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.com09/26/2021 11:46:06PM 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. Cristiana Schettini - 9789004346253 Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 11:46:06PM via free access <UN> A Social History of Prostitution in Buenos Aires 359 on tensions arising from the commercialization of social relationships. From a local perspective, the (foreign) prostitute embodied the effects of money cir- culation and of the “otherness” that was invading Argentina.3 At the same time, hygienist physicians saw prostitutes as part of their wider interest in “marginality”. Such interest was evidenced by their obsession with observing different subjects who, in their minds at least, represented the dan- gers of disorder resulting from the growing cultural heterogeneity that charac- terized the city in those years.4 The most significant historiographical research about the period of regu- lated prostitution in Buenos Aires (1875–1936) was written by Donna Guy, a North American historian, and it was published in 1991. Her time frame partly overlaps with the period of consolidation of the nation-state (1880–1910), a time characterized by economic growth, the mass immigration of European workers, and the establishment of a national plan of organization following the long period of instability that had characterized most of the nineteenth century. This period has come to be seen as a foundational time in the history of a modern, prosperous, and cosmopolitan Argentina, and it has also been seen as indicative of its contradictions, social tensions, and authoritarian prac- tices. The policies that were implemented to control the sex trade can also be included under this heading. Thus, it is commonplace in the diverse literary and historiographical productions on the subject to find reiterations of rapid urban changes, massive European immigration, and the high number of men among immigrants as factors that drove prostitution.5 Influenced by Foucauldian and gender-based approaches to social history, Guy sought to study prostitution in connection with debates about definitions of family, nation, and citizenship.6 Among the wide variety of primary sources she used, Guy privileged the contributions of politically active professional men and women to public debates about the regulation of prostitution and their 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. Cristiana Schettini - 9789004346253 Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 11:46:06PM via free access <UN> 360 Schettini 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,