Bott, Las Condiciones. 56 Edward Bristow, Prostitution and Prejudice: The Jewish Fight against White Slavery 1870– 1939 (Oxford, 1982).
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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
57 The existence of a mutual aid society and its achievements, such as purchasing a cem- etery and a synagogue, later brought to light in the midst of a public scandal that re- inforced the association between the trafficking of women and the Jewish community, reflects and condenses the contradictions between the liberal principles that organised society and the spreading of nationalistic, conservative, and anti-Semitic thinking in Ar- gentina. For more on this see among others McGee Deutsch, Crossing Borders and Daniel Lvovich, Nacionalismo y antisemitismo en la Argentina (Buenos Aires, 2003). 58 Julio Alsogaray, Trilogía de la trata de blancas (Buenos Aires, 1933); Levy, La Mancha de la Migdal, p. 243. 59 Levy asserts that, based on the law, the members of the organization were deported to the neighbouring country of Uruguay from where they had no difficulty in returning. Levy, La Mancha de la Migdal, p. 248. 60 Yvette Trochon, La Ruta de Eros (Montevideo, 2006); José Luis Scarsi, “Cómo y por qué se formó la Zwi Migdal”, Todo es historia, 482 (2007), pp. 6–22; McGee Deutsch, Crossing Borders; Yarfitz, “Polacos, White Slaves and Stille Chuppahs”.
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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 organi- zation of pimps that benefited from the regulation but rather to a myriad of complex factors including economic and cultural motivations. Indeed, the ma- damas 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 broth- els 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 doc- tors and police officers as acts of “clandestine prostitution”, these encounters may better be understood as part of the changes in urban nightlife and enter- tainment, 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 intermedi- ary between city and rural brothels. Besides suggesting the existence of na- tional sex work circuits linking small villages to the city (overshadowed by the
61 Goldar, La Mala vida, pp. 34–35. 62 Manuel Gálvez, La trata de blancas (Buenos Aires, 1905); Manuel Gálvez, Nacha regules (Buenos Aires, 1919). 63 Goldar, La Mala vida, p. 39.
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64 Cecilia Allemandi, “El servicio doméstico en el marco de la transformaciones de la ciudad de Buenos Aires, 1869–1914”, Diálogos, 16 (2012), pp. 385–415. For more on the Argentinian female labour market, see Lobato, Historia de las Trabajadoras en la Argentina. 65 Sebastián Tallón, El Tango en sus etapas de música prohibida (Buenos Aires, 1959), p. 42. 66 Tallón, El Tango en sus etapas, p. 44; Pellarolo, Sainetes, cabaret, minas y tangos.
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67 Cristiana Schettini, “South American Tours: Work Relations in the Entertainment Market in South America”, International Review of Social History, 57 (2012), pp. 129–160. 68 “Clandestine Prostitution”, 24 June, 1924. League of Nations Archive [hereafter lna], box S 171.
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The Abolitionist Period
Initial resistance to the regulation of prostitution was replaced at the begin- ning 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 nation- ally 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
69 Argentine Report. Appendix n.4: “Suspicious Case”. lna, box S 171. The extra value ac- corded to foreign and older prostitutes due to their greater experience in the trade was a recurrent theme among clients. In the mid-1930s, for instance, police officer Ernesto Pareja suggested that men from Buenos Aires preferred European prostitutes because they were seen as “veterans of the trade”. Ernesto Pareja, La Prostitución en Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires, 1937). 70 At one point, the informant told the undercover investigator: “A green girl is twice as much trouble as a wife. […] The girl must be an expert.” “Traffic in women and children”, pp. 7–9, June, 1924. lna, box S 171.
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71 Miranda, “Buenos Aires, entre Eros y Tanatos”, p. 109. 72 Ibid., p. 110. 73 Carretero, Prostitución en Buenos Aires, p. 189. 74 María Luisa Mugica found that in the first months after the law of social prophylaxis was implemented some prostitutes in the city of Rosario tried to attract their clients by proudly exhibiting their health booklets. They used this document like the earlier official medical examination, unintendedly putting doctors in the awkward position of being their guarantors. In the doctors’ view, this was a regular medical certificate that had no resemblance to the previous official medical certificates issued under the system of regu- lation. Mugica, La ciudad de las Venus.
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Recent Trends
Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, the control and moni- toring of prostitution was carried out through the discretionary activities of police officers, which led to the police becoming increasingly involved in orga- nizing 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 busi- ness. 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 peri- ods 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 avail- able for the period usually refer to women interned in hospitals to be tr eated
75 Guy, El Sexo peligroso, pp. 213–239. 76 Sofía Tiscornia (ed.), Burocracias y violencia. Estudios de antropología juridica (Buenos Aires, 2004), esp. pp. 89–125; Marcelo Sain, “La policía en las ciencias sociales: Ensayo sobre los obstáculos epistemológicos para el estudio de la institución policial en el campo de las ciencias sociales”, in Mariana Sirimarco (ed.), Estudiar la policía: La mirada de las ciencias sociales sobre la institución policial (Buenos Aires, 2010), pp. 27–56; and Debora Daich, “Contravenciones y prostitución: La producción burocrática-administrativa de es- tadísticas”, Papeles de Trabajo, 24 (2012), pp. 31–48; Deborah Daich and Mariana Sirimarco, “Policías y prostitutas en la Argentina: el control territorial en clave de género”, in Daich and Sirimarco, Género y violencia, pp. 61–84.
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77 See note 7 and Mario Pecheny and Mónica Petracci, “Derechos humanos y sexualidad en la Argentina”, pp. 43–69. 78 Debora Daich, “Los Papelitos de la prostitución: Hacia una descripción feminista y densa de la prostitución en Buenos Aires”, in José Olivar et al. (eds), La prostitución hoy en Améri- ca Latina: Entre el trabajo, políticas y placer (Bogotá, 2011).
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79 Varela, “Entre las demandas de protección y autodeterminación”.
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