Compromised Positions: Prostitution, Public Health, and Gender Politics in Revolutionary Mexico City

History / Latin American Studies / Women’s Studies

“ In this new and important contribution examining the direction of the Mexican revolution, Bliss addresses the complex relationships between the authority assumed by Mexico’s revolution and the political activism of traditionally marginal actors, which influenced the revolution. Carefully researched and well written, her book sides with the historiography suggesting that the Mexican revolution produced new politically active participants who influenced the changes and responsibilities assumed by the revolutionary government.” —J. B. Kirkwood, University of Evansville, Choice

Prostitution, Public Health, and Gender Politics in Revolutionary Mexico City

Jon Chas

Katherine Elaine Bliss is Assistant Professor of History and a member of the Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Compromised Positions

P r o s t i t u t i o n , Public Health, and Gender Politics in Revolutionary Mexico City

[T]his is compelling social history, with admirable detail and “ provocative analysis.... [T]he narrative successfully highlights the voices of those women who found themselves—despite the rhetoric—excluded from Mexico City’s revolutionary family.” —Elizabeth Rigby, Times Literary Supplement

Bliss

Compromised Positions

“ A nuanced study of how revolutionary politics tried, but ultimately failed, to eradicate prostitution in Mexico City because of its reluctance to promote changes in masculine sexuality and its refusal to include women, particularly prostitutes, in its revolutionary family. This book makes a significant and original contribution to Mexican histor-iography, one that will challenge the fundamental willingness of revolutionary l e a d e r s t o t a k e g e n d e r i s s u e s s e r i o u s l y. ” —Donna J. Guy, Ohio State University

T h e P e n n s y l v a n i a St a t e U n i v e r s i t y P r e s s

Katherine Elaine Bliss

U n i v e r s i t y P a r k , P e n n s y l v a n i a | w w w. p s up r e s s . o r g

ISBN 0-271-02126-8

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Penn State Press

Compromised Positions

KATHERINE ELAINE BLISS

Compromised Positions Prostitution, Public Health, and Gender Politics in Revolutionary Mexico City

THE PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS UNIVERSITY PARK, PENNSYLVANIA

Disclaimer: Some images in the original version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bliss, Katherine Elaine, 1968– Compromised positions : prostitution, public health, and gender politics in revolutionary Mexico City / Katherine Elaine Bliss. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-271-02125-X (cloth : acid-free paper) 1. Prostitution—Government policy—Mexico—Mexico City. 2. Sexually transmitted diseases—Mexico—Mexico City. 3. Mexico—Politics and government—1910–1946. 4. Mexico—Social policy—20th century. I. Title. HQ151.M49 B54 2001 306.74’0972’53—dc21

2001016369

Copyright 䉷 2001 The Pennsylvania State University All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA 16802–1003 It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper for the first printing of all clothbound books. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1992.

For my parents, Robert and Juliee Bliss

Contents

1 2 3 4 5 6

List of Figures and Tables

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction: Prostitution, Sexual Morality, and Reformism in Revolutionary Mexico City

1

The Porfirians’ City of Pleasure: Prostitutes, Patrons, and Sexual Propriety

23

Revolutionary Capital: Warfare and the Changing Business of Sexual Commerce

63

The Science of Redemption: Syphilis, Sexual Promiscuity, and Reformism

95

Evaluating the Cult of Masculinity: Manliness, Money, and the Morality of Exchange

127

Testing the Limits of Tolerance: The Place of Vice in a Revolutionary Metropolis

153

The End of the Road? Gender and the Politics of Abolition

189

Postscript: The Unredeemed Revolution

207

Bibliography

217

Index

235

F i g u r e s a n d Ta b l e s

Figures 1. Marı´a Villa, alias ‘‘La Chiquita,’’ shooting Esperanza ‘‘La Malaguen˜a’’ 2. Francisco ‘‘el Chalequero’’ slitting the throat of a prostitute 3. Map of the proposed zona de tolerancia and area businesses affected 4. Advertisement for Neo-Salvarsan 5. Advertisements for physicians who treat ‘‘secret sicknesses’’ 6. Newspaper illustration regarding efforts to study female delinquency—‘‘Presuntas delincuentes’’ 7. Advertisement for Testofort 8. Two prostitutes on Calle Cuauhtemoctzı´n in Mexico City, 1934, photographed by Henri Cartier-Bresson. (Henri Cartier-Bresson / Magnum Photos) 9. Map of the proposed zona de tolerancia 10. Cover of the guidebook Me´xico de noche 11. Advertisement for the Cabaret Venus 12. Advertisement for the Cucaracha Cocktail Club 13. An advertisement offering reservados 14. Advertisements for casas recomendables 15. Advertisement for the infamous ‘‘Casa Ruth’’

38 52 68 101 103 122 133

156 160 169 171 172 174 178 180

Tables 1. Prostitutes’ Reasons for Entering La Vida, 1872 2. Prostitutes’ Occupations, 1904 3. Prostitutes’ Birthplaces, 1904–1905

31 34 35

Acknowledgments

My interest in this project—and in the lives of women and men caught in the crossfire of revolution, moral reform, and urbanization—was sparked a long time ago. As a student at Harvard College in the late 1980s, I became simultaneously interested in international politics, women’s history, and Hispanic American literature. A reading of Isabel Allende’s La casa de los espı´ritus, and a fascination with the powerful character, brothel madam Tra´nsito Soto, led to a paper on the figure of the prostitute in twentieth-century literature, which itself led to a research project on the legal regulation of sexual commerce in Mexico and Cuba. That project, in turn, led to a small research grant, a trip to the archives in Mexico City, and a senior thesis on prostitution and nationalism in the context of the Mexican revolution. Later, as a graduate student at the University of Chicago in the early 1990s, I returned to the topic with a new interest in legal and medical history. After speculating with various projects dealing with the history of carrancismo in the early twentieth century, on the one hand, and mid-century housing, sanitation, and urban social conditions, on the other, I found that my interest in gender politics, sexuality, and public health persisted, and I returned to the history of revolutionary reformism and regulation with a fresh perspective. Over the past five years, working on this book and at the same time teaching graduate and undergraduate courses on gender, Latin America, and U.S.–Latin American relations at the University of Massachusetts has opened my eyes to the importance of considering how international reform movements as well as national ideas about masculinity, femininity, and sexuality shape popular and official attitudes toward commercial sex work, disease risk, gender-based violence, and health-seeking behavior in local context.

xii

Acknowledgments

I owe enormous gratitude to the scholars, colleagues, editors, archivists, friends, and family who helped me move intellectually from one phase to the next as I analyzed data and worked on the many stages of this book. Those who provided advice and who initially encouraged me to pursue this topic as a college student include James Brennan, Mary Rolda´n, Ce´sar Salgado, and John Womack Jr. At the University of Chicago, a host of scholars including John Coatsworth, Friedrich Katz, Claudio Lomnitz-Adler, Douglas Massey, and Susan Stokes read proposals and drafts and shared their perspectives on Mexico with me, offering support and encouragement as well as honest advice regarding when to rethink chapters or return to the ‘‘drawing board.’’ At the Pennsylvania State University Press, director Sandy Thatcher and his staff were consistently communicative, reliable, and thoroughly professional in the manner with which they carefully handled the manuscript’s final transformations. My thanks go also to the Instituto Nacional de Antropologı´a e Historia, which granted me permission to use the cover photograph from the Archivo Casasola, and to Magnum Photos, which granted permission to use the Henri Cartier-Bresson photograph of the women in the Cuauhtemotzı´n district in 1934. In addition to those who worked with the project in a formal capacity, I owe special thanks to the Centro de Estudios Histo´ricos and the Centro de Estudios Demogra´ficos y del Desarrollo Urbano at the Colegio de Me´xico for offering me academic affiliation during my research trips to Mexico City. I am similarly grateful to the staff at the Archivo General de la Nacio´n, the Archivo Histo´rico de la Secretarı´a de Salubridad y Asistencia, and the Archivo Histo´rico de la Ciudad de Me´xico, all of whom helped me conduct the detective work necessary to find documents about a topic that was never really supposed to exist, much less persist in archival form half a century later. I want especially to thank Eutiquio Franco, former director of the AGN, who helped me secure access to important documents from the Federal District’s Consejo Tutelar para Menores Infractores, and the staff at the AHSSA, who helped me locate and photocopy maps of the late 1920s zona de tolerancia. In the United States, Walter Brem, at the Bancroft Collection at the University of California, Berkeley; Peter Stern, at the Pauline Collins collection at the University of Massachusetts; and the staff at the Nettie Lee Benson Collection at the University of Texas were most helpful in facilitating my search for obscure magazines, hygiene treatises, and guidebooks they didn’t always realize were in their depositories! I must also acknowledge the numerous friends and colleagues who prof-

Acknowledgments

xiii

fered advice regarding archival sources, commented on presentations or drafts, or at one time or another provided a congenial environment in which to advance new ideas regarding gender, health and welfare, revolutionary Mexico, legal and medical history, or urban life. Since almost everyone with whom I discussed this project asserted that they really did not know anything ‘‘about Mexican prostitution,’’ I must thank them for encouraging me to place my study of the topic within a broader and comparative context. My special thanks go to Jeremy Adelman, Diego Armus, William Beezley, Anne-Emmanuelle Birn, Ann Blum, Robert Buffington, Lauren Derby, William French, Laura Gotkowitz, Donna Guy, Ivan Hinojosa, Elizabeth Hutchison, Gilbert Joseph, Thomas Klubock, John Lear, Victor Macı´asGonza´lez, Pablo Piccato, Lara Putnam, Karin Rosemblatt, Kristin Ruggiero, Patience Schell, Alexandra Stern, Mark Szuchman, and Mary Kay Vaughan. Donna Guy and Mary Kay Vaughan deserve special acknowledgment for taking an early interest in the topic and for encouraging me to pursue it. From my earliest semesters in graduate school, Mary Kay graciously shared her time and knowledge of Mexican social history and gender politics with me and has consistently offered sound advice and challenges to place the study in a broad consideration of reformism, social movements, international politics, movements, and gender. And Donna Guy read—and reread—the manuscript in its many guises, generously sharing her expertise in gender studies and comparative politics at every stage. In addition, Alexandra Stern pointed me toward several important documents and shared her critical perspective on early twentieth-century health and hygiene with me. Ann Blum, my archive compan˜era, similarly deserves special mention not just for her solidarity in the trenches of welfare history but also for reading endless drafts, for commenting on numerous conference presentations, and, most of all, for offering good cheer and encouragement as the writing neared its final stages. Over the period that I worked on this project I had the opportunity to benefit from more general audience commentary at seminars, workshops, and conferences at the following venues: Yale University; Harvard University; the University of Illinois–Chicago; the University of Chicago; the University of Michigan; the University of Arizona; the Five Colleges; the New England Conference on Latin American Studies; the Illinois Conference on Latin American Studies; the Carleton University conference on the History of the Family; the Latin American Studies Association meetings in 1994, 1995, 1997, and 2000; the American Historical Association/Confer-

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ence on Latin American History meetings in 1995, 1996, and 1999; and the 1994 Reunio´n de historiadores mexicanos y norteamericanos in Mexico City. At the University of Massachusetts I have benefited from the friendship and advice from numerous colleagues who have guided me through the intellectual and, at times, not-so-intellectual process of writing a book. I am especially grateful to Carmen Diana Deere, Bruce Laurie, Luis Marentes, Kathy Peiss, Jane Rausch, and Mary Wilson. The graduate students with whom I have been fortunate to work, especially Kristin Harper, read portions of the manuscript and offered their suggestions and comments as well. I owe special thanks to Kristin for taking time out of a busy trip to Mexico City to secure written permission for me to use the cover photograph. The Department of History granted me a Research and Curriculum Enhancement Leave in 1998 to work on the manuscript and provided financial assistance to secure some photograph permissions. The UMass Center for Latin American, Caribbean and Latino Studies, along with a grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, provided research support for my trip to the University of California–Berkeley Bancroft Collection in 2000. I am grateful to the CLACLS and History Department staff for helping me negotiate the often complicated university grant accounting processes. Additional funding for this research came from Harvard College Committee on Latin American Studies/Tinker Foundation grant (1988); the University of Chicago Center for Latin American Studies/William and Flora Hewlett Foundation grant (1991, 1992, 1993, 1995); the University of Chicago Department of History and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Pre- Dissertation Grant (1992); the University of Chicago Population Studies Center and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Demography Training and Research Grant (1993–94); and the University of Chicago Center for Mexican Studies/Joyce Foundation travel grant (1995). Aside from the conference attendees, commentators, reviewers, and colleagues, numerous friends outside the profession supported this project either by opening their homes to me as I consulted archives or libraries in their cities or by providing encouragement and diversion when the archives were closed—or when the computer broke down! For their hospitality in Chicago I thank Doug and Pam Walter; in Washington, D.C., and Atlanta, Kimberly Bockhaus Collins; in Mexico City, Sara Silver; in Austin, the Moraleses, the Buatts, and Martha Perry; in Boston, Anna Puleo McGowan; and in San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, Charles and Mary Marsh. For their friendship and encouragement I thank Karen and Jonathan Cohen, Jessica Dor-

Acknowledgments

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man, Silvia Luna, Allyson Mendenhall and Eliot Hoyt, Emily Mieras, AnnMiche`le Morales, and Kristin Walter. Like everyone else who supported my work on this project, my family members always insisted that they knew nothing about prostitution. Indeed, a long-running joke was that I could never really tell my grandmothers what I studied for fear they might be scandalized! So I usually commented that I was examining the lives and experiences of poor women and men in Mexico in the 1920s and 1930s, which, of course, was true. But both my grandmothers, Isabel Lewis Fuselier and Eugenia Harms Bliss van Valkenburgh, lived through the 1920s and 1930s and traveled quite a bit to Mexico City over their lifetimes, and I think my interest in the time and place—if not the topic—can also, in many ways, be attributed to them. I am also deeply grateful to my parents, Robert Harms Bliss and Juliee Fuselier Bliss, for their love and for their emotional and financial support over the years during which I researched and wrote this book. As I flew through Dallas on my various trips to and from Mexico, or sequestered myself in their study with a laptop computer and piles of documents over vacations, they cheerfully plied me with questions about my work. What was it about? How was it progressing? And, most important, when would it be finished? Their curiosity, loving encouragement, and gentle prodding have been absolutely essential to the project. This book is dedicated to them.

Introduction Prostitution, Sexual Morality, and R eformism in Revolutionary M exico C ity

What did six destitute women, the Mexican president, a Spanish nightclub owner, and a public hospital have to do with revolution in late-1920s Mexico City? Quite a bit, according to Ami Aguallo, Julia Andrade, Margarita Martı´nez, Eufrasia Pa´ramo, Dolores Analla, and Manuela Domenzaı´n, all residents of the capital. When these six Mexico City prostitutes, who called themselves the ‘‘daughters of disgrace,’’ wrote Mexican president Plutarco Elı´as Calles to complain about the laws that governed the practice of sexual commerce in the nation’s largest city, they defined themselves as ‘‘nationalists’’ who were concerned for Mexico’s welfare. In fact, they warned the president that not only were foreign men sexually exploiting Mexican women in illegal cabarets but also that the public hospital where prostitutes were sent to recover from sexually transmitted infections was, instead, a corrupt and unhealthy place in which the ideals of the Mexican Revolution were routinely compromised.1 1. Letter from Ami Aguallo, Julia Andrade, Margarita Martı´nez, Eufrasia Pa´ramo, Dolores Analla, and Manuela L. Domenzaı´n to the President of the Republic, in Archivo Histo´rico de la Secretarı´a de Salubridad y Asistencia, Me´xico, D.F. (hereafter AHSSA), Salubridad Pu´blica

2

Introduction

In their letter, the ‘‘daughters’’ centered their complaints around the 1926 Reglamento para el ejercicio de la prostitucio´n, which legislated who could practice sexual commerce, specified where the exchange of sex for money could take place, and articulated the prostitute’s obligations with respect to medical examination by federal public health personnel. They argued that this law did nothing to benefit Mexicans or the country as a whole. Policymakers promoted regulated prostitution as the best way to safeguard the health and moral welfare of all Mexicans, but far from protecting poor women from the ‘‘unscrupulous’’ designs of predatory pimps, madams, and bordello clients, the ‘‘daughters’’ insisted, the new Reglamento instead benefited ‘‘pernicious foreigners’’ and threatened to turn Mexico’s sexually oriented businesses into centers of ‘‘scandalous vice and a refuge for perverse men from all corners of the globe.’’ To make matters worse, the ‘‘daughters’’ warned, foreign prostitutes were willing to perform all manner of ‘‘indecent’’ activities with their customers and, like pimps, enjoyed administrative indulgence, going so far as to cruelly insult the Mexican prostitutes in the public syphilis treatment facility, the Hospital Morelos, and on the street. After attacking the nature of the Reglamento’s medical and judicial requirements, the women then asked the president whether the law itself ‘‘was nationalism or betrayal?’’ Finally, the ‘‘daughters of disgrace’’ portrayed themselves as hard workers and helpless victims in the new order and appealed to President Calles’s sense of paternalism and revolutionary morality, writing ‘‘Mr. President: do not blame us for living this kind of life, we were laborers [and] workers, but they have closed the factories [and] the workshops, [and] the work in the countryside has been suspended. What can we do? We think that 70 percent of us lead this life out of necessity and only 30 percent because of vice.’’2 For the ‘‘daughters,’’ at least, the links between work, social policy, nationalism, morality, health, and revolution were all too clear. Mexico City’s 1926 Reglamento para el ejercicio de la prostitucio´n was only the latest in a series of legislative measures dating to the mid-nineteenth century that sought to contain the spread of often incurable sexually transmitted infections such as syphilis and gonorrhea among the national population.3 The registration, inspection, and surveillance of sexually active (hereafter SP), box 3, September 10, 1927, 3. It is likely these names were pseudonyms, for the women wrote several times over a nine-month period and frequently changed first and last names to protect their anonymity, or as they said, to ‘‘avoid reprisals.’’ 2. Ibid. 3. The first reglamento was imposed in 1865 by the French during that country’s occupation of Mexico. Ricardo Franco Guzma´n, ‘‘El re´gimen jurı´dico de la prostitucio´n en Me´xico,’’ Revista de la Facultad de Derecho en Me´xico, 1972, no. 85–86:86. See also Leovigildo Figue-

Introduction

3

prostitutes was based on the modern science of hygiene, but the Reglamento’s spirit of tolerating male sexual promiscuity and containing disease among a group of ‘‘deviant’’ women resonated with older Catholic beliefs that prostitution, although a sin, was also a ‘‘necessary evil’’ that could prevent greater problems like rape or seduction from threatening the moral order. Thus the provisions of the Reglamento—that all women over the age of eighteen who were not virgins and who wished to engage in sexual commerce register with health authorities, undergo weekly inspections for signs of venereal disease, and submit to hospitalization if found to be suffering from a contagious affliction—were shaped by a complex layering of scientific prescriptions to limit disease and degeneration over religious concerns to limit sin and social unrest. Health and hygiene laws offered no similar guidelines for male clients’ obligations or responsibilities, for the idea that ‘‘normal’’ men were sexually promiscuous while ‘‘normal’’ women were not underpinned the Reglamento itself.4 In many ways the 1926 law, like its predecessors, rested on older arguments regarding the prostitute’s deviancy and the client’s normalcy that modern hygienists and sexologists used to justify public health concerns and place the burden of disease prophylaxis on women.5 However, in several respects the Calles-era Reglamento was revolutionary, for it anticipated the abolition of regulated prostitution and the end to tolerated procuring. It idealized, instead, a future of radically altered gender relations when women would no longer work in sexual commerce, when men would no longer visit prostitutes, and when all citizens would be held equally responsible for disease transmission.6 The communication between the ‘‘daughters,’’ poor women who identified themselves as participants in a disreputable but legal economic activity, and former military officer and current president of the Republic Plutarco Elı´as Calles, arguably the most influential man in Mexico at the time, sheds roa Guerrero, ‘‘La prostitucio´n y el delito de lenocinio en Me´xico y los Artı´culos 207 y 339 del Co´digo Penal del Distrito Federal y territorios federales’’ (Lic. thesis, Escuela Nacional de Jurisprudencia, Universidad Auto´noma Nacional de Me´xico, 1946). 4. Angus McLaren, The Trials of Masculinity: Policing Sexual Boundaries, 1870–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). McLaren notes that ‘‘the law was actively involved in the construction of male and female roles, though the boundaries themselves were flexible, bending under class, gender and ethnic pressures’’ (7). 5. As the first article of the Reglamento states, the object of the legislation was to ‘‘impede by all means necessary the propagation of sexually transmitted disease.’’ ‘‘Reglamento para el ejercicio de la prostitucio´n en el Distrito Federal,’’ Boletı´n del Departamento de Salubridad Pu´blica, 1926, no. 1–2:162–87. See also ‘‘Reglamento para el ejercicio de la prostitucio´n (Distrito Federal),’’ 1926, chapter 1, article 1, in Figueroa Guerrero, ‘‘La prostitucio´n y el delito de lenocinio,’’ 28–29. 6. Franco Guzma´n, ‘‘El re´gimen jurı´dico,’’ 86.

4

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light on the complicated perspectives on gender, welfare, nationalism, and reform that circulated in postrevolutionary Mexico City. At the broadest level, it demonstrates the highly politicized nature of ideas about medicine, law, work, and the Revolution’s duty to safeguard the well-being of its citizens. After all, as the ‘‘daughters’’ implied, was it fair for a revolutionary state to permit one group of women to be infected with sexually transmitted disease just so that the rest of the nation might enjoy good health? And did prostitutes themselves not have the right to ensure their own well-being by acting as free agents in a legal although disreputable trade? More specifically, the ‘‘daughters’ ’’ conscious distinction between ‘‘vice’’ and ‘‘necessity’’ with respect to their work suggests that the women acknowledged that some might view prostitutes as deviant and immoral but insisted that most had chosen to prostitute themselves because they could not otherwise earn a living in the fragile postwar economy. Similarly, the nationalistic tone of the letter reveals the growing prominence of politically connected men in the everyday practice of metropolitan sexual commerce and implies that the ‘‘daughters’’ resented the participation of foreign women in what they believed was ‘‘their’’ business milieu. The letter also shows that such supposedly socially marginal Mexicans as female prostitutes nevertheless understood the political currency of reformist rhetoric regarding welfare and rights and deployed it for their own ends, for by defining themselves as the ‘‘daughters of disgrace,’’ these women were clearly seeking to portray themselves as defenseless victims who deserved the state’s protection, who might be redeemed of their ‘‘disgrace’’ as ‘‘fallen women,’’ and who had a right to participate fully in revolutionary society. Far from being a strange episode in the history of the Mexican Revolution, the Mexico City prostitutes’ petition strikes at the heart of one of the most important aspects of national political ideology: the stated goal of ‘‘redeeming the Mexican people’’ from the poverty, vice, ignorance, immorality, and corruption that many revolutionaries believed had plagued the country under the long dictatorship of Porfirio Dı´az. It was over the period between 1876 and 1911, many argued, that Mexico had become an authoritarian and antidemocratic nation stifled by unjust economic policies, beaten down by foreign business owners, and demoralized by the greed and corruption of the metropolitan elite. Like enhancing political participation, like implementing agrarian reform, and like extricating Mexico from foreign influence, then, instituting social reform was a principal concern of many men and women who participated in or supported the armed conflict and struggle for political change that characterized the effort to topple Dı´az and to

Introduction

5

set up a new political regime between 1910 and 1917. And like political participation, economic development, and nationalism, reformism was a concept that counted on administrative, legislative, and popular support. Intellectuals, lawyers, medical professionals, journalists, educators, and union activists who were dismayed by the Porfiriato’s corruption and inspired by the possibilities presented by constitutional, social, and political guarantees dedicated themselves to ‘‘redeeming’’ the Mexican people. Lawyers and elected officials worked to craft and implement legislative reform, while doctors, teachers, urban planners, and criminologists worked in new public institutions to implement such ‘‘redeeming’’ policies as anticlericalism, public education, judicial reform, and the provision of health care. Neighbors, hospital patients, prison inmates, domestic servants, street vendors, and even prostitutes similarly developed their own concepts of the state’s responsibility vis-a` -vis their well-being. Indeed, between 1916 and 1940 the reformist ideal regarding redemption circulated freely in spaces ranging from legislative chambers and the executive office to correctional facilities, health clinics, neighborhood markets, and newspaper pages, acquiring a multitude of meanings and opinions regarding its implementation along the way. But while the idea of redemption manifested itself in speeches and reform tracts directed toward Indians, peasants, beggars, and children, prostitutes were overwhelmingly invoked as those citizens most deserving of ‘‘moral uplift’’ and a second chance. In fact, for middle-class activists, at least, reformism emerged as a way both to differentiate themselves from Mexico’s poorest citizens and to demonstrate their affiliation with revolutionary principles. Legislators, public officials, and private citizens alike invoked the ‘‘redemption’’ of ‘‘fallen women’’ as their cause cele`bre, promoting legislation to ban procuring, to train women to work in alternative occupations, to persuade clients to restrain their tendency toward sexual promiscuity, and to abolish the Reglamento itself. As early as the 1916 constitutional convention in Quere´taro, delegate Francisco Ibarra demanded that his fellow legislators ‘‘comply with the revolutionary promise that we have made to redeem our people, taking them from the abject poverty in which they have been cast’’ and abolish regulated prostitution.7 In 1930 Dr. Arturo 7. ‘‘16a sesio´n ordinaria celebrada en el Teatro Iturbide la tarde del lunes 16 de diciembre de 1916,’’ cited in Comisio´n Nacional para la Celebracio´n del Sesquicentenario de la Proclamacio´n de la Independencia Nacional y del Cincuentenario de la Revolucio´n Mexicana, Diario de los debates el Congreso Constituyente (Mexico City: Ediciones de la Comisio´n Nacional para la Celebracio´n del Sesquicentenario de la Proclamacio´n de la Independencia Nacional y del Cincuentenario de la Revolucio´n Mexicana, 1960), 1:792.

6

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Oviedo Mota wrote Pascual Ortı´z Rubio, president of the Republic, to declare that ‘‘the Revolution, in its program to redeem the popular classes, is obligated to combat this ’necessary evil’ left over from the Dictatorship. For the Porfirians, the popular classes were despised by Society, and it mattered little or not at all that their children, fodder for the cannon or the brothel, suffered.’’8 And the head of the Campaign Against Venereal Diseases spoke in similar terms in 1937 regarding abolition. In a study that advocated dispensing with the Reglamento altogether, Dr. Enrique Villela declared: The Mexican Revolution cannot and will not be detained! Full of accomplishments planted in its breast by dreams filled with promise, it will break fetishes, it will combat extreme prejudices, it will destroy the stronghold of illegally created interests and impregnate them with its own spirit, its dreams, and its goals of justice and dignity for all Mexican people, and once again it will bring light, truth, and health to the irredent social masses!9 Redemption appealed to a variety of interested parties in Mexico City, for its broad promise to rectify unjust social conditions for men and women seemingly offered something for everyone. Despite redemption’s universal appeal, its implementation was a highly controversial process, for the cultural practices and social attitudes embedded in the Reglamento specifically, and in the organization of sexual commerce more generally, were connected to some of the most powerful forces of revolution and were shaped, on the one hand, by reformers’ older ideas about class and gender and, on the other, by the intended reformees’ own conceptualizations of citizenship, rights, responsibilities, and social change. To be sure, official efforts to remove women from prostitution and to encourage men to quit visiting brothels were inspired by the purest of revolutionary and humanitarian intentions, for syphilis was a degenerative and debilitating disease that was difficult to treat, and all available information suggests that female prostitutes worked in deplorable conditions that could be likened to ‘‘sexual slavery.’’ But as Villela’s comments make clear, redemption also posited a hierarchical relationship between the state and ‘‘the 8. Arturo Oviedo Mota, ‘‘El problema social de la prostitucio´n,’’ letter to President Pascual Ortı´z Rubio, 1930, in AHSSA, SP, Servicio Jurı´dico (hereafter AHSSA-SP-SJ), box 20, file 10. 9. Enrique Villela, ‘‘La prostitucio´n y las enfermedades vene´reas en Me´xico,’’ in AHSSA, SP, Inspeccio´n Anti-vene´rea (hereafter AHSSA-SP-IAV), box 5, file 1, pp. 57–58. Although ‘‘irredent’’ might indicate ‘‘unredeemed,’’ it seems, in fact, to refer to nationalistic aspirations.

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7

Mexican people,’’ who might only find ‘‘justice and dignity’’ if the state brought them ‘‘light, truth, and health.’’ Indeed, this book shows that the Mexican reformism’s project to ‘‘redeem’’ female prostitutes and their clientele was ultimately undermined by revolutionary conditions themselves, by widespread challenges to the reforms, and by the reformers’ own unwillingness to alter their outdated ideas about gender, class, and society despite their stated commitment to radical social change. To describe how the process of moral reformism in revolutionary Mexico was ultimately shaped—and compromised—by a variety of participants, I examine the cultural politics of prostitution, sexual morality, and gender in Mexico City. I chose Mexico’s capital and largest urban center for several reasons: Mexico City was the playground of the Porfirian elite, it was the seat of the new revolutionary governments, it became home to new public institutions in the 1920s and 1930s and, over the same period, also became home to migrants and refugees who participated in the world of sexual commerce. As such, it provides an ideal venue for examining the gender and class dynamics of social reform in Mexico between 1917 and 1940. Because Mexico City was also a ‘‘region of revolution’’ as well as the nation’s capital, it proved to be a most convenient laboratory for experimentation with a variety of reform measures. As Mexico’s largest city and political and commercial center, moreover, the capital was also a place where ideas about revolution and reform quickly circulated and provoked debate among residents and observers. In revolutionary Mexico City, the reform of ‘‘problematic’’ female sexual behaviors was carried out in medical and educational institutions, while ‘‘problematic’’ male sexual behavior was either ignored or penalized. Ultimately, the abolition of the Reglamento and the reform of penal and sanitary codes represented compromises among the revolutionary imperatives of commerce, public health, and gender equality.

Gender and the Mexican Revolution Whether or not the Mexican Revolution was a ‘‘revolution for women’’ has inspired considerable research over the past three decades. This question rests on the assumption that the social upheaval and political reconstruction of the period between 1910 and 1940 provided new legislators and political leaders with the opportunities to benefit women economically, legally, and politically as a specific social group. By focusing on legal change and on the visibility and prominence of women’s organizations themselves, historians

8

Introduction

of women in Mexico have demonstrated that, at least to some extent, female peasants, workers, and professionals did gain a greater public presence over the course of revolution and reconstruction and that the early-twentiethcentury movement for women’s legal rights gained strength in the context of feminist struggles with male legislators over women’s right to vote in the 1930s.10 But although working and professional women gained constitutional guarantees concerning occupational conditions, salaries, maternity leave, and freedom of professional choice, male legislators nevertheless failed to implement a ‘‘feminist agenda’’ and did not grant women the right to vote until 1953, nearly forty years after the Constitution of 1917 had gone into effect and well after the great revolutionary debates about citizenship and political participation. Indeed, historians of women in Mexico have had little choice but to conclude that the Mexican Revolution was not so much a ‘‘revolution for women’’ as a ‘‘patriarchal event’’ that largely consolidated male authority at all social levels.11 Broadening the ‘‘categories of analysis’’ to include gender and organized activism that took place outside the mainstream movement for women’s rights has permitted historians to ask why it was that the Revolution’s apparent potential to equalize relations between men and women failed. Some work has demonstrated that warfare itself reinforced broader social ideas about male authority both within and outside the home, as the well-known horror stories regarding soldiers’ violence and the rape, kidnapping, and abuse of unprotected women in rural villages reveal.12 Moreover, the war’s conclusion and the constitutionalist victory created a sense of entitlement among well-connected military officials and even common soldiers, who, 10. Anna Macı´as, Against All Odds: The Mexican Feminist Movement in Mexico to 1940 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982); Ana Lau and Carmen Ramos, eds., Mujer y revolucio´n, 1900–1917 (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Estudios Histo´ricos de la Revolucio´n Mexicana, 1993); Julia Tun˜on, Mujeres en Me´xico: Una historia olvidada (Mexico City: Editorial Planeta, 1987); Sandra McGee-Deutsch, ‘‘Gender and Socio-Political Change in TwentiethCentury Latin America,’’ Hispanic American Historical Review 71 (1991): 260–76; Esperanza Tun˜on Pablos, Mujeres que se organizan: El Frente Unico Pro Derechos de la Mujer, 1935– 1938 (Mexico City: Coordinacio´n de Humanidades / M. A. Porrua, 1992); Shirlene Ann Soto, Emergence of the Modern Mexican Woman: Her Participation in Revolution and Struggle for Equality, 1910–1940 (Denver, Colo.: Arden Press, 1990). 11. Heather Fowler-Salamini and Mary Kay Vaughan, eds., Women of the Mexican Countryside, 1850–1990 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1994), xv; Mary Kay Vaughan, ‘‘Rural Women’s Literacy During the Mexican Revolution: Subverting a Patriarchal Event?’’ in ibid., 106–24. 12. Elizabeth Salas, ‘‘The Soldadera in the Mexican Revolution: War and Men’s Illusions,’’ in Fowler-Salamini and Vaughan, Women of the Mexican Countryside, 93–105.

Introduction

9

despite their movement’s rhetoric of reform and anticorruption, also sought personal enrichment as repayment for having defended the nation against domestic and international threats alike.13 These men invested in such businesses as brothels, gambling halls, and cabarets, which, among other things, reinforced the segregation of male spaces of socialization and leisure away from home. In addition, many of the Revolution’s reforms themselves— education policy and land redistribution, to name two—idealized the father as household head and mediator between the family and the new state, strengthening male authority in public and private spaces alike.14 But studies have shown that the nature of revolutionary coalitions and high-level political compromises themselves also created the possibility for changes in gender policy.15 Some women did assume leadership roles in the armies and in political movements; the new regimes’ reliance on female support required them to grant some concessions to groups with their own political agendas; and the conflicts between reformers and military leaders politicized activities that seemed well outside the scope of revolutionary interest. As groups who were the intended targets of social and moral reforms became aware of the language and themes of redemption, moreover, they added their own meanings to the idea of reform and challenged the state’s version of revolutionary morality, as the language chosen by the ‘‘daughters of disgrace’’ makes clear. Like the experience of women in war, the role of ‘‘popular’’ groups and their influence on revolutionary social policy has preoccupied historians of the Revolution, who have centered their analyses around a series of questions pertaining to political ideology, social participation, and cultural politics over the course of the conflict itself. To what extent did the ‘‘subaltern’’ in Mexico play a role in shaping the outcome of the national revolutionary project? Was the Revolution, in fact, just a male bourgeois event and culmi13. Alan Knight, The Mexican Revolution, 2 vols. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986, 1990), 2:453. 14. Daniel Nugent and Ana Marı´a Alonso, ‘‘Multiple Selective Traditions in Agrarian Reform and Agrarian Struggle: Popular Culture and State Formation in the Ejido of Namiquipa, Chihuahua,’’ in Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico, ed. Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniel Nugent (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 209–46. 15. See Mary Kay Vaughan, ‘‘Modernizing Patriarchy: State Policies, Rural Households and Women in Mexico, 1930–1940,’’ in Hidden Histories of Gender and the State in Latin America, ed. Elizabeth Dore and Maxine Molyneux (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 194–214, as well as Steve J. Stern, The Secret History of Gender: Women, Men and Power in Late Colonial Mexico (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 326–40.

10

Introduction

nation of the nineteenth-century Liberal reforms? Or did it, in the end, create and at least attempt to implement a utopian vision for Mexico?16 After all, Francisco Madero, the northern landowner and revolutionary ‘‘apostle,’’ called Mexicans to revolution in order to demand the recognition of the promises of the Liberal Constitution of 1857 regarding individual political participation that he and his supporters believed the Dı´az regime had stymied.17 And when Madero and his vice president Jose´ Marı´a Pino Sua´rez were killed by men loyal to Dı´az supporter and federal army chief Victoriano Huerta, another northern landowner, Venustiano Carranza, rallied a new coalition of revolutionaries under the goals of constitutionalism and nationalism both to oust the ‘‘usurper’’ and to combat the influence of foreign governments and businesses in Mexico’s internal affairs. Like Madero’s movement, Carranza’s constitutionalism proclaimed a complex assortment of social and economic goals to attract a broad coalition and, for a while at least, found common ground with urban laborers, the followers of northern rebel Francisco ‘‘Pancho’’ Villa, and the followers of the peasant leader and ‘‘Atilla of the South,’’ Emiliano Zapata, who advocated collective-style agrarian reform. Of course, after they ousted Huerta, this fragile constitutionalist coalition dissolved into civil war, with Carrancistas fighting Villistas and Zapatistas for national leadership for two more years.18 By 1916–17, despite the constitutionalist triumphs over Villa and Zapata, and despite the decidedly Carrancista character of the Quere´taro con16. Various studies of the different perspectives on the Mexican Revolution include Adolfo Gilly et al., eds., Interpretaciones de la revolucio´n mexicana (Mexico City: Nueva Imagen, 1979); Alan Knight, ‘‘The Mexican Revolution: Bourgeois? Nationalist? Or Just a ‘Great Rebellion’?’’ Bulletin of Latin American Research 4, no. 2 (1985): 1–37; Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniel Nugent, ‘‘Popular Culture and State Formation in Revolutionary Mexico,’’ in Joseph and Nugent, Everyday Forms of State Formation, 3–23; John Womack Jr., ‘‘The Mexican Revolution, 1910–1920,’’ in Mexico Since Independence, ed. Leslie Bethell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 17. Francisco I. Madero, The Presidential Succession of 1910, trans., Thomas B. Davis (New York: Peter Lang, 1990). 18. Regarding Constitutionalism’s adherence to Liberal goals, Alan Knight writes that ‘‘Constitutionalism’’—or Carrancismo—was not simply Maderismo redivivus. True, it recruited many old Maderistas, it made similar pledges, it was similarly infused with liberal ideas, and it honored the anniversary of Madero’s death every February. But Maderismo had failed in practice and experienced a tragic demise.’’ He instead argues that Carrancismo was therefore the ‘‘ ‘self criticism’ of Maderismo, refined and tempered in the furnace of 1913– 1914; it exemplified a new spirit and new conception of political struggle, in which the old liberal idealism gave way to a ‘ruthless, cunning, arbitrary’ realpolitik’’ (Mexican Revolution, 2:104). On the goals of the Zapatista faction, see the ‘‘Plan de Ayala,’’ in John Womack Jr., Zapata and the Mexican Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), appendix B, 393–404. On the dissolution of the Carranza-Villa-Zapata alliance, see Friedrich Katz, The Secret War in Mexico: Europe, the United States, and the Mexican Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 253–97.

Introduction

11

stitutional convention, the legal code that resulted represented a compromise for groups tired of conflict, for it incorporated measures that were both ‘‘old-style’’ liberal as well as ‘‘collective’’ in nature and which encoded in the nation’s most important legal document a tension between individual rights and community welfare.19 Perhaps nothing reflected this tension between the opposing ideals of individual rights and collective progress more clearly than the revolutionary effort to promote public health reform. The Revolution promised that the individual had the right to enjoy good health, and yet the idea of public health itself asserts that the individual does not have the right to endanger the health of the entire community. Thus the federal government’s effort to reduce the incidence of sexually transmitted disease and to promote public health at a national level necessarily brought public officials into conflict with individual choices regarding work, leisure, sexual behavior, and personal well-being.20 Studying the urban debates over prostitution, public health, gender relations, and reformism is thus a good way to shed light on questions of revolution, state-building, and popular experience. The percentage of the female population working as prostitutes increased over the course of the social and economic disruption of Porfirian ‘‘modernization.’’ The supply of and demand for the services of prostitutes was fostered by revolutionary upheaval itself, and sexual commerce continued to be a source of income for women after the Revolution as well. The war similarly emphasized ideas about male sexual promiscuity among soldiers and military officers, even as the rise of radical constitutionalists and the prominence of socialists, eugenicists, and feminists in reform circles posited new social roles for men and women. Public health reforms not only brought the state into conflict with reformers and the Mexican people, they also rendered visible the role of foreigners in the sex trade. Moral reform in Mexico City intersected with a much broader series of revolutionary concerns regarding economic development, population, the role of the military, and nationalism. Thus when the ‘‘daughters’’ asked whether the Reglamento was ‘‘nationalism or betrayal,’’ 19. Womack, ‘‘The Mexican Revolution of 1910–1920,’’ 176–77. 20. Jose´ Alvarez Ame´zquita et al., Historia de la salubridad y asistencia en Me´xico (Mexico City: Secretarı´a de Salubridad y Asistencia, 1960); on early public health interventions in Mexico, see Romana Falco´n, ‘‘Force and the Search for Consent: The Role of the Jefaturas Polı´ticas of Coahuila in National State Formation,’’ in Joseph and Nugent, Everyday Forms of State Formation, 115; see also Anthony Mazzaferri, ‘‘Public Health and Social Revolution in Mexico, 1877–1930’’ (Ph.D. diss., Department of History, Kent State University, 1968).

12

Introduction

they were being extremely shrewd in their choice of words, for they tied their frustration over the laws that governed their occupation to debates going on at the highest echelons of federal government. Social revolutions are uniquely conducive to full-scale evaluations of sexual behavior, morality, and gender relations. Disputes between peasants and landlords, workers and capitalists, or republicans and monarchs, revolutions are typically violent episodes in which the social base of political power changes hands, in which previously inactive social groups initiate political activity, or in which national economic organizations are restructured in accordance with well-articulated sets of ideas.21 In part, the disruptive process of war itself opens a space in which traditional ideas about gender are challenged, as men, women, and children mobilize to support the struggle. War also fosters opportunities for social change insofar as economic need and even desperation create spaces for new social roles. But it is also true that once the armed phase of revolution is over and participants struggle to define a new order, conflicts of a more ‘‘personal’’ nature seem to emerge. In what is often considered a period of political and social reconstruction, the new leadership works to establish the intellectual and cultural foundations of revolutionary government, bringing politics into the closets, the dressing rooms, the bedrooms, and the thought processes of the people. In France, only a few years after the Oath of the Tennis Court and the proclamation of ‘‘liberty, equality and fraternity,’’ for example, the National Convention decreed what colors citizens should wear and what kinds of beds they should sleep in, reorganized the calendar, and even changed the names of the days of the week.22 What began as an effort to overthrow the tsars in Russia later progressed to a state in which Bolshevik 21. Overviews of theoretical approaches to the study of revolutions include Joseph and Nugent, ‘‘Popular Culture and State Formation in Revolutionary Mexico,’’ in Joseph and Nugent, Everyday Forms of State Formation, 3–24; Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). On the role of ideology in revolution, see the debate between William H. Sewell, Jr., ‘‘Ideologies and Social Revolutions: Reflections on the French Case,’’ Journal of Modern History 57 (1985): 57–85, and Theda Skocpol, ‘‘Cultural Idioms and Political Ideologies in the Revolutionary Reconstruction of State Power: A Rejoinder to Sewell,’’ ibid., 86–96. 22. Lynn Hunt, ‘‘The Unstable Boundaries of the French Revolution,’’ in The History of Private Life, vol. 4, From the Fires of Revolution to the Great War, ed. Michelle Perrot, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1990), 17–19, 21; Michelle Perrot, ‘‘The Family Triumphant,’’ in ibid., 99–167; Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991).

Introduction

13

policymakers advocated ‘‘free love,’’ shared household duties, and left their children in the hands of state-run child care.23 Peasant revolutionaries in China forced women to cut their hair and unbind their feet in the same year they began to reorganize agrarian land holdings.24 In 1971, only a few years after the first successful collectivized sugar harvest, Cuban leaders at the Congress on Education and Culture decreed that homosexuality was a ‘‘social pathology.’’25 The Bolivian Movimiento Nacional Revolucionario regulated the household relations between servants and masters at the same time that its leaders nationalized the tin mines.26 And in revolutionary Nicaragua, Sandinista leaders redistributed rural properties and established free medical clinics while at the same time decreeing the obligations of adult children to aging parents.27 In a broad consideration of revolutionary social reform, then, the Mexican state’s efforts to curb brothel attendance, not to mention close cantinas and ban cockfighting, confirm a predictable yet intriguing revolutionary politicization of leisure, family, and sexual behavior. Despite the tendency for social revolutions to create state interest in a variety of issues unrelated to specifically revolutionary concerns, the politicization of sexual behavior, work, and entertainment is, of course, not solely related to revolution. The concerns of the early twentieth-century Mexican reform community were consistent with international movements regarding the social conditions of modernization, human rights, and public health reform over this same period. As those who have examined the social and political origins of the Mexican Revolution point out, the outbreak of violence there was unique in contemporary Latin America, not because Mexico was relatively underdeveloped, but because the rapid pace of modernization, skewed patterns of export-led development, and more extensive economic 23. Wendy Z. Goldman, ‘‘Working-Class Women and the Withering Away of the Family: Popular Responses to Family Policy,’’ in Russia in the Era of NEP: Explorations in Soviet Society and Culture, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Alexander Rabinowitch, and Richard Stites (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 125–44. 24. Kay Ann Johnson, Women, the Family and Peasant Revolution in China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); Christina Gilmartin, ed., Engendering China: Women, Culture and the State (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994. 25. Alfred Padula, ‘‘Gender, Sexuality and Revolution in Cuba,’’ Latin American Research Review 31 (1996): 226–35; Margaret Randall, Women in Cuba: Twenty Years Later (New York: Smyrna Press, 1981), 101. 26. Leslie Gil, Precarious Dependencies: Gender, Class and Domestic Service in Bolivia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 40–42; Herbert S. Klein, Bolivia: The Evolution of a Multi-Ethnic Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 227–45. 27. Roger Lancaster, Life Is Hard: Machismo, Danger and the Intimacy of Power in Nicaragua (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992).

14

Introduction

growth that had taken place there placed special strains on the nation’s social fabric.28 In this context, the politicization of sexuality, occupation, and leisure in 1920s and 1930s Mexico City was also consistent with reformist concerns over the human costs of modernization that mobilized doctors, jurists, and activists around the world over the same period. At the time that Mexicans in the capital debated and politicized such occupations, cultural practices, and health hazards as prostitution, brothel visitation, and the spread of sexually transmitted infections, the issues were the subjects of considerable concern among feminists, jurists, and humanitarians in Latin America and in the United States, Europe, and colonial Asia and Africa. Indeed, police efforts to repress prostitution, reformers’ concerns about ‘‘ ‘the girl problem,’’ and delegates’ participation in international meetings about ‘‘white slavery’’ reflected the anxieties of political and social elites over the cultural implications of modernization, industrialization, and immigration globally. As in Mexico, the movement of women across borders like goods and the justice of regulated prostitution also mobilized people in England, France, Switzerland, Canada, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Chile, Peru, and the United States who were dedicated to human rights. These men and women believed in the freedom of the individual to choose his or her occupation, objected to state-tolerated prostitution, and promoted the abolition of such policies as the Reglamento of 1926. Reformers formed activist societies and international inspection agencies to determine the roots of ‘‘social ills’’ in diverse national contexts.29 The feminists, legislators, and doctors who debated the relationship of sexual commerce to the Mexican Revolution were familiar with international social reform ideologies and followed the international reform community’s debates over measures to protect women and children closely. Moreover, Mexican feminists and legislators hosted individuals associated with the League of Nations Campaign to Suppress the 28. Katz, Secret War in Mexico, 4. 29. See, for example, Vaughan, ‘‘Modernizing Patriarchy,’’ 195–99; Donna J. Guy, Sex and Danger in Buenos Aires: Prostitution, Family and Nation in Argentina (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991); Asuncio´n Lavrin, Women, Feminism and Social Change in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, 1890–1940 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995); Magali Engel, Meretrices e doutores: Saber medico e prostituc¸a˜o no Rio de Janeiro (Sa˜o Paulo: Editora brasilense, 1988); Mary Gibson, Prostitution and the State in Italy, 1860–1915 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1986); Sheldon Garon, ‘‘The World’s Oldest Debate? Prostitution and the State in Imperial Japan, 1900–1945,’’ American Historical Review 98 (1993): 710–32; and Lori D. Ginzburg, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics and Class in the Nineteenth Century United States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).

Introduction

15

Traffic in Women and Children, corresponded with international activists, published papers by prominent foreigners, attended international conferences, and gave speeches at international reform meetings during and after the period of revolutionary warfare. There is no doubt that these largely middle-class reformers brought a knowledge of and keen interest in international human rights legislation with them to their revolutionary activity.30 But if abolitionism had to do with individual human rights, the politicization of prostitution in revolutionary Mexico City was clearly linked to the international eugenics and health and ‘‘social hygiene’’ movements as well. Doctors, public health specialists, and social activists sought to control female prostitution out of concern over the potential spread of syphilis to clients and children, because they deplored the diffusion of the ‘‘white slave’’ trade, and because they embraced nationalist fears over the implications of foreign immigration, labor market reform, and international trade for local tradition, social order, and economic progress.31 In addition, some activists worried that regulated prostitution reflected ‘‘antimodern’’ and ‘‘uncivilized’’ behavior, an issue that gravely concerned reformers in other rapidly developing Latin American nations dependent on exports and on foreign investment in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.32 Indeed, Mexican public health specialists, eugenicists, criminologists, and social workers actively participated in Pan American health and hygiene conferences, sent delegates to meetings in Europe and the United States, shared information about disease conditions in Mexico with interested colleagues, and brought information about reform projects in other countries home with them. 30. Alan Knight, ‘‘Popular Culture and the Revolutionary State in Mexico, 1910–1940,’’ Hispanic American Historical Review 74 (1994): 396–444. 31. Ruth Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America, 1900–1918 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982); Judith R. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); League of Nations, Report of the Special Body of Experts on the Traffic in Women and Children, pt. 1 (Geneva: Publications of the League of Nations, 1927); Glen Petrie, A Singular Iniquity: The Campaigns of Josephine Butler (New York: Viking Press, 1971). 32. Susan Besse, ‘‘Crimes of Passion: The Campaign Against Wife-Killing in Brazil, 1910– 1940,’’ Journal of Social History 22 (1988): 653–66; Eduardo A. Zimmerman, ‘‘Racial Ideas and Social Reform: Argentina, 1890–1916,’’ Hispanic American Historical Review 72 (1992): 23–45. See also Ricardo D. Salvatore, ‘‘Criminology, Prison Reform and the Buenos Aires Working Class,’’ Journal of Interdisciplinary History 23 (1992): 279–99; Jorge Salessi, ‘‘The Argentine Dissemination of Homosexuality,’’ Journal of the History of Sexuality 4 (1994): 337–68; and Cecilia Mun˜oz and Ximena Pacho´n, La nin˜ez en el siglo XX: Salud, educacio´n, familia, recreacio´n, maltrato, asistencia y proteccio´n (Bogota: Planeta Colombiana Editorial, 1991).

16

Introduction

The politicization of work, leisure, disease, and reformism in the 1920s and 1930s, thus, must be seen as intimately tied both to revolutionary social conditions and ideologies and to the influence of international reformism in Mexico. Prostitution regulations had their origin in French public policy but reached their heyday under Porfirio Dı´az, when his capital city acquired a magnificent veneer that attracted foreign investors but which barely disguised the violence, corruption, and human exploitation that characterized the lives of men and women who were not the direct beneficiaries of Dı´az’s favor. Revolution then exacerbated the precarious situation of villagers and the urban poor, and between 1911 and 1920 refugees flooded the city, changing the political economy of vice and creating new conditions for the spread of venereal disease, even as constitutional debates created a new discourse on rights and welfare. The period of reconstruction gave doctors, social workers, and legislators with interests in human rights and in development issues institutions in which to experiment with new approaches to the problems of disease and exploitation, and citizens’ groups mobilized to address these issues as well. Thus President La´zaro Ca´rdenas’s abolition of the Reglamento in 1940 was intimately tied to international and domestic health and rights imperatives. What this analysis of social reform within revolution shows is that even within the broader context of international concerns over sexually transmitted disease, human rights, occupation, and leisure, Mexican citizens themselves linked reformism to revolutionary nationalism. The published agendas, speeches, petitions, and protests of the reformers show that they perceived the Revolution and sexual commerce to be ideologically and practically joined. It was in the name of the Revolution that officials restricted the mobility of prostitutes by confining them to zonas de tolerancia and limited the work of women in cabarets; it was also in the name of the Revolution that they established schools to reform prostitutes, organized free venereal disease treatment clinics, worked to attract men to afternoon sports leagues instead of brothels, outlawed pimping and procuring, and in 1940 suspended the 1926 Reglamento requiring prostitutes to register as such with health inspectors. Like legislators and activists in Brazil, Chile, Argentina, and the United States, then, Mexican public officials, doctors, and feminists discussed prostitution and its implications for disease and women’s status. However, neighborhood activists, legislators, and even prostitutes themselves debated sexual commerce policy in the 1920s and 1930s, arguing that its persistence represented the Porfiriato’s enduring legacy of inequality and corruption. As such, they said, the persistence of pros-

Introduction

17

titution was a slap in the face to the Revolution’s commitment to promote social equality and enhance the status of marginal groups.33 How is it that in revolutionary Mexico City, prostitution was both an issue in the domestic social revolution and a concern for international movements focused on human rights and public health? There seem to be three reasons for this. The first is that there is something inherent in the activity of revolution—the warfare, the utopian rejection of the past, the idealization of the future, and the reconstruction and state-building—that contributes to the politicization of such issues as sexuality, morality, and reformism. The second is that in the larger process of revolutionary mobilization, social groups not explicitly affiliated with armed activity nevertheless organize collectively and integrate extrarevolutionary concerns into the broader political agenda. The third is that there is an inherent tension between the utopianism of reformism and the reliance of the reformers themselves on older ideas about gender and social class that creates opportunities for new movements not associated with mainstream reformism to integrate their values with the reform agenda. Although the reform processes I describe here are tied both to revolution and to international social movements, I intend this project to contribute to a broad literature on Mexican social and political life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. On the one hand, it works to expand knowledge of revolutionary ideologies by examining social legislation that pertained to urban populations, social diversions, popular culture, women, and public health. On the other, it works to bring the social experiences of poor men and women into sharper focus. Central to my argument is an explicit distinction between the prostitute herself and prostitution. I have assumed that prostitutes have a variety of complex and overlapping reasons for engaging in sexual commerce, including economic obligations to family members, their exploitation and victimization by men or other women, because they believe that prostitution offers greater financial gain than other occupations open to them, or because its potentially transient nature suits their immediate needs. Also, I show that in revolutionary Mexico City, popular and official definitions of who a ‘‘prostitute’’ was varied widely, from the woman working in a brothel who had sexual intercourse with ten to twenty men a day to the young girl who accepted breakfast or a pair of shoes from ´ rgano del Departamento de 33. ‘‘La higiene: Base de la economı´a nacional,’’ Salubridad: O Salubridad Pu´blica 1, no. 1 (1930): 9–10; Extraordinary session, Diario de los Debates de la XXVII Legislatura, June 15, 1918; Extraordinary session, Diario de los Debates de la XXVIII Legislatura, May 12, 1919; Ordinary session, ibid., November 12, 1919.

18

Introduction

a man after her first sexual encounter. Similarly, I assume that men who visited prostitutes also had a variety of reasons for visiting and paying women for sex and that, like the definition of ‘‘prostitute,’’ that of ‘‘patron’’ or ‘‘client’’ varied also. From these perspectives, then, I analyze the politicization of prostitutes and prostitution in early-twentieth-century Mexico City—as well as how different social groups deployed the issue of sexual commerce in petitions and protests between 1910 and 1940—to elucidate the formal and often informal connections between revolution, urban culture, sexuality, and social reform. A decade ago, researchers investigating the social and cultural dynamics of sexuality in twentieth-century Mexico would have had to turn to the largely quantitative studies of population growth and reproductive health for background information. Historians of colonial New Spain and early independent Mexico had published a series of important works on such issues as marriage, sexuality, and prostitution.34 Political scientists and sociologists had expanded the studies of labor and social movements in Mexico to consider women as well.35 But such questions as how twentieth-century men and women thought about sexual behavior, how society defined particular activities as ‘‘masculine’’ or ‘‘feminine,’’ and how and when men and women defined themselves as homosexual or heterosexual in Mexico had 34. See Asuncio´n Lavrin, ed., Sexuality and Marriage in Colonial Latin America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1989); Patricia Seed, To Love, Honor and Obey in Colonial Mexico: Conflicts over Marriage Choice, 1574–1821 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988); Silvia Arrom, The Women of Mexico City, 1790–1857 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985); Tun˜on, Mujeres en Me´xico; Ana Marı´a Atondo Rodrı´guez, El amor venal y la condicio´n femenina en el Me´xico colonial (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropologı´a e Historia, 1992); Josefina Muriel, Los recogimientos de mujeres: Respuesta a una problema´tica novohispana social (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Auto´noma de Me´xico, 1974); Richard Boyer, Lives of the Bigamists: Marriage, Family and Community in Colonial Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995); Juan Jose´ Pescador, De bautizados a fieles difuntos: Familia y mentalidades en una parroquia urbana, Santa Catarina de Me´xico, 1568–1820 (Mexico City: Colegio de Me´xico and Centro para Estudios de Demografı´a y de Desarrollo Urbano, 1992); Stern, Secret History. 35. Tun˜on Pablos, Mujeres que se organizan; Mary Kay Vaughan, State, Education, and Social Class in Mexico, 1880–1928 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1982); Soto, Emergence of the Modern Mexican Woman; Macı´as, Against All Odds; Lourdes Benerı´a and Martha Rolda´n, The Crossroads of Class and Gender: Industrial Homework, Subcontracting and Household Dynamics in Mexico City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); and Brı´gida Garcı´a, Humberto Mun˜oz, and Orlandina de Oliveira, Hogares y trabajadores en la Ciudad de Me´xico (Mexico City: Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales, Universidad Nacional Auto´noma de Me´xico, 1982).

Introduction

19

yet to motivate a substantial body of research from historical, literary, or anthropological perspectives. Within the last decade, however, several works have considerably broadened the field of work on sexuality in Mexico by examining the historical, representational, and quotidian understanding of sexual behavior in Mexican society. Drawing on the methods of cultural anthropology, social history, and literary criticism, researchers have broadened the discussion of sexuality in modern Mexico to include analyses of the intersections of power, culture, and sexuality in a modernizing nation. The approaches of these authors reflect a clear appreciation of the quantitative and demographically oriented work of previous decades, yet these scholars—inspired by Michel Foucault’s insights into sexuality and power; Pierre Bourdieu’s work on class, practice and identity; and Joan Scott’s prescriptions for studying gender and history—also seek to explore how men and women construct their own sexual lives, how sexuality is understood in popular culture, and how defining and negotiating sexual identities reconstructs power relations from the bedroom to the boardroom, ultimately exerting change on the state.36 By focusing on masculinity, homosexuality, and the image of the barren prostitute, these texts are broadening the field of study of Mexican cultural politics by incorporating marginal figures into analyses of society and social change. This new research, which covers areas ranging from Yucata´n and Mexico City to Guadalajara and the U.S. border raises a number of significant questions and suggests fruitful avenues for regionally based and culturally oriented research on sexuality, national identity, and culture.37 Inspired by the promises of these new approaches, I address personal choices, sexual behavior, and power relations in the historical context of 1920s and 1930s Mexico City. But one of the most difficult tasks in writing about the private lives of seemingly marginal people in historical context is that much of the information they offer is mediated by the state. Social workers, doctors, lawyers, and judges summarized inmate or patient inter36. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978); Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977); Joan Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). 37. See, for example, Annick Prieur, Mema’s House: On Transvestites, Queens, and Machos (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Matthew Gutmann, The Meanings of Macho: Being a Man in Mexico City (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996); Joseph Carrier, De los otros: Intimacy and Homosexuality Among Mexican Men (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995); and Carter Wilson, Hidden in the Blood: A Personal Investigation of AIDS in the Yucata´n (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).

20

Introduction

views and submitted subjective reports that shaded official information about poor men and women with the employee’s own class and gender biases. Relying on court cases or reform tracts to elucidate information about poor people can, as many have argued, lead the historian to accept the reformer’s ‘‘moral’’ tone and, with respect to prostitution, make it difficult to hear the voices of the men and women who actually participated in the sex trade themselves. After all, it is likely that the ‘‘daughters’’ had some help in framing their letter to the president, for although the text is typed, their signatures are shaky, suggesting that they had some help framing their protest. And social workers’ assessments of reasons young women went into sexual commerce in the 1920s capital are full of judgments regarding the ‘‘perversions’’ or ‘‘immorality’’ of particular adolescents. As scholars who have examined sexual behavior in historical context have suggested, one way to avoid adopting the moralists’ tone is to explicitly examine the variety of official and reformist attitudes toward such seemingly marginal people as prostitutes, pimps, madams, and brothel patrons.38 Indeed, by studying what some reformers construed as ‘‘deviant’’ and what others saw as ‘‘normal,’’ one can elucidate the broader factors that create tensions over social behavior in a particular society. But studying reformers still skirts the problem of locating the ‘‘voices’’ of the so-called marginal people themselves. How can one determine the attitudes of prostitutes, their clients, pimps, and others who actively participated in the world of sexual commerce? To what extent may some of the information gleaned at the crossroads of work, medicine, and law be taken at face value? How does one use state or reformist sources and still say something about popular experience? When does a legal code merely reflect legislators’ ideas about what is normal or abnormal, and when can it provide broader information about the kinds of activities men and women undertake that others find offensive?39 Moreover, how can one use case files and trial transcripts to shed light on peoples’ ideas about sexual relationships, honor, or individual happiness, knowing that interviewees’ often framed their stories in familiar narratives and that the context of the inter38. Luise White, The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). White observes that ‘‘even analytical studies of prostitution identified with regulationists and reformers’ values’’ and calls for histories of sexual commerce that examine the trade and the relations between women and men on their ‘‘own terms’’ (7). 39. See Florencia Mallon, ‘‘The Promise and Dilemma of Subaltern Studies: Perspectives from Latin American History,’’ American Historical Review 99 (1995), and Gilbert M. Joseph, ‘‘On the Trail of Latin American Bandits: A Reexamination of Peasant Resistance,’’ Latin American Research Review 25 (1990): 7–53.

Introduction

21

view itself no doubt shaped the informants’ vocabulary selection and attention to detail? And how can one generalize about ideas regarding sexuality, morality, or gender norms from a limited set of cases selected for archiving decades ago? These questions, and the use of ‘‘public’’ sources to uncover information about ‘‘private’’ behaviors, have inspired considerable discussion, for as some scholars have pointed out, the process involves a certain level of ‘‘imagining’’ and extrapolation of data.40 Others lament the dearth of statistical information that might help confirm assertions about cultural attitudes or political ideologies.41 To the extent that I have been able, I have sought to use historical statistics, maps, and medical records to provide a broader context for understanding why women went into prostitution or where brothels were located, nevertheless keeping in mind that even numbers are not without their biases, as the forthcoming discussion of late-nineteenth-century efforts to quantify ‘‘vice’’ in the capital make clear. The vast majority of the sources that inform this project on gender and the politics of moral reform in revolutionary Mexico City were located in the national and municipal archives and library collections in the Federal District itself. At the Archivo General de la Nacio´n in Mexico City I consulted the presidential, administrative, and institutional collections, including the case files from the agency for the reform and protection of delinquent children, the Consejo Tutelar para Menores Infractores. This is a closed archive to which I received access thanks to the help of then-director Eutiquio Franco, in 1993, and I have agreed to change the identifying characteristics of the cases I cite to protect the confidentiality of those involved. The Archivo Histo´rico de la Secretarı´a de Salubridad y Asistencia’s collections regarding the administration of urban public health projects as well as the Federal Campaign Against Venereal Disease provided considerable information about the state’s perspectives on health and sexual behavior as well as how prostitutes and clients resisted reformist intrusions into their lives. The Archivo Histo´rico de la Ciudad de Me´xico provided information regarding brothel licenses, public diversions, jails, homicides, and violence in the city over the late years of armed conflict, while I found information about pimping and infanticide at the informal archive at the Reclusorio del Sur federal 40. Debates over the goals and methods of Mexico’s ‘‘new cultural history’’ were the subject of the May 1999 issue of the Hispanic American Historical Review. See William E. French, ‘‘Imagining and the Cultural History of Nineteenth Century Mexico,’’ Hispanic American Historical Review 79 (1999): 249–69. 41. Regarding objections to the ‘‘new’’ cultural history, see Stephen H. Haber, ‘‘Anything Goes: Mexico’s ‘New’ Cultural History,’’ Hispanic American Historical Review 79 (1999): 309–30.

22

Introduction

penitentiary itself. At the Biblioteca Nacional and Hemeroteca Nacional I consulted magazine collections and theses in the areas of social work, psychology, and the law, while at the Archivo Histo´rico de la Secretarı´a de Educacio´n Pu´blica I found information on school hygiene programs and efforts to coordinate sex education and provide vocational training for women interned at the city’s Hospital Morelos. In the United States, the collections at the Library of Congress and the National Archives in Washington, D.C., revealed information on joint U.S.-Mexican efforts in the 1940s to combat the spread of venereal diseases, and at the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas, I consulted that library’s extensive collection of public health bulletins, feminist speeches, and social science monographs published in Mexico in the 1920s and 1930s. Finally, I retrieved data from collections of the Widener, Langdell Law, and Countway Medical libraries at Harvard University, the Regenstein and Crerar Libraries at the University of Chicago, and the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley.

1 The Porfirians’ City of Pleasure Prostitutes, Patrons, and Sexual P ropriety

Late one afternoon in early June of 1903, seventeen-year-old Pedro L., a bricklayer and resident of Mexico’s capital city, stopped at one of the cheap restaurants that were popular gathering spots for the inhabitants of the capital’s less expensive neighborhoods on his way home from work. It’s not clear why he didn’t walk on by. Perhaps it was the odor of hot food wafting from the makeshift kitchen, or maybe it was the sound of drunken laughter emanating from the bar’s interior that inspired him to join the crowd for a pulque or two. Whatever it was that originally prompted him to step through the cafe´’s doors, it is clear that once inside he did not like what he saw. There, drinking at a table with several local prostitutes and a number of male laborers sat his querida (girlfriend), Filomena H., engaged in intimate conversation with a local blacksmith. According to an interview Pedro granted to noted Mexican crime writer Carlos Roumagnac in the fall of that year, he had not seen Filomena for three days when he spied her with the blacksmith and the mujeres pu´blicas. Before that, Pedro said, the couple had lived together for a ‘‘month or so.’’

24

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Pedro knew that the sixteen-year-old Filomena associated with local streetwalkers and ‘‘was already a lost cause, a girl who hung around the neighborhood sleeping with anyone for money or just for the hell of it,’’ but he nevertheless apparently expected her to demonstrate some level of affection for him in exchange for the shelter and physical pleasure that he had given her. After all, as he told Roumagnac, he had been sleeping with women since he was fourteen and felt certain that he had ‘‘satisfied’’ Filomena. When she saw Pedro, however, Filomena apparently recalled a different impression of the bricklayer’s sexual prowess, for she began shouting that he was a caballo (horse), a mula (mule), and a buey(ox) while clinging to the ironworker, who she said was her new padre or father.1 After learning that Filomena considered him homosexual, sexually impotent, and stupid besides, Pedro stalked out of the cafe´.2 That could have been the end of it, but Filomena followed him out onto the street, insulting him continuously. He did not give in to his growing rage, however, until she slapped him. Filomena’s new padre tried to stop the fight, but Pedro pulled a knife. When Pedro lunged at the man he believed had stolen his girlfriend’s affections, Filomena threw herself between them and was mortally wounded. When questioned about his actions, Pedro told Roumagnac that he did not regret having killed Filomena and stated that his fight was with the blacksmith, ‘‘mostly because I knew that he had touched her.’’ Pedro was convicted of homicide and sentenced to eight years in Mexico City’s Belem jail. There, he told Roumagnac, he spent his time trying to avoid the sexual attentions of other male inmates and learning shoe repair as a trade.3 1. Carlos Roumagnac, Los criminales en Me´xico: Ensayo de psicologı´a criminal (Mexico City: Librerı´a de Ch. Bouret, 1904), 90–93. It is unclear what, exactly, padre means in this context. The word padrote sometimes referred to a male procurer during this period, and Filomena could have implied that the blacksmith was her new ‘‘pimp.’’ Or her use of the word might just reflect that she considered that she had found a better ‘‘protector’’ in her new boyfriend. 2. In his introduction to sexual behaviors at the Belen Jail, Carlos Roumagnac explains the language the prisoners used to describe different sexual practices and positions. According to Roumagnac, the caballo was the ‘‘passive’’ participant in a sexual encounter between men (Los criminales en Me´xico, 77–78). By calling Pedro a caballo Filomena directly challenged her former lover’s masculinity. On Roumagnac’s investigations of homosexuality at Belen, see Robert Buffington, ‘‘Los Jotos: Contested Visions of Homosexuality in Modern Mexico,’’ in Sex and Sexuality in Latin America, ed. Donna J. Guy and Daniel Balderston (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 118–32. For popular definitions of buey (stupid) and mula (sterile), see Armando Jime´nez, Vocabulario prohibido de la picardı´a mexicana (Mexico City: Editorial Posada, 1976). I thank Rob Buffington and Pablo Piccato for sharing their thoughts on how to translate these words with me. 3. Roumagnac, Los criminales en Me´xico, 90–93. Roumagnac defines chulo as ‘‘he who had the rights to her [a prostitute’s] sexual favors without the customary fee’’ (151).

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The story of Pedro’s jealousy, Filomena’s insults, their fight, and Filomena’s murder raises questions about gender relations and sexual practices in Mexico City during the late Porfiriato. A period when public officials estimated that there were between 11,000 and 30,000 working prostitutes in a city of only about four hundred thousand residents, the last decade of the dictatorship that would drive Mexico to revolution was a time of considerable economic and social upheaval for men and women alike.4 Among other things, the continuing consolidation of private property under mid-nineteenth-century Liberal reforms and the shift from subsistence agriculture to the cultivation of commercial crops in the Mexican countryside pushed women and men from traditional villages; the central valley’s industrialization lured them to the city on their own or with family members looking for work, independence, or adventure.5 In the city, however, unpredictable labor cycles, crowded living conditions, inflation, low wages, and the dangers and pleasures of urban life put new tensions on family relationships. Adolescents sought their own work and leisure activities, parents and siblings succumbed to the diseases of poor nutrition, crowded living, and bad sanitation, and poverty tempted many to engage in such marginal activities as prostitution and procuring.6 While we don’t know why Filomena herself became a prostitute or why she took up residence with a man she apparently despised, it seems clear that the young woman had somehow reconciled herself to a life of sexual pro4. Luis Lara y Pardo, La prostitucio´n en Me´xico (Mexico City and Paris: Librerı´a de la Vda. de Ch. Bouret, 1908), 19, 25–29. 5. Ciro Cardoso and Carmen Reyna, ‘‘La industria de transformacio´n (1880–1920),’’ in Me´xico en el siglo xix: Historia econo´mica y de la estructura social, ed. Ciro Cardoso (Mexico City: Nueva Imagen, 1988), 381–404; Gustavo Garza, El proceso de industrializacio´n en la ciudad de Me´xico, 1821–1970 (Mexico City: Centro de Estudios de Demografı´a y del Desarrollo Urbano, Colegio de Me´xico, 1985), 86; John Tutino, From Insurrection to Revolution: Social Bases of Agrarian Violence, 1750–1940 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 322–23; Katz, Secret War in Mexico, 6, 13; Stephen H. Haber, Industry and Underdevelopment: The Mexican Economy, 1890–1940 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986). 6. John Lear, ‘‘Mexico City: Popular Classes and Revolutionary Politics,’’ in Cities of Hope: People, Protests and Progress in Urbanizing Latin America, 1870–1930, ed. James A. Baer and Ronn Pineo (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1998), 53–87; Rodney Anderson, ‘‘Mexican Workers and the Politics of Revolution,’’ Hispanic American Historical Review 54 (1974): 94–113; Tony Morgan, ‘‘Proletarians, Polı´ticos, and Patriarchs: The Use and Abuse of Cultural Customs in the Early Industrialization of Mexico City, 1880–1910,’’ in Rituals of Rule: Public Celebrations and Popular Culture in Mexico, ed. William H. Beezley, Cheryl English Martin and William E. French (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1994), 151–71; Ricardo Pe´rez Montfort, ed., Ha´bitos, norma y esca´ndalo: Prensa, criminalidad y drogas durante el Porfiriato tardı´o (Mexico City: Plaza y Valde´s, 1997).

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miscuity, violence, and hardship. Through Roumagnac we do know that Pedro’s father had died of pneumonia some nine years earlier and that his mother passed away in January of the year in which he killed Filomena. Five of his eight siblings had died, and, like his parents, Pedro enjoyed drinking alcohol. He was also, by his own account, fond of sexually adventuresome women. Before killing Filomena, Pedro had been in jail twice for raterı´a, or petty theft.7 What brought such young men and women as Pedro, Filomena, and the blacksmith together in love, desire, jealousy, and violence? If Pedro knew Filomena was a prostitute and that she routinely had sexual relations with other men, why was he jealous of the blacksmith’s attentions to her that summer afternoon in 1903, and why did he resort to violence in order to resolve the conflict? For her part, how did Filomena move so quickly from living with Pedro to seeking the blacksmith’s ‘‘protection,’’ and what compelled her to insult Pedro’s intelligence and sexual prowess in public? It’s impossible to know, of course, what the couple’s domestic life was like, why Filomena hadn’t been home in three days, or what happened to the blacksmith. It is clear, however, that this tale of sex and violence was hardly an isolated incident in early-twentieth-century Mexico City.8 Late Porfirian newspapers, police reports, medical surveys, crime studies, and even travel guides all confirm that many of the women in the capital’s poor neighborhoods frequently worked as prostitutes, that men of all professions and classes associated with them, and that these men and women repeatedly engaged in violence inspired by jealousy, infidelity, disrespect, or perceived offense in the context of a sexual relationship. In a narrow sense, the documents of the Porfiriato shed light on the everyday practice of sexual commerce and the more general ideas about sexuality and sociability that characterized life in the city’s poorer barrios. In a broader sense, they reveal something about the cultural processes of urbanization and economic development that characterized the later years of this period. They show how sexual behavior, for observers like Roumagnac and others, could be a 7. Roumagnac, Los criminales en Me´ xico, 90–93. On raterı´ a, see Pablo Piccato, ‘‘¡Cuidado con los rateros!’’ (paper presented at the Conference on the Contested Terrains of Law, Justice, and Repression in Latin America, Yale University, May 1997). 8. Travel guides from the late Porfiriato frequently commented on the violence visitors to the city could expect. See Adolfo Dollero, Me´xico al dı´a: Impresiones y notas de viaje (Mexico City and Paris: Librerı´a de la Vda. de Ch. Bouret, 1908, 1911), and Adolfo Prantl and Jose´ L. Grosso, La ciudad de Me´xico: Novı´sima guı´a universal de la capital de la Repu´blica Mexicana. Directorio clasificado de vecinos y funciones del Gobierno Federal y oficinas de su dependencia (Mexico City: Librerı´a Madrilen˜a, 1901).

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27

marker for social class, and how the Porfirian ideals of rationality, ‘‘order, and progress’’ were consistently undermined by popular conceptualizations about honor and status.9 Analyzing the social practice and organization of commercial sex in Porfirian Mexico City makes it possible to understand the anxiety prostitutes and prostitution created for capitalinos during the later reform phase of the Revolution. During this period legislators and public officials decried the excesses of Porfirian sexual culture and emphasized the ancien re´gime’s corruption to justify the Revolution’s strictures regarding moral purity. But if the political elite had fostered a culture dedicated to their own proclivities at the expense of the Mexican people, as reformers claimed, evidence also shows that the activities of prostitutes and patrons themselves were critical in shaping attitudes about sexual propriety in the Porfirians’ city of pleasure.

The Law of Desire According to the 1872 Reglamento para el ejercicio de la prostitucio´n en Me´xico, a prostitute was any woman over the age of fourteen who was not a virgin, who habitually had sexual relations with more than one man, and who expressed a specific desire to engage in sexual commerce.10 The Reglamento’s stated purpose was to protect the general population from exposure to such sexually transmitted diseases as syphilis, gonorrhea, and other bacteria-borne infections, whose effects ranged from the debilitating to the 9. William E. French, ‘‘Prostitutes and Guardian Angels: Women, Work and Family in Porfirian Mexico,’’ Hispanic American Historical Review 72 (1992): 529–53. Three other discussions of Porfirian-era prostitution are Marcela Sua´rez and Guadalupe Rı´os de la Torre, ‘‘Aculturacio´n, mujer y el discurso sobre la prostitucio´ n,’’ in Espacios de mestizaje cultural (Mexico City: Universidad Auto´noma Metropolitana, Azcapotzalco, 1991), 117–34; Carmen Ramos Escando´n, ‘‘Sen˜oritas porfirianas: Mujer e ideologı´a en el Me´xico progresista, 1880– 1910,’’ in Presencia y transparencia: La mujer en la historia de Me´xico, ed. Ramos Escando´n (Mexico City: Colegio de Me´xico, 1987), 143–61; and Cristina Rivera-Garza, ‘‘Prostitutes, Sexual Crimes, and Society in Mexico, 1867–1930’’ (paper presented at the conference ‘‘The Contested Terrains of Law, Justice, and Repression in Latin America,’’ Yale University, April 1997). 10. ‘‘Reglamento para el ejercicio de la prostitucio´n,’’ 1872, article 1, in AHSSA-SP-IAV, box 1, file 1. Franco Guzma´n, ‘‘El re´gimen jurı´dico,’’ provides a helpful overview of the legal history of regulationism in Mexico. See also Alvarez Ame´zquita et al., Historia de la salubridad y asistencia en Me´xico.

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deadly.11 The law rested on the assumption that the sexually active population was heterosexual and that it was customary for ‘‘normal’’ men to pay ‘‘deviant’’ women in exchange for sexual services. Since the ‘‘normal’’ Mexican female was expected to devote herself to the tasks of reproduction and mothering, the Reglamento thus placed the burden of disease prophylaxis on the ‘‘deviant’’ and sexually promiscuous woman, whom it expected to register with public health authorities, pay licensing fees, carry an identification card, undergo weekly gynecological examinations, and submit to hospitalization if found to be carrying a venereal infection.12 Although men clearly participated in the process of disease transmission, sexually promiscuous males were exempt from legal or medical surveillance. Unregistered women merely suspected of having several sexual partners, however, could not count on the same treatment, for medical authorities considered them to be clandestinas, and health inspectors regularly hunted, arrested, physically inspected, and involuntarily registered such women as prostitutes.13 The emphasis the 1872 Reglamento placed on keeping sexually promiscuous women under regular legal and medical surveillance drew on the models of public health regulation established in Europe some four decades earlier and set the tone for the Porfirian state’s legal and medical intervention into the popular male practice of paying women for sex. The idea that registering and inspecting prostitutes was the best way to check the spread of syphilis had originated in Paris in the 1830s, and governmental oversight of sexual commerce had been widely adopted throughout Europe and Latin 11. For a review of syphilis and its treatment in historical perspective, see Charles Clayton Dennie, A History of Syphilis (Springfield, Ill.: Charles Thomas Publishers, 1962), 103–26; John Thomas Crissey and Lawrence Charles Parish, The Dermatology and Syphilology of the Nineteenth Century (New York: Praeger, 1981); Allan M. Brandt, No Magic Bullet: A Social History of Venereal Disease in the United States Since 1880, expanded ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); and Theodor Rosebury, Microbes and Morals: The Strange Story of Venereal Disease (New York: Viking, 1971). 12. For historical perspectives on mothering in early-nineteenth-century Mexico, see Arrom, The Women of Mexico City. Arrom writes that the ‘‘growing prestige of motherhood now imbued with a civic function, meant that mothers deserved recognition for their worthwhile contributions to society’’ (85–86). Also see V. Guadalupe Romero, ‘‘Sobre el medio ma´s fa´cil y sencillo de generalizar la buena educacio´n primaria en la Repu´blica: Discurso pronunciado en la Sociedad de Geografı´a y Estadı´stica,’’ Suplemento al tono sesto del Boletı´n de la Sociedad Mexicana de Geografı´a y Estadı´stica (Mexico City, 1858). 13. ‘‘Reglamento para el ejercicio de la prostitucio´n,’’ 1872, in AHSSA-SP-IAV, box 1, file 1. These laws were similar to those enacted later in Argentina and Colombia. See Guy, Sex and Danger in Buenos Aires, 52, and Marlene Sa´nchez Moncada, ‘‘La prostitucio´n en Bogota´,’’ Anuario Colombiano de Historia Social y de la Cultura 25 (1988): 146–87.

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29

America by the end of the nineteenth century under hygienic justifications.14 Originally imposed by French authorities during their country’s ill-fated imperialist project in Mexico in the early 1860s, public health regulation of sexual commerce was officially adopted by Mexican health authorities under the Restored Republic in 1867, and the 1872 Reglamento represented the first real refinements to the French law. Between 1873 and 1898 Porfirian public health experts modified the Reglamento only slightly, raising the minimum age at which a woman could legally register as a prostitute from fourteen to sixteen and expanding the list of contagious afflictions which could subject a woman to involuntary medical care.15 But despite its stated devotion to furthering the goals of late-nineteenth-century medical science, the Mexican public health community’s emphasis on registration, surveillance, and medical prophylaxis of sexually active women in order to prevent the spread of disease also rested on older Catholic notions of moral transgression. These religious ideas conceptualized prostitution as a ‘‘necessary evil’’ and tolerated the prostitute’s ‘‘sin’’ as an aid in preventing sexually adventuresome men from creating greater threats to the social order by engaging in such activities as rape, bestiality, pederasty, or homosexual intercourse.16 Despite the general conviction on the part of the public health and medical communities that the regular inspection of prostitutes was the best way to protect sexually promiscuous Mexican men, their wives, and their children from a plague of contagious, untreatable disease, the Mexicans’ early efforts at registering prostitutes failed miserably. By 1872 authorities had succeeded in tracking down only 311 women, a figure which most likely represented only those involved in the very top echelon of sexual commerce. 14. Alain Corbin,Women for Hire: Prostitution and Sexuality in France after 1850, trans. Alan Sheridan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 3–29. For discussions of different responses to regulationism in Europe, the United States and other parts of Latin America, see Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society, 13–39; Timothy Gilfoyle, City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790–1920 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), 181–223; Rosen, Lost Sisterhood, 10–13; Lavrin, Women, Feminism and Social Change, 141; Sueann Caulfield, In Defense of Honor: Gender, Sexuality and Nation in Early 20th Century Brazil (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 40, 58–59. 15. Franco Guzma´n, ‘‘El re´gimen jurı´dico,’’ 83–134. 16. On colonial and religious perspectives on prostitution and criminality in Spain and New Spain, see Muriel, Los recogimientos de mujeres; Atondo Rodrı´guez, El amor venal; Mary Elizabeth Perry, Gender and Disorder in Early Modern Seville (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); and Ruth Pike, Penal Servitude in Early Modern Spain (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1983).

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The uneasy coexistence of religious and scientific beliefs among male hygienists characterized early efforts to understand why women turned to prostitution in the capital city. In that year, head of Mexico’s Inspeccio´n de Sanidad, Dr. Jose´ Marroui, captured the disgust with which male public authorities officially regarded all prostitutes when he published a ‘‘scientific’’ report revealing the reasons Mexican women entered prostitution, which was commonly referred to as la vida or ‘‘the life.’’ Underscoring the public health community’s faith in the explanatory powers of statistical analysis, the hygienist, after interviewing the women, selected one of several broad options to quantify the reasons Mexican women resorted to sexual commerce in an urban environment. Such categories as ‘‘love for the adventuresome life,’’ ‘‘because of jealousies,’’ and ‘‘because of vices or inclinations,’’ which totaled more than half of the available options for the more than three hundred women Marroui interviewed (see Table 1), suggested that sexually active, nonmonogamous women were passionate, tempestuous, and morally wayward creatures who could neither control their lives nor their tendencies toward lasciviousness and licentiousness.17 Dr. Jose´ Marı´a Reyes, a hygienist who also studied the matter and who published a paper in Mexico’s prestigious Gaceta Me´dica two years later, confirmed prostitutes’ tendencies toward greed and sloth, stating that ‘‘in some women who are not of the lower class, but who are not quite middle class either, fictitious necessities exert a powerful influence. The desire to appear in public in clothing that these women’s fathers could not possibly afford obligates them to throw themselves into a relationship that almost always ends in prostitution.’’18 Marroui’s colleague in the public health service, Dr. Ignacio Bravo y Alegre, similarly summarized the medical establishment’s sense that women who engaged in sexual commerce were a justifiable—if repugnant—‘‘evil,’’ stating that ‘‘although it is a vile class, despised and considered scum by all of society, it is a scum on which society nevertheless depends.’’19 On the eve of Porfirio Dı´az’s successful Revolution of Tuxtepec, which would establish the Oaxacan military caudillo as Mexico’s president and as the architect of the nation’s transition to modernity, medical authorities viewed sexually promiscuous women of all classes with suspicion and disgust and yet a quasireligious conviction that their labor prevented worse problems overall. 17. Jose´ Marroui, ‘‘Memoria de la prostitucio´n,’’ 1872, in AHSSA-SP-IAV, box 1, file 4. 18. Jose´ Marı´a Reyes, ‘‘Higiene pu´blica: Estudio sobre la prostitucio´n en Me´xico,’’ Gaceta Me´dica de Me´xico, December 15, 1874, 453. 19. ‘‘Informe del comisario de la Inspeccio´n de Sanidad Bravo y Alegre,’’ 1873, in AHSSASP-IAV, box 1, file 17.

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Table 1 Prostitutes’ Reasons for Entering La Vida, 1872

Image not available

Source: Jose´ Marroui, ‘‘Memoria de la prostitucio´n,’’ 1872, AHSSA-SP-IAV, box 1, file 4.

Between 1876 and 1911, the medical community’s interest in classifying social deviance and understanding the ‘‘distribution of vice’’ in the capital led health officials to refine the regulation system, which enshrined a hierarchy within sexual commerce and crowned the matrona as the ideal mediator between prostitutes, their clients, and the Mexican state. Under the latenineteenth-century public health regulations, women were classified either as being en comunidad, that is, working in brothels where they also lived, or as aisladas, independent women who could meet clients in a variety of locales: casas de asignacio´n, houses run by matronas where registered prostitutes had sexual intercourse with men but where they did not live; casas de citas, houses run by matronas where inscritas and unregistered women, alike, could meet and socialize with males to whom they were not married; registered hotels; and their own rooms, called accesorias, which could also be licensed for the practice of sexual commerce. According to this classification schema, brothels were divided into four classes, which covered the range from posh pleasure palaces, where prostitutes and patrons enjoyed fine decorations and sumptuous private bedrooms, to crude shacks, where prostitutes and patrons coupled on rough woven mats, using only tattered blankets to secure some privacy from the others doing the same thing only a few feet away. Casas de asignacio´n were similarly classified, and brothel and casa madams alike paid licensing fees that depended on the class of their establishment.20 Under the Reglamento, matronas ensured that the pupilas under their su20. ‘‘Proyecto de ‘Reglamento de mujeres pu´blicas,’ ’’ 1867, in AHSSA-SP-IAV, box 1, file 1.

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pervision adhered to the provisions of the state’s anti-syphilis campaign, for by law the matronas were responsible for ensuring that the women were registered, that they reported for their medical exams on a regular basis, and that the clients who frequented their establishments were free from disease as well. Matronas over the age of thirty were not themselves required to register as prostitutes, for the law apparently could not contemplate sexual desirability in a woman over that age; however, the madam was responsible for ensuring that all pupilas were old enough to work in sexual commerce. Under the 1871 penal code matronas could be arrested for the crime of corrupcio´n de menores if they intentionally recruited underage girls.21 In fact, the matrona who ‘‘habitually procures or facilitates the corruption of those under the age of eighteen to satisfy the disgusting passions of another’’ could be imprisoned for between six and eighteen months; and this conviction carried an even weightier penalty if the child was under the age of eleven.22 Thus, late-nineteenth-century public health regulations and criminal law alike held the matrona responsible for both physical and moral contagion within the urban milieu.

Labor of ‘‘Love’’ Some thirty-six years after Dr. Marroui’s survey of Inspeccio´n de Sanidad records revealed only 311 registered prostitutes in Mexico City, Dr. Luis Lara y Pardo, a social hygienist who published a book called La prostitucio´n en Me´xico, surprised the reading public when he announced that there were almost 10,000 registered prostitutes in the 1908 capital, a city which in the 1900 census had counted only 195,251 women. The 1898 Reglamento had raised the minimum legal age for prostitutes to sixteen, and Lara y Pardo calculated that nearly 98 percent of the city’s prostitutes were between the ages of fifteen and thirty. Moreover, his figures demonstrate that slightly more than 15 percent of the city’s young adult women were officially engaged in sex work by the time of the Revolution.23 More shocking, then, was Lara y Pardo’s conclusion that there had to be at least as many clandestinas circulating in the city’s marginal neighborhoods! Like Dr. Marroui, Lara y Pardo surveyed the available statistical data from the Inspec21. Francisco Javier Ramos Bejarano, El delito de corrupcio´n de menores, estudio dogma´tico (Mexico City: UNAM Facultad de Derecho, 1961). 22. Ibid., 17. 23. Lara y Pardo, La prostitucio´n en Me´xico, 19.

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cio´n de Sanidad to determine the social and economic circumstances that surrounded young Mexican women’s alarming turn to prostitution. Lara y Pardo’s information confirmed early hygienist Jose´ Marı´a Reyes’s bold assertion that ‘‘few, very few, women from society’s decent families form part of this disgraceful contingent,’’ and revealed that work in sexual commerce afforded many poor women with a means of integrating into an often lackluster urban economy.24 He made careful notes of the kinds of occupations from which prostitutes came, studied the women’s fathers’ professions, considered the women’s stated level of education, and concluded that most capital city prostitutes were poor, rural migrants who had little schooling and pitifully few vocational skills. For the years Lara y Pardo reviewed, 1904 and 1905, the great majority of prostitutes either reported working as domestic servants or claimed absolutely no other means of occupation save offering their bodies to Mexico’s men. Those women who did claim more diverse work experience had labored in low-paying and unskilled jobs in such fields as laundry, sewing, restaurant service, and light manufacturing, which in the early 1900s rarely provided female employees with a living wage.25 In La prostitucio´n en Me´xico, moreover, Lara y Pardo even speculated on the likely sexual desirability of the inscritas. Out of the 774 prostitutes categorized physically at the Consejo Superior de Salubridad in 1905, he noted, only 61 were ‘‘pretty,’’ while a full 446 had been classified as ‘‘ugly’’ by the inspector in charge. Despite the fact that he ironically noted that ‘‘the obligatory homeland of all prostitutes is Guadalajara,’’ the city which supposedly boasted the most beautiful women in all of Mexico, apparently this information was not enough to offset the fact that in the eyes of Mexico’s distinguished medical specialists, prostitution seemed to attract the country’s least attractive women.26 His survey results were consistent with Marroui’s 1872 social analysis and echoed Roumagnac’s 1903 interviews, confirming that even if there were a few prostitutes who claimed to be from such exotic sites as Spain, France, the United States, or even Cuba, the streets of the Federal District were teeming with largely poor, unprepared young Mexican women ready to sell their sexual favors in exchange for a meal, a few centavos, or a pair of shoes (see Tables 2 and 3).27 Lara y Pardo describes how such factors as education, migration, and 24. 25. 26. 27.

Reyes, ‘‘Higiene pu´blica,’’ 452. Lara y Pardo, La prostitucio´n en Me´xico, 35–40; Lear, ‘‘Mexico City,’’ 53–87. Lara y Pardo, La prostitucio´n en Me´xico, 52. Marroui, ‘‘Memoria de la prostitucio´n,’’ 1872, in AHSSA-SP-IAV, box 1, file 4.

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Table 2

Prostitutes’ Occupations, 1904

Image not available

Source: Luis Lara y Pardo, La prostitucio´n en Me´xico (Mexico City: Librerı´a de la Vda. de Ch. Bouret, 1908), pp. 35–40.

limited employment options for women prompted many to turn to prostitution in late Porfirian Mexico City. Nevertheless, he failed to capture the more personal family conflicts, lovers’ quarrels, physical abuse, and other difficulties that led women to what was widely understood to be an undesirable occupation. In his survey, Marroui had acknowledged the impact family and personal difficulties had on women’s prostitution and had attempted to quantify these issues through the use of such categories as ‘‘because of jealousies’’ or ‘‘because of vices.’’ But Lara y Pardo’s own opinion that the ‘‘prostitute is the most rudimentary, most degenerate social parasite,’’ in fact, left little room for such understandings. His assessment contradicts the life histories many prostitutes presented to pubic officials and to interested

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Table 3 Prostitutes’ Birthplaces, 1904–1905

Image not available

Source: Luis Lara y Pardo, La prostitucio´n en Me´xico (Mexico City: Librerı´a de la Vda. de Ch. Bouret, 1908), p. 49.

interviewers like journalist and amateur criminologist Carlos Roumagnac. Indeed, such convictions as Lara y Pardo’s that the prostitute’s ‘‘aptitude for living a normal life atrophies because she does not have to do anything to ensure her subsistence; her mental capacity diminishes; and her free will is paralyzed, her moral sentiment vaporizes until it vanishes completely’’ demonstrates more about his own fears and concerns about poverty, de-

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generation, and urban life than about the prostitutes’ lives and struggles themselves.28 When interviewed, many women rejected the medical and scientific establishment’s notion that they were physically degenerate, instead invoking older religious ideas of shame and repentance to explain their participation in what many acknowledged was a ‘‘life of sin.’’29 Moreover, they sought even as sexually promiscuous women to project an image of feminine modesty and humility. In their registration photographs first- and second-class women dressed with the utmost decorum, like women of the classes to which their clientele belonged. Julia Gonza´lez, a first-class inscrita who sat for her picture in 1865 under the initial French health regime, for example, donned a flower-adorned hat over her curled hair and wore a sumptuous but practical jacket, parasol, and hoop skirt for the occasion. In the same year, the second-class inscrita Amalia Rojas wore her shoulder-length hair pulled back from her face with a simple band and wore a flowered shawl over a plain, high-collared white dress and earrings.30 The register from 1869 shows that nineteen-year-old Jesusa Espinosa, originally from Mexico City, wore what appears to have been a plain servant’s outfit for her thirdclass photograph.31 Testimony from 1909 confirms that prostitutes were still orchestrating their appearance to reflect the social class of their clientele and to project their social aspirations. Dr. Eduardo Lavalle Carvajal, a syphilis specialist and member of the Inspeccio´n de Sanidad service, wrote in that year that ‘‘the apparel of the lowest-class prostitutes is no different from that of our most ragged peladas. Those of the second- and third-class look like our women workers, save that they wear flashier clothing, and the firstclass prostitutes adopt the fashions of our bourgeois ladies and grandes dames such that it is not easy to tell whether the colors of their skirts are more attention-getting or their hats larger and more attractive.’’ On the street, he said, ‘‘the prostitute defends herself from the cold and from indis28. Lara y Pardo, La prostitucio´n en Me´xico, 90–91. 29. ‘‘Carmen Olvera pide quedar separada de la prostitucio´n,’’ 1909, in AHSSA-SP-IAV, box 2, file 32. See also ‘‘Carmen Alfaro . . . esta´ inscrita como mujer pu´blica, pero arrepentida de ello va a vivir en lo sucesivo de una manera honrada trabajando como costurera y por lo tanto, a Ud. suplica . . . ,’’ 1909, ibid. 30. Sergio Gonza´lez Rodrı´guez, ‘‘Cuerpo, control y mercancı´a: Fotografı´a prostibularia,’’ Luna Co´rnea, no. 4 (1994): 74–75; Patricia Masse´, ‘‘Photographs of Mexican Prostitutes in 1865,’’ History of Photography 20, no 3 (1996). 31. Gonza´lez Rodrı´guez, ‘‘Cuerpo, control y mercancı´a,’’ 72.

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creet glances the same way as any other person of her sex,’’ referring, presumably, to women’s common use of the long shawl or rebozo.32 Interviews, surveys, and the prostitutes’ own testimony reveal that a young woman’s early and often involuntary sexual debut was the principal factor that led her to sell sexual services in brothels and on Mexico’s city streets. The physical and emotional pain of sexual violation by a male relative, acquaintance, or family friend, coupled with Mexican society’s idealization of feminine sexual purity, led some sexually experienced young women, they told investigators, to see themselves as worthless except as prostitutes to the greater male public. To counter this kind of claim, Lara y Pardo cynically confided to his readers that ‘‘it can be affirmed, following observation and hearsay, that the majority of these women lost their virginity quite voluntarily in that terrible promiscuity in which our lower classes live. Others have lost it indiscriminately, as if it were something trivial.’’33 Nevertheless, women who spoke to Carlos Roumagnac from Belem Jail in the early 1900s insisted that rape, incest, and sexual abuse were traumatic incidents that set them on the road to the brothel. Marı´a Villa, ‘‘La Chiquita,’’ the famous Mexico City prostitute who killed suspected rival ‘‘La Malaguen˜a’’ in 1897, told Carlos Roumagnac in a 1903 interview that her ‘‘deflowering’’ at the age of thirteen, her subsequent abandonment by her ‘‘lover,’’ and her later addiction to morphine were factors that had led her to a life of prostitution and which had kept her there. As ‘‘La Chiquita’’ reflected on her life from the perspective of a dimly lit cell in Belem jail, she told Roumagnac that she had left her home on the outskirts of the provincial city of Guadalajara to work as a live-in maid for a local family. When she was only thirteen, however, the household’s oldest son raped her and then kidnapped her from the family home, placing her in a separate house where he kept her as his querida and yet had sexual relations with her only three more times over a nine-month period out of apparent respect for Villa’s stated distaste for sexual intercourse. Although he perhaps hoped that she would reconcile herself to his attentions, the young man apparently tired of her failure to develop a spirit of sexual adventure and moved on, abandoning her to her fate. Alone, the young Villa returned to domestic servitude, the only work that she knew, but, Roumagnac writes, 32. Eduardo Lavalle Carvajal, ‘‘Profila´xis vene´rea: Medios pra´cticos de fa´cil aplicacio´n y de prontos resultados,’’ Gaceta Me´dica de Me´xico, May 31, 1909, 337. 33. Lara y Pardo, La prostitucio´n en Me´xico, 58, 90–91.

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Image not available

Fig. 1 The widely publicized 1897 murder trial of Marı´a Villa, alias ‘‘La Chiquita,’’ captured the attention of capitalino society and made the public aware of the conditions in which prostitutes worked and lived. Reprinted from Roberto Berdecio and Stanley Appelbaum, eds., Posada’s Popular Mexican Prints (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, 1972).

‘‘during that period one of so many traffickers in human flesh was making the rounds of Guadalajara, searching for young merchandise, and with the help of two friends of Villa’s, tracked down the girl, trapped her in her nets and sealed the infamous contract, bringing Marı´a to Mexico, where she began her life in the brothel at the age of fifteen.’’ In the capital, the young Villa, who was later dubbed ‘‘La Chiquita’’ for her diminutive size, became a morphine addict and a depressive before shooting and killing a woman she suspected of having seduced her chulo.34 The common practice of placing inexperienced adolescent daughters in the households of more prosperous families as domestic servants put thousands of young women, like Marı´a Villa, at substantial risk of rape or sexual abuse. Because they were young, unmarried, unprotected, uneducated, and female, they were easy sexual prey for male superiors or even other domestic 34. Roumagnac, Los criminales en Me´xico, 106. For a study of Marı´a Villa’s notoriety, see Rafael Sagredo, Marı´a Villa (a) La Chiquita, no. 4002 (Mexico City: Cal y Arena, 1996). See also Robert Buffington and Pablo Picatto, ‘‘Tales of Two Women: The Narrative Construal of Porfirian Reality,’’ The Americas 55, no. 3 (January 1999): 391–424.

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workers who were indifferent to the virginity of unrelated, poorer women.35 The example of M. Isabel M., a thirty-year-old native of Mexico City, for example, confirms this pattern of domestic servitude, early sexual experience, and a life of personal difficulties that ended in violence and incarceration. According to Roumagnac, Isabel was the daughter of a porter-father and street vendor–mother who had separated when she was young. At the age of eleven she began work as a domestic servant. By age fourteen she had abandoned that work to run away with a pastry cook who ‘‘dishonored’’ her before abandoning her to the streets of the capital. An adolescent who was sexually experienced and whose sister, according to Roumagnac, had at age thirteen ‘‘embraced la vida,’’ Isabel had few female role models, and Roumagnac wrote that at that point ‘‘she turned to prostitution, perhaps imitating her sister.’’36 According to his report, her existence had only become more difficult in the seventeen years since she had begun selling her sexual services to Mexico City’s men. To make her work less distasteful, it seems, Isabel, like ‘‘La Chiquita,’’ had turned to mood-altering drugs. Over time she had become addicted to the popular fermented cactus drink, pulque, and got intoxicated frequently so that, as she told Roumagnac, she would feel ‘‘as though [her] whole body were asleep.’’ When drunk, moreover, Isabel fought easily with other prostitutes as well as her clients, and she had been hospitalized five times for serious cuts to her body and face, one of which had left her with a disfiguring eleven-centimeter scar. But Isabel’s life finally took a turn for the worse when she was incarcerated for killing her lover, a shoemaker named Manuel R., on the tenth of April 1900. According to Isabel, she and Manuel had been in an admittedly nonmonogamous relationship for about a year, and he was her common-law husband or aması´o. The couple’s problems apparently began when Manuel began to beat her. Isabel told Roumagnac, ‘‘My aması´o, who was almost always drunk, beat me frequently, and I was very afraid of him. At ten that night he pulled me and hit me so that I would come with him, and then he began to beat me, giving me a slap on the eye that left me stunned.’’ She seized Manuel’s knife, which he had entrusted to her that afternoon for safekeeping, and stabbed him with it twice before fleeing to the safety of a 35. It was rare that the men who raped domestic servants were ever brought to trial, but Roumagnac describes one case in which a policeman who raped a nine-year-old servant in his household was sentenced to ten years in prison as punishment for his deed. Roumagnac, Crı´menes sexuales y pasionales: Estudio de psicologı´a morbosa (Mexico City: Librerı´a de Ch. Bouret, 1906), 109. 36. Roumagnac, Los criminales en Me´xico, 151.

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nearby hotel, where she was apprehended by police. Justifying her actions, she said, ‘‘That day, although I had had a bit to drink, I wasn’t drunk, but anger is a great motivator, and when someone is bothering you it is natural that you should want to defend yourself, and that night I was not up for suffering in silence. But I stabbed him out of fear, and I assume that if he had taken the knife away from me it would be I who was dead.’’37 Like Isabel and Marı´a Villa, many of the women who shared their stories with Roumagnac painted pictures of hardship, abandonment, and eventual seduction and betrayal by an older man who, once satisfied, left his young ‘‘conquest’’ to be swallowed up by la vida. While it is entirely possible these women sought to frame their life stories with narratives that they hoped might elicit sympathy from Roumagnac and his readers, even Lara y Pardo, who viewed prostitutes as ‘‘degenerate parasites’’ and ‘‘agents of their own disgrace’’ acknowledged the fact that older men in Mexico took advantage of the naı¨vete´ of young girls to satisfy their sexual urges.38 Indeed, many hygienists and criminologists blamed such ‘‘conquests’’ on lower-class males, using sexual predation as a kind of marker of social status, but this kind of behavior was not, according to Lara y Pardo, limited to the poorest male residents of the capital. Only a few months before the publication of La prostitucio´n en Me´xico, the hygienist told his readers that ‘‘a respectable bureaucrat was accused of having deflowered two little girls under the age of fifteen.’’ With evident disgust the hygienist added that ‘‘the history of that bureaucrat, save his age and position, is a common one.’’ It turned out that the ‘‘old man’’ had used small gifts of candies and sweets to lure the girls to a room he had rented specifically for the purposes of entertaining sexual conquests. There, Lara y Pardo divulged, ‘‘the three would lock themselves in and dedicate themselves to scenes that rivaled the Romans for their decadence.’’ After their orgiastic afternoons were over, the girls left the apartment sucking on lollipops and using the few centavos the official gave them to take rides around town.39 Despite his own admission that ‘‘that history, with less interesting people, with a less alarming conclusion and without the solemnity of the judicial proceedings, is repeated over and over again,’’ Lara y Pardo cynically warned his readers to be wary of such dramatic tales.40 37. Roumagnac, Crı´menes sexuales, 152. 38. For an interesting discussion of prostitution narratives, see Debra A. Castillo, Easy Women: Sex and Gender in Modern Mexican Fiction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 243–52. 39. Lara y Pardo, La prostitucio´n en Me´xico, 58. 40. Ibid.

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Rape, youthful naı¨vete´, unprotected work environments, and the differences between men’s and women’s own expectations about sexual relationships played significant roles in young women’s entry into the world of sexual commerce, but they fail to explain how a young woman made the mental transition from nonvirgin to prostitute. Certainly not every woman who had an early or violent sexual experience in Mexico ended up in sexual service. Moreover, marriage among the poorer residents of the capital was not universal, and many women had several sexual partners over a lifetime without entering prostitution.41 Thus, despite Lara y Pardo’s dire warnings about the inaccuracy of ‘‘dramatic’’ portrayals of la vida, Federico Gamboa’s 1902 novel, Santa, sheds some light on what was probably a difficult decision. An immensely popular work, and the first Mexican novel with a female protagonist, Gamboa’s account was based on his own observations of the Porfirian underworld, his discussions with prostitutes, and his interest in the 1897 murder trial of ‘‘La Chiquita.’’ The novel follows the life of a young campesina (peasant girl) who has an ill-fated affair with a local army officer and is thrown out of her house when her family discovers that that she has had a miscarriage, proof, of course, that she had been sexually active without their consent. Knowing of no other place to go, Santa travels from San Angel to Mexico City, where she is recruited by Elvira, a Spanish matrona, to work in a downtown brothel. Gamboa implies that Santa directs herself toward brothel work because she accepts her family’s assertion that she is tainted beyond hope of redemption. In one of the first scenes of the novel, Elvira’s manager, Pepa, asks Santa whether she is fully aware of the horrors that await her as a purveyor of sexual services to countless unknown men at the first-class brothel. Although her only advertisement of what is to come is the image of Pepa’s naked body with its ‘‘sinewy calves, deformed, withered muscles [and] a discolored, flabby stomach, with deep wrinkles and creases all the way across,’’ Santa resolutely embraces her fate and moves through the official registration process.42 She exclaims to the aged Pepa, 41. Arrom, The Women of Mexico City, 129–53; Stern, Secret History, 270–72. 42. For studies of Santa, see Castillo, Easy Women, 37–62; Marı´a R. Gonza´lez, Imagen de la prostituta en la novela mexicana contempora´nea (Madrid: Editorial Pliegos, 1996); and Carmen Ramos Escando´n, ‘‘Del cuerpo social al cuerpo carnal: Santa y La Calandria o el inconsciente polı´tico de una sociedad reprimida,’’ Signos: Anuario de humanidades 5 (1991): 193–223. Regarding Gamboa’s investigations of metropolitan prostitution to write the novel, see Jean Franco, Plotting Women: Gender and Representation in Mexico (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 96–97.

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I’m here because I no longer belong in my house, because my mother and my brothers have thrown me out, because I don’t know how to work and above all because . . . because I swore I would end up here and no one believed me. I care little whether these houses and this life are as bad as they say or if they are worse, one is the same as another. . . . fortunately, I care for no one.43 On Santa’s first night at Elvira’s she suffers the lewd jokes and groping from countless parroquianos, as clients were sometimes known, but she is ultimately spared any greater misfortune—at least at first—because the client who has purchased her attentions for the evening passes out in an alcoholic stupor before demanding her services. Over the course of the novel, Gamboa contrasts the virtuous countryside with the corrupt city and credits Santa’s transition from reluctant and inexperienced campesina to the star of the metropolitan demimonde to her psychological state, portraying her as intent on self-destruction and anxious to punish her own moral disgrace by relentlessly breaking all social norms regarding proper feminine sexual behavior.44 Only a few weeks after her first night at Elvira’s, Gamboa writes, the formerly naive Santa has become the toast of Mexico City’s wealthy men, whom she allows to bathe her naked body in champagne at an after-hours event at the exclusive Maison Doree´ Sports Club. Later Santa becomes the mistress of celebrated Spanish bullfighter El Jaramen˜o, who sets her up in his guesthouse apartment. However, her long exposure to urban life has ensured her moral corruption, and she is unable to stay faithful to him. Santa cheats on El Jaramen˜o one afternoon while he is away, but he catches her and throws her out. She returns to 43. Federico Gamboa, Santa, 3d ed. (Madrid: Eusebio Go´mez de la Puente, 1910; reprint, Mexico City: Ediciones Fontamara, 1993), 10. 44. For a discussion of the relative advantages and drawbacks to rural and urban life in the late Porfiriato, see Julio Guerrero, La ge´nesis del crı´men en Me´xico (Mexico City and Paris: Librerı´a de la Vda. de Ch. Bouret, 1901). In this work Guerrero divides the social classes of Mexico City into categories based on sexual behavior, lifestyle, and customs. When he described a group he called A(b), the ‘‘antiguo lepraje’’ of Mexico City, he said that these largely indigenous and mestizo men and women ‘‘have lost any sense of shame; their language is tavern-like; they live in sexual promiscuity, they frequent the worst pulquerı´as in the worst neighborhoods, they fight, and they are the principal initiators of scandal’’ (159). For a more general discussion of ideas about urban space, corruption, and purity over this period, see Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London: Methuen Press, 1986); Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1966); and Alain Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor in the French Social Imagination (Leamington Spa: Picador Press, 1994).

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brothel life, but now a hopeless alcoholic, she ends her days in a lower-class establishment serving workers and migrants, eventually succumbing to cancer of her ill-used reproductive tract. Gamboa, who recalled of his conversations with prostitutes that ‘‘within their liberal and graphic language I discovered a well of infinite sadness,’’ writes that after her spectacular public debut, Santa suffered from a seemingly self-destructive ‘‘compulsion to flaunt, destroy and infect that beautiful, tasty, voluptuous flesh.’’45 Whether or not women who worked in sexual commerce in the late Porfiriato were, in fact, self-destructive, it is certain that they confronted violence, physical humiliation, and sexual abuse in the context of their work and that they faced infection with incurable disease, alcoholism, and drug addiction as well. In 1908 Lara y Pardo noted that prostitutes commonly suffered from vaginal ulcers, gonorrhea, and syphilis, not to mention intestinal parasites, which was a common ailment for capitalinos in all occupations.46 Lavalle Carvajal reported one year later that almost all the women he examined for the Inspeccio´n de Sanidad had vaginal infections ranging from mild irritations to full-blown gonorrhea.47 He also stated that ‘‘we know that the prostitutes’ poor hygienic habits cause a general deterioration of their health.’’48 In addition to exposing them to often incurable sexually transmitted diseases, the brothel’s environment offered its denizens easy access to liquor, for matronas frequently encouraged their pupilas to drink because it encouraged the men who visited their establishments to relax, spend more money, and contribute to the upkeep of the house. As Lara y Pardo observed, ‘‘It is well-known that there is not one house of prostitution in which there is not a sale of alcoholic beverages. As soon as the cantinas have closed for the night and on holidays, as well, the alcohol begins to circulate at brothels, always at elevated prices,’’49 despite the fact that the Reglamento forbade the sale of liquor in brothels. Brothels and casas de asignacio´n provided residents and visitors with access to other intoxicants too. Marı´a Villa told Roumagnac she experimented with a variety of injectable drugs, including morphine, to which she became addicted. Villa told the criminologist that upon being injected by one of her clients, she felt at peace for one of the first times in her life, ‘‘very good, contented and able to sleep.’’50 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

Gamboa, Santa, 73. Lara y Pardo, La prostitucio´n en Me´xico, 196. Lavalle Carvajal, ‘‘Profilaxis vene´rea,’’ 330–31. Ibid., 329. Lara y Pardo, La prostitucio´n en Me´xico, 75. Roumagnac, Crı´menes sexuales, 107.

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Personal difficulties brought many women to their work in sexual commerce, and addiction may have kept some there, but having sexual intercourse with men for money was not inconsistent with young women’s pursuing relationships based on love, desire, and emotional attachment. The information Marı´a Villa shared with Roumagnac, for example, indicates that her chulo visited her every Sunday night, escorting her to theater shows and restaurants before spending the night for free with her at the brothel where she lived. Villa’s diary, in fact, reflects that her attachment to her lover, Salvador Ortigosa, became even stronger after her imprisonment and the loss of his company. In 1897, she threatened suicide upon receiving a letter from him ending their relationship. Villa wrote, ‘‘Dear God, I will go crazy . . . is my crime so great that you will punish me this way? On the sacred ground of my homeland, gu¨ero mı´o, I will take my life if you quit writing me or coming to visit me. Why do you abandon me?’’51 One week later, with Ortigosa still refusing to renew the relationship, Villa tried to poison herself with an overdose of laudanum. She survived, however, and although she never heard from Ortigosa again, Villa remained obsessed with the man for whom she had killed, even refusing to acknowledge the romantic attentions of other inmates. When she received a love letter, corn cakes, a silk shawl and lacquered box from a male prisoner who, like her, was serving a lengthy sentence for murder, Villa found that although she was grateful for his interest, she could not respond positively to his amorous overtures. In her journal she wrote that ‘‘in his letter this Sr. speaks words of love to me, yet my ears are full, I will not write him because in the end I cannot love him, because in my heart no one lives’’ but Ortigosa, of whom she wrote, ‘‘that man was my life and he will be my death.’’52 Some prostitutes developed affection for and even obsessions over clients and boyfriends; others found comfort in the friendships and romantic relationships they formed with other women at the brothel, in jail, or on the street. Female prostitutes who lived alone but who frequented casas de citas often worked together for mutual protection. They watched out for each other’s children, lent each other money, and helped each other find safe places to work. Lara y Pardo’s observations of the underworld led him to conclude, moreover, that lesbian relationships were common among women involved in sexual commerce, an assertion supported by Roumagnac as 51. Ibid., 120. 52. Ibid., 121.

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well. As Roumagnac reports, when Marı´a Villa started having troubles with the lover for whom she eventually she committed murder, two Spanish prostitutes advised her to have sexual relations with women, as a ‘‘remedy to calm [her] nerves.’’ According to Villa, one of her friends told her that safismo was ‘‘better than loving a man,’’ and Villa stated that ‘‘she practiced it’’ three times but did not find women to [her] liking, as [she] was totally obsessed’’ with Ortigosa.53 Moreover, Lara y Pardo claimed that brothel matronas typically sought to retain their pupilas by encouraging their sexual involvement with other women at the house. In his study of prostitution in the capital Lara y Pardo indicated that, like the predatory sexual practices of older men, the pattern by which old matronas seduced young women was well known. According to the higienista, matronas fostered sexual relationships among brothel inmates to promote harmony within the closed brothel world and because ‘‘the women rarely produce domestic conflict and in general remain loyal to the houses in which they are implicated in the ways of depraved love.’’54 He wrote that whenever a new pupila of reasonably decent appearance arrives, the matronas, with the instinct of good entrepreneurs who know a good acquisition when they see one, initiate her into lesbianism in order to satisfy their old and depraved interests and to fulfill their interests as merchants. After a while they abandon their preferida to another of the aisladas in the house. In this way they undertake a systematic, conscious campaign in favor of lesbianism with so much success that in the brothels of Mexico it is not possible without veritable exceptions to find a woman who does not indulge herself with that sexual vice.55 The fact that incarcerated women tattooed their female lovers’ names on their arms and wore their hair parted to one side to advertise their sexual preferences, however, demonstrates that many female-female relationships were quite serious, and Roumagnac reports that prostitutes who identified themselves as lesbians solicited male clients on the city’s streets but maintained personal relationships with the women for whom they developed emotional attachments.56 But despite the evidence that prostitutes main53. 54. 55. 56.

Ibid., 108. Roumagnac, Los criminales en Me´xico, 183. Ibid. Lara y Pardo, La prostitucio´n en Me´xico, 81–82.

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tained a complex web of personal and emotional relationships with men and women, neither Lara y Pardo nor Roumagnac could accept the idea that some women might find greater emotional satisfaction with other females than with men. Instead, they attributed safismo, like prostitution, to the ‘‘depravity’’ and ‘‘degeneracy’’ of the women themselves.

Ladies and Leisure Mexico’s Reglamento para el ejercicio de la prostitucio´n defined the status of prostitute, stated her sanitary obligations, and made clear which activities might be permissible inside and outside the brothel, but it made hardly any reference to clients save that they be over the age of fifteen and free from venereal disease, a fact that the state required the prostitute or matrona to ascertain before permitting the client to indulge in sexual activities.57 If there were nearly 11,000 registered prostitutes and many more clandestinas working on the capital’s streets and in the bordellos of all classes that matronas had established, there was also a considerable demand for their services as well. Migration and the development of the capital as a center for manufacturing, politics, and commerce brought single men of all social classes to the late Porfirian capital city, but unmarried men were by no means the only customers. A culture of male sociability with other men away from the home as well as a legally codified sexual double standard established the social parameters that made sexual commerce appealing to men of all marital statuses in the early-twentieth-century capital. Inconsistent societal expectations for young men and young women in Porfirian Mexico condemned adventuresome girls to a life of criminal marginality but encouraged boys to be sexually experimental. The sense that men could not be held accountable for their sexual appetites, in fact, underpinned the Reglamento and informed most doctors’ assessments of why prostitutes were in such demand. As Dr. Jose´ Marı´a Reyes had noted in his 1874 study of the matter, ‘‘Material pleasures, divorced from moral sensibilities, form the base of prostitution, which degrades men until it reduces them to the level of beasts.’’ Forty years later, Lavalle Carvajal stated that ‘‘male chastity until marriage will always be exceptional among us.’’58 57. ‘‘Proyecto de ‘Reglamento de mujeres pu´blicas,’ ’’ 1867, in AHSSA-SP-IAV, box 1, file 1. 58. Lavalle Carvajal, ‘‘Profilaxis vene´rea,’’ 347.

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Because the search for sexual pleasure rendered men morally incapacitated, some doctors argued, ‘‘they search out sensual pleasures and will take even the most illegal and corrupt means to find them.’’ This obsessive search for sexual outlets, Reyes had worried, led young men to ‘‘turn to masturbation,’’ and, he added, ‘‘It is not uncommon among ignorant peoples to see pederasty in all its forms and even bestiality.’’ But since doctors believed that ‘‘the disgusting and repugnant vice’’ led to heart and brain dysfunction, experts like Reyes acknowledged that it was best to let young men have sex with prostitutes in order to avoid the ‘‘dementia, epilepsy, hypochondria and hysteria’’ to which ‘‘solitary pleasures’’ could give rise.59 That visiting prostitutes was the best way ‘‘make a boy a man,’’ as well as the best way to prevent the greater medical and social problems experts associated with masturbation, pederasty, bestiality, and male-male relationships, was accepted as fact by doctors associated with Mexico’s emerging social hygiene movement in the late nineteenth century. But even though making a select group of ‘‘deviant’ women sexually available for adventuresome men seemed to promise social orderliness, as early as 1874 Reyes lamented the ‘‘education in vices that young people, and even children, receive in this country.’’ He wrote that showing young men erotic books and ‘‘lubricious spectacles,’’ not to mention giving them alcohol, which ‘‘excites passions and withers moral sensibilities,’’ led to the point at which ‘‘we see the repugnant spectacle of fifteen-year-old ‘veterans’ knocking on brothel doors.’’60 By 1908, in fact, Lara y Pardo noted that a visit to a prostitute had become a mandatory rite of passage for teenage boys of all social classes and that a general male obsession with prostitutes threatened to be Mexico’s ruin if citizens could not turn their attention to more serious matters. Referring principally to lower-class capitalinos, the hygienist advised his readers to ‘‘note with what great curiosity the young man who has barely left infancy looks toward those balconies, on whose shaded windows tempting shadows dance and from which laughter and sensual music flow. See with what anxiety the young man prowls the streets where prostitutes congregate, waiting for the opportunity to spy one of them getting into or leaving a coach, exposing her stockinged thigh for all to view.’’61 In fact, many of the men Roumagnac interviewed stated that they had begun having regular sexual relations with prostitutes as early as the age of thirteen or four59. Reyes, ‘‘Higiene pu´blica,’’ 447. 60. Ibid., 448. 61. Lara y Pardo, La prostitucio´n en Me´xico, 56.

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teen, with one boy claiming to have ‘‘satisfied’’ women at the age of seven.62 In the company of friends, male relatives, and colleagues from work, or on their own, maturing boys familiarized themselves with neighborhood brothels and cultivated relationships with locally based women considered ‘‘loose’’ and available for sexual adventure. Nineteen-year-old Francisco Ch., serving a prison sentence for the murder of two young schoolteachers, told Roumagnac that an older cousin had first initiated him into the practice of masturbation, which he enjoyed ‘‘to excess’’ until the age of twelve, when the same cousin took the young Francisco to a brothel to have his first sexual experience with a prostitute.63 As Francisco told Roumagnac, after this experience he became a regular connoisseur of local ‘‘public women.’’ ‘‘The hardest part,’’ he explained to the criminologist, ‘‘was getting started, and after that, back in the pueblo, I did it whenever the opportunity presented itself.’’64 Besides its stated purpose of preventing the spread of degenerative and incurable sexually transmitted disease, the Reglamento’s unstated job was to protect ‘‘honorable’’ young women from the advances of such predatory and sexually curious single men as Francisco Ch. That condemning a group of sexually experienced and ‘‘dishonored’’ women to prostitution might dissuade men from seducing, dishonoring, and abandoning young virgins derived from older religious and legal prescriptions for limiting the proliferation of sin and social disorderliness, but in Porfirian times this idealized protection apparently did not extend to young, lower-class girls, as the life stories of women like Marı´a Villa and Isabel M. make clear. And despite the availability of female prostitutes for inexpensive sexual encounters, the prospect of seducing a young virgin apparently still appealed to some Mexican men, who considered it a sign of their virility to be the one who sampled a young woman’s ‘‘first fruits.’’ Age, race, and gender played a role in this early experimentation scenario, for men often targeted younger, poorer, darker women like domestic servants or schoolgirls, but sexually adventuresome men also seduced young boys, ‘‘making them women,’’ as well.65 The popularity of being the one to ‘‘deflower’’ a female virgin is re62. See, for example, Carlos Roumagnac’s interview with Porfirio J., in Crı´menes sexuales, 81. 63. Carlos Roumagnac, Matadores de mujeres (Mexico City: Librerı´a de Ch. Bouret, 1910), 155. 64. Ibid. 65. Roumagnac, Los criminales en Me´xico, 102. For discussions about gender, age, and sexuality among young men in Mexico, see Carrier, De los otros, 214; Prieur, Mema’s House, 86; and Wilson, Hidden in the Blood, 101. See also Silvana Paternostro, In the Land of God and Man: Confronting Our Sexual Culture (New York: Dutton Press, 1998), 181–83.

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flected in one Mexico City mother’s success in holding a widely publicized neighborhood raffle in which her young daughter ‘‘was sacrificed to the man who held the winning ticket.’’66 As Lara y Pardo noted, however, some men ‘‘pay for virginity as if it was a precious jewel’’ but added cynically ‘‘how often that virginity is long gone!!’’67 Young men may have sought the services of prostitutes in order to experiment sexually in a culture that guarded the purity of its privileged daughters, but a visit to a brothel or casa de asignacio´n was more than just a rite of passage for Mexico’s male adolescents. For adult men, spending time with prostitutes was also a way of spending time with male friends and colleagues, and although one doctor noted that ‘‘it is rare in Mexico to find men in their sexual prime who are not aficionados of easy, cheap love with no commitment,’’ often the evening’s focus was less on the sex act itself than on the sociability of time spent drinking alcohol, dancing, and joking among friends.68 For male members of Mexico City’s bourgeoisie, visiting women at a first-class casa de asignacio´n constituted, on the one hand, an opportunity to escort a beautiful and sought-after courtesan around the city’s restaurants and theaters, and on the other, a chance to interact with women of a different social class without paying attention to the strict sexual mores that placed such physical and emotional distance between socially prominent men and women. Time spent with prostitutes could be characterized by socializing, dancing, flirting, and the exchange of sexually charged language that those same men might not welcome at a gathering that included their female dependents. In fact, inspectors Se´vero Herrera and Ramo´n Gallardo of the Consejo Superior de Salubridad Pu´blica reported that prostitutes and clients observed in the public spaces of several downtown hotels interacted much like couples engaged in serious—if sexually permissive— courtship. On their New Year’s Eve surveillance of the Hotel Seminario in 1906, for example, Herrera and Gallardo wrote that ‘‘at about six thirty a carriage arrived, dropping off a couple, including a man dressed like a gentleman and one of the women who is registered with this office, well dressed, first class, from the ‘special group.’ The carriage waited at the door for them, and they came out after about an hour, dismissed the driver and then walked arm in arm toward the Zo´calo, where we could observe them easily.’’69 Similar entries over the month of January revealed that it was 66. Lara y Pardo, La prostitucio´n en Me´xico, 132. 67. Ibid., 59. 68. Lavalle Carvajal, ‘‘Profila´xis vene´rea,’’ 322. 69. ‘‘Diversos oficios de la Inspeccio´n de Sanidad, dando cuenta de vigilancia a casas sospechosas,’’ 1907, in AHSSA-SP-IAV, box 2, file 27. The name Zo´calo refers to the plaza mayor (main square) of Mexico City.

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common for couples to arrive at the Seminario in the late afternoon or early evening, and then spend between thirty minutes to an hour inside undertaking what the police euphemistically called the entrevista ı´ntima. After the ‘‘interview’’ was over, it seems, couples frequently left together to promenade or enjoy some evening entertainment at a local theater that presented sexually suggestive material. Herrera and Gallardo’s notes reflect that it was not just financially secure men who visited prostitutes in this way, for over the period of surveillance the two inspectors observed a veritable cross section of Porfirian male society—gentlemen, army officers, charros, students, and laborers—escort women ranging from ‘‘elegant’’ to ‘‘suspicious’’ through the Seminario’s portals. Although the intrepid health inspectors did not witness the bedroom interactions between these prostitutes and their clientele, their descriptions of the locales, their observations regarding the couples’ dress and comportment, and their comments about the couples’ postcoital activities shed light on the intensely sociable nature of visiting prostitutes in the late Porfiriato.70 Prostitutes and clients may have joked, enjoyed entertainment, and engaged in sociable behavior in brothels, casas de asignacio´n, and theaters, but the fact that working women provided a sexual service for paying men was never lost. For Porfirian men of means, ‘‘conquering’’ the latest star of the demimonde was a way to demonstrate one’s wealth, status, and virility to friends and colleagues, for as Lara y Pardo asked, ‘‘Is it not true that the imagination becomes overexcited by the legend that runs from mouth to mouth, crowning in glory the prostitute?’’ Gamboa’s novel Santa portrays this kind of frenzied consumerism clearly. On Santa’s first night, Elvira, the Spanish matrona of the brothel, offers the ‘‘fresh flesh’’ to the wealthy governor of a distant state. Promoting her new merchandise, Elvira tells the governor, ‘‘Do you like her? That’s my new one. I swear to you that she has not yet debuted in the house and that she’s worth a million. . . . do you want her?’’ Anxious to be the first to try out the new pupila, the governor replies, ‘‘Of course, I want her or no one.’’71 Indeed, once word of Santa’s beauty circulates among the city’s brothel-going men, she is in high demand. After her debut, Gamboa writes, Santa drew clients from across the city, and ‘‘among so many men were fathers, husbands, the rich and powerful, a few Catholics, other freethinkers, philanthropists, bureaucrats, and authorities.’’72 70. Ibid. 71. Gamboa, Santa, 29. 72. Ibid., 73.

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But while some men apparently reveled in the pleasure of being one of the first to ‘‘sample’’ a new prostitute, others became frustrated over the transient nature of such encounters and sought to make the arrangement more permanent. Some young men attempted to help prostitutes of whom they were fond to leave la vida, depositing money with the Inspeccio´n de Sanidad to vouch for their good behavior.73 Prostitutes who rebuffed this sort of attention risked violence at the hands of their would-be champions. At the turn of the century, Lara y Pardo told his readers, a young man who had recently moved to Mexico City from the coast, ‘‘like all who come to the city, went to visit one of the most popular houses of prostitution.’’ There he met ‘‘one of so many women and became obsessed.’’ Unable to understand that theirs was a strictly commercial venture, it seems, the young man showed up a few days later and tried to kill the woman, wounding instead a young student and ending up in jail.74 The lover of Luisa M., a registered prostitute of lowest class, was not as inept. He slashed her face twice when she rejected him.75 When violence failed to force women to comply with their wishes, some men found solace only in death, their own and that of the woman. According to the newspaper El Popular, in September 1906, twenty-two-year-old Valentin C. y L. killed a brothel pupila by shooting her once in the chest before turning the gun on himself, leaving behind a note that read ‘‘Don’t blame anyone for my death. I’m killing myself because I have been deceived by a woman I love and whom I will kill first.’’76 Socializing with friends, the chance to ‘‘conquer’’ a new star, or the opportunity to pursue a more serious, if ill-fated, love affair certainly brought men to late Porfirian establishments of ill repute, but it would be a mistake to think that public encounters with inscritas were the only activities that drew men to sites of sexual commerce. Despite the legal and social acceptability of male sexual promiscuity, some men sought to keep their visits to prostitutes secret, and either visited bordellos at odd hours to avoid friends or sought the services of aisladas in the city’s marginal neighborhoods far from their own. Going to a brothel outside their neighborhood also represented an opportunity for men to participate in less socially acceptable sexual activities. Men visited casas de citas to conduct affairs with married 73. ‘‘Carmen Olvera pide quedar separada de la prostitucio´n,’’ 1909, in AHSSA-SP-IAV, box 2, file 32. 74. Lara y Pardo, La prostitucio´n en Me´xico, 56. 75. Roumagnac, Crı´menes sexuales, 166. 76. Roumagnac, Matadores de mujeres, 29.

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Fig. 2 Prostitutes in Porfirian Mexico City faced a variety of occupational hazards ranging from infection with syphilis and threats by angry clients to stalking, rape, and murder by the infamous Mexican ‘‘Jack the Ripper,’’ Francisco ‘‘el Chalequero,’’ who left his victims to die alongside the banks of the Rı´o Consulado. Reprinted from Roberto Berdecio and Stanley Appelbaum, eds., Posada’s Popular Mexican Prints (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, 1972). women or to deflower virgins, while others indulged in activities that friends and colleagues might consider ‘‘scandalous.’’ One group of neighbors reported that a Catholic priest was among the most enthusiastic participants at the loud and sexually permissive parties hosted at a local bordello. But aside from flouting occupational convention, men of all social classes also visited brothels and casas de asignacio´n to have sex with other men and with children.77 The Reglamento specifically prohibited the presence of children over the age of three in establishments devoted to sexual commerce, thus accommodating a prostitute’s nursing infant but requiring the prostitute-mother to deposit her child with other caretakers after the weaning. Nevertheless, it seems that some women were reluctant to give up their young offspring, and matronas also perceived the commercial advantages to having young bodies in their establishments. Lara y Pardo said that ‘‘in 77. Reyes, ‘‘Higiene pu´blica,’’ 455.

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brothels it is not only common that children older than three years live there but also that many times they are recruited and raised there with the end that they may later serve as a means of generating income.’’78 Clients may have also frequented bordellos and casas de asignacio´n to have sexual intercourse with other men who, although not under the surveillance of the Reglamento, dressed as women and, like female prostitutes, offered sexual services for a fee.79 Moreover, like female aisladas, men solicited male customers at the Zo´calo late at night. Sexual relations between adult men were not illegal in Porfirian Mexico, but ‘‘scandalous’’ behavior was, and frequent police raids on urban sites of suspected homosexual activity made public sexual encounters among men risky.80 The well-publicized fact that many sodomitas arrested for ‘‘scandalous behavior’’ suffered from syphilis, which doctors assumed they had acquired through intercourse with other men, moreover, may have also encouraged men to seek the sexual services of other men in brothels, which might be counted on to have some medicinal and prophylactic preparations on hand.81

The Place of Pleasure in the Late Porfiriato Prostitutes and clients met, mingled, transacted business, and formed relationships in the brothels, hotels, bars, and streets of Porfirian Mexico City, where they undertook all manner of socially acceptable, culturally taboo, and even illicit behavior. The Reglamento was federal in nature, but it was the city that established where sexual commerce might legally take place. Over the late nineteenth century the city council experimented with two distinct policies regarding the spatial boundaries of sexual commerce in the growing urban environment: concentrating the women in specific urban neighborhoods and ultimately dispersing them throughout the city, merely prohibiting their presence in certain, well-populated areas.82 Both provisions sought to disguise prostitution from the rest of the public, but as Lara 78. Lara y Pardo, La prostitucio´n en Me´xico, 75. 79. Sergio Gonza´lez Rodrı´guez, Los bajos fondos: El antro, la bohemia y el cafe´ (Mexico City: Cal y Arena, 1992), ‘‘Manola que es Manolo,’’ graphic appendix. 80. ‘‘Los 41 maricones / Encontrados en un baile de la Calle de la Paz el 20 de noviembre de 1901,’’ in Posada’s Popular Mexican Prints, ed. Roberto Berdecio and Stanley Appelbaum (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, 1972), 127. 81. Roumagnac, Crı´menes sexuales, 151. 82. Archivo Histo´rico de la Ciudad de Me´xico, Me´xico, D.F. (hereafter AHCM), ‘‘Policı´a en General,’’ vol. 3645, file 1714.

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y Pardo was quick to point out, young women and men grew up knowing exactly who the prostitutes in their neighborhoods were, and asserted that ‘‘one way or another, it is certain that in Mexico, from dying old people to the most virginal young women, everyone knows perfectly well where the brothels are and what they represent.’’83 According to Lara y Pardo’s examination of Inspeccio´n de Sanidad records, by 1906 there were fifty-seven brothels registered with public authorities, and these were evenly divided between first- and second-class establishments. In the same year there were also thirty-six casas de asignacio´n of all classes. Since most venues were small, with anywhere between three and ten women living inside, with ten thousand registered women, much commercial sexual activity took place outside the upscale brothels where prostitutes lived. Women may have preferred to register as aisladas to enjoy the greater freedom of the casas de asignacio´n or casas de citas, and the Reglamento’s strict requirements for establishing a brothel were discouraging indeed. Not only were matronas required to outfit each room with a supply of a disinfectant containing potassium permanganate that the women were to apply to their genitalia to prevent infection, but all windows were to be covered with curtains or shades, the doors were to remain closed, and the bedrooms were to be strictly separated from each other. As Lara y Pardo wrote, ‘‘According to the spirit of the Reglamento, the brothel must be a discreet place, disguised like any [other venue for] vice, under the purview of the city, where there is no scandal and in which the virtuous neighbors know not what is happening.’’ The Reglamento, he noted, placed the burden of protecting clients and pupilas from ‘‘moral or bodily’’ contamination on the matrona, who ‘‘with tender solicitude, must reject all drunk or contagious clients, look out for the well-being of the pupilas, give them preparations to avoid contagion, respect their liberty, and give them hygienic living quarters and decent clothing to wear.’’ Furthermore, ‘‘The brothel will be an ideal residence in which the exercise of prostitution is an accidental fact, or in any event, a world apart that does not project its moral corruption or organic infection.’’84 But even attempting to comply with these requirements was demoralizing for some madams. One woman who had petitioned to establish a brothel in 1907 became so discouraged at all the requirements and fees that she notified the Inspeccio´n de Sanidad of her decision to abandon the project only a few months later. An83. Lara y Pardo, La prostitucio´n en Me´xico, 71–72. 84. Ibid., 71.

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other aspiring matrona, Luisa L., had to completely demolish and rebuild the house where she hoped to set up a sexually oriented business.85 These were not the only women to find brothel management difficult; in 1907 alone twenty-two brothels opened and just as many closed.86 By most accounts the life of a first-class bordello pupila was the most enviable, for these women paid the most in registration fees, lived in wellappointed pleasure palaces, enjoyed on the attentions of high-priced hairstylists and dressmakers, who visited the brothels for coiffures and daytime fittings, and partook of the finest wines and foods at night.87 Photographs of a 1902 bordello reflect ample beds, marble tables, and fine vases and mirrors intended to convey a sense of oriental exoticism and pleasure.88 But since it was the custom for the prostitutes and the matrona to split the woman’s earnings evenly, even the inscritas in these luxurious establishments rarely made enough money to afford the finery the most exclusive clientele required, and the matronas would advance them the cash or goods, thereby keeping the women in perpetual financial obligation in an urban version of the debt peonage that tied so many Mexican peasants to agricultural estates over the same period.89 In the afternoons the women might also tend to their young children or receive their chulos, whom, with the permission of the matrona, they did not charge for sexual relations.90 Before the evening’s activities they would prepare for the potential of infection also. According to the Reglamento all prostitutes were to be instructed in how to prevent exposure to venereal disease and how to apply the potassium permanganate solution to their genital region.91 However, lest cleansing themselves with this harsh acidic solution fail, many women resorted to burning crossed matches on the floor in a superstitious effort to prevent disease as well.92 85. ‘‘Diversos oficios de la Inspeccio´n de Sanidad, dando cuenta de vigilancia a casas sospechosas,’’ 1907, in AHSSA-SP-IAV, box 2, file 27. 86. Lara y Pardo, La prostitucio´n en Me´xico, 67. 87. Letter from Josefa Dı´az to the president of the Consejo Superior de Salubridad requesting permission to work in brothels as a hairdresser, in ‘‘Diversos oficios de la Inspeccio´n de Sanidad, dando cuenta de vigilancia a casas sospechosas,’’ 1907, in AHSSA-SP-IAV, box 2, file 27. 88. Ava Vargas, ed., La casa de citas en el barrio galante (Mexico City: Ediciones Grijalbo, 1991). 89. Lara y Pardo, La prostitucio´n en Me´xico, 79 . 90. Ibid., 78; Roumagnac, Los criminales en Me´xico, 167. 91. ‘‘Proyecto de ‘Reglamento de mujeres pu´blicas,’’ 1867, in AHSSA-SP-IAV, box 1, file 1. 92. Lara y Paro, La prostitucio´n en Me´xico, 73.

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Just as they enjoyed relatively tolerable living conditions, first-class women who contracted disease in a sexual encounter could generally expect cordial treatment from the doctors of the Inspeccio´n de Sanidad. The ‘‘aristocracy of the trade,’’ as Lavalle Carvajal called those who earned enough money to pay for their treatment at the city’s public syphilis hospital for women, the Hospital Morelos, had their own wing and private beds where they were separated from the regular locked wards for sick public women. The Hospital Morelos, located in an old colonial granary-turned-sixteenthcentury-hospital, had been reorganized specifically for the purpose of treating syphilitics in the late nineteenth century and was centrally located at Alameda Park, slightly west of the city’s central plaza.93 Doctors sometimes visited the most exclusive brothels for a fee, but for other inscritas the trip to the Inspeccio´n de Sanidad offices that adjoined the Hospital Morelos to have a gynecological exam was mandatory. As Lavalle Carvajal complained, however, surely there is no exhibition that is more indecorous, more cynical and more contrary to the spirit of the Reglamento than that daily procession of women who, by the hundreds, parade to the place where the doctor must give them the obligatory examination of their genital organs. Some go in coaches, in groups of four, others by foot, still others assault the trolleys that pass by the offices and in those chat in the most obscene manner, commenting on the upcoming visit without the least respect for the other people in the car. There they discuss in raised voices the details of the medical exam, they recall specific episodes of their visits to the Inspeccio´n, and they cast lots and practice superstitious charms that they believe will keep them out of the dreaded hospital.94 But despite the class-based differences in medical care, all prostitutes, it seems, retreated behind a mask of feminine modesty when undergoing the inspection by male doctors. Lavalle Carvajal noted that ‘‘those of the special first category limit themselves to the exposition of the genital organs, the hands (sometimes), and the face. The regular first-class and second-class women also exhibit their thighs, as they are not in the custom of wearing stockings.’’ According to Lavalle Carvajal, it was ironically the lowest-class 93. Adrian Quiros Rodiles. Breve historia del Hospital Morelos. (Mexico City: Departamento de Salubridad de Me´xico, 1933), 8, 73–74. The building is now occupied by the Franz Meyer Museum. 94. Lavalle Carvajal, ‘‘Profilaxis vene´rea,’’ 344–45.

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prostitutes who received the most thorough inspection, for he wrote that ‘‘the lowest-class women, barefoot, show everything in the lower part of the body, and most of the abdominal wall.’’95 As doctors lamented, many were terrified of the physical exam and sought to avoid going to the Hospital Morelos at all costs. Lavalle Carvajal observed that ‘‘it is necessary to have sent some hundreds of prostitutes of all classes to the Morelos to understand the panic that sets in when they see the doctor pull out the hospital admission ticket.’’ The doctor recalled that one woman, in fact, was so offended that she sent him a packet of pubic lice upon her release from the hospital, threatening him with greater reprisals if he sent her there again.96 When all else failed, some women resorted to bribing Sanidad officials to give them clean bills of health rather than suffer the indignity of forced hospitalization in the syphilis treatment facility.97 To prevent the spread of disease and thus the need for hospitalization and medical intervention, the law required that women who worked in brothels keep prophylactic chemicals in their bedrooms and require clients to cleanse their genital areas before and after engaging in sexual intercourse.98 However, as Lavalle Carvajal wrote in the Gaceta Me´dica in 1909, the actual state of hygiene in most of the city’s brothels was deplorable. He stated that a recent tour of some of the city’s venues of sexual commerce had convinced him that the health department’s regulations were being routinely disregarded. ‘‘I asked for official permission to visit brothels of the lowest class, which are of the greatest interest, and while I was waiting for that, ignoring the possibility of threats or a disagreeable encounter with a pimp, made discreet visits, taking a survey of the range of officially established centers of vice’’ in the capital, he said. On this secret trip through the lowest echelons of the metropolitan demimonde, Lavalle Carvajal reported, the spaces in these brothels set aside for public entertainment were filthy, and the private rooms where prostitutes met with clientele were little better. ‘‘When I examined pallets and beds, I saw dirt and uncleanliness that startles the senses and hygienic deficiencies covered over with silk and golden fabric. Downstairs, painfully obvious and repugnant filth; upstairs, sufficient cleanliness, 95. Ibid. 96. Ibid., 318. 97. ‘‘Diversos oficios de la Inspeccio´n de Sanidad, dando cuenta de vigilancia a casas sospechosas,’’ 1907, in AHSSA-SP-IAV, box 2, file 27. Prostitutes resented the involuntary nature of their confinement and protested living conditions at the hospital, on occasion prompting riots at the treatment facility. See Quiros Rodiles, Breve historia del Hospital Morelos, 74–75, 78, 83. 98. ‘‘Proyecto de ‘Reglamento de mujeres pu´blicas’ ’’ 1867, in AHSSA-SP-IAV, box 1, file 1; Lara y Pardo, La prostitucio´n en Me´xico, 64.

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but the objects that could enhance sexual hygiene in those temples of rented love do not even exist.’’ Lavalle Carvajal stated that the even the most wellappointed bordellos failed to provide clients with the possibility of a comfortable, postcoital genital cleansing. Instead, he said, ‘‘They do not even have a bidet or hygienic fountain to allow one to wash in a comfortable position instead of having to balance ridiculously, squatting over a wash basin or tray of questionable sanitary status.’’ Clients could hardly be expected to take prophylactic measures, the doctor observed, if they were required to perch precariously while naked in front of a strange woman. He recommended at the very least two liters of water per room per person so that both prostitutes and their clients could cleanse themselves of any syphiliscausing bacteria immediately after each act of intercourse.99 However, given the number of women who complained about clients who refused to pay and the reports about men who murdered ‘‘public women’’ out of jealousy or anger, it seems unlikely that prostitutes had much control over their clients at all, much less the power to require them to use a preparation that raised questions about their freedom from infection.100 Because of the strictures associated with brothel life, some aisladas, and many more clandestinas, preferred to meet in hotels or to recruit their clientele at bars, theaters, and restaurants. Aisladas were free to take their clients to their apartments, which were licensed for such purposes, but many lower-class prostitutes met clients at hotels like the Seminario or even less fashionable sites. The hygienic amenities of these hotels apparently also left something to be desired, as ‘‘the rooms in these hotels are totally disgusting; the sheets are rarely changed and it is quite difficult to obtain even a little bit of water; the use of soap is entirely unknown.’’101 As Lara y Pardo pointed out, there was little privacy in this kind of undertaking, for many of the city’s inexpensive hotels, he claimed, permitted bystanders to look in the windows and observe couples’ transactions, and the whole building, he insisted, ‘‘exhales a nausea-inducing odor.’’ But for those who did not require privacy, some enterprising shopkeepers maintained rooms where they allowed couples to have sexual relations behind a thin curtain separating them from the unsuspecting diners; on Buena Muerte street one woman operated ‘‘a disgusting little store, in name only, for the true nature of that locale was nothing other than to serve as a spot for couples to unite without 99. Lavalle Carvajal, ‘‘Profilaxis vene´rea,’’ 335. 100. Roumagnac, Matadores de mujeres, 25, 26, 27, 29, 30, 35, 123, 135, 155. 101. Lavalle Carvajal, ‘‘Profilaxis vene´rea,’’ 336.

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having to pass through the legal or ecclesiastical formalities.’’ To keep up appearances the space was apparently outfitted with a counter, stove, and food-preparation equipment, but according to Roumagnac, ‘‘the principal and most productive piece of furniture for the proprietress of that horrible establishment was a bed, indispensable for the commerce and which gave much greater profits than the sale of soups, moles, and other foods and drinks that were available.’’102 Others merely transacted their business on the city streets undertaking rodeo, or a slow circle, around the capital’s main plaza, openly advertising their wares in front of the Palacio Nacional, metropolitan cathedral, and city offices. According to critics, the women solicited clientele and then retired only as far as the trees and bushes that decorated the Zo´calo to seal the business deal.103 Despite the brazenness with which many prostitutes performed their work, the petitions registered prostitutes submitted to public officials requesting to be removed from the lists of licensed sex workers convey the sense of shame that many felt at having used their bodies to support themselves and their interest in returning to the life of a working-class wife or laborer. In April 1909, for example, inscrita Carmen Olvera wrote the Inspeccio´n de Sanidad to request that she be allowed to ‘‘separate herself from prostitution,’’ a grant for which she said would be ‘‘eternally grateful.’’ Olvera, who cast herself in the role of a repentant Mary Magdalene, wrote that ‘‘she who comes before you with the greatest respect states: that she is registered with the Inspeccio´n de Sanidad as a prostitute; but, repentant of that, will go to live with a person who will support her, who will commit to her good behavior by offering a deposit, as the Reglamento requires.’’ Just a week later, a woman named Carmen Alfaro expressed similar sentiments about her desire to put her life as a prostitute behind her. She stated that ‘‘repentant, she will go to live in an honorable manner as a seamstress.’’ Many of the other women who petitioned the Inspeccio´n de Sanidad that month similarly portrayed themselves as weak and sinful women, citing shame and repentance as reasons they sought to leave the life, return to live with their families, or try their luck as domestic servants for a while.104 Documents like Alfaro and Olvera’s petitions tell us little about who the women were or why they had decided prostitution was no longer a desirable occupation for them, but they do convey a sense that sexual commerce was 102. Roumagnac, Matadores de mujeres, 134. 103. AHCM, ‘‘Policı´a en General,’’ vol. 3644, file 1698. 104. AHSSA-SP-IAV, box 2, file 32.

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difficult work that women sought to leave whenever possible. However, Inspeccio´n records also confirm that the women frequently returned to prostitution within a few short months. It’s not clear if this was because their new living arrangements did not work out or because they had trouble earning a living on their own. Historically, religious and charitable institutions had assumed responsibility for helping such ‘‘repentant’’ women make a transition to more ‘‘honorable’’ work by providing moral support and vocational training, but the few reform institutions that existed in the late Porfiriato were small, private, and chronically underfunded.105 Although the city and judicial officials had long discussed the desirability of setting up a publicly operated ‘‘Asilo para Arrepentidas,’’ this project had never been fully implemented.106 In the late Porfiriato the Mexican Philanthropic Society ran a modest establishment called the Asilo de Regeneracio´n e Infancia, which served largely to protect girls under age fifteen who had found themselves on the streets; the Sociedad Protectora de la Mujer, which ran a dormitoryworkshop where prostitutes lived and developed vocational skills to lead a new life did cater to arrepentidas but was limited in size and funding.107 For many prostitutes, a definitive separation from la vida was difficult, for many confronted jail, disease, or life as a mother and aması´a in a poor neighborhood of the city. In the worst cases, they faced death at the hands of a former lover, like Filomena. As they grew older and became less attractive to their customers, savvy women saved their money and became matronas, ready, as Lara y Pardo noted, to exchange being exploited for being one of the society’s unscrupulous exploiters of men and women alike. Male clients, of course, did not confront the same concerns of age and occupation, because for them visiting prostitutes was first and foremost a leisure activity. On the eve of revolution 105. See Joaquı´n Garcı´a Icazbalceta, Informe sobre los establecimientos de beneficencia y correccio´n de esta capital: Su estado actual, noticia de sus fondos, reformas que desde luego necesitan y plan general de su arreglo, ed. Jose´ Marı´a Andrade (Mexico City: Moderna Librerı´a Religiosa, 1884). 106. ‘‘Proyecto de decreto y reglamento sobre prostitucio´n,’’ Boletı´n del Archivo General de la Nacio´n 3, no. 9 (1979): 10–11. As Silvia Arrom notes of prostitutes’ civil rights in the nineteenth century, ‘‘Many protective provisions applied only to ‘decent’ women: virgins, nuns, and honest wives and widows. Prostitutes lost the right to demand child support, and the seduction, rape, or offense of a ‘vile’ woman carried no penalty, unless it involved physical behavior’’ (The Women of Mexico City, 65). 107. Albert Judson Steelman, ‘‘Charities for Children in the City of Mexico’’ (Ph.D. diss., School of Divinity, University of Chicago, 1907), 74. The Asilo was privately operated but funded by the Federal District. See also Morgan, ‘‘Proletarians, Polı´ticos, and Patriarchs,’’ 161.

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in Mexico, urban sexual commerce was a booming business. The Porfirians’ city of pleasure was supported by social practices that failed to provide young women with adequate vocational training or education, by cultural expectations that men would be sexually promiscuous, and by laws that codified a sexual double standard in a difficult economy.

2 Revolutionary Capital War fa r e an d t h e Ch a n g i n g Bu s i n e s s of Sexual Commerce

According to a group of some twenty of Mexico City’s most prominent madams, by 1918 the capital city’s sex trade was suffering badly. These women blamed their declining economic fortunes on tensions with local residents, seven years of revolutionary warfare, the influx of soldiers and refugees from the countryside, and troublesome new reglamentos. As Salvador Herna´ndez, an attorney hired by these matronas, put it in a petition to the ayuntamiento (city council) that year, escalating rents and resentful neighbors were only two problems his clients faced. Feeding and clothing the prostitutes under their care, maintaining their establishments’ sanitation, and ensuring that the women they employed complied with their state-mandated medical inspections took up a considerable amount of the madams’ precious time and hard-earned money. Steep licensing fees plus competition from newly opened cabarets further raised the cost of doing business. Worse, it seems, a shortage of respectable patrons eager to visit brothels and spend money freely had threatened the financial viability of sexual commerce and created a veritable crisis in the metropolitan sex trade. Some cli-

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ents, according to Herna´ndez, were so rude and unruly that they arrived at the brothels drunk and threatened the madams and prostitutes with guns and other forms of violence once inside. To add insult to injury, Herna´ndez sadly noted of the new brothel patrons, ‘‘The majority won’t even pay for the use of a woman who sacrifices her body in order to live.’’1 On the surface, this petition suggests that the booming Porfirian market in sexual services had, like so many other businesses, suffered severe setbacks in the aftermath of revolution. But considering popular novels and accounts of everyday life in revolutionary Mexico, it is clear that the image of the soldier, at least, was closely associated with prostitutes and brothels. After all, North American journalist John Reed reported that the soldiers at the Villista front pursued relationships with ‘‘loose women’’ in villages throughout northern Mexico, while the troops under the fictitious Demetrio Macı´as in Mariano Azuela’s Underdogs similarly associate bravado with brothel attendance.2 Even Jose´ Vasconcelos, future education minister and Villa supporter, recalled visiting the capital’s prostitutes with a high-ranking revolutionary who, with other military personnel, made nightly rounds of the capital’s bordellos to drink, converse with friends, and perhaps have sexual intercourse with ‘‘public women.’’3 Rather than diminish the demand for the services of prostitutes, it seems that the Revolution’s disruption of village and urban life, the breakup of families, and the social and cultural expectations of soldiers in war instead created a climate of ever more exaggerated sexual permissiveness. It is clear that Porfirian style, house-based sexual commerce, like other financial activities, suffered a temporary setback over the course of the revolution. The militarization of the populace, a growing population of single women in a city suffering from rampant unemployment, the ayuntamiento’s fiscal crisis, and the rise of a class of male business entrepreneurs who invested in new cabarets, burlesque theaters, and inexpensive hotels undermined the near monopoly on sexually oriented business that madams and registered prostitutes had enjoyed under the old regime. Facing greater competition from aisladas and clandestinas who found a ready supply of clients in the veterans and soldiers who frequented such new, all-night entertain1. AHCM, ‘‘Sanidad,’’ vol. 3891, file 200. 2. John Reed, Insurgent Mexico (New York: International Publishers, 1969); Mariano Azuela, The Underdogs, A Novel of the Mexican Revolution, trans. W. E. Munguı´a, Jr. (New York: New American Library, 1963). 3. Jose´ Vasconcelos, La Tormenta, segunda parte de ‘‘Ulı´ses Criollo,’’ 7th ed. (Mexico City: Ediciones Botas, 1948).

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ment venues as cabarets and dance halls, many madams found that it was no longer profitable to operate downtown ‘‘community’’ establishments for clientele who did not wish to play the game as the old Porfirians had. By 1921, after repeated appeals to the city council for relief and assistance, many women reluctantly closed their doors and sought their fortunes elsewhere.

Soldiers of Fortune As early as 1911, the same year in which Francisco I. Madero’s revolution against Porfirio Dı´az concluded with the dictator’s resignation and departure from Mexico, city councillor Leopoldo Villarreal had proposed legislation to control the mobility and visibility of prostitutes and street vendors in the nation’s capital. The problem, said Villarreal, had actually originated with the vendors, for many of these merchants were from rural areas and brought their goods in from the countryside for the day. In the city, they set up fruit and taco stands in the Zo´calo amid the trees and park benches that at that point graced the Plaza Mayor. Rather than dispose of their refuse in a garbage dump when they retired at night, however, these merchants discarded their mango rinds and greasy leftovers on the public walkways, where the trash attracted flies, rodents, and scavenger birds and hindered pedestrian activity. Even worse, it seems, the vendors and their customers could not be bothered to find lavatory facilities where they might answer nature’s call in private.4 The lush central plaza that welcomed visitors to the political and commercial center of the city had become, according to Villarreal, a place of filth and decay. But if the presence of sandal-clad campesinos, rotten meat, and human excrement in the Zo´calo were not bad enough, Villarreal maintained that the plaza was as immoral as it was unsanitary, for the trash-filled walkways had apparently become so overgrown with trees and bushes, he said, that they provided a dark and secret haven in which prostitutes apparently felt comfortable entertaining clientele during daylight hours. Protesting the fact that the capital’s main plaza had become a refuge for people engaged in marginally legal activity, the councillor demanded that the ayuntamiento ban prostitutes from the garden, advising ‘‘energetic dispositions to avoid 4. AHCM, ‘‘Policı´a en General,’’ vol. 3644, file 1698.

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the transit and downright solicitation the fallen women make in prejudice against public morality.’’5 It was not until the fall of 1912, a good year after Villarreal’s proposal, that the government of the Federal District took steps to legislate the geographic boundaries of sexual commerce in what was now the Maderista capital. The Federal District’s project to center a ‘‘tolerance zone’’ around a narrow calle (street) called Cuauhtemoctzı´n, where numerous matronas had already established their businesses, was a departure from Porfirian ‘‘dispersion’’ policies and provoked bitter neighborhood protests. The District’s plan stipulated that all matronas and prostitutes, who had previously been scattered around the city, relocate their businesses to this rapidly urbanizing district south of the plaza mayor by the end of the year. The approved vice district encompassed some sixty city blocks and large tracts of undeveloped land, starting at the corner of Calle del Nin˜o Perdido and Calle de Netzahualcoyotl, including the area east of Calle del 5 de Febrero, south to the Rı´o de la Piedad on the city’s southern border, and west again to Calle del Dr. Andrade. From there, the boundary of permitted vice ran north again, skirting the little plaza at Campo Florido, joining Callejo´n de Pajaritos, including the narrow Calle de Nava, and ending back at Calle del Nin˜o Perdido.6 The neighborhood was almost completely undeveloped: its streets were unpaved, it boasted no sewage facilities, and it was home, by some accounts, to colonies of bloodthirsty mosquitoes.7 Most residential buildings were wooden shacks that workers and migrants had hastily constructed in areas scattered throughout the often muddy expanse.8 The governor’s office mandated that all families not involved in sexual commerce move elsewhere if they were not inclined to share living space with prostitutes and their clientele in what was, by all accounts, an unattractive residential area.9 5. Ibid. 6. AHCM, ‘‘Policı´a en General,’’ vol. 3645, file 1714. 7. ‘‘Por que y en que extensio´n faltan servicios de urbanizacio´n en el Distrito Federal, del informe presentado por el Dr. Jose´ Manuel Puig Casauranc, Jefe del Departamento Central ´ rgano del Departamento ante el Consejo Consultivo en la sesio´n u´ltima,’’ Nuestra ciudad: O del Distrito Federal 1, no. 2 (May 1930): 8–9. See also Jorge H. Jime´nez Mun˜oz, La traza del poder: Historia de la polı´tica de los negocios urbanos en el Distrito Federal de sus orı´genes a la desaparicio´n del Ayuntamiento, 1824–1928 (Mexico City: Ediciones De´dalo, 1993), 235. 8. Secretarı´a de Fomento, Colonizacio´n e Industria, Censo general de la Repu´blica Mexicana verificado el 28 de octubre de 1900 conforme a las instrucciones de la Direccio´n General de Estadı´stica a cargo del Dr. Antonio Pen˜afiel: Distrito Federal (Mexico City: Secretarı´a de Fomento, Colonizacio´n e Industria, Oficina Tip. de la Secretarı´a de Fomento, 1901). 9. AHCM, ‘‘Policı´a en General,’’ vol. 3645, file 1714.

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Despite the area’s industrial aspect, the zoning decree provoked an immediate outcry from local residents, who resented the Federal District’s transformation of their working-class colonia into a vice zone. In an industrial area where working men and women had developed a local tradition of moral uplift and mutual aid, officially tolerated vice, many feared, would bring dishonor to the entire neighborhood.10 Shortly after the governor’s proclamations, organizers under the leadership of one Francisco Barrera, who identified themselves as ‘‘residents of the area,’’ circulated through local factories and workshops collecting signatures for a petition protesting the location of the new ‘‘tolerance zone’’ and the draconian means with which it was to be implemented. This petition invoked the themes of family, fatherhood, honor, and work against the establishment of the new vice zone: ‘‘We want to inform the authorities of the great prejudice that the families of these workers who have their honorable homes next to the houses of ill repute would suffer.’’ Not only had the number of homes inhabited by ‘‘people of order’’ diminished over the previous weeks, according to the group, but the number of matronas who had ‘‘invaded’’ the area had risen in the time since the proclamation. These men focused on the bad example the prostitutes’ proximity would pose for their wives, sisters, and daughters, who worked in such local establishments as the El Conejo Hat Factory, the Nueva Industria Bed Manufacturer, or even the Palacio de Hierro, a department store that employed seven hundred local residents.11 Surely, the protesters reasoned, local women would become jealous and demoralized upon seeing the ease with which prostitutes earned their money. Worse, still, was the fact that their female dependents might be vulnerable to attack by unruly brothel clientele. Writing to city councillor and proponent of the zone, Francisco Martı´n Reyes, the men of the neighborhood invoked their social rights as patriarchs and household heads, emphasizing that ‘‘one can see the importance of the number of workers . . . who naturally have their homes near the factories,’’ advising him to consider ‘‘how prejudicial it would be for the poor families who earn their small salaries to 10. Lear, ‘‘Mexico City,’’ 61; Morgan, ‘‘Proletarians, Polı´ticos, and Patriarchs,’’ 166. 11. Like most prostitutes, neighborhood residents were poor, often migrant, involved in factory work, service, unskilled occupations, and the informal sector. According to the 1900 census report, the community was occupied principally by vecindad-dwelling renters or, less frequently, by people who lived in hastily constructed wooden jacales. These spaces housed a mix of people from the Federal District and from such surrounding states as Hidalgo, Mexico, Quere´taro, and Guanajuato. Secretarı´a de Fomento, Colonizacio´n e Industria, Censo General de la Repu´blica Mexicana. By 1910 nearly half the city’s population was from outside the capital. Morgan, ‘‘Proletarians, Polı´ticos, and Patriarchs,’’ 152.

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Image not available

Fig. 3 The Federal District’s 1913 effort to concentrate all brothels and casas de asignacio´n in a working-class neighborhood near the city center sparked angry protest and outrage from local families who resented the city’s equating them with prostitutes and their patrons. Illustration by Edward Poole, University of Chicago, Physical Sciences Division, Graphic Arts Office, taken from Archivo Histo´rico de la Ciudad de Me´xico (AHCM), Policı´a en General, volume 3645, file 1714. have in their constant view the facility with which the women of the bad life obtain all of their comforts and satisfy all of their whims, without having to suffer the privations to which the working families are subjected because of the insufficiency of the daily wages they earn.’’ While the occupations of the organizers themselves are not clear, the unsuccessful petitioners claimed to represent some 2,200 laboring men and women in requesting the ayuntamiento reconsider its decree that all ‘‘houses of ill repute’’ move to the zone by January 1913.12 12. AHCM, ‘‘Policı´a en General,’’ vol. 3645, file 1714.

Revolutionary Capital

List of local industries: (see Fig. 3) 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

Palacio de Hierro Homeopathic Hospital National School no. 71, Night School for Workers no. 10 ‘‘La Nueva Industria’’ Bed Manufacturing Company French carpenters and cabinetmakers ‘‘El Castor’’ Hat Manufacturing Company ‘‘El Conejo’’ Manufacturing Company Stephan and Torres Printshop and Bindery Livi et al. Workshop Agustı´n Crosset Smelting Company Mattress Factory and Perfume Manufacturing Company Mechanic/repair shop Tag and Label Manufacturing Company ‘‘El Aguila’’ Pencil Factory ‘‘La Carpeta’’ Workshop/Studio National School no. 19 and Night School for Workers no. 11 Warehouse ‘‘El Nuevo Mundo’’ Woodworking Shop School Cafeteria no. 7 American Book and Printing Shop Alcohol refinery Girls’ School no. 68 and Night School for Workers no. 35 Carbonated water plant Cardboard manufacturing plant Sa´nchez and Resauro Carriage Shop ‘‘El Jonuco’’ Grocery ‘‘Black Diamond’’ Paints Factory French tailor ‘‘Los Industriales’’ Plant Shoe factory Crockery plant Cardboard factory Spanish hospital Asylum/Reformatory ‘‘La Perfeccionada’’ Bonnetmakers

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Local opposition to madams and prostitutes commenced with the Federal District’s formal designation of a vice district in a working-class neighborhood, but the conflict between those involved in metropolitan prostitution and their neighbors deepened with the renewal of revolutionary hostilities in February, just one month later. Before 1913 the capital had been spared the worst of the devastation of the Revolution. But that February’s decena tra´gica, or the ‘‘tragic ten days’’ during which Porfirio Dı´az’s nephew, Fe´lix Dı´az, and former collaborator, Bernardo Reyes, rebelled from prison, gathered their forces, and attacked the capital, brought war to the heart of the Colonia Obrera, as the Cuauhtemoctzı´n area came to be known. The Dı´az/Reyes revolt paved the way for the regime of federal army head General Victoriano Huerta, and the ensuing battle devastated the city sector that abutted the zona de tolerancia, for it was at the citadel on nearby Calle Balderas that the rebels staged their uprising and where much of the fighting over Madero’s legitimacy and succession took place. Film shot during the struggle shows an urban area leveled by cannon fire. Contemporary newspaper accounts documented thousands of men and women rendered homeless and cut off from access to food and water in the wake of the destruction. Such observers as U.S. ambassador Henry Lane Wilson noted that the city’s devastation after la decena tra´gica was overwhelming and marveled at the people’s ability to survive such ‘‘destruction and death.’’13 In his memoirs, area resident Pedro Granados recalled that ‘‘the area suffered physical changes, for with the Revolution it was converted into a bloody theater, in whose streets and plazas bullets flew by, hundreds of cadavers were recovered, and the blood, poverty and flies created a festival of horror.’’14 The bombing and physical destruction of the Colonia Obrera took its toll on local lives and morale, but the violent deaths of Madero and his vice president Pino Sua´rez provoked greater problems for barrio residents, for Venustiano Carranza’s call to arms against el usurpador, as his opponents called Huerta, brought renewed fighting to Mexico’s countryside, the consequences of which devastated everyday life in the capital’s poor neighborhoods. The conflict between the constitutionalists and the Huerta regime in 1913 and 1914, and the subsequent power struggle between the supporters of Venustiano Carranza, Francisco ‘‘Pancho’’ Villa, and Emiliano Zapata from the middle of 1914 to the beginning of 1916, left an indelible mark on 13. Toscano, Salvador. Memorias de un mexicano. [videorecording] (Madera, CA: Madera Cinevideo, 1986). Henry Lane Wilson, Diplomatic Episodes in Mexico, Belgium and Chile (New York: Doubleday, 1927), 258–59. 14. Pedro Granados, Las carpas de Me´xico: Leyendas y ane´cdotas del teatro popular (Mexico City: Editorial Universo, 1984), 25.

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the city’s women. The constant fighting upset rural life, and the bombing of bridges, the destruction of roads, and the decimation of railroad lines left the defenseless city without the necessary supplies of food on which its largely commercial and manufacturing residents depended.15 As the commercial and political center of the nation, moreover, the city was like a prize in a violent game. Between intermittent battles, struggles with invading armies, and skirmishes on the municipal outskirts, many industrialists closed or slowed down factory production, releasing numerous workers to their fates as informal vendors and traders of services for food and forcing many to move in with relatives to bear the brunt of scarcity and insecurity. Chronicler of life in Mexico City during the Revolution, Francisco Ramı´rez Plancarte observed that over this period thousands of starving capitalinos were reduced to trapping stray cats to kill for food and that it was all too common to see people rummaging through piles of trash and refuse searching for something to eat. Women of all ages, he noted, turned to prostitution, trading sexual services for food or a night’s shelter; Ramı´rez Plancarte even went so far as to estimate that up to half the city’s women had at some point exchanged sex for necessities over the course of the war.16 Local observations confirm this impression. Indeed, when local bakers refused to lower bread prices despite rampant poverty and starvation, critics complained that it was women already engaged in prostitution who led a desperate riot against the pastry makers in the city.17 Refugees and local women may have occasionally turned to the world’s ‘‘oldest profession’’ and sold sex to their neighbors and to military men in a difficult economy, but prostitutes’ ranks swelled when the revolutionary armies sacked the capital, abandoning the soldaderas—the soldiers’ sisters, wives, daughters, and lovers who traveled with the units—to their own devices in a strange city without friends or family.18 Popular music, literature, and newspaper reports in and outside Mexico painted a picture of the sol15. Haber, Industry and Underdevelopment, 169. 16. Francisco Ramı´rez Plancarte, La ciudad de Me´xico durante la revolucio´n constitucionalista (Mexico City: Ediciones Botas, 1940), 366–67, 423–27. 17. Lear, ‘‘Mexico City,’’ 68. The problem of social tensions created by the influx of refugees, unemployment, and prostitution is also discussed in Douglas R. Weiner, ‘‘Razmychka? Urban Unemployment and Peasant In-Migration as Sources of Social Conflict,’’ in Russia in the Era of NEP: Explorations in Soviet Society and Culture, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Alexander Rabinowitch and Richard Stites (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 144–56. 18. Elizabeth Salas, Soldaderas in the Mexican Military: Myth and History (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 40. Salas notes that ‘‘the soldadera was vital to securing and preparing food. A typical soldadera in 1910 carried a food basket complete with a tablecloth, decorative plates and flowers, as she vied with other women to take a soldier’s money to purchase food and cook it for him.’’ Salas, ‘‘The soldadera in the Mexican Revolution,’’ 95.

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dadera as a woman of loose morals, but interviews with the women themselves suggest that female sexual promiscuity and exchange of a sexual encounter for money or food must be considered in the context of the women’s participation in the armies, which was often informal, certainly dangerous, and constantly subject to reassessment upon the death of the man with whom she traveled.19 Although some soldiers brought their wives and children with them both to ensure their safety and to have their assistance with transporting goods and food preparation, others established relations with women in the towns in which they were quartered, bringing them along when the army moved on. Indeed, despite the long tradition of including women and children with military units and the necessity of their work within Mexican militias that did not have professional service personnel, many revolutionary leaders failed to appreciate the women’s contributions and made their lives difficult, forcing them to run behind the mounted divisions or ride in crowded and often uncomfortable train cars with animals and dangerous ammunition. Regular foot soldiers gave the women their soldada, or pay, in exchange for their performing such domestic tasks as food preparation and some equipment maintenance, but they also expected the women to carry luggage and to forage for provisions. When the man with whom she was traveling was wounded or died, however, the soldadera’s life became precarious, indeed, and popular convention—if not army policy—held that she would need to seek the protection of another man if she hoped to survive. In his reportage of his travels with the Villistas, North American journalist John Reed tells the story of Elizabetta, a soldadera whose lover had been killed and who within minutes had already been claimed by another soldier, Don Fe´lix. Reed recounts that when Don Fe´lix saw Reed talking with Elizabetta, he warned the reporter, ‘‘Oiga, sen˜or, this is my woman here.’’ Reed, however, says that Elizabetta begged Reed to let her stay with him for the night so that she might avoid the other man’s amorous overtures. The next morning, however, Reed notes that he was surprised to see Elizabetta cheerfully preparing breakfast for the man who had summarily claimed her as his own property the day before. When he asked her if she was going with him, Reed 19. ‘‘El Chalequero,’’ a criminal Roumagnac interviewed in 1903 and again in 1906, told the criminologist that during his stay at the prison of San Juan de Ulloa in Veracruz, he frequently paid to have sex with the guards’ soldaderas. Roumagnac, Matadores de mujeres, 198. But the popular image of the soldadera was contradictory. For example, Sergei Eisenstein’s Viva Mexico!, an unfinished film about the Mexican Revolution, which praised the soldaderas as the unsung heroines of the conflict.

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reports Elizabetta as having replied, ‘‘Of course I’m going! Seguro! Is he not my man?’’20 Following a soldier to war could be dangerous for a woman, but staying home was not safe either. Being female and alone in a village meant that one was vulnerable to the sexual advances of soldiers and other villagers, as Esperanza, a Morelos resident interviewed in the 1940s by anthropologist Oscar Lewis, pointed out. Esperanza told Lewis that her husband had joined the Zapatista army more because of its promise of clothes and food than because of any ideological sympathies with that army’s struggle for ‘‘land and liberty.’’ While he was off at the front, a male neighbor began making unwelcome sexual advances toward her. Esperanza said that ‘‘my neighbor, seeing me alone, began to talk to me of love. He would say things . . . that I should sleep with him and he would help me get food.’’ Her only recourse was to join her husband at the front.21 Even the Carrancistas made things difficult for women. Jesusa Palancares, widow of a constitutionalist soldier killed in battle, told a reporter in a lengthy interview that the new government had no interest in paying war widows their husbands’ pension funds, and she asserted that in a meeting with constitutionalist leader Venustiano Carranza, the first chief himself told her that ‘‘if you were old, the government would give you a pension. But some day you’ll marry again, and the dead husband certainly can’t be expected to maintain the new one.’’22 Left to her own devices in the capital, Palancares worked various jobs as a nurse and waitress before ultimately supporting herself as a cabaret dancer, an occupation strongly associated with sexual commerce. But despite the dangers of city life for single women, many families were still convinced that the cities were safer for their young daughters than the revolutionary countryside and sent the adolescents to the capital, where they nevertheless suffered poverty, abuse, and exposure to ‘‘vice’’ and other misfortunes.23 20. Reed, Insurgent Mexico, 113–15. For a discussion of Reed’s portrayal of the violence, machismo, and ‘‘savagery’’ of the Villista front, see Christopher P. Wilson, ‘‘Plotting the Border: John Reed, Pancho Villa, and Insurgent Mexico,’’ in Cultures of United States Imperialism, ed. Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 340–61. 21. June E. Hahner, ‘‘A Mexican Peasant Woman Remembers,’’ in Women in Latin American History, revised ed., ed. June Hahner (Los Angeles: University of California Latin American Center Publications, 1980), 160. 22. Elena Poniatowska, Hasta no verte, Jesu´s mı´o (Mexico City: Ediciones Era, 1969), 136–37. 23. Judith Friedlander, ‘‘Don˜a Zeferina Barreto: Biographical Sketch of an Indian Woman from the State of Morelos,’’ in Fowler-Salamini and Vaughan, Women of the Mexican Countryside, 131.

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The passage of revolutionary armies through the capital after Huerta’s defeat and then during the protracted civil conflict similarly affected the legal dimension of sexual commerce. In May 1914, just two months before its collapse, the Huerta government had implemented a new Reglamento para el ejercicio de la prostitucio´n en el Distrito Federal, which specified that ‘‘all women engaged in sexual commerce should register with authorities,’’ dress with decency, abstain from making scandals, and refrain from visiting ‘‘honorable families’’ or speaking to ‘‘men accompanied by ladies or little girls’’ in public. The new government of the Federal District also reserved the right to establish which areas and sites of public diversion were off limits to prostitutes and their clientele in a rejection of the old Maderista-era tolerance zone plan.24 But during the constant fighting over the spring and summer of 1915, the city was repeatedly besieged by constitutionalist and conventionist forces as the parties who had joined to oust Victoriano Huerta and protest the occupation of the port of Veracruz by the United States now squabbled among themselves over national leadership. Whenever it occupied the capital, each army sought to establish its presence by dictating new rules governing urban social morals. On July 11, 1915, constitutionalist and close collaborator of First Chief Carranza, General Pablo Gonza´lez, ordered municipal president Dr. Juan Vanegas to close all bars, liquor stores, brothels, casas de citas, and other sites of prostitution, warning all proprietors that any infraction would be punished with the hefty fine of one thousand to ten thousand pesos and ‘‘would in no way be condoned.’’25 But only two weeks later the constitutionalists lost the city to the Zapatistas, who under General Gilardo Magan˜a promptly dissolved the ayuntamiento, effectively repudiating the constitutionalist moral strictures.26 The Zapatistas released all prisoners and asylum inmates, allowed those brothels whose matronas donated one hundred pesos a month to the municipal Public Welfare coffers to stay open and even permitted them to provide musical entertainment for patrons.27 When the constitutionalists retook the city only a few months later, they found themselves unable to rein24. ‘‘Reglamento para el ejercicio de la prostitucio´n en el Distrito Federal’’ (Mexico City: Impresores del Gobierno Federal, 1914), 7–8. In 1914 the federal legislature voted to cease funding the Hospital Morelos, turning the building over to the Junta de Damas Cato´licas to run as a children’s hospital and homeless shelter. The subsequent legislature choose to reopen the facility in 1915. Quiros Rodiles, Breve historia del Hospital Morelos, 87–88. 25. ‘‘El General Alfredo J. Machuca inviste al Ayuntamiento de la ciudad de Mexico con la Suprema Autoridad Civil,’’ Boletı´n Municipal, July 15, 1915, 164. 26. ‘‘Acta de disolucio´ n del anterior Ayuntamiento,’’ Boletı´ n Municipal, December 31, 1917, 3. 27. AHCM, ‘‘Sanidad,’’ vol. 3892, file 216.

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vigorate the old proscriptions against brothel entertainment and resolved to make the best of the situation, allowing the brothels to stay open but reserving the madams’ donations for army coffers rather than distributing them to the poor and indigent residents of the city.28 The ongoing renegotiation of metropolitan public health ordinances under revolutionary occupation must have been confusing to the matronas, not to mention the city residents, but it was the behavior of soldiers and other clientele that most vexed capitalinos during the conventionist and constitutionalist years. Military men enjoyed both visiting bordellos and spending time with the women they met in the city’s cafe´s, bars, nightclubs, and streets. The habit of spending time with prostitutes characterized army personnel of all ranks and social classes too, for documents reflect that all ranks, from foot soldier to generals, actively participated in the trade in sex in Mexico’s wartime capital. Indeed, in an essay collection he published in the 1930s, writer Luis Angel Rodrı´guez recalled a scene in which a decorated constitutionalist general took time away from his military duties to make a special trip to a brothel one afternoon. When the madam sent word to the local military headquarters to tell the unnamed ‘‘revolutionary hero’’ that she had procured an innocent young woman, ‘‘beautiful, like an angel,’’ for his pleasure, the general apparently dropped everything and, with several aides, drove immediately to the brothel to make arrangements with the madam, all the while pacing the room, according to Rodrı´guez, like ‘‘a tiger in the Roman circus, into whose bloody teeth they were going to throw a Christian virgin.’’ While his aides traded stories about their jefe’s equally impressive military and erotic exploits, the general and the girl disappeared for a few hours, but, as Rodrı´guez recalls, the general eventually emerged from the room, threw quite a bit of money at the madam, and quickly assembled his aides, leaving without the usual formalities. According to Rodrı´guez, when the madam learned that the general had not been able to muster the energy to ‘‘deflower’’ her new merchandise, she did not despair of locating another suitable client from among the revolutionary troops stationed in the capital and quickly sent word to a colonel who she was certain would ‘‘take the general’s leftovers.’’29 Education reformer and politician Jose´ Vasconcelos described the brothel-going practices of the military and 28. Ibid., file 200. Alan Knight observes that the Constitutionalist Army’s reputation for ‘‘graft, corruption and profiteering’’ was well deserved (Mexican Revolution, 2:381, 418) and notes that the Constitutionalist ‘‘moralising campaign collided with the immediate imperatives of profit—and taxation’’ (463). 29. Luis Angel Rodrı´guez, Jaulas y pa´jaros del amor: veinticinco estampas del vicio en Me´xico (Toluca, Mex.: Talleres Tipogra´ficas ‘‘la Carpeta,’’ 1934), 40.

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political leaders similarly. Vasconcelos observed that during the height of revolutionary activity, one politician with whom he was acquainted ‘‘invited me to go on the nightly round of brothels in the capital.’’ All of the clientele, he noted, were militares in the new order.30 Not only did soldiers seek to demonstrate their power and status by associating with public women, but one observer recalled that ‘‘a young man could barely go out in public with a good-looking girl before an abusive and drunk guy in a uniform came up with a gun and threatened to take her away.’’31 One deputy to the constitutionalist convention in 1916 worried, in fact, that the military’s prominent association with brothel prostitutes gave all revolutionaries a bad name. Lauding the work of the valiant constitutionalist soldiers and leaders from the northern states of Sonora and Sinaloa and calling them ‘‘real revolutionaries’’ who had fought not for pay but for patriotic sentiments, he contrasted them with ‘‘fifis, gentlemen, fifis with decorated uniforms, [who] do nothing more than fill the cafe´s and houses of prostitution in the capital.’’32 Revolutionary leaders may have worried about the soldiers’ behavior in the city out of ideological concerns, but it was the city’s residents who bore the actual brunt of their presence. Once peace returned and a new constitution was drafted, capitalinos became increasingly unwilling to tolerate the militares’ raucous behavior and lack of respect for urban working people. The police were frequently called to break up the loud disputes between soldiers and women, who, if not precisely clandestinas, were nevertheless presumed to be prostitutes.33 More frustrating to the residents of the city, however, were the new and often illegal casas de asignacio´n, where loud music, extreme language, and violence generally disturbed the public peace. At the end of August 1917 Enriqueta M. de Villasen˜or wrote to the newly reopened Mexico City ayuntamiento to complain about the constant disturbances local prostitutes and their military clientele created in what had previously been a calm, orderly, family-oriented neighborhood. Villasen˜or, who lived next to a ‘‘house of ill repute’’ run by matrona Consuelo Villarreal, bitterly noted that ‘‘now it is absolutely impossible to live next to them, now they are insufferable, yesterday they were making a huge scandal, 30. Vasconcelos. La Tormenta, quoted in Gonza´lez Rodrı´guez, Los bajos fondos, graphic appendix, no page number. 31. Granados, Las carpas de Me´xico, 31. 32. Congreso, Ca´mara de Diputados, Diario de los debates de la H. Ca´mara de Diputados, 27th legislature, special session, an˜o 1, no. 47 (June 2, 1917). 33. AHCM, ‘‘Justicia. Ca´rceles. Planillas y listas de detenidos,’’ vol. 2684, file 117.

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drinking, and when they were through, broke all of the bottles.’’ More frustrating to Villasen˜or and her family was the apparent immunity from prosecution that the prostitutes of Villarreal’s establishment and the militares who visited them seemed to enjoy. Despite the Villasen˜or family’s repeated requests that the city intervene, five months later the constant noise and violence continued to present problems for the sen˜ora and her neighbors. At the end of January 1918, Villasen˜or again pleaded with the city to do something about the matrona and her brothel, writing that the previous evening ‘‘the women and the soldiers were yelling and screaming. They were playing the piano and singing, but one could hardly understand the words, for what they were trying to do was make trouble, and if anyone says anything they start to insult you; the clients are all soldiers, and the women think that because of that they can do what they want, such that they even shoot off bullets.’’34 Villasen˜or’s frustration over the city’s failure to deal with public women and their clientele reflected a broader problem that the city council faced in the late teens, that is, the fact that the ayuntamiento’s law enforcement agencies were regularly thwarted by internal corruption and influence peddling. The ayuntamiento’s best efforts to respond to citizens’ complaints and to challenge militares and matronas met regularly with favoritism, as high-ranking military officers not only challenged civilians over access to ‘‘public women’’ but even sought to intervene to protect their favorite matronas from unpleasant entanglements with the law. Agustina de la Vega, a matrona who ran an establishment well outside the tolerated zone on the Calle Roma in the Colonia Jua´rez, for example, enjoyed the protection of soldiers and even, she claimed, ‘‘a general and high-ranking government official.’’ De la Vega’s establishment was in a relatively upscale residential neighborhood, but it was anything but the quiet and innocuous setting the Reglamento envisioned. De la Vega’s influence and connections were apparently so extensive that even a city administrator who lived near her could not get the police to address his concerns over her bordello’s disorderliness. As a public official who lived near de la Vega’s establishment wrote angrily in November 1917, he and his family, who lived in one of the apartments in the building in which de la Vega had established her business, had had next to no sleep and even less peace of mind since the prostitutes moved in. The administrator complained that in order to protect the morality of his loved ones, he was ‘‘obliged to close all the doors out of fear of that lady when 34. AHCM, ‘‘Sanidad,’’ vol. 3894, file 1325.

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she gets drunk, which happens frequently.’’ Despite the generalized offensiveness of the locale, the event that inspired the angry administrator’s complaint was ‘‘an enormous scandal in the house, in which the lady, some prostitutes and other soldiers began screaming insults and obscene words, until the police from the eighth precinct came, but then they quickly left without the energy to break up the scene.’’ To add insult to injury, de la Vega had apparently shrugged off her neighbor’s threats to denounce her flagrant disregard for the Reglamento, telling him that she was immune from repercussions because she could count on protection from a government official.35 De la Vega’s lack of respect for the ayuntamiento, the city’s impotence in the face of higher authorities, and the municipal police’s apparent fear of entanglement with powerful military men created tension, not only between the prostitutes and their immediate neighbors, but also between the prostitutes and their landlords. These men and women took matters into their own hands, denouncing matronas, evicting prostitutes, and charging socalled vice merchants higher rents. Manuel Paredes Arroyo, a native of Pachuca, Hidalgo, who owned property in the Federal District, complained about the ‘‘people of doubtful conduct’’ and the ‘‘disorders’’ that characterized daily life at the brothel one of his tenants had secretly established in the Comonfort Avenue casa de vecindad, or tenement house, which he rented out and which connected to his own residence through a common patio and several doorways. Arroyo stated that he had leased the space next to the home where he lived with his wife and young daughters to a Sen˜ora Ema de la Roca, who, he said, never gave him any indication that she intended to establish a brothel. De la Roca’s business, Arroyo claimed, had brought nothing but trouble to the apartment building. Arroyo and a tenant who ran a carpentry workshop on the premises claimed that de la Roca’s clients frequently urinated and defecated in the patio and threw cigarette butts into the space where the tenant kept his wood supplies. When the ayuntamiento investigated the situation, it discovered that de la Roca was not, in fact, authorized to operate a brothel, for the license was actually in the name of one Diana Romain, a well-known madam who officially operated several firstclass establishments throughout the zone. Perhaps because Romain did not wish to endanger her other business interests by having a conflict with the municipal agency, she agreed to close the illegal brothel without incident.36 35. Ibid., file 1297. Regarding the history of the police in Mexico, see Alejandro In˜igo, Bita´cora de un policı´a, 1500–1982 (Mexico City: Departamento del Distrito Federal, 1985). 36. AHCM, ‘‘Sanidad,’’ vol. 3892, file 1319.

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The refusal by landlords to tolerate prostitutes and madams as tenants made it difficult for these women to find affordable space for brothels and casas de asignacio´n.37 Despite the fact that almost all of the one-story outbuildings called accesorias on such streets as Libertad, Ave Marı´a, Pajaritos, Allende, Netzahualcoyotl, Dr. Daniel Ruı´z, and Cuauhtemoctzı´n were licensed for sexual commerce, many area landlords were still not anxious to have casas de asignacio´n on their personal properties and either refused to rent to prostitutes, charged them higher rents, or regularly threatened them with eviction to assert some level of control. Investing in a brothel was already an expensive undertaking, for the Reglamento required matronas to provide clean bed sheets and hygienic materials for prostitutes and clients as well as toilets and other amenities. A third-class brothel might have only a kitchen, toilet, and patio in addition to the bedrooms, but a first-class site that passed inspection could have ‘‘perfectly clean and comfortable rooms with wood floors covered with practically new rugs’’ as well as ‘‘complete sanitary installations.’’38 To avoid these requirements, some aisladas lied about their professions and rented rooms which they then licensed for sexual commerce. As Margarita Soler, owner of a casa de hue´spedes (boarding house) on the Avenida Hombres Ilustres, complained to the city in 1917, two women tenants lied, telling her they were hairdressers, and after they moved in began receiving clients, to the shock and dismay of the other residents. Soler requested the city’s assistance in evicting the two prostitutes, which she received.39 Perhaps the most telling indication that the city was largely impotent to deal with the proliferation of vice and violence in the revolutionary capital was the fact that matronas frequently circumvented the brothel establishment requirements by licensing numerous rooms in a vecindad for aislada work. Theoretically, the aislada licensed her own apartment for sexual commerce or entertained clients at a casa de asignacio´n. But some women who wished to engage in sexual commerce at a higher level worked to control entire buildings of one-room apartments. For example, Gabriela Berthet presumably did not personally receive clients in all sixteen rooms for which 37. Attilio Sabbatini protested the presence of a brothel on the Avenida Jalisco to the Secretario de Gobernacio´n in 1925. Sabbatini complained that he had trouble renting his property because of the ‘‘scandals’’ at the brothel. See Archivo General de la Nacio´n, Me´xico, D.F. (hereafter AGN), Direccio´n General de Gobierno (hereafter DGG), series 2a.014.29, box 1, file 2. 38. AHCM, ‘‘Sanidad,’’ vol. 3893, file 249. 39. Ibid., vol. 3894, file 1282.

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she held licenses on various streets throughout the Colonia Obrera. Instead, it is likely that she operated the rooms like an extended casa de asignacio´n, collecting money from women who wished to use the bedrooms for commercial purposes.40 Francisca Herna´ndez, another unregistered matrona, was more subtle than Berthet in her approach, for she had other women take out the licenses but then controlled a large share of locally based, sexually oriented businesses because she was the guarantor of numerous accesorias on several city blocks in that urban sector in which vice was permitted.41

Moral Bankruptcy Between 1917 and 1921 the Mexico City council found itself caught between a desire to comply with revolutionary social imperatives and monetary and administrative crises. With a growing population, limited resources, and repeated accusations of fiscal mismanagement, the city found itself in dire straits, indeed. To generate income, administrators sought to raise fees for the types of entertainment matronas could offer bordello and casa de asignacio´n clients. But these licensing strategies contradicted new revolutionary imperatives regarding work, health, and redemption and placed the city council in a difficult situation. During the late Porfiriato, hygienists such as Luis Lara y Pardo had clearly painted prostitutes as degenerates and ‘‘agents of their own disgrace’’; however, as the records of the Mexico City ayuntamiento and the federal legislature make clear, officials who were inspired by constitutional guarantees regarding work, welfare, and individual liberties now cast prostitutes in the role of victims of the Porfirians’ social hypocrisy. For example, as part of a larger discussion about Article 123, delegates to the constitutional convention in Quere´taro had recognized the problems single, working women faced to put food on the table for their children and recognized that these workers were precisely those who turned to prostitution out of poverty. In January 1917 delegate Porfirio del Castillo had assessed this problem in terms of social hypocrisy. He complained that society ignored poor women, was uncharitable toward the single mother, and then con40. On furniture in an aislada’s apartment, see ibid., vol. 3893, file 232. 41. Ibid., vol. 3894, files 1268–80.

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demned her when she ‘‘had no other choice than to throw herself in the street to sell her caresses in order to keep her family from dying.’’42 In a speech he delivered to the federal legislature in September 1917, Deputy Arturo Higareda from Jalisco painted a similar picture of prostitutes as victims of ignorance and corruption. Noting that ‘‘the majority of the representatives listening know that there are three things that have degenerated our poor classes: first, the clergy, which hides the truth and which exploits the poor; second, the government, which, being tyrannical, deprived them of learning, which is the bread of understanding and fountain of spirit; and in the third place, vices, which keep them from working,’’ he advocated the legislature implement reform measures regarding work and education.43 As Yucata´n diputado Felipe Trigo told a gathering of the federal legislature in 1920, ‘‘Regulated prostitution is the greatest shame of all modern societies. The official prostitute is exploited by the madam, the client, the doctor and the Government. It seems incredible that one female organ should bring food to so many people.’’44 Concerns over this new view of prostitutes as victims of Porfirian corruption and male excess infused the city council’s debates over how to reform municipal policies to accommodate new revolutionary principles. In the sympathetic spirit of Higareda and Castillo, in 1918 the members of Mexico City council sincerely debated how that governing body could protect the women in brothels from both unruly clientele and unscrupulous madams. In an impassioned speech in February of that year, local representative Dr. Agustı´n Vidales argued that it was imperative the municipal government protect prostitutes from abusive work situations. Not only did he suggest that the ayuntamiento mandate that ‘‘public women’’ who worked in brothels have a day of rest, he based his logic on the idea that they were overworked by the matronas and subjected to physical and emotional degradation by their clientele. The citizen’s right to freedom from slavery, codified in constitutional article 4, also inspired him. As he spoke, he invoked both the humiliating sex acts prostitutes were required to perform and the disdain with which their customers treated them. He told the gathered officials that 42. Comisio´n Nacional para la Celebracio´n, Diario de los debates del Congreso Constituyente, no. 52, January 12, 1917. See the discussion of tensions between ‘‘warriors and socialists,’’ in Mosse, Image of Man, 110–32. 43. Congreso, Ca´mara de Diputados, Diario de los debates de la H. Ca´mara de Diputados, 27th legislature, an˜o 2, no. 13 (September 4, 1917). 44. Ibid., 29th legislature, an˜o 1, no. 97 (December 24, 1920).

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it is constitutional that everyone get a day of rest, principally workers (laughs from the council); taking into account that these poor women are eternally locked in those houses, suffering all kinds of humiliations, since they are treated in the majority of cases with the greatest disdain, it is nothing unusual that they should be granted a day of rest. I think it is only a matter of justice to give them a day off, since these poor creatures are always subject to the immoderate exploitation of the women who run those houses. Vidales further drew parallels between prostitution and slavery, pointing out that some madams prevented their pupilas from leaving their establishments, forcing them into debt and keeping their clothes and shoes under lock and key.45 Indeed, only days before, pupila Elvira Castillo had brought her complaint against matrona Adela N. to the council’s attention. Having worked at the matrona’s Netzahualcoyotl brothel for forty-five days, Castillo fled, complaining that Adela N. had refused to pay her and owed her some shoes as well as a dress.46 In order to learn more about the contours of brothel life, the city councillors commissioned a study of the registered bordellos in the city to learn how many women worked there, what the most popular days were and what days women might reasonably be released. By May 1918 the council’s surveys of the metropolitan demimonde had revealed that most brothels had anywhere from six to twelve women, with the lower-class brothels having only two or three. The ideals of work and leisure inspired the councillors to implement policies to give the women some relief from their work conditions, ‘‘knowing of the slavery to which the women in the brothels are subjected due to their disgrace.’’ One councillor stated that given the nature of prostitutes’ work it was just to grant the women ‘‘a night of calm, away from the daily orgies, so that they may recuperate their rest, which is sacrificed in the practice of a repugnant obligation.’’ Moreover, the council determined that the women also had the right to ‘‘have fun, if that is what they wish,’’ and voted to give all brothel prostitutes a day of rest, to the great consternation of the matronas.47 Under Dr. Vidales, the city council espoused the desire to help prostitutes and other poor women disentangle themselves from violent and unpleasant 45. Ordinary meeting of the Ayuntamiento de la Ciudad de Me´xico, February 21, 1918, in Boletı´n Municipal, March 12, 1918. 46. AHCM, ‘‘Sanidad,’’ vol. 3891, file 5. 47. Ibid., file 50.

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or involuntary work situations, but the fact was that the ayuntamiento could not count on the financial resources necessary to protect brothel inmates or common streetwalkers, and many women had to take their security into their own hands. The area in which most brothels were generally concentrated was, by all accounts, a dangerous zone in its own right, and prostitutes faced the additional threat of violence from their clients which city police could neither prevent nor, in many cases, prosecute. Marı´a Isabel Smith, who worked in a brothel on Calle de la Camelia, where numerous other bordellos were located, was shot to death on the second of January 1918 by Jose´ Rojo de la Vega, who police later concluded was a client who managed to get into the brothel to seek ‘‘some form of vengeance.’’48 Only eleven days later police returned to the area to investigate the stabbing of Raquel Gutie´rrez, a presumed aislada who had been wounded by ‘‘a man who fled’’ from the ‘‘el Jonuco’’ accesoria located on the first block of Netzahualcoyotl.49 Because the city could not be counted on to keep order, many matronas hired strong or armed men to be present during brothel hours or, like Frances Levy, proprietress of a well-appointed bordello, maintained ferocious guard dogs on the premises. Even these extreme measures, however, did not make the area secure. Levy, a long-time Mexico City madam who had had a series of brothels and who had been suspected by Porfirian authorities of trafficking in foreign women, found herself involved with the police in February 1918 because ‘‘her door was open after the official hour, and a dog she kept at the brothel bit a young man, Ignacio Alvarez,’’ who was walking down the street, for which she had to pay a steep fine.50 The climate of violence coupled with unruly clientele frustrated neighbors and landlords and created problems for established and aspiring matronas alike. And if it were not enough that the city could not control the unruly patrons or the trade in sex, the city exacerbated the matronas’ problems in two more ways. First, the city began extending cabaret licenses as favors to men who had served the city well over the problematic years of revolutionary uncertainty. Second, in an effort to increase revenues, the city permitted the sale of liquor and the provision of dance music in brothels but placed heavy fees on this activity. If the high fees were not bad enough, the prohibition on playing piano after 1 a.m., many matronas complained, gave 48. AHCM, ‘‘Policı´a, Inspeccio´n General, Comisarı´a, Partes Diarios (1918),’’ vol. 3658, file 1. 49. Ibid. 50. AHCM, ‘‘Sanidad,’’ vol. 3891, file 7.

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the new cabarets an unfair advantage, for as entertainment venues where men and women mingled, drank, and danced, they made it unnecessary for men interested in a sexual encounter to visit a site of licit prostitution. How could brothels survive in such a competitive business environment? In the late teens, the American-inspired dance hall and theater venues had caught on in Mexico City, for such sites provided independent men and women with the opportunity to enjoy social and physical contact without interference from their parents, the state, or a matrona. As early as 1915, enterprising businessmen and military leaders sought to capitalize on new crazes, such as jazz, the fox-trot, the danzo´n, and the shimmy, by obtaining licenses to operate public dance clubs and cabarets. According to the municipal debates, a baile pu´blico was family oriented and served soft drinks, whereas a cabaret was open from midnight until dawn and served liquor.51 At the long-established Tivoli del Eliseo theater, property of Manuel F. Bustos, public dances were held on Sundays and holidays, but in 1915 the ayuntamiento was assured that these ended at 9 p.m. and served only beer and soft drinks.52 Early that same year another entrepreneur secured permission to exhibit vaudeville-type shows at the Teatro Welton, an establishment ‘‘for men only,’’ after he assured the city that the entertainment included neither exotic dancing nor obscene films and that he had eliminated all ‘‘private theater boxes,’’ or reservados, where men and women frequently engaged in ‘‘immoral activity.’’53 Later that session revolutionary captain Miguel Zayas sought to obtain a permit to have public dances on Thursdays and Saturdays with extended hours until five in the morning, but the ayuntamiento members determined that such a sites of potential immorality had no place in a city as distinguished as the Mexican capital. When the city council members considered the matter in sessions, some debate centered around the fact that Zayas should be at least somewhat honored for his contribu51. Ordinary session of the Ayuntamiento de la Ciudad de Me´xico, January 29, 1918, in Boletı´n Municipal, January 29, 1918, 99. 52. Ordinary session of the Ayuntamiento de la Ciudad de Me´xico, February 9, 1915, in Boletı´n Municipal, April 30, 1915, 14. In his study of the commercialization of sex in New York City over the late eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries, Timothy Gilfoyle argues that the new concert halls, cabarets, and ‘‘masquerades’’ that developed there created a new climate of sexual permissiveness, writing ‘‘this mixture of intoxicating stage shows and sexual pleasure introduced a new, more eroticized form of prostitution to New York,’’ and says that ‘‘concert saloons established a new organization model for prostitution.’’ Gilfoyle, City of Eros, 225. 53. Ordinary session of the Ayuntamiento de la Ciudad de Me´xico, January 22, 1915, in Boletı´n Municipal, April 30, 1915, 9–11.

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tions to the Revolution, but the ayuntamiento determined that it could not change the rules for a military commander and that the dances must take place during daylight hours.54 The city’s inability to enforce its own laws became apparent the following week, however, when the military government summarily notified the city council that Capitan Zayas had been given permission to operate late-night dances at the Salon Degollado between 9 and 5 a.m.55 But in March 1915, when a mere civilian Carlos Salı´n sought permission to run Sunday evening dances in ‘‘Bucareli Hall’’ from four in the afternoon until ten at night, the ayuntamiento denied him a permit.56 The suspension of all city council activities between the constitutionalist takeover of the city and 1917 created opportunities for madams to compete with the cabarets by legally offering dancing and liquor. Initially matronas had paid thirty-two pesos to gain the rights to have piano music played in the brothel at night, but by 1919, the matronas’ lawyer, Salvador Herna´ndez, claimed that, without warning, the city raised the fee for a piano license from thirty-two pesos per month to eighty.57 The intrepid lawyer then raised several issues for the city council to consider with respect to the financial burden the additional forty-eight peso fee would cause the city’s brothel duen˜as. First and foremost, he pointed out, the business of sexual commerce was not as lucrative as the city councillors seemed to believe. Herna´ndez stated that ‘‘we really must consider the economic crisis in which my clients find themselves, for there is not sufficient demand for prostitution, and it is hardly the business it used to be, largely because clients are scarce and many of them are individuals with few scruples.’’ In his 1919 letter to the city council, Herna´ndez emphasized that ‘‘the good times, the days when one or another client would pay fifty or more pesos while at the house, are totally gone, for they either do not want to spend their money, or they save it for other necessities.’’58 As the matronas’ representative, moreover, Salvador Herna´ndez wrote to the municipal president, appealing to his moral foundations and good judgment, and asking that ‘‘in view of the fact that scarce resources affect no one like they affect my clients, because of the nature of their work and the fact that clandestine prostitution has developed so much 54. Ordinary session of the Ayuntamiento de la Ciudad de Me´xico, February 19, 1915, in Boletı´n Municipal, April 30, 1915, 17. 55. Ibid., 20. 56. Ordinary session of the Ayuntamiento de la Ciudad de Me´xico, in Boletı´n Municipal, June 15, 1915, 142. 57. AHCM, ‘‘Sanidad,’’ vol. 3891, file 200. 58. Ibid., file 199.

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. . . hours of the night can pass without one client stopping by.’’ Even worse, Herna´ndez insisted, the matronas’ long hours of vigilance ‘‘do not give them any hope of paying their expenses the next day,’’ such as feeding the women, paying musicians, and maintaining the house. But the real problem, according to the lawyer, was that there were so many cabarets and public dances that were open until one o’clock that the matronas needed to be able to stay open with music until three so that they could capture the after-hours business.59 Indeed, in 1919 Frances Levy advised the municipality that she was ‘‘passing through truly difficult circumstances in the maintenance of her house because at the hour when there are finally customers, I must suspend the piano.’’60 That the money for the licenses went straight to administrative projects was bad enough for many matronas, but others claimed that they faced illegal fines imposed by corrupt city employees too. In protesting the fees, matronas typically worked to project an image of upstanding businesswomen. Several women complained that some of the inspectors working for the ayuntamiento took advantage of their good natures by requesting drinks, knowing full well that they were not licensed to serve alcohol. Diana Romain complained to the ayuntamiento that ‘‘on the thirtieth day of last month an inspector from the ayuntamiento came to the house demanding a drink, but as I told him there was none, he demanded I acquiesce to his wishes, so I sent someone out to the street to bring some back.’’ At this point, however, the official fined the hapless madam fifty pesos for serving alcohol without a license. After implying that the inspector had taken advantage of her innate womanly hospitality, Romain invoked a sense of feminine weakness and begged that the ayuntamiento waive her fine on account of the fact that she had been respectful of the man’s wishes. However, the board saw fit only to reduce the fine to twenty-five pesos and let her off with a warning that she was not to make exceptions, even for an employee of the city.61 Marina Martı´nez, in February 1919, found herself in similar circumstances regarding corrupt officials. A municipal agent, whom she named only as Bravo, ‘‘was in the house, saying he would arrange my liquor license, to which I said nothing, then I invited him and his friend to have a beer, indicating that they were from my own personal stock, and they accepted my invitation and then tried to pay me, which I refused on account 59. Ibid., file 22. 60. Ibid., file 182. 61. Ibid., file 3.

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of the fact that I don’t have the corresponding permission.’’ After establishing that she was a generous and warm-hearted woman, Martı´nez denounced the corruption of the city officials, saying ‘‘I think it was this sole fact that made them give me a citation for 250 pesos.’’62 While the matronas battled with the ayuntamiento over the legitimacy of the liquor and piano fees, such male-owned cabarets as the Palacio de Marmol, also known as the Gato Negro, and the Cabaret del Salon Rojo were almost entirely unregulated and gained notoriety for the sexually permissive climate that flourished inside. Not only were these sites in which aisladas and clandestinas circulated, but the nightclubs’ owners trafficked in illegal substances as well. Located on Calle Tacuba, the Palacio de Marmol patrons included ‘‘well-known prostitutes,’’ who ‘‘with the permission of the owner and the employees smoke marijuana and sniff cocaine.’’ On the dance floor, moreover, the women undertook the moves of the scandalous shimmy, a dance that involved considerable and sexually suggestive upper-body movement, while couples took advantage of the fact that the Palacio de Marmol’s owners, in anticipation of their clients’ needs, had gone so far as to construct reservados ‘‘where couples engage in every kind of excess imaginable.’’63 Inspector Carlos M. Semper, who visited the site around midnight on May 19, 1920, said that the Palacio de Marmol’s ‘‘offensive’’ atmosphere only really became apparent between two in the morning and dawn, ‘‘when one can fully appreciate the character of that cabaret because that is when the activity reaches excessive levels.’’ But for those men and women who were uncomfortable having sexual relations in the cabaret itself, a cheap hotel located just down the block offered prostitutes a place to take their clients. Semper noted that ‘‘it is publicly known and even notorious that in that cabaret, and all those of its kind, once they have made the contract of love or vice, the couples leave in the early morning hours and spend the night in the nearby hotels.’’ Such nearby sites as the Hotel Imperio, down the street, had been under surveillance for several months when authorities confirmed that prostitutes took clients there for hourly or half-hourly sessions, charging a peso-and-ahalf before returning to the street to solicit business in front of the cabarets.64 In order to attract clientele, Semper said, the prostitutes ‘‘in that space caress their partners as they might in any whorehouse.’’65 To make matters 62. 63. 64. 65.

AHCM, ‘‘Infracciones: Casas de Asignacio´n,’’ vol. 2316, file 36. AHCM, ‘‘Diversiones Pu´blicas—Bailes,’’ vol. 823, file 4. AHCM, ‘‘Sanidad,’’ vol. 3891, file 59. AHCM, ‘‘Diversiones Pu´blicas—Bailes,’’ vol. 823, file 4.

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worse, according to the inspector, the clientele was apparently so enthusiastic about the entertainment that they were reluctant to take the time to find the urinals, which were located in a room separated from the main dance floor, and had thus taken to relieving themselves in the main room itself such that ‘‘the place is completely filthy and emits an unbearable stench.’’66 Cabarets were not the only venue to attract the ayuntamiento’s attention during this era, for any space in which men and women interacted without supervision was suspect. Movie theaters attracted the city council’s concern as well, for they were dark and unregulated locales where balconies afforded men and women the necessary privacy to conduct ‘‘immoral acts.’’ The Salon Rojo was a cinema located only a few blocks away on Avenida Francisco I. Madero, the street named for Mexico’s fallen ‘‘apostle.’’ But despite its locale, according to the inspector who investigated it, the Salon Rojo was host to some of the most repugnant sexual activity in the metropolis; the ‘‘salon on its upper floor . . . may be considered the most immoral of all the immoral cabarets that exist in the Capital.’’ Aside from the fact that women of ‘‘doubtful conduct’’ mingled inside the theater with young sen˜oritas escorted by their families, one inspector reported a popular show in which ‘‘a woman rides mounted on the leg of a man, and they begin to make the most immoral movements, with man and woman shaking their shoulders and chests.’’ The ayuntamiento’s principal concern, however, was the impression all this might have on young children. Parents, it seems, inadvertently brought their children to the Salon Rojo for a Sunday afternoon’s diversion, only to discover that the entertainment could hardly be considered appropriate for family outings. In one hour alone, the Inspector claimed, ten shimmies had been performed in a space that had at one time been the meeting place of high society and where parents took children to ride the electric stairwell the owners had installed.67 The Palacio de Marmol / Gato Negro and the Salon Rojo were but two of the most notorious sites in which illicit sexual activity occurred or was arranged. Three other cabarets as well as five additional dance halls and academies served as sites where women met clientele in the challenging environment that characterized Mexico City’s night life in the teens through the early 1920s. In fact, one city councillor, a Sen˜or Prieto, reported that at the Teatro Principal ‘‘there are daily orgies at this site, where women of ’ill-re66. Ibid. 67. Ibid.

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pute,’ soldiers and civilians fight constantly.’’68 Thanks to the ayuntamiento’s fiscal and political troubles, both the old vice district as well as the newer cabarets were violent, sexually permissive, and unregulated venues, which increasingly reflected the bankrupt city’s inability to enforce public order or morality in the postrevolutionary years.

The Informal Market The new political economy of vice caused problems for Mexico City matronas in the years following the Revolution, for not only was it hard to attract clients, it was also difficult for them to retain pupilas when the women could earn a living in inexpensive accesorias or at unregulated venues like the Gato Negro. Moreover, the city no longer viewed the matrona as the key to the relationship between sexually promiscuous women and the state and sought instead to redeem prostitutes as victims of matronas and clients alike. Many pupilas were reluctant to subject themselves to the stifling rules of brothel life, and madams found that they had constant troubles with the women they employed. According to the matronas’ lawyer, Salvador Herna´ndez, ‘‘The women who live in the houses, believing that they have support at all levels, frequently threaten the interests of the matronas,’’ who provided the women with money and clothes. ‘‘The ungrateful women,’’ he continued, ‘‘run from the house at the first opportunity, taking everything with them and mocking the duen˜a, who has no legal support to prevent such actions.’’69 The expanding population of independent prostitutes and clandestinas and unregulated venues forced many matronas to rethink their business strategy and close their doors. According to a February 1918 debate in the ayuntamiento’s chamber, prostitution ‘‘had increased at an alarming rate in the neighborhoods that are off limits according to the regulation.’’70 In accordance with custom, unmarried, unemployed women who appeared inebriated and in the company of soldiers were presumed to be prostitutes, and police frequently arrested such women for crimes such as ‘‘drunkenness and scandalous behavior,’’ 68. Ordinary session of the Ayuntamiento de la Ciudad de Me´xico, in Boletı´n Municipal, January 29, 1918, 57. 69. AHCM, ‘‘Sanidad,’’ vol. 3891, file 22. 70. Ordinary session of the Ayuntamiento de la Ciudad de Me´xico, February 26, 1918, in Boletı´n Municipal, March 12, 1918, 247.

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‘‘fighting,’’ and ‘‘public indecency.’’ The inspectors who apprehended these women rarely elaborated on the circumstances of the arrest, save that the women had ‘‘insulted police’’ or that their behavior was ‘‘highly inconvenient.’’ They also began rounding up women who were practicing rodeo, or walking in a slow circle around a public space soliciting clients. Soledad Mendoza Garcı´a, a nineteen-year-old from Guanajuato, single and living in a poor area of Mexico City, and Esperanza Gutie´rrez Gardun˜o, a native capitalina, also nineteen years old, were apprehended for rodeo in July 1917.71 During the first week of August that same summer, the city’s police remanded six more clandestinas to the jail for streetwalking and for practicing prostitution without a license. Of the women remanded to police custody, the average age was twenty-four, all were single and without occupation, and only two were from Mexico City itself.72 Streetwalkers like Mendoza Garcı´a and Gutie´rrez Gardun˜o illegally solicited customers around such monuments as the Teatro Nacional and near the National Palace and the Metropolitan Cathedral, much as they had in the years before the heavy fighting of the Revolution. These sites were popular because they were centrally located, gave prostitutes access to a variety of clientele, and afforded the participants in a sexual encounter some level of privacy, either in a darkened side street or among the plants and fountains that decorated the plaza mayor of Mexico City through at least the 1930s. But in the late teens and early 1920s, police reported, this area was also frequented by drug dealers, afeminados, and sodomitas, who competed with female prostitutes for access to male clientele in this downtown area.73 Like the district where the brothels were located, this was an area where even the police took precautions. According to daily police reports for January 1918, the street lights were frequently out, and murderers took advantage of the darkness in order to stalk and kill women in the area at night. On the twentieth of that month, in fact, police had recovered the cadaver of a ‘‘common woman’’ with ‘‘strangulation marks’’ next to the Palacio de Hierro department store.74 But despite the apparent problem of clandestine streetwalking, it was the growing number of women who operated informally out of the new cabarets and dance halls that the capital counted 71. 142. 72. 73. 74. file 1.

AHCM, ‘‘Justicia. Ca´rceles. Planillas y listos de detenidos,’’ vol. 2684, file 1, report Ibid. Ibid. AHCM, ‘‘Policı´a, Inspeccio´n General, Comisarı´a, Partes Diarios (1918),’’ vol. 3658,

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among its newest evening attractions who caused matronas—and the ayuntamiento—the greatest worry. Passing as dance instructors and actresses, these women could set up appointments with potential clients without arousing the suspicion of the police inspectors. The social and legal disruptions of the late teens facilitated the participation in metropolitan prostitution of not only adult women but also much younger ones as well. The city council was particularly concerned about these jovencitas inexpertas. They established a commission to investigate reports that Mexico’s young girls were the newest recruits to the capital’s ‘‘army of deviant women.’’ At a meeting of the ayuntamiento councillor Manuel Garcı´a Noriega informed his fellow representatives of the scandals that characterized the downtown Cabaret Bucareli, saying that ‘‘the space is frequented by young girls, whom they call gatas, they are basically children, and recently, after business hours, they did the following things to an eleven-year-old: they gave her alcoholic drinks and then they took her out of there and committed all manner of immoralities with her.’’75 Some madams even reported the presence of young girls in local houses of prostitution run by competitors in order to extend their business influence. Felicidad la Raurı´, emphasizing the upstanding nature of her own business, wrote the city in March 1918 to make the municipal governing body aware of the fact that on the callejo´n (alley) Ave Marı´a there were four girls under the age of thirteen working in local ‘‘centers of terrible perversion,’’ with two girls as young as eleven receiving clients day and night.76 Young women found in such sites were placed in the state’s custody and the brothels closed.77 In addition to making it possible for young women to become involved in the metropolitan sex trade, the permissive atmosphere of cabarets and public dance halls fostered the participation of two additional groups in the world of sexual commerce: pimps and foreign prostitutes. Although it had long been acknowledged that some men had money invested in brothels, it was the norm was for women to run the establishments, and the Reglamento did not acknowledge the participation of pimps or padrotes in the metropolitan sex trade. By the early 1920s, however, the influx of foreigners and pimps, like the new reglamentos, directly challenged the usual ways of doing business and raised questions about the efficacy of prevailing regulations. 75. Ordinary session of the Ayuntamiento de la Ciudad de Me´xico, January 15, 1918, in Boletı´n Municipal, January 29, 1918, 57. 76. AHCM, ‘‘Sanidad,’’ vol. 3891, file 62. 77. AHCM, ‘‘Justicia. Ca´rceles. Boleros y Menores,’’ vol. 2682, file 2.

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Brothel management had historically been the domain of older, ex-prostitutes who had either saved enough money or had the backing of someone who did to set up an establishment. Neighbors’ complaints, however, paint the early 1920s as a period during which foreign pimps and prostitutes became involved in the sex trade and directly challenged the traditional privileges of the Mexican matrona. The extent to which foreigners had become involved in Mexico’s sex trade over the course of the Revolution is a matter of debate. One group of residents of the Callejo´n de las Cruces complained that ‘‘there is a guest house owned by Arabs that appears to be a humble space, but it is really a casa de asignacio´n because there are late night parties where individuals drink, play games of chance, and commit other acts which decency prevents describing, but the women at the house who appear to be servants are really nothing more than prostitutes, proof of which is that on the upper floors of the house there are special rooms where the disgusting acts to which we refer take place.’’78 Revolution, migration, and municipal regulations challenged the Mexico matronas’ ability to compete with the new entrepreneurs.

Debt Crises By the early 1920s competition from clandestinas, foreigners, and young girls, not to mention the ayuntamiento’s stringent fees, had become too much for many matronas, who found themselves in debt and forced to abandon their businesses. In February 1918 Marı´a Aldana wrote the ayuntamiento that she planned to close her second-class brothel at Santo Tomas because ‘‘of lack of resources and because it is no longer in my interest to keep running said brothel.’’79 Only six months later Aldana requested permission to set up another second-class brothel on the Callejo´n de Galeana, but she shut that shortly thereafter as well. But such difficulties were not limited to lower-class matronas, for Blanca Garcı´a, a first-class madam, faced similar problems. In January 1918 she had established a first-class brothel on Calle de Cuauhtemoctzı´n but after her request for a piano license was denied, she wrote the ayuntamiento saying that ‘‘because I have suffered enormous losses due to the lack of patrons,’’ she was turning in her license and planned to close the house.80 Garcı´a faced even more troubles later, however, for in August 1918 she asked for permission to establish a 78. AHCM, ‘‘Sanidad,’’ vol. 3891, file 11. 79. Ibid., vol. 3891, file 28. 80. Ibid., files 9 and 30.

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second-class brothel, this time on Calle del Dr. Daniel Ruı´z; only two months later she conceded defeat in that enterprise as well. Garcı´a wrote the president of the ayuntamiento, saying that ‘‘because of the bad luck the second-class brothel at number 22 of the first block of Calle del Doctor Daniel Ruı´z has had’’ she had decided to close it.81 Three women who together opened a first-class venue on Moctezuma, Marı´a Go´mez, Rosa Romano, and Bertha Gonza´lez, had a similar experience. After only three short months they returned the license to the ayuntamiento’s sanitation section and said that they were leaving the business.82 To avoid such extreme misfortune, others sought to downgrade the status of their establishments in order to reduce their overhead. Bertha Nun˜ez, proprietress of a brothel on the Privada de la Libertad, plaintively wrote the city in April 1918 saying that ‘‘finding herself in really desperate circumstances she asks that you consider her brothel a second-class establishment.’’83 This petition was rejected because the inspectors determined that the Nun˜ez site was furnished ‘‘luxuriously.’’ But another woman’s petition to downgrade was approved. When Angela Montes asked to change her Cuauhtemoctzı´n establishment from first to second class, the inspectors who visited Montes’s business site recommended approving the petition because ‘‘the furnishings in that house are modest, and there are only six prostitutes.’’84 Some madams got out of the business altogether. Ana Sa´nchez discovered that brothel management in the trying revolutionary economy was too difficult and decided to return to work as an aislada. Sa´nchez, who had opened a third-class brothel on the Callejo´n Ave Marı´a in February, wrote in March 1918 that ‘‘seeing that the house is really not set up for that kind of business and in view of the fact that it is not my desire to have women under my vigilance, I am desisting in this project and need to return to prostitution, asking that you grant me a license as a third-class aislada.’’85 Still other women in financial trouble transferred their businesses over to a friend or manager; Marina Martı´nez, for example, passed her first-class brothel to her manager, Angela Aguirre, in the name of ‘‘justice’’ when she tired of working hard for what seemed to be a modest return.86 In what was, at least for matronas, an inhospitable business climate, 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86.

Ibid., file 122. Ibid., file 39. Ibid., file 126. Ibid., file 135. Ibid., file 47 bis. Ibid., file 128.

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many closed their doors, and of those, many returned to prostitution. By the early 1920s the Revolution’s demographic upheaval and economic reorganization had significantly altered the practice of sexual commerce as well as the attitudes of the men and women who participated in the trade. Fewer clients were willing to visit brothels themselves, as men and women alike sought entertainment and work in new theater and dance halls. The Revolution was over, but the city’s permissive atmosphere was still a frustration for the matronas, and their neighbors, who longed for the quiet and ‘‘honor’’ of the prerevolutionary capital.

3 The Science of Redemption Syphilis, Sexual P romiscuity, and Reformism

In a speech to a gathering of public health specialists at the 1926 Pan American Sanitary Congress in Washington, D.C., Mexico’s representative, Dr. Bernardo Gaste´lum, singled out syphilis as the number-one health problem confronting the revolutionary government. Gaste´lum, who was chief of the Departamento de Salubridad Pu´blica in Mexico City, claimed that nearly two-thirds of the Mexican population was afflicted. Nine years after the implementation of the Constitution of 1917, Gaste´lum lamented that the capital city, the showcase of the Revolution’s commitment to social welfare, had a dismal record with respect to disease diagnosis and treatment. In Mexico’s largest metropolis, he noted, some 50 percent of the population suffered from the skin lesions, gastrointestinal disorders, and memory loss that marked the various stages of syphilis.1 Over the period between 1916 and 1. Bernardo J. Gaste´lum, ‘‘La persecucio´n de la sı´filis desde el punto de vista de la garantı´a social,’’ Boletı´n del Departamento de Salubridad Pu´blica, 1926, no. 4:8. At the same time, he claimed that 60 percent of the country’s population suffered from syphilis and that 18,000 of the 20,000 prostitutes in the capital were similarly afflicted. Hygienists may have based their

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1921, moreover, the death rate from the disease had risen dramatically.2 To make matters worse, congenital syphilis accounted for the majority of infant deaths before the age of one and killed many young adults between the ages of twenty-five and thirty. According to Gaste´lum, the disease now accounted for blindness, deafness, and nerve degeneration among members of the population at all ages.3 Gaste´lum’s statistics were certainly alarming, but his analysis of the roots of the problem must have seemed even more alarming to the assembled medical experts. Rather than target prostitutes, clients, or madams as the source of Mexico’s public health problems, the hygienist instead blamed two of the principal institutions upon which Mexican society was held to be based—the family and the Catholic Church—for promoting a kind of secrecy with respect to intimate physical relations that encouraged male sexual promiscuity and the spread of incurable, sexually transmitted disease. Drawing on reformist ideas that the Porfirian dictatorship had corrupted Mexican society, Gaste´lum argued that Catholic false modesty fostered both a cult of masculinity and a sexual double standard that encouraged married men to pursue sexual relations with prostitutes in brothels, in cabarets, and on the streets, while their wives remained monogamous at home. Religiosity and prudishness, Gaste´lum said, further complicated the situation, for the embarrassment many men and women associated with sexual intercourse prevented them from acknowledging disease symptoms or seeking treatment. Worse, this shame limited the willingness of parents to talk to their children about sexual hygiene or teach them how to avoid contracting venereal disease altogether. But despite his concerns over the ‘‘social slavery’’ of prostitutes and the spread of sexually transmitted infections, for Dr. Gaste´lum these problems were merely symptoms of larger cultural obstacles to economic development in Mexico.4 claims that more than half of all Mexicans suffered from syphilis on random surveys of blood taken at free venereal disease treatment clinics. Nevertheless, while these sample may have been easy to obtain, they probably weren’t representative of the population at large. In early-twentieth-century Paris and Chicago health officials estimated that anywhere between 5 and 20 percent of the population carried syphilis. See Corbin, Women for Hire, and Suzanne Poirier, Chicago’s War on Syphilis, 1937–1940: The Times, the Trib and the Clap Doctor, with an Epilogue on Issues and Attitudes in the Time of AIDS (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995). 2. The death rate had more than doubled, but syphilis still accounted for only 2 percent of all metropolitan mortality. Gaste´lum, ‘‘La persecucio´n de la sı´filis,’’ 6. 3. Ibid., 8. 4. Gaste´lum used this phrase in a letter to madams Leonora de la Torre and Marina Martı´nez explaining the Reglamento’s reinvigorated prohibition of alcohol in brothels in 1926. See AHSSA-SP-IAV, box 3, file 3.

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In his concluding remarks, Dr. Gaste´lum urged the Latin American delegates gathered in Washington to follow revolutionary Mexico’s example by promoting openness in sex education and venereal disease treatment and by encouraging men and women to change their sexual behavior. He hoped that the other delegates would enact measures to dissuade men from seeking the services of prostitutes, to recommend all citizens to seek disease treatment, and to encourage ‘‘fallen women’’ to seek different vocations. To halt the continued physical degeneration of the population and to ensure the economic development that Mexico and the other Latin American nations craved, Gaste´lum said, it was necessary to strip sexuality of its antiquated cloak of privacy and situate it, instead, within the modern domain of health science.5 Sexual morality and venereal disease were hardly the reasons rural peasants, urban workers, and other members of the various popular social movements in Mexico took up arms and waged revolution between 1910 and 1917. After all, if what matronas, legislators, and ordinary residents in Mexico City said was true, there were as many soldiers in the brothels as there had been on the battlefields.6 But if syphilis and promiscuity were neither causes of revolution nor concerns of the average soldier, sexuality nevertheless became intimately associated with revolutionary ideology during the social reform and state consolidation that characterized the period after 1920. In the aftermath of armed conflict metropolitan prostitution proliferated, and a new class of reformers saw in political reconstruction the opportunity to use new public institutions as spaces in which to engineer a revolutionary society purged of the degenerate behaviors they believed threatened revolutionary Mexico’s economic potential. 5. The delegates to the Pan American Sanitary Congress resolved to work cooperatively to study ways to combat the incidence of venereal disease in the Americas. United States Public Health Service General Files, 1924–35, group 90, box 202, pp. 1340–46, Pan American Sanitary Congress, September 27, 1926. The group resolved to meet in Lima, Peru, in one year to report their findings. On regional discussions regarding the threats sexually transmitted diseases posed for national development, see Guy, Sex and Danger in Buenos Aires; Lavrin, Women, Feminism and Social Change; Nancy Leys Stepan, The ‘‘Hour of Eugenics’’: Race, Gender and Nation in Latin America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); Caulfield, In Defense of Honor; Eileen Sua´rez Findlay, Imposing Decency: The Politics of Race and Sexuality in Puerto Rico, 1870–1920 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000); and Alexandra Minna Stern, ‘‘Responsible Mothers and Normal Children: Eugenics, Nationalism and Welfare in Post-revolutionary Mexico, 1920–1940,’’ Journal of Historical Sociology 12, no. 4 (December 1999). 6. See, for example, Vasconcelos, La Tormenta, and Azuela, Underdogs. See also Castillo, Easy Women; Gonza´lez, Imagen de la prostituta; and James B. Lynch, Jr., ‘‘Orozco’s ‘House of Tears,’ ’’ Journal of Inter-American Studies 3, no. 3 (1961): 367–83.

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Inspired also by the scientific underpinnings of U.S. and European social legislation, these reformers sought to establish a revolutionary administration centered as much around new ideas of progress and social regeneration as around the better known popular goals of political participation, term limits, and agrarian reform. In the aftermath of armed struggle, these reform-minded men and women enlisted in the state’s bureaucracies, where, like Dr. Vidales and councillor Go´mez Noriega, they worked to implement the social provisions of the Constitution of 1917, inaugurating new public assistance agencies to emphasize the Revolution’s commitment to a redeemed, scientific, and progressive society. In the clinics, prisons, and vocational schools that served as the reformers’ theaters of operation, hygienists, teachers, social workers, and criminologists became the new foot soldiers of the state’s cultural revolution, constructing revolutionary institutions as places in which to sanitize and modernize social, sexual, and family relations in the new moral order. Ultimately, the state’s quest to redeem the promiscuous citizens of the revolutionary capital medicalized female deviance, despaired over to how handle male sexual behavior, and pried open the door through which the Mexican Revolution entered the private homes and bedrooms of Mexican men and women.

Diagnosing Decadence Syphilis was not the leading cause of death in 1920s Mexico, but in 1926 public health specialists put it at the top of their list of concerns for several reasons. As Dr. Gaste´lum told the Pan American Sanitary Congress, syphilis threatened to clog the engines of the national economy because it debilitated society’s most valuable members. Certainly other, more infectious diseases—including tuberculosis, measles, and influenza—similarly afflicted young men and women in the prime of their productive and reproductive years.7 However, syphilis had unique properties that threatened the revolutionary nation, for it seemed highly contagious, was difficult to diagnose, and after centuries of medical research was still almost impossible to treat. Moreover, while a mother could pass the disease to her child during birth, syphilis spread principally through sexual intercourse. Unlike diseases which traveled through air, water, or food to infect ‘‘innocent’’ victims, 7. Boletı´n del Departamento de Salubridad Pu´blica, 1925, no 2:248.

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syphilis deliberately moved from body to body when one person’s infected genital sores contaminated a sexual partner’s skin. Among other things, the appearance of syphilis symptoms demonstrated that the victim had had sexual relations with someone who had had more than one sexual partner. Although public health specialists had long worried about venereal disease in Mexico, between 1916 and 1925, they became concerned that the disease’s rapid spread among the capital’s population reflected the Mexican peoples’ promiscuity and foreshadowed the nation’s economic ruin. Invoking medical, social, and psychological sciences, reformers structured investigations to obtain precise information on the incidence of the disease and to develop strategies for combating this pernicious threat. By 1926 Dr. Gaste´lum maintained that despite his department’s best efforts, the statistics cataloging syphilis in the capital were inadequate because doctors were not required to report syphilis cases to public health authorities out of respect for the patient’s privacy.8 But even assuming the numbers were imprecise, the department had collected enough data to assert with confidence that treponema pallidum, the bacterium that causes syphilis, had infected at least one half of the capital’s population.9 More worrisome to hygienists, however, were the results of a study that showed that many of these infections were of recent origin. Over the nearly four hundred years since syphilis burst onto the medical scene, doctors had determined that the disease had four progressive stages characterized by varying degrees of contagiousness, latency, and physical and mental degeneration. Surveys of patients at one of Mexico City’s antivenereal disease dispensaries had demonstrated that the vast majority of the 3,700 syphilitics seen there between 1921 and 1925 were in the first or second stages of infection.10 Compounding this bad news was the sobering information that between 1916 and 1920, syphilis was the leading cause of miscarriage and stillbirth in the city.11 Children who survived birth to a syphilitic mother, moreover, often developed the disease symptoms later in life. A test at a local elementary school in the early 1920s, for example, showed that 80 percent of the students had reacted positively to a blood test 8. Gaste´lum, ‘‘La persecucio´n de la sı´filis,’’ 7. In his study of prostitution in Mexico City between 1906 and 1908, Lara y Pardo similarly complained about the poor data collection among the nation’s public agencies (La prostitucio´n en Me´xico, 30). 9. Gaste´lum, ‘‘La persecucio´n de la sı´filis,’’ 6. 10. Adrian de Garay, ‘‘Los dispensarios del Departamento: Los dispensarios vene´reo-sifilı´ticos,’’ Boletı´n del Departamento de Salubridad Pu´blica,’’ 1925, no. 4:91. 11. ‘‘Causas de muerte intrauterina de enero 1916 a la fecha,’’ Boletı´n del Departamento de Salubridad Pu´blica, 1921, no. 1:83.

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for syphilis, which they had almost certainly acquired congenitally.12 Those who survived to adolescence were more likely to succumb to infection than nonsyphilitics and to die in their mid to late twenties.13 Amid this discouraging collection of information was the fact that the syphilis death rate in the capital, although still quite low, was climbing, with the disease accounting for only 0.82 percent of all deaths in Mexico City in 1916 and fully 1.82 percent in 1925.14 That syphilis killed more and more Mexicans each year was a source of concern for health reformers, but most believed that it was the disease’s resistance to diagnosis and treatment that posed the greater threat. Not only did syphilis mimic the symptoms of other diseases, but some patients lived with and exposed others to disease for years before seeking medical attention. The most precise means of making a diagnosis was the Wassermann test, but this invasive procedure, which required a blood sample, often discouraged patients from going to a doctor for help. And even after diagnosis the science of treatment was haphazard, at best. Since the fifteenth century doctors had experimented with a wide variety of treatments to alleviate the often painful and embarrassing symptoms of syphilis, which included virulent skin pustules that covered the body’s extremities. For most of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, physicians had relied on compounds of mercury dichloride and potassium iodide to treat these sores, but it was never clear whether these preparations actually eliminated the disease from the body.15 In fact, it was not until the German immunologist Paul Ehrlich developed the arsenic-derived Salvarsan in 1906 that anything seemed to truly suppress syphilis’s symptoms.16 By the 1920s, Mexican anti-venereal disease clinics and sifilicomios (syphilis hospitals) alike were using an improved, less toxic form of the drug, Neo-Salvarsan, to treat the highly contagious, oozing lesions that characterized the disease.17 Beyond the difficulty of diagnosing and treating syphilis, an additional source of concern to hygienists was the fact that syphilis cases seemed to be concentrated among the capital’s working classes. Careful observation led 12. AHSSA-SP-IAV, box 5, file 1, p. 35. 13. Gaste´lum, ‘‘La persecucio´n de la sı´filis,’’ 6. 14. Ibid. 15. Dennie, A History of Syphilis, 103–26; Crissey and Parish, Dermatology and Syphilology. 16. Brandt, No Magic Bullet, 40–41. 17. Samuel Villalobos, ‘‘Tratamiento de las enfermas sifilı´ticas en la Sala Armijo del Hospital Morelos,’’ Boletı´n del Departamento de Salubridad Pu´blica, 1925, no. 2:85–87.

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Fig. 4 Paul Ehrlich’s arsenic-derived Salvarsan medications were the first to offer doctors any real hope of halting the apparent syphilis epidemic in Mexico. Treatment with Salvarsan and Neo-Salvarsan, a less toxic derivative of the original preparation, nevertheless required the patient to undergo regular drug injections, be closely supervised by medical personnel, and suffer such unsavory side effects as dehydration and diarrhea—and occasionally death. Reprinted from Asistencia: Organo de la Beneficencia Pu´blica en el Distrito Federal, August 15, 1934. Mexican physicians, legislators, and social activists to conclude that in Mexico syphilis was a disease intimately associated with both sexual promiscuity and poverty, a fact that seemed to fly in the face of constitutional imperatives to redeem the Mexican pueblo from the vices and unjust social conditions many believed the Porfirian dictatorship had allowed to flourish. Wealthy capitalinos contracted syphilis, to be sure, but hygienists observed

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that upper-class men were more likely than members of the city’s lower classes to use condoms when having sexual intercourse with prostitutes and that they were also more likely to seek the most advanced venereal disease treatment methods, such as diathermy, from high-priced, private doctors.18 In fact, ignorance of the symptoms, a failure to utilize prophylactic measures, and a refusal to seek appropriate medical attention characterized the general population’s approach to sexually transmitted disease. Recognizing that many people feared that the cost of medical treatment would ruin their families, the Departamento de Salubridad Pu´blica had encouraged poor and working-class capitalinos to seek medical attention by establishing inexpensive, anonymous venereal disease treatment clinics in working-class neighborhoods.19 Doctors referred difficult cases to such public hospitals as the Jua´rez, the General, and the prostitutes’ Hospital Morelos, all of which provided inpatient care. In both the clinics and the hospitals, however, physicians followed the same protocol to treat the disease. This involved weekly injections of Neo-Salvarsan over a period of several months until the patient either showed signs of cure, or the drug’s toxicity caused the patient to develop one of the preparation’s more debilitating side effects, which included excessive salivation, diarrhea, cardiac disturbances, and dehydration. In extreme cases, adverse reaction to the medicine could cause death.20 The existence of public venereal disease treatment clinics may have alleviated some patients’ reluctance to be treated for disease, but a larger obstacle to syphilis eradication, many reformers felt, was the secrecy and privacy with which many Mexicans regarded sexual matters. Dr. Gaste´lum had told the gathered public health specialists in Washington that he deplored the principle of patient confidentiality, which made syphilis difficult to track, but he and other health specialists recognized that this medical practice rested on popular beliefs that sexual activity was both shameful and private. To address these concerns, in 1927 the Departamento de Salubridad Pu´blica embarked on a massive propaganda campaign to educate the men and women of Mexico City about sexually transmitted disease. Employees distributed some 630,000 pamphlets on syphilis, 430,000 on gonorrhea, and ´ rgano del De18. Ramo´n Ojeda Falco´n, ‘‘Campan˜a Pro-Higiene Social,’’ Salubridad: O partamento de Salubridad Pu´blica 1, no. 1 (1930): 517; AGN, Administracio´n Pu´blica de la Repu´blica (hereafter APR), ‘‘Presidentes—La´zaro Ca´rdenas’’ (hereafter LC), file 425.1/25. 19. Similar concerns over the correlation between syphilis and poverty marked anti-venereal disease campaigns in the United States. See Poirier, Chicago’s War on Syphilis, 140–41. 20. Villalobos, ‘‘Tratamiento de las enfermas sifilı´ticas,’’ 85–87; Dennie, A History of Syphilis, 103–26.

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Although public health officials, such as Dr. Bernardo Gaste´lum, argued that the best way to eradicate venereal diseases among the general population was to encourage early treatment and to discuss sexuality with openness and honesty, many doctors catered to the public’s shame with respect to sexual matters and attracted patients by promoting their work with ‘‘secret sicknesses.’’ ‘‘Enfermedades Secretas’’ reprinted from Juan Manuel Aurroecochea and Armando Bartra, eds., Puros Cuentos: Historia de la historieta en Me´xico, 1934–1950 (Mexico City: Ediciones Grijalbo, 1993), 36. ‘‘Dr. C. Carrillo y Ca´rdenas’’ reprinted from Nosotras: Revista de la mujer que lucha, July 1934, 17.

Fig. 5

251,000 on bodily hygiene in that year alone. The pamphlets’ promoters hoped this printed and graphic material would ‘‘break old, narrow-minded and vicious popular customs and destroy the prejudices and beliefs that ignorance has engendered among the lower classes.’’21 Doctors reported that women, especially, had little information about sexual matters. Male magazine readers could gain detailed information about human anatomy and sexuality by ordering such privately distributed pamphlets as Ignorancia Total, which promised readers current and ‘‘scientific’’ information on sexual practices and pleasures ‘‘that will flabbergast you!’’22 Mexican women, however, rarely had access to accurate informa21. AHSSA-SP-SJ, box 43, file 1. 22. Advertisement in Detectives: El mejor semanario de Me´xico, March 28, 1932, 4.

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tion about reproduction or sexual hygiene. In fact, many young women who found themselves seeking a doctor’s attention at the Hospital Morelos confessed that they did not understand how they came to be sick or pregnant, for no one had ever discussed sex with them.23 To ensure that the topic of human sexuality became a matter of open discussion, the department also underwrote and produced radio programs that transmitted a ‘‘moralizing tendency of social renovation.’’ In addition, hygienists borrowed from the U.S. social hygiene movement and preceded mainstream cinema attractions with informal chats about sexuality, formal lectures about disease symptoms, and short, cautionary films that dramatized the long-term consequences of syphilis infection.24 Nurses and doctors, moreover, gave talks in factories, in markets, and in public gardens to promote open discussion of such issues as sexual hygiene and how to pick a healthy sex partner.25 And in case anyone missed these notices or meetings, officials placed posters on buildings and in parks that reminded picnickers and pedestrians alike that ‘‘syphilis is not a secret illness; if you don’t confess it, your children will show it.’’26 Social hygienists hoped that by saturating the city’s public spaces with graphic images and discourses about sexually transmitted disease, men and women would be more likely to recognize a problem and seek treatment before they infected someone else. The money and time public agencies devoted to the anti-syphilis campaign demonstrated its importance to reformist conceptions of secular revolution and of cultural and economic progress. But if syphilis education, prevention, and treatment concerned Mexico’s hygienists, the largest obstacle to eliminating syphilis, many believed, was the population’s sexual pro23. This assessment is based on a survey of several hundred case files regarding juvenile delinquency in Mexico City between 1926 and 1944. See AGN, Consejo Tutelar para Menores Infractores (hereafter CTMI). 24. Departamento de Salubridad Pu´blica, Seccio´n de Propaganda e Educacio´n Higie´nica, Memoria de los trabajos realizados por el Departamento de Salubridad Pu´blica, 1925–1928, 2 vols. (Mexico City: Ediciones del Departamento de Salubridad Pu´blica, 1928), 249–50. 25. Ibid. Sex education manuals used by public school teachers also emphasized the importance of selecting healthy sex partners. Juan Soto, author of La educacio´n sexual en la escuela mexicana, encouraged young men to ‘‘avoid those friendly girls who are the most sought after for their youth and attractiveness, who look so fresh, who use all means to attract men to ‘play love,’ who try to pass as serious, married women and who, in reality, are nothing more than semi-prostitutes, more dangerous because of the extent of their venereal disease infection than real prostitutes.’’ Juan Soto, La educacio´n sexual en la escuela mexicana: Libro para los padres y los maestros (Mexico City: Ediciones Patria, 1933), 152. 26. Advertisement in Mujer: Revista para la elevacio´n moral e intelectual de la mujer mexicana, March 1, 1927, back cover.

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miscuity. The importance of making sexuality a scientific issue—and not a moral one—underscored these concerns. Shame and secrecy with respect to sexual matters kept men and women from seeking disease treatment and discussing sexual activity with others, but, reformers worried, these impulses apparently did not prevent them from engaging in premarital or even extramarital affairs, as the rising rates of sexually transmitted infections in the capital attested. Venereal disease, most reformers held, could be stopped dead in its tracks if Mexican men and women disciplined themselves and committed themselves to a judicious program of sexual restraint and prophylaxis. Reformers worried that even if prudishness could be addressed through education and the dissemination of public information, the promiscuity of Mexico’s young was now a disease unto itself. Between 1925 and 1928, the Boletı´n de Salubridad reported that the number of spaces registered for sexual commerce had fallen from some 300 to 190, while the number of inscritas had continued to rise.27 When Dr. Gaste´lum made his dire announcements about syphilis at the 1926 Pan American Sanitary Congress, public officials estimated that there were thousands of prostitutes in Mexico City, a metropolis of around one million people.28 In the years since Lara y Pardo’s dismal revelation that there were 10,000 registered prostitutes, the number of inscritas had diminished thanks to more than a decade of political conflict and bureaucratic disorder; however, between 1925 and 1927 authorities had revived the campaign to register promiscuous women, counting nearly 5,000 by 1928.29 Arrest figures coupled with informal observation led officials to estimate that there were at least 15,000 unregistered women, including numerous teenage girls.30 This information confirmed public officials’ suspicions that a plague of promiscuity threatened to ruin all of Mexico. Given this situation, reformism in 1920s Mexico City began to center around the figure of the prostitute for her role in both spreading disease and in encouraging promiscuous sexual activity. But unlike Porfirian solutions, which sought to segregate, castigate, and ultimately eliminate the prostitute and the other characters in her social world, Gaste´lum-era solutions included observation, analysis, reform, and social reintegration. A symptom of the disciplinary failures of the Mexican people, the prostitute warranted 27. ‘‘Seccio´n de identificacio´n y registro: Inscripciones,’’ Boletı´n del Departamento de Salubridad Pu´blica, 1927, no. 3:87. 28. Gaste´lum, ‘‘La persecucio´n de la sı´filis,’’ 6. 29. ‘‘Seccio´n de Identificacio´n y Registro,’’ 87. 30. Gaste´lum, ‘‘La persecucio´n de la sı´filis,’’ 6.

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special scrutiny for her sexual contact with Mexico’s youth and future. Reformers advocated using scientific techniques of sociology, medicine, and psychology to understand and then treat both the adolescent and the adult dimensions of the problem.

The Pathology of Promiscuity Nowhere did revolutionary concerns over understanding the pathology of promiscuity and the science of redeeming Mexico’s young population intersect more precisely than in the Mexico City juvenile court. Founded in 1926, the Tribunal para Menores Infractores was modeled on the City of Chicago’s court for adolescent delinquents.31 Despite the influence of U.S. urban progressivism, however, the Mexican Tribunal had a nationalistic mission to ‘‘regenerate’’ minors who broke the law and to prepare them for full participation in a revolutionary society. To do so, it employed legions of social workers, psychiatrists, doctors, criminologists, and child development experts to compile information on the social and medical landscapes of deviance in Mexico. In the reform process, the state assumed total authority over the bodies and minds of the city’s sexually active young women. Funded by the Departamento del Distrito Federal, the Mexico City– based Tribunal was administered by the newly formed Departamento de Readaptacio´n y Prevencio´n Social. In accordance with the department’s goals, the Consejo Tutelar para Menores Infractores oversaw the medical and educational agencies that supported the court.32 The council’s mission to redeem and reincorporate delinquents into Mexican society explicitly rejected 31. Carmen Madrigal, Los menores delincuentes: Estudio sobre la situacio´n de los Tribunales para Menores: Doctrina y realidad (Mexico City: Ediciones Botas, 1938). See also Carmen Castan˜eda Garcı´a, Prevencio´n y Readaptacio´n Social en Me´xico, 1926–1970 (Mexico City, 1979). On earlier approaches to the reform of young girls in the United States, see Ruth M. Alexander, The Girl Problem: Female Sexual Delinquency in New York, 1900–1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995); Barbara M. Benzel, Daughters of the State: A Social Portrait of the First Reform School for Girls in North America, 1865–1905 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983); and Mary E. Odem, Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States, 1885–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995). 32. The first juvenile court in Mexico was established in 1923 in the state of San Luis Potosı´. Genia Marı´n Herna´ndez, Historia del tratamiento a los menores infractores en el Distrito Federal (Mexico City: Comisio´n Nacional de Derechos Humanos, 1991), 21. See also Madrigal, Los menores delincuentes, and Manuel Ibarguengoytia, ‘‘Bosquejo histo´rico de la delincuencia infantil’’ (Lic. thesis, Escuela Libre de Derecho, Mexico City, 1941).

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the tenets of Porfirian criminology, which held that delinquents were inherently degenerate and without potential for social rehabilitation.33 Revolutionary administrators envisioned the court to be an institution with dual analytical and instructive missions: to be a medical and social laboratory in which court employees could study the cultural and biological origins of sexual delinquency in Mexico and to be a school in which reformers could impress the future generation with core revolutionary values of nationalism, secularism, and productivity. The Tribunal para Menores Infractores proved to be an ideal laboratory in which to study the most frustrating of revolutionary social problems: sexual promiscuity and its close companion, juvenile prostitution.34 Girls apprehended as clandestinas by Inspeccio´n de Sanidad police were sent to the Hospital Morelos for medical treatment before being interned at the Escuela de Correccio´n in Coyoaca´n. Although the 1926 Reglamento had raised to eighteen the age at which a woman could register as a prostitute, it mandated that public officials attempt to prevent underage prostitutes from reentering la vida as adults. The Reglamento thus required that girls arrested as clandestinas experience reformatory life. Prostitutes were not the only residents of the girls’ reformatory, for the law subjected female thieves, murderers, and vagrants to disciplinary action as well. Nevertheless, by the 1930s, juvenile prostitutes comprised some 50 percent of the reform school’s resident population.35 33. See, for example, Guerrero, La ge´nesis del crı´men en Me´xico; Lara y Pardo, La prostitucio´n en Me´xico; and Roumagnac, Crı´menes sexuales. The science of hereditarianism was influenced by the work of the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso. See Cesare Lombroso, Crime: Its Causes and Remedies (Boston: Little, Brown, 1918). For analyses of reform discourses regarding crime and delinquency in Porfirian Mexico, see Robert Buffington, ‘‘Revolutionary Reform: The Mexican Revolution and the Discourse on Prison Reform,’’ Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 9 (1993): 71–93, and Pablo Piccato, ‘‘El discurso sobre la criminalidad y el alcoholismo hacia el fin del porfiriato,’’ in Pe´rez Montfort, Ha´bitos, normas y esca´ndalo, 77–121. 34. Psychiatrists, educators, and criminologists associated with the Tribunal also used their research to present analyses of Mexican sexual promiscuity at national and international conferences. See Rau´l Gonza´lez Enrı´quez, ‘‘Te´rminos generales para la exploracio´n sexolo´gica en los nin˜os,’’ 441–49; Esther Chapa, ‘‘Consideraciones acerca de las primeras experiencias sexuales de las nin˜as proletarias,’’ 450–57; and Juan Soto, ‘‘La educacio´n sexual antes de la edad escolar,’’ 458–60, in Memoria del VII Congreso Panamericano del Nin˜o, reunido en la ciudad de Me´xico del 12 al 19 de octubre de 1935, vol. 2 (Mexico City: Talleres Gra´ficos de la Nacio´n, 1937). 35. Madrigal, Los menores delincuentes. The correctional schools for boys and girls were originally institutions designed to house orphans and abandoned children, but they began accepting delinquents in the late nineteenth century. While this practice suggests that school officials had recognized the links between abandonment and delinquency, the institution they ran

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One of the Tribunal’s most important tasks was to determine the origins of promiscuity among Mexico City’s delinquents. Social science and medical science complemented each other in this undertaking, for reformers judged an understanding of Mexican family relations, nutrition, and endocrinology to be essential in determining the delinquent’s mental state and potential for redemption. In a rejection of Porfirian hereditarianism, the court’s directors subscribed to the theory that an adolescent’s propensity to commit deviant social acts resulted not from inherent immorality but from the peculiar circumstances of his or her social and economic environment. As the reason the majority of the girls were at the Escuela de Correccio´n, prostitution gravely concerned the court’s directors. The institution’s directorship and social workers devoted their efforts to determining how self-esteem, sexual promiscuity, and abusive male-female relations impacted the propensity of lower-class women to engage in sexual commerce.36 In a speech she presented to a gathering of public health specialists, Dr. Mathilde Rodrı´guez Cabo, the psychiatrist, socialist, feminist, and head of the Federal District’s Departamento de Readaptacio´n y Prevencio´n Social, emphasized the state’s special responsibility to redeem adolescent prostitutes. Addressing the issue of capitalism and the prevalence of a double sexual standard in Mexico, Rodrı´guez Cabo argued that Mexican girls living in poor or working-class neighborhoods suffered doubly in the nation’s capitalist, male-dominated society. It was this society, she said, which paid women low wages and subjected girls to sexually violent environments in which acquaintances, relatives, and family friends abused them with impunity.37 Rodrı´guez Cabo said it was no wonder so many Mexican girls turned to prostitution and justified orienting the school’s programs to study the environmental and social causes of sexual commerce and to meet their needs. The court’s fleet of social workers undertook this minute and scientific examination of the origins of crime in Mexico. Mediating between the infunctioned in the mid-to-late nineteenth century as a holding center, a place that kept abandoned children off the street and segregated delinquents from the public in order to protect society. 36. Beatrı´z Gonza´lez Pe´rez, ‘‘El problema de la prostitucio´n en Me´xico’’ (Lic. thesis, Facultad de Jurisprudencia, Escuela de Trabajo Social, Universidad Auto´noma de Me´xico, 1940); Madrigal, Los menores delincuentes, 17; Marı´n Herna´ndez, Historia del tratamiento a los menores infractores, 21; Mathilde Rodrı´guez Cabo, ‘‘El problema sexual de las menores mujeres y su repercusio´n en la delincuencia juvenil femenina,’’ Criminalia 6, no. 10 (June 1940); Mercedes Pons y Galindo, ‘‘Proteccio´n del menor en Me´xico’’ (Lic. thesis, Facultad de Derecho, Universidad Nacional Auto´noma de Me´xico, 1935), 47–48. 37. Rodrı´guez Cabo, ‘‘El problema sexual de las menores mujeres,’’ 544–45.

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mate population, their families, and the court’s judges and teachers, social workers performed interviews with inmates’ families to compile for each inmate a social history document that became the core of her file.38 Men and women who had studied at the national university’s new School of Social Work, these court employees visited the urban colonias, the rural outskirts of the Federal District, and sometimes even the delinquents’ provincial family homes to prepare their analyses of why these girls had run afoul of the law.39 Mexico’s School of Social Work had opened shortly after the Revolution, and over time the profession had attracted primarily young, unmarried, educated women but counted some older widows and men among its members as well.40 Once the health police had apprehended the girls, these men and women represented the first line of contact between young women and the state. In her capacity as head of the Departamento de Readaptacio´n y Prevencio´n Social, Dr. Mathilde Rodrı´guez Cabo emphasized the secular and nonmoralistic nature of social work when she warned social workers against permitting a ‘‘bourgeois morality’’ or ‘‘prudish religiosity’’ to influence their interaction with delinquents accused of sex crimes; nevertheless, relationships between social workers, the girls themselves, and their families were marked by social tensions.41 Although Rodrı´guez Cabo emphasized the secular and scientific nature of the social workers’ mission, their reports to judges and court administrators reflected their own gender and class biases. A review of case files confirms that as in the Porfirian era, a girl’s early sexual experience, subsequent familial abandonment, and lack of education were key factors in her involvement in sexual commerce, and the men and women who worked with girls who had experienced prostitution sincerely contemplated the factors that led them to this ‘‘disgraceful’’ lifestyle. Accordingly, social workers also contemplated the roles that older adults, such as parents, clients, and even madams, had played in the girls’ lives. However, in this undertaking, their 38. This activity was carried out under the authority of Article 16 of the Constitution of 1917, which protected the privacy of an individual in his home; public health and judicial considerations, however, permitted the state to enter the home with written authorization from a judge. 39. The trend toward professionalized social work has been the subject of several studies. See Daniel J. Walkowitz, ‘‘The Making of a Feminine Professional Identity: Social Workers in the 1920s,’’ American Historical Review 95 (1990): 1051–75, and Regina G. Kunzel, ‘‘The Professionalization of Benevolence: Evangelicals and Social Workers in the Florence Crittenden Homes, 1915 to 1945,’’ Journal of Social History 22 (1988): 21–43. 40. Robert C. Jones, Schools of Social Work in Latin America (Washington, D.C.: Pan American Union, Division of Labor and Social Information, 1943), 16–17. 41. Rodrı´guez Cabo, ‘‘El problema sexual de las menores mujeres,’’ 544.

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own gendered ideas about the kinds of experience men or women brought to their work influenced the questions they asked prostitutes and their families and how they analyzed the prostitutes’ family and work environments. Women were more likely than men to focus on conflictive mother-daughter relationships to explain a girl’s delinquency, for instance, whereas men focused on the public world in which the apprehended prostitutes had lived and worked. Social worker Esperanza Balmaceda de Josefe´ described one girl’s situation in the following way: ‘‘I suspect that a situation of conflict was established between her and her mother, aggravated by the poverty that forced the girl to run away.’’42 These comments reflected a sensitivity to the often complicated influences of financial difficulties, poor education, and family relations that led to female delinquency. Regarding another girl, who had worked as a prostitute at a downtown hotel ever since her soldier boyfriend had abandoned her, Balmaceda reported that ‘‘the girl could not find any other means of earning a living than prostitution, which she practiced for two months.’’43 Such advocates also contemplated with concern the girls’ own psychological profiles and worried that naı¨vete´ had led many to their current circumstances. Regarding a fourteen-year-old who had been abandoned by her mother, orphaned by her father, raped at pistol point by a soldier, and reduced to begging on the streets of one of the city’s most dangerous neighborhoods before being hospitalized for syphilis, social worker Judith Mangino stated that the girl had had a boyfriend who had offered to assume responsibility for her but that the girl herself now doubted he would be so enthusiastic, given her sexual experience. Mangino stated that ‘‘this boy offered to marry her, but she says that ‘he knows nothing of what has happened to me, for when he knew me I was still a virgin.’ ’’ The girl had admitted that she was in love with this suitor but had seemingly resigned herself to a life on the rough streets of the capital.44 Another girl elicited similar concerns from social workers, who reported that she stated that she kept having sex with workers she met at the public dances because ‘‘they always said they would come back for me, and then they never did.’’45 Male social workers who worked with girl prostitutes typically obtained 42. AGN-CTMI, box 31, file 9108. By agreement with the directors of the Archivo General de la Nacio´n, Me´xico, D.F., and in the interest of preserving the confidentiality of juvenile offenders and their families, I have changed the names of those whose files I have consulted and cited. 43. AGN-CTMI, box 2, file 4020. 44. Ibid., file 2049. 45. Ibid., file 1806.

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information that related to the public dimension of sexual commerce. Having spent time in Mexico City’s brothels to collect precise data about the lifestyle inside, male social workers such as Miguel Haro and Enrique Catala´n presented details about girls’ sexual practices that female social workers rarely broached in their case study reports. Miguel Haro, for example, frequently discussed the lesbian relationships that girls developed in brothels or on the street.46 Enrique Catala´n focused on the activities prostitutes performed as a means of measuring their potential for redemption; he noted that one girl was ‘‘very gross,’’ ‘‘completely lazy,’’ and ‘‘perverted’’ after visiting the brothel where she had been employed.47 Social workers’ class biases informed their analyses of the girls’ family lives as well. Both male and female social workers identified malignant characters and landscapes in the worlds of these girls in accordance with their preconceived notions of ‘‘proper’’ family life. They perpetuated the notion that the city was a dangerous, sophisticated, and corrupt space as well, arguing that parents living in Michoaca´n or Oaxaca were not adequately prepared to deal with daughters who had become accustomed to life on the streets of the national capital. Enrique Catala´n noted of one girl that ‘‘this world is completely dangerous, and if she is not completely perverted, if she stays in it, she will be.’’48 And Elsa H. Vda. de Me´ndez described one girl who had fled her family’s home in Morelia in the following terms: ‘‘Perhaps she is not a bad girl, but she has become accustomed to freedom and says she wants to look for work; she does not exhibit any repentance for the life she has led.’’49 For the most part, social workers believed it was better to place the girl in the state reformatory than return her to her parents, who they often believed had probably created the unstable domestic environment that had driven the girls into prostitution in the first place. Regarding another girl from Yucata´n, who had family in the capital, the social worker said that she had only a sister and brother-in-law in the city. These people loved her, but were ‘‘incapable of facilitating her regeneration because she is difficult terrain and they have neither the culture nor the will to help her.’’50 The conviction that the revolutionary state could be a better parent and authority figure than the nontraditional family permeated the court’s ‘‘social history’’ analyses. In the social history documents single fathers as well 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

Ibid., box 3, file 5443, and box 4, file 6885. Ibid., box 33, file 9160. Ibid., box 34, file 9827. Ibid., box 33, file 9451. Ibid., box 32, file 9467.

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as stepfathers were singled out as being especially incapable of raising daughters in a complex urban center. Fathers concerned the court’s child advocates because by abandoning their wives and children, by engaging in ‘‘unhealthy activities’’ that set a bad example for their offspring, and by physically abusing their children, these men, reformers feared, had corrupted the morals of an entire generation of young Mexicans, leaving them ill prepared to lead the revolutionary nation into the future. As Enrique Catala´n, a social worker with the court, wrote to the secretary general of the Tribunal para Menores Infractores regarding a particular girl; her father was to blame for his street vendor daughter’s prostitution. He complained that the father of the girl, an individual without scruples or any cares for the education of his children, came to this court by previous appointment, and when we told him about the reason his daughter was here, without demonstrating any concern, said that the girl was indebted to him, that she was a disobedient, whimsical girl with tendencies toward vagrancy, but in my thinking, the only person to blame for what has happened is the father, who lacks character but more than anything interest in the education of his children.51 But if nontraditional families concerned the social workers of the Tribunal para Menores Infractores, the spatial organization of the lower-class Mexican home provoked the greatest anxiety for reformers committed to social regeneration. Court documents from the 1920s and 1930s fixated on the vecindad as a site for ‘‘secret,’’ ‘‘immoral,’’ and dangerous activities. By the twentieth century, the vecindad, or tenement house, had become a convenient form of urban living, since it provided families with both private rooms as well as access to common resources such as water. By 1900 there were vecindades in all city sectors, with a concentration of the tenementstyle residences in the metropolitan center, the migrant and working-class neighborhoods such as Cuauhtemoctzı´n, which most prostitutes called home.52 Some of these vecindades had been built expressly for the purpose of providing concentrated housing, but others had been established in con51. Ibid., box 24, file 7326. 52. Secretarı´a de Fomento, Colonizacio´n e Industria, Censo y divisio´n territorial del Distrito Federal, verificados en 1900 (Mexico City: Oficina Tip. de la Secretarı´a de Fomento, 1901), 5–9.

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verted colonial hospitals, convents, or palaces. The private apartments of a vecindad typically opened onto a common courtyard or patio. Social workers saw these patios as spaces where the private and the public sides of domestic life mixed in potentially explosive combinations. Public patios might provide common resources for struggling urban families, but social workers suspected that vecindad managers, who tended to be widows, took advantage of the public dimension of residential life to recruit local girls into prostitution, call clientele in from the street while parents were away, and serve as moral contaminants.53 Nevertheless, it was the vecindad’s private spaces that most concerned Mexican social workers. The least expensive apartments had only one room, and social workers all worried that this secluded space served as a venue for delinquency. Hot and poorly lit areas with little air circulating through them, the spaces provided crucial privacy to families comprised of parents, children, and relatives who shared blankets and sleeping accommodations. Social workers worried that it was in these rooms that minors observed their elders engaging in sexual intercourse and undertook the same activities with their friends. Gustavo Va´zquez noted that ‘‘given the number of people who out of necessity are compelled to sleep in these rooms, it is easy to understand how they become spaces in which people present themselves with all their passions and defects; in them we have seen the most terrible crimes committed, the murders of good and uninvolved bystanders, the most disgraceful sexual relationships . . . and hatred, vengeance and intrigue.’’54 A fellow student corroborated Va´zquez’s opinion in his own thesis project. Jesu´s Martı´nez Castro wrote, ‘‘I cannot comprehend, because I ask myself if it is even possible to think, never mind ascertain, that people can live in the conditions in which this group of people with which we are concerned live.’’55 For social workers and criminologists, the Mexican home, in particular, was an untrustworthy social and political unit that exposed the nation’s young citizens to the very behavior the Revolution promised to extirpate. It was the state’s duty, therefore, to develop a prescription to redeem not just 53. AGN-CTMI, box 2, file 1806. According to Silvia Arrom, the behavior of the female apartment manager has long preoccupied families in Mexico City because of her control over who enters the domestic space. See Arrom, The Women of Mexico City, 131. 54. Gustavo A. Va´zquez R., Etiologı´a de la delincuencia ´ınfantil en Me´xico: Ideologı´a que debe sostener el o´rgano que conozca de las faltas cometidas por menores (Mexico City: Impresores Gra´ficos, 1950), 11. 55. Jesu´s Martı´nez Castro, ‘‘Delincuencia juvenil’’ (Lic. thesis, Facultad de Derecho, Universidad Nacional Auto´noma de Me´xico, 1936), 9.

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delinquents but also the authority figures and social landscapes that had shaped them.

Prescription for Redemption Public health and penal law made adolescent girls the easiest group of sexually promiscuous capitalinos for reformers to study because once incarcerated for underaged prostitution they became wards of the state. Whether or not a young girl had ever set foot in a brothel or accepted money in exchange for sexual intercourse, her sexual experience subjected her to state intervention, and her social, economic, sexual, and family history provided the cultural revolution’s foot soldiers with a wealth of information regarding metropolitan venues in which vice incubated. The legality of female prostitution made gender, like social class, a critical factor in the development of reform strategies because the state could assume custody of girls and women. Nevertheless, although educators and doctors used prostitutes as captive research subjects in their search for the ‘‘remedies’’ for ‘‘wayward femininity,’’ they failed to fully analyze the components of male sexual deviance in the same manner. In fact, although female sexual promiscuity was seen as the product of a deviant society, male sexual promiscuity was seen as natural, if disagreeable. Educators, legislators, and criminologists based their prescription for redemption on these gendered understandings of deviance and sexuality. For juvenile Mexican girls, the medical report, like the social history, was an essential component of the court’s analysis of the etiology of deviance. Interviewers like Enrique Catala´n and Esperanza Balmaceda speculated about a girl’s ‘‘repentance’’ or potential for ‘‘redemption,’’ but the court doctor’s medical assessment truly determined whether or not a young prostitute could be ‘‘cured’’ of her promiscuity. If social workers noted family vices, court doctors noted girls’ medical problems that could explain their delinquent tendencies. Female physicians typically filled this sensitive position, which required examining young girls for signs of sexually transmitted disease, determining whether their young patients had been sexually active, and speculating about the likelihood that they had ever been pregnant, and whether they had miscarried or aborted that pregnancy. Insofar as doctors and social workers communicated about particular inmates, they espoused distinct understandings of the relationship between heredity, the biological

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basis of disease, and criminal vice.56 If a prostitute’s mother had herself been a prostitute, had ever been hospitalized for syphilis treatment, or had lived with several different lovers, social workers understood these factors to have implications for subsequent generations. Catala´n, for example, pointed to the fact that a girl’s mother had children with several different men as a means of explaining the daughter’s ‘‘great affection for the masculine sex.’’57 Medical doctors, however, concerned themselves with prostitutes’ psychological and even chemical abnormalities. A faith in the explanatory powers of endocrinology underpinned their analyses of Mexican delinquency, for doctors believed that the thyroid and sex hormones, in particular, had strong implications for female criminality, generally, and for prostitution, especially. In an updated version of nineteenth-century ideas that the prostitute’s body was inherently degenerate, the director of the Mexican Eugenics Society, Dr. Alberto Saavedra, noted that much of the nation’s female delinquency could be attributed to ‘‘hyper-ovarian’’ function—a malady in which a girl’s body produced too much estrogen and progesterone, causing her to be more interested in sex than the normal Mexican woman. Medical practice further held that this problem could be easily cured through pharmaceutical intervention.58 In this spirit, doctors treated prostitutes’ diseases that were evidence of poverty and malnutrition, such as gingivitis, cavities and gastrointestinal infections, but they worked also to determine the components of vice that might be subjected to medical intervention. According to Dr. Armando Raggi Ageo, a criminologist popular among penal circles in Mexico, endocrine studies opened new scientific and ‘‘modern’’ explanatory avenues for specialists in the sociology and biology of female delinquency: ‘‘Certain female behaviors . . . incomprehensible for our grandparents, were attributed to evil spirits, but now there is a therapy for femininity which seeks to regulate and normalize her psyche, altered in many cases by purely biological reasons, previously attributed to bad upbringing or whimsy and justified with the familiar diagnosis of hysteria.’’59 In this spirit, doctors frequently diagnosed prostitutes as suffering from ‘‘hyper-ovarian function’’—which explained their sexual behavior—and 56. Pons y Galindo, ‘‘Proteccio´n del menor en Me´xico,’’ 50. 57. AGN-CTMI, box 29, file 8213. 58. ‘‘Sı´ntesis del curso de eugenesia dedicado a trabajadores sociales,’’ Eugenesia, n.s. 1, no. 2 (December 1939): 9. Eugenesia was published by the Sociedad Mexicana de Eugenesia. On eugenics in Mexico, see Stepan, The ‘‘Hour of Eugenics,’’ and Stern, ‘‘Responsible Mothers and Normal Children.’’ 59. Armando Raggi Ageo, ‘‘La mujer y el delito,’’ Criminalia 7, no. 7 (March 1941): 444–45.

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from hypothyroidism, which explained their laziness, prescribing surgeries and pharmaceutical preparations to cure their bodies of wayward sexual tendencies. The understanding that poverty and poor education were correlated with precocious sexual activity and led to prostitution shaped reform efforts for women both over and under eighteen. After they had performed social, medical, and psychological evaluations on juvenile girls, for example, court administrators removed girls who had reform potential from ‘‘infected’’ family or occupational situations and placed them, instead, in the Escuela de Correccio´n to embark upon the curative work of revolutionary redemption.60 A sense that these girls could and should be molded into virtuous revolutionary citizens permeated the reformatory. The ‘‘science’’ of redeeming young, sexually active girls influenced the design of the architectural, educational, and vocational components of this program. Revolutionary theories of justice had emphasized the state’s duty to redeem delinquents by placing them in moral settings that emphasized education over punishment, and the Tribunal laid the groundwork for cultural revolution by putting this theory into architectural and institutional practice.61 At the main offices of the Escuela de Correccio´n, officials worked to reorient the institution’s internal spaces to inculcate a sense of community, nationalism, and faith in the secular state.62 By renovating the central patio and planting rose bushes among colorful tiles and sparkling fountains, authorities hoped to provide the girls with a pleasant space for contemplation and reflection. New classrooms gave teachers and students alike the inspiration to initiate civics and literacy training. A pool and volleyball courts provided inmates with an opportunity to develop strength and teamwork, and after classes inmates practiced patriotic theater presentations in an auditorium that held up to 450 people. In addition, the new dormitories reflected an emphasis on communal living. Prior to the Revolution, dormitories had 60. Hermelinda Gutie´rrez H. de Garcı´a Escamilla, ‘‘El hogar colectivo como tratamiento en la prevencio´n y solucio´n de la delincuencia ´ınfantil’’ (Lic. thesis, Facultad de Derecho y Ciencias Sociales, Universidad Nacional Auto´noma Mexicana, 1945). 61. Article 18 of the Constitution of 1917 states that ‘‘the Federal Government and the states will organize their penal systems in their respective jurisdictions around the idea of work, qualifications for work, and the use of education as a means of socially readapting the delinquent.’’ 62. Madrigal, Los menores delincuentes. For an analysis of architectural reforms in revolutionary Mexico, see Antonio E. Me´ndez-Vigata´, ‘‘Politics and Architectural Language: PostRevolutionary Regimes in Mexico and Their Influence on Mexican Public Architecture, 1921– 1952,’’ in Modernity and the Architecture of Mexico, ed. Edward R. Burian (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997).

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segregated young delinquents. The newly renovated building, however, had long wards with beds running down the middle of the space. The idea was that this would help girls learn the discipline necessary to live in a group, gain a sense of community, and learn ‘‘good’’ behaviors from each other. The cultural activities the directors planned for delinquent girls emphasized revolutionary anticlerical values. Between 1921 and 1926, Catholic women had undertaken an enthusiastic although limited project to promote the reform of prostitutes, and the Unio´n de Damas Cato´licas had sent members to visit young prostitutes at the Hospital Morelos, encouraging them to be baptized, to accept Jesus, and to abandon their ‘‘sinful’’ ways.63 But the anticlerical sentiment that inspired Gaste´lum and Calles-era appointees stood in strong opposition to this kind of religious indoctrination and, by 1926, the Consejo Tutelar para Menores Infractores countered the Damas’ project by struggling to make the public reformatory, the Escuela de Correccio´n, a more appealing alternative to underage prostitutes than the Damas’ private reformatory, the Eje´rcito de Defensa de la Mujer. Whereas the Damas’ reform program urged repentant prostitutes to confess their sins and embrace a life of Christian morality, activities at the Escuela de Correccio´n emphasized the secular nature of Mexican society. Reformatory administrators took advantage of the religious holidays to gather delinquents’ families together under the supervision of social workers in the reformatory’s common room. In this setting they organized group activities to foster respect for Mexico’s diverse regional cultures rather than religious sentiment. For instance, on religious holidays the reformatory’s dining staff prepared meals to inculcate a sense of pride in national diversity, and around Easter served mole poblano or fish in a Veracruz sauce in a mix of pious and patriotic devotions.64 At Mexico City’s reformatory for girls, the Escuela de Correccio´n, the inmates’ creative, artistic, and culinary output supported the institution financially and provided crucial job training for girls who had ‘‘fallen’’ into ‘‘the life’’ because they did not know how to earn a living. Upon their arrival at the reformatory, delinquent girls took intelligence and achievement tests 63. ‘‘Eje´rcito de Defensa de la Mujer,’’ La Dama Cato´lica, August 31, 1921. On the broader implications of the Damas’ work in the 1920s, see Patience A. Schell, ‘‘An Honorable Avocation for Ladies: The Work of the Mexico City Unio´n de Damas Cato´licas Mexicanas, 1912–1926,’’ Journal of Women’s History, Winter 1999, 78–104. 64. ‘‘Vacaciones en el Tribunal para Menores,’’ Mujer: Revista para la Elevacio´n Moral e Intelectual de la Mujer Mexicana, April 1, 1929, 13. See Adrian Bantjes’s analysis of the state’s effort to counter religious sentiment with nationalistic fervor in ‘‘Burning Saints, Molding Minds: Iconoclasm, Civic Ritual, and the Failed Cultural Revolution,’’ in Beezley, French, and Martin, Rituals of Rule.

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to determine their literacy levels and logical reasoning potential; those who were judged capable of learning were placed in math, civics, and literacy classes.65 Those girls the teachers deemed to be mentally challenged studied ‘‘domestic arts’’ and learned how to clean house and wash clothes, since social workers aspired to place them as servants when they were out of the reformatory. Prostitutes who showed intellectual promise studied the more complicated ‘‘home industries,’’ in addition to reading, writing, and Mexican history.66 For young women who had little vocational experience, cooking and sewing clothes for fellow inmates gave them survival skills reformers judged appropriate to their sex and class. Although some girls moved through the school in a matter of weeks, it was more common for them to live under the state’s tutelage until they were eighteen. This practice both reflected the reform community’s conviction that only in rare circumstances could the family be trusted to inculcate young Mexicans with progressive revolutionary virtues and the fact that some girls were at the reformatory because they had no family at all.67 But even for those who did have family, parents’ requests to resume custody of their daughters were often rejected, reflecting the revolutionary institution’s implicit belief that public internment represented the only way to combat the vices they were convinced the Mexican family practiced in private. Finally, the state claimed the authority to shape the formation of new families as well. Social workers assumed the task of molding the families of Mexico’s future by having the final say over marriages between boyfriends and pregnant inmates. For example, one girl had turned to prostitution after she left her boyfriend who had beaten her when she plucked her eyebrows and went to a public dance without him. The seventeen-year-old told social workers that she had run away with her boyfriend when she was thirteen and that although she did not love him, she liked him well enough to marry him. Concerned that the relationship between the two adolescents was not a nurturing one, social workers recommended that she stay at the Escuela de Correccio´n, during which time they eventually located the girl’s family in 65. Ibarguengoytia, ‘‘Bosquejo histo´rico de la delincuencia ´ınfantil,’’ 66; ‘‘Reglamento del Tribunal Para Menores del Distrito Federal,’’ Mujer 3, no. 24 (1929). ´ rgano del Departamento de Psicotecnı´a e Higiene Mental 66. See Boletı´n Psicote´cnica: O del Gobierno del Departamento del Distrito Federal, vol. 1 (1923). 67. See Ann Shelby Blum, Children Without Parents: Law, Charity and Social Practice, Mexico City, 1867–1940 (Ph.D. diss., Department of History, University of California, Berkeley, 1998), for an overview and analysis of state policies with respect to orphans in Mexico.

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Puebla and sent her home to carry her pregnancy to term under her mother’s care.68

Side Effects Reformist ideology posited smooth relations among social workers, delinquent girls, and their families, but these prescriptions did not always work and in some instances actually created greater problems for the girls and court employees. Being cloistered at the Escuela de Correccio´n in the southern suburb of Coyoaca´n frustrated some young women who had become accustomed to an independent—if dangerous—life, and many tried to escape; for others who had been placed in the state’s custody because they were merely ‘‘at risk’’ of falling into a life of crime, their confinement with veteran or recidivist prostitutes exposed them to vice networks among the capital’s demimonde. Moreover, despite the fact that the reformatory was idealized as a ‘‘healthy,’’ sexless venue, in fact the young inmates sometimes formed sexual relationships with each other, thwarting reformist prescriptions regarding sanitation and hygienic morality altogether. Among young women engaged in prostitution in Mexico City, the prospect of going to the corre inspired as much horror as a trip to the Hospital Morelos, and social work reports demonstrate that underage prostitutes sought whenever possible to avoid the snares of Inspeccio´n de Sanidad police charged with bringing underage girls to the court’s attention. Girls who worked out of inexpensive hotels in Cuauhtemoctzı´n or closer to the center, at perhaps the Hotel Peru´, the Hotel Libertad, or the Hotel Santo Domingo, formed cordial relationships with hotel staff, who frequently alerted the young sex workers about an impending raid by health inspectors or even provided hiding places for the girls. Those who were apprehended, however, chafed at the reformatory’s isolation, rigorous physical examinations, and organized discipline, performing strip shows in front of the second floor windows for male pedestrians and plotting escape plans together to reduce the tedium. For example, one young woman, whose street name was ‘‘la Mosca’’ or ‘‘the Fly,’’ was given permission to sell raffle tickets outside the reformatory because she had demonstrated good behavior. She fled with the money from the ticket sales, and after being returned to custody used her 68. AGN-CTMI, box 4, file 7213.

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contacts in the outside world to flee again, this time taking a group of friends with her to a casa de asignacio´n. According to the school director, Clementina Parra, who summarized the case for an internal review, ‘‘she is a bad element for the others,’’ and the director despaired that the teachers could ever reform the girl. ‘‘For this reason,’’ she wrote, ‘‘I ask you to turn her over to her uncle.’’69 Other inmates were more daring than ‘‘la Mosca’’ in their attempts to escape what they perceived to be the oppression of the corre. According to one report regarding a sixteen-year-old inmate from Pachuca who had been apprehended practicing prostitution in the capital, ‘‘The girl has suggested to her companions a plan to flee, promising that she will serve as a guide to the world of prostitution.’’ Not only had she recruited fellow inmates to join her, but she had developed a dangerous and violent plan to carry out the escape. She intended, it seems, to set the dormitory curtains on fire and flee in the ensuing confusion, but officials got word of the plan and segregated her from the rest of the population.70 The fact that some girls planned to run away to live together as romantic partners also concerned social workers. As Miguel Leo´n observed, regarding an inmate who had been apprehended for prostitution, ‘‘E.M. is very loving with the minor, C.P.; she kisses and feeds her and has promised her that when they flee, she will take her to some dances, where they will have a good time.’’71 The Tribunal’s directorship worried particularly about orphaned girls who had merely been placed at the reformatory because their lack of family put them at risk for ‘‘falling into’’ prostitution. Social worker R. Amezcua advised the institution’s director in 1928 that one girl had been placed in the correctional institution solely because she had ‘‘been deceived by her boyfriend who took her to a hotel, where she was unable to defend her honor.’’ Without any parents or siblings to protect her, the girl had been placed at the Escuela, but the former ‘‘innocent’’ had only made friends with bad influences, run away, and found work in a brothel before being reapprehended. Escuela director Parra noted in 1931 that ‘‘it is urgent to find 69. Ibid., box 2, file 1841. 70. Ibid., box 3, file 2049. 71. Ibid., box 4, file 6539. In his discussion of the ‘‘internal discourse’’ of nineteenth-century French secondary schools, Michel Foucault argues that the entire architecture of the school reflected concerns about the sexuality of the students. He writes, ‘‘What one might call the internal discourse of the institutions—the one it emphasized to address itself, and which circulated among those who made it function—was largely based on the assumption that this sexuality existed, that it was precocious and active, ever present’’ (The History of Sexuality: Volume I, 27–28). See also AGN-CTMI, box 4, file 6885; box 3, file 5813; box 27, file 7812; and box 3, file 5707.

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an appropriate place where she can live and work to support herself. This girl has no family and her stay at the school is due more to that fact than to any bad conduct in which she has engaged.’’72 Finally, the fact that the court occasionally entertained requests to place the young charges in positions as domestic servants actually placed the adolescent women back in the very situations that had led them to prostitution in the first place. For example, Gloria Mendoza petitioned to have a girl who had been in her employ released to her only a few months after social workers had placed her at the reformatory. Mendoza remembered the girl’s kindness to her family and sought to return the favor by inviting her to join the Mendoza household, where she would perform janitorial duties in exchange for clothes, food, a place to sleep, and supervision. Despite the fact that it was precisely this kind of situation that had led the girl to sexual experimentation and prostitution in the first place, the court eventually granted Mendoza’s petition, noting that ‘‘she is of average culture, worries about her children’s’ instruction, and expresses herself easily and correctly.’’73 Juvenile law facilitated the state’s control over promiscuous young women, but the task of redeeming older prostitutes was a more difficult matter, for women over eighteen who engaged in sexual commerce were not delinquents and could not be subjected to laws that placed them in the revolutionary state’s custody. Nevertheless, like juvenile prostitution, the participation of older women in sexual commerce was a source of concern to public authorities. Adult prostitutes, like juveniles, tended to be rural migrants, have low levels of education, and to suffer from syphilis and other sexually transmitted infections. They were also often mothers, and hygienists worried that it was their daughters who would form the next front of the syphilis epidemic by virtue of the fact that they were likely to imitate their mothers.74 But it was the fact that they were infected with disease that made it possible to subject adult women to reform, for those who were interned at the Hospital Morelos were required to participate in the new educational facilities the institution had developed for its long-term clients. Between 1918 and 1921 the city had worked to limit legal prostitution by raising the fees matronas had to pay in order to license a house or apartment for prostitution and by sending public agents to popular dance halls to repress such provocative moves as the shimmy.75 And they had consis72. 73. 74. 75.

AGN-CTMI, box 2, file 1885, pp. 19–21. Ibid., file 1806. AHSSA-SP-IAV, box 3, file 4. AHCM, ‘‘Sanidad,’’ vols. 3891–94.

Image not available

Fig. 6 This Mexico City newspaper illustration demonstrates official efforts to chart fluctuating levels of female delinquency, often associated with sexual promiscuity. Although women could be arrested for theft, murder, and assault, as well as other criminal activities, in the 1920s and 1930s, criminologists and residents of Mexico City alike tended to associate female delinquency with the prostitute’s sexually aggressive posture. Reprinted from El Nacional (Mexico City), February 19, 1939.

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tently raised the monthly fees prostitutes themselves had to pay in order to remain legally registered. It had quickly become clear, however, that these strategies had unintended consequences, as the steeper fees only pushed the women underground, swelling the ranks of the clandestinas operating in the capital. In 1926 president Plutarco Elı´as Calles signaled a new tactic when he signed a new Reglamento para el ejercicio de la prostitucio´n, which formalized a reform program for prostitutes interned at the Hospital Morelos.76 The Escuela Morelos included a series of new classrooms, where prostitutes studied reading and writing and such trades as sewing, leatherwork, and cooking.77 School directors emphasized their effort to ‘‘awaken in [their prostitute patients] a moral sensibility and give them a more honorable means of earning a living’’ to help them reintegrate into society.78 Under the 1920s reformist prescriptions, adult and adolescent women were subject to the state’s medical and educational authority, but sexually promiscuous men were not, for despite Dr. Gaste´lum’s concerns over the cult of masculinity, reformers’ ideas about redemption rested on the apparent consensus that men were naturally promiscuous and that this behavior might be impossible to change. Federal deputy Modesto Gonza´lez Galindo from Tlaxcala presented a dim view of male sexual discipline when he addressed a meeting of the Twenty-eighth Legislature on the topic of whether or not women should be allowed to work in bars. Men, Gonza´lez Galindo said, drank to excess in cantinas because they were lured in by the presence of sexually available women. He noted, ‘‘I can assure you, fellow deputies, that if many men enter bars, it is not because they want to go there to imbibe alcohol nor because they have a habit of drinking spirits; they do it because they see, as I said earlier, the silhouette of a woman, and they go in to spend money that should instead buy their family’s food or be used to purchase some other object of utility.’’79 Some legislators, like the outspoken radical Antonio Dı´az Soto y Gama, blamed long-standing institutions like Catholicism for preventing divorce and creating situations in which men sought out additional sexual partners.80 Others, like Dr. Eliseo Ramı´rez, credited the 76. AHSSA-SP-SJ, box 7, file 14. 77. Alvarez Ame´zquita et al., Historia de la salubridad y la asistencia, 263. 78. ‘‘En El Hospital Morelos,’’ Boletı´n del Departamento de Salubridad Pu´blica, 1925, no. 3:8, in AHSSA-SP-IAV, box 3, file 1, and box 15, file 1. 79. Congreso, Ca´mara de Diputados, Diario de los debates de la H. Ca´mara de Diputados, 27th legislature, an˜o 1, no. 12 (May 12, 1919). 80. Cro´nicas y Debates de la Soberana Convencio´n Revolucionaria (Mexico City: Biblioteca del Instituto Nacional de Estudios Histo´ricos de la Revolucio´n Mexicana, 1965), 3:548–49.

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double standard with creating an ideal of female marital sexuality which bored men and forced them to go to brothels to ‘‘satisfy their sexual appetites.’’81 Hygienists such as the head of the Federal Campaign Against Venereal Diseases, Dr. Enrique Villela, pointed out that ‘‘we men have been taught that our vitality must be converted into a career of violence, in which feminine purity is trampled.’’82 And Juan Soto called the Mexican male ‘‘the beast-like man who is dominated by his instincts without thinking of his social responsibilities. . . . [H]e obeys his zoological instincts.’’83 Hygienists and social workers alike determined that the reform of Mexico’s men might well require a different approach.

Revolutionary Science In the 1920s and 1930s, social service agencies dedicated to criminal justice, public education, and public health increasingly intervened in the private, intimate lives of the Mexican population. Ostensibly, this action was designed to inculcate new revolutionary goals of anticlericalism, bodily discipline, nationalism, and interest in economic progress among young and adult members of the public alike. But this condensation of social legislation, medical science, and cultural reform at the crossroads of family life and sexuality reflected class- and gender-based conceptualizations of behavior that led to tensions between reformers and Mexican men and women, even as bureaucrats worked to engineer a new social order that rejected the corruption and bankrupt moral authority of the ancien re´gime. The revolutionary concern over syphilis, and the state’s obsession with the population’s sexual behavior, facilitated public efforts to diagnose decadence, understand the pathology of promiscuity, and prescribe methods of reform. In this context, the private dilemmas of the capitalinos became the state’s business in the public arenas of the clinic, the school, and the reformatory. As he told the Pan American public health experts in 1926, Dr. Gaste´lum had urged the health ministers of the Latin American republics to reduce the spread of syphilis by adopting legislation to restrict prostitution and to medicalize a sexual morality he saw warped by secrecy. In the years 81. Eliseo Ramı´rez, ‘‘Dicta´men acerca de la reglamentacio´n de la prostitucio´n,’’ in AHSSASP-SJ, unclassified. 82. AHSSA-SP-IAV, box 5, file 1. 83. Soto, La educacio´n sexual, 145.

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that followed Dr. Gaste´lum’s speech, in Mexico at least, a corps of welfare agency bureaucrats sought to implement this science of redemption and to sanitize Mexican moral, social, and domestic relations by ensuring the state’s authority over popular private lives, family matters, and plans for the future.

4 Evaluating the Cult of Masculinity Manliness, Money, and the Morality of Exchange

When public health officials blamed Mexico’s cult of masculinity for the syphilis epidemic they believed was threatening national economic development, they lamented a sexual double standard that seemed to tolerate male sexual promiscuity and either demand female monogamy or condemn the adventuresome woman to prostitution. Under this logic, they argued that the pursuit of multiple sex partners by men led to the spread of diseases that were degenerative and difficult to treat. This acknowledgment of the role of men in the propagation of disease was certainly a shift from the Porfirians’ view that the prostitute’s body itself was inherently deviant and diseased. But despite the rhetoric of the reformers, the efforts of public officials to keep men from pursuing sexual encounters with prostitutes, however, were not nearly as successful as their attempts to encourage young girls and women to leave sexual commerce and learn a new trade, for public health law made it possible to institutionalize, medically treat, and educate public women but not their male clientele. The efforts by the Departamento de Salubridad Pu´blica to popularize the

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idea of sexual moderation by distributing pamphlets and presenting talks in factories, public parks, and sites of diversion provoked protest and angry commentary from critics who accused the department of promoting a ‘‘dangerous sanitary dictatorship’’ and intruding on the public’s private lives.1 Popular response to administrative efforts to diminish the attractiveness of the cult of masculinity, in conjunction with social workers’ and doctors’ observations of juvenile prostitution cases, only confirmed reformers’ worst fears: Mexican men were not only unwilling to give up pursuing sexually available women, but it was military officers, policemen, and government employees themselves who could be blamed for the participation of so many young capitalinas in the metropolitan sex trade. Over the 1920s and early 1930s, investigative cooperation between the social workers of the Consejo Tutelar para Menores Infractores and the agents of the Inspeccio´n de Sanidad revealed just how extensive men’s commitment to prostitution was, for case files implicated army personnel in many a young woman’s ‘‘disgrace’’ and showed that some clients did not even recognize the undesirability of the sex trade. In 1931, for example, the case of one underage prostitute who was apprehended by agents from the Inspeccio´n de Sanidad raised important questions about the cult of masculinity. A fifteen-year-old from the town of Iguala in the state of Guerrero, Graciela Escobar had attempted to register as a prostitute after ‘‘being apprehended on Calle Donceles by the health inspectors.’’ As she told the social worker who interviewed her, she had been living at the Hotel Santo Domingo in the city center when she found herself in financial difficulties, took the advice of a hotel maid named Gloria, and ‘‘threw herself into the street,’’ believing that ‘‘in that life she would always have money.’’2 Escobar’s participation in metropolitan prostitution could be traced to the bad influence of an army lieutenant with whom she had run away from home when she was thirteen, the court official found. Living with the lieutenant as his soldadera, she prepared his food and maintained the couple’s domestic space while on the road. But when they arrived in the central state of Guanajuato where he would be stationed in the town of Sarabia, the teniente told her to ‘‘return to her house,’’ in effect abandoning her. She told him that ‘‘she did not want to return to her home, for she did not have clothes and was ashamed,’’ but the lieutenant apparently just gave her 1. ‘‘La peligrosa dictadura sanitaria,’’ El Universal, June 26, 1926, cited in Mazzaferri, ‘‘Public Health and Social Revolution,’’ 247. 2. AGN-CTMI, box 1, file 4020.

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money and told her to leave, at which time she traveled to the capital, where she stayed in the inexpensive Santo Domingo Hotel before finding work as a prostitute.3 The lieutenant’s unsupportive attitude was bad enough, court officers noted, but the men in Mexico City treated the adolescent little better. While Escobar studied reading and math and recovered from the syphilis and gonorrhea infections she had acquired as a prostitute, a man named Francisco Arroyo, whom social workers assumed was a former client, began sending her love letters and gifts and promising to secure her release from la corre. As Arroyo wrote the young woman upon learning of her apprehension and internment, he would ‘‘visit just as soon as possible,’’ promising to meet with the judge who was overseeing her case. In the meantime, as he wrote her in November 1931, ‘‘Yesterday I could not come, and I will try to visit today, but since I am not certain that I will be able to see you, I am sending nuts, sweets, and the stockings you requested. I know they are not very nice, but since you will just use them in the institution, I hope you will forgive me.’’ Lest she forget him, moreover, he even sent her paper with which to write him back.4 For health officials and court social workers, cases like Escobar’s demonstrated not only the familiar role army officers played in disrupting family life and in dishonoring young girls but also shed light on how young prostitutes’ clients failed to appreciate the troubling and even dangerous nature of the work in which the women they enjoyed were engaged. Indeed, the court’s glimpse into the world of family crises, poverty, sexual exploitation, and prostitute-client relations showed public officials in Mexico City’s new institutions that it was quite often government employees themselves who routinely visited prostitutes and who even helped maintain the young women in their occupation. One social worker noted that another girl who lived at the Hotel Santo Domingo and who typically worked at the Cabaret ‘‘La Nin˜a’’ received regular financial support from a policeman in the Fifth Precinct. As Elsa H. Vda. de Me´ndez observed, ‘‘This man has another family and on some days gives her a peso and fifty centavos, but on other days he does not give her anything, so, the girl, with his consent, goes out every night to search of new clients, with whom she spends the night in different hotels.’’5 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid., box 33, file 9596.

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As medical specialists, psychiatrists, jurists, and social activists developed agendas to deal with Mexico City’s moral crisis and confronted profound resistance when they tried to inculcate more ‘‘modern’’ and ‘‘revolutionary’’ behaviors among metropolitan men, they found it necessary both to refine the definition of the dangerous client and to shift their focus to a new class of men who had become visibly active in the metropolitan underworld. Loosely categorized as lenones, these men were also known as apaches, souteneurs, and rufianes and included those who incited women to prostitution and lived off their ‘‘wages of sin.’’6 In studying and debating the roles of clients and lenones in undermining revolutionary reform efforts in the Mexican capital, reformers in the late 1920s and early 1930s focused on two aspects of male involvement in ‘‘immoral enterprise’’: work and money. Over time, clients who were also fathers, and men who supported themselves through pimping emerged as the most suspect devotees of the cult of masculinity, the father-client because he threatened to spread disease to his wife and children and the pimp because he was violent and victimized women. As the criteria for understanding Mexico’s cult of masculinity evolved, what separated the tolerated client from the dangerous clientfather and what separated the client-father from the pimp was the generation and disposal of money itself. In this schema, unmarried men who earned their own salaries and chose to spend their money on prostitutes were less socially offensive than fathers who, when they visited prostitutes, did their families and the nation a great disservice by wasting their hardearned money instead of turning it over to their wives to pay for food and other necessities. It was pimps, however, who attracted the greatest amount of reformist and popular attention in the late 1920s and 1930s, for they neither worked nor earned their own money and, worst of all, exploited women for their personal gain. To understand how the components of the cult of masculinity changed over time and the process by which reformers essentially dismissed the client while criminalizing male entrepreneurship in sexual commerce, it is helpful to evaluate the components of Mexico’s so-called cult of masculinity; ana6. Luise White argues in The Comforts of Home that the reformer’s failure to address the client’s role in encouraging prostitution is often accompanied by the shift of focus to the pimps themselves. White writes that ‘‘in the rhetoric of reform, the middle-class men whose needs and energies required a population of registered prostitutes were replaced by pimps as the source of prostitutes’ exploitation’’ (5). McLaren notes that in England the law made the relationship between pimps’ failure to work and their exploitation of women for material gain explicit, for pimps were tried and judged in accordance with the 1898 Vagrancy Act. McLaren, Trials of Masculinity, 16.

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lyze popular images and penal reforms that centered around the idea of the leno´n (pimp) and the crime of lenocinio (sexually exploiting women without a license); and consider criminal accusations of lenocinio themselves. While reformers were willing to blame pimps and crime tabloids to blame foreigners for exploiting Mexican women, it was prostitutes themselves who employed the lenocinio accusation as a way to try to force Mexican men into compliance with their own code of gender relations that respected women’s work, honor, money, and control over how it was spent.

A Question of Underdevelopment In 1926 health reformers such as Dr. Gaste´lum became concerned over the nation’s cult of masculinity, worried that it threatened Mexico’s ruin, and contemplated ways to encourage Mexican men to comply with the reformist project. But just as science and medicine informed the analysis of ‘‘wayward femininity’’ in Mexico, so did ideas about ‘‘nature’’ underpin the reform community’s investigation into ‘‘improper’’ masculinity. Confronting evidence that men were unwilling to give up their ‘‘right’’ to seek sexual pleasure with a variety of women, hygienists and criminologists became convinced that male promiscuity might well be a ‘‘natural’’ if undesirable aspect of Mexican masculinity after all. Reformist efforts to analyze, evaluate, and challenge this ‘‘natural’’ state of affairs centered around ideas regarding work, family, and the law. When members of the Departamento de Salubridad Pu´blica began to study and debate the components of the cult of masculinity, they couched their descriptions in terms that reflected a man’s ‘‘natural’’ tendencies to work and engage in sexual activity. Soto’s observation that the Mexican was the ‘‘beast-like man who . . . obeys his zoological instincts’’ and Ramı´rez’s observation that Mexico’s men had been taught only to ‘‘satisfy their sexual appetites’’ without taking responsibility for the consequences suggested that men might be difficult, if not impossible, to reform.7 Accepting the fact that men would invariably seek out multiple sex partners, educators and health officials had long urged prophylaxis and sexual restraint. A popular pam7. Soto, La educacio´n sexual, 145. Ramı´rez, ‘‘Dicta´men acerca de la reglamentacio´n de la prostitucio´n,’’ in AHSSA-SP-SJ, unclassified. On the development of ‘‘sexual science’’ in the nineteenth century, see Cynthia Eagle Russett, Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989).

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phlet describing venereal disease prevention techniques, for example, acknowledged male promiscuity and encouraged moderation in terms that even the most sexually adventuresome male might appreciate. Although men and women alike were urged to wash the genital region at least once a day, men specifically were instructed to use a special soap after having sexual relations with a prostitute. Too-frequent sexual intercourse, moreover, concerned the pamphlet’s authors, who wrote that ‘‘the abuse of sex causes many nervous system disorders and quickly leads to impotence. We understand ‘abuse’ to mean the daily indulgence in sexual activities; some hygienists recommend a young, healthy man make use of a woman only once a week and that as he ages he should diminish his sexual unions, insofar as semen is very rich in necessary nutrients, and if it is used up then there will be a general deterioration of the body with grave consequences.’’8 The reformist discussion about clients, work, and money centered around traditional understandings of men’s social roles. For example, to explain the problematic attitude of male clients, criminologist Alfredo Quiroz used the familiar dichotomy between mothers and prostitutes to explain the difference between fathers and clients. Calling men who sought the services of public women ‘‘male prostitutes’’ and the ‘‘twin brothers’’ of female prostitutes, Quiroz explained that men, like women, had two mental states. Females, he said, were either ‘‘maternal’’ or ‘‘infertile.’’ Quiroz noted that if a woman’s psychological state revolved around her reproductive capacities, a similar explanatory schema that centered around men’s ‘‘essential attribute,’’ work, could be applied to males. According to Quiroz, the ideal man was he who ‘‘with good behavior and instincts . . . works first, because fighting and working are sexuality, but sublimated sexuality.’’9 Just as the ‘‘good’’ woman sought her ‘‘natural’’ expression in motherhood, so too did the ‘‘good’’ man seek his natural expression in fatherhood and hard labor. If the category of work could separate the good man from the bad, reproduction and refinement offered similar evaluative criteria for Quiroz and other criminologists. As Quiroz explained, like ‘‘good women,’’ ‘‘true’’ men indulged in sexual activity largely because of the ‘‘reproductive instinct.’’ It was their duty to reproduce, he said; thus sexual activity and reproduction were work. ‘‘Dangerous’’ men were those who had underdeveloped repro8. Archivo Histo´rico de la Secretarı´a de Educacio´n Pu´blica, Mexico City, Departamento de Psicopedagogı´a e Higiene, ‘‘Cartilla de higiene escrita especialmente para la poblacio´n de la Valle de Oaxaca,’’ 1925, file 135.1. 9. Alfonso Quiroz, ‘‘Prostitucio´n masculina vs. prostitucio´n femenina,’’ Criminalia 3, no. 1 (September 1936): 15.

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Official concerns over sexually transmitted disease and promiscuity in the revolutionary capital did not keep pharmaceutical manufacturers from marketing aphrodisiacs and other medicines designed to enhance male sexual performance. Reprinted from Aurreocochea and Bartra, Puros cuentos, 36.

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ductive inclinations and who not only engaged in sexual encounters that were not likely to lead to conception and family-formation but even wasted money on the enterprise. Quiroz explained that ‘‘the other male psychology is that which parallels the prostitute . . . the man who is indifferent to his essential attribute, work, and dedicates himself instead to an exaggerated care of his body [and] to sports, and we must not forget that such activities are a degenerated kind of work.’’ Not only did men who visited prostitutes spend an inordinate amount of time and money on their physical appearance, misplacing their energies, according to Quiroz, but they failed to develop refined emotional qualities as well. For Quiroz, these ‘‘male prostitutes’’ were socially dangerous because ‘‘these people are characterized by an exaggerated sense of sentimentality, always superficial, and which, in a constitutional and innate manner, keeps them from being true men.’’10 But in the end Quiroz linked the issues of promiscuity and the pur10. Ibid.

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suit of relations with prostitutes to male ‘‘instincts,’’ saying that men who were ‘‘capable of satisfying themselves in that harem that is prostitution’’ were ‘‘men with base instincts, not refined and with few scruples, who should be chaste if not abstinent.’’11 Thus the clients of prostitutes were not only lazy but also incapable of being fathers. In this admittedly confusing logic, men who paid prostitutes for sex could not be ‘‘true’’ men, because they shirked their reproductive responsibilities and failed to develop good work habits besides. Quiroz’s attack on sexually promiscuous and socially irresponsible fatherhood resonated with the public health and social work agendas in the late 1920s. Indeed, over this period, fathers who visited prostitutes emerged as the only clients the Departamento de Salubridad Pu´blica could reasonably target; hygienists worried that it was fathers who were to blame for the spread of the venereal disease epidemic to innocent wives and children.12 An advertisement the Departamento de Salubridad Pu´blica placed in popular magazines, in fact, pathologized the promiscuous father, portraying him as diseased and the source of his poor family’s misfortune. In the drawing the father is standing behind the mother, on crutches, with his eyes downcast. She is sitting with crying children on her lap. The text runs as follows: ‘‘Syphilis in the father causes the ruin of the home. The health certificate guarantees the health of the WIFE and that of the children. A kiss, a caress, these are the frequent vehicles of syphilis contagion. Syphilis is the principal cause of miscarriages and why many children are born dead. Syphilis is not a secret sickness. If you don’t confess it, your children will show it.’’13 Men might enjoy spending time with women who were not their wives, but, the ad implied, they would endanger the future of their offspring in the end. By placing the announcement in women’s magazines, the Departamento de Salubridad Pu´blica worked to ensure that women knew such male behavior should not be tolerated. Their work with adult and juvenile offenders convinced state social 11. Ibid. 12. Work on fatherhood in historical perspective includes Robert Griswold, Fatherhood in America, a History (New York: Basic Books, 1993). See also the special issue of the Journal of Family History 24, no. 3 (1999), which Robert Griswold edited. On Latin America, see also Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt, ‘‘Domesticating Men: State Building and Class Compromise in Popular Front Chile,’’ in Dore and Molyneux, Hidden Histories, 262–90, and Donna J. Guy, ‘‘Parents Before the Tribunals: The Legal Construction of Patriarchy in Argentina,’’ in ibid., 172–90. 13. Advertisement in Mujer: Revista para la elevacio´n moral e intelectual de la mujer mexicana, March 1, 1927, back page.

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workers that fathers threatened not just their families but the community at large when they engaged in sexual activity with multiple women and neglected their children’s emotional, financial, and moral needs. When they discussed the reasons that a young man or woman had turned to a life of crime on the streets of revolutionary Mexico City, social workers focused on specific characters and landscapes that had shaped an adolescent’s experience in the bustling metropolis. Among the variety of pernicious influences social workers noted, the child’s father or stepfather attracted the greatest attention.14 Although they might discuss the role a delinquent’s negligent or absentee working mother had played in the process by which a Mexican child fell into such wayward activities as theft or illegal commerce, fathers were the most frequent and direct targets of reformers’ scrutiny. Sociologists, medical doctors, psychologists, and other reformers argued that fathers harmed their families, urban society, and Mexico at large by undertaking a variety of undesirable behaviors. Those who slept with prostitutes not only infected their families with such disabling maladies as syphilis, gonorrhea, and alcoholism but also corrupted the morals of an entire generation of young Mexicans, leaving them ill prepared to lead the revolutionary nation into the future. Social workers’ preoccupation with the failures of Mexican fatherhood directly influenced their analyses of why young women fell into prostitution. Regarding the case of a seventeen-year-old girl who had been a waitress, a domestic servant, and a cabaret dancer, social worker Carmen Garcı´a noted that the girl had run away from home at an early age after she became disgusted with her father’s domestic habits. After the girl’s mother died, Garcı´a noted, the girl claimed that her father brought strange women home at night and then drank to excess with them. Once drunk, he then used violence to discipline his sons and daughters. The girl’s testimony caused Garcı´a to conclude that the child’s father was ‘‘not only severe but cruel to his children; he beats them constantly until physically scarring them and on one occasion threw one into a well, from which the neighbors had to extract him.’’ The girl told Garcı´a that following this event she and two of her brothers had fled their father’s house. She had placed her young brothers at a friend’s home while she formed sexual relationships with various men and worked a variety of menial jobs to support herself and to supply her siblings with food and clothing. Eventually, the young woman had explained to Garcı´a, 14. AGN-CTMI. This observation is based on analysis of several hundred case files compiled between 1926 and 1944.

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she had worked full time as a prostitute once she secured a position in a modest downtown brothel. As Garcı´a noted in her report to the Tribunal’s directorship: ‘‘The girl has lived a libertine life. After the death of her mother she fought constantly with her father; part of this was her fault, but part of it was brought about by his lack of caring for his children and his low morality, exemplified by the fact that he brought different women home with him and basically authorized the girl to have sexual partners and to bring them to the house.’’15 In this particular case, Garcı´a and the other workers at the Consejo Tutelar determined the girl’s promiscuity could be directly linked to her father’s deplorable actions and example. The Tribunal’s judges ruled that it was most appropriate for the girl to remain in the state’s custody until she was eighteen and could earn a living on her own or, more likely, register formally as prostitute.16 She was sent to the Casa de Orientacio´n, where she learned a trade. Further, although her brothers had not, unlike her, broken the law, social workers recommended their internment at the Casa de Orientacio´n para Varones so that they might also be redeemed from their father’s bad influence.17 If the court was willing to take children away from a problematic and promiscuous father, it was powerless to render much discipline to the father himself. Indeed, it was only fathers who visited prostitutes and also abused children who could expect to receive the full force of the law. Penal law in Mexico tolerated neither the abuse of children nor the corruption of minors, but the more general focus on fathers over the 1920s and 1930s gave women with problematic spouses support in confronting extramarital promiscuity and child abuse. For example, when Concepcio´n Herna´ndez appeared at the office of the Ministerio Pu´blico to denounce her aması´o, a Tlalpan district meat vendor, for atentados contra el pudor y lesiones (attempted sexual assault), her story centered around Torres’s pursuit of relations with other women and his predatory attitude toward the daughters she had had with another man. Herna´ndez said she had been washing her tenyear-old daughter Magdalena’s laundry when she saw that the girl’s undergarments had ‘‘very ugly stains’’ and that, upon questioning her daughter, learned ‘‘that Jose´ Antonio wanted to do bad things to her.’’ When asked 15. AGN-CTMI, box 24, file 7348. 16. See Mathilde Rodrı´guez Cabo, Estudios sobre la delincuencia e infancia abandonada (Mexico City: Imp. Compan˜ı´a editora ‘‘La Razo´n,’’ 1931). 17. AGN-CTMI, box 24, file 7348.

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for her testimony, Magdalena declared that she was asleep in the one bed she, her sister, her mother, and Torres shared in the small apartment when her mother’s boyfriend covered her mouth, threatened her, put her on top of him, and took out the ‘‘thing between his legs and put it where she urinates, which felt very ugly.’’ Later, Magdalena told the police, Torres threatened to beat her if she told her mother what had happened. Since the day that Torres touched her, she said, she had felt ill. Torres declared that he was, in effect, the ‘‘stepfather’’ of Magdalena and that he had lived in the one-room house with Concepcio´n for a year and a half. Nevertheless, when his aması´a confronted him with Magdalena’s underpants, he denied the ‘‘accusation as unjust’’ and suggested it is was probably a story concocted by Concepcio´n’s sisters, who, he said, were always trying to ‘‘put him in a bad light.’’ Nevertheless, he offered his own interpretation regarding the origins of little Magdalena’s infection, which was almost certainly venereal. Claiming that the ten-year-old child frequently left the house and spent time on the street until nine at night, he implied that she was sexually active and suggested that she had likely contracted her infection from a local suitor with whom she was sexually involved. Two events prompted Torres to revise his testimony and to offer additional insight into the mystery of Magdalena’s stained pantaletas. First, both Magdalena and her mother asserted that the ten-year-old did not make the rounds of the neighborhood at night, and second, medical tests determined that Torres himself suffered from what was probably gonorrhea. Torres insisted that he had not had ‘‘carnal’’ contact with his stepdaughter, but he conceded that it was possible he suffered from a sexually transmitted disease, since after all, he had had sexual relations with a ‘‘woman on the street’’ only a few days before. The day after his encounter with the prostitute, he was playing with Magdalena, he said, when she got on top of him to play caballito, or ‘‘little horse.’’ Throughout their play, he emphasized, she was always dressed. It was true that he was concerned when he saw little Magdalena moving like ‘‘a burned chicken’’ a few days later, he noted, but he attributed her pain walking to poorly fitting shoes. In summary, Torres emphasized that he was an ‘‘honest man without vices’’ and a good ‘‘family man,’’ who used his peso a day salary to sustain Concepcio´n and her daughters, who, in any event, were not his own.18 Although Torres earned money and shared it with his aması´a and her two 18. Archivo del Reclusorio del Sur, Mexico, D.F., Primera corte penal, Atentados contra el pudor y lesiones, unclassified.

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daughters, his defense actually cast him as the worst kind of family man Mexican society had to offer. He maintained a regular job and earned a daily wage, it was true, but not only did he fail to get along with Concepcio´n’s sisters, he even admitted paying to have sexual relations with prostitutes, yet claimed to have no vices. In his defense, moreover, he had even claimed that Magdalena contracted her gonorrhea while out on the street, which, had it been true, would have been proof that he was failing to defend his daughters from the sexual dangers inherent in public life. In an effort to rehabilitate the man convicted of sexual assault, the presiding judge ordered Torres sentenced to a fine plus six months’ imprisonment during which time he might contemplate his responsibilities to Concepcio´n, Magdalena, and the greater national community.19

Victims and Exploiters Within revolutionary health and criminological analyses, prostitutes’ clients were encouraged to contemplate their responsibilities to their families and to the community, but in fact they were only penalized if they physically endangered society’s youngest members. According to health law, the fact that Torres had probably infected Concepcio´n with the gonorrhea he acquired from his encounter with the ‘‘woman on the street,’’ however unfortunate, was a matter for the couple to work out privately. Reformers lamented that men spent their money on prostitutes and neglected or abused their children to do so, but they conceded that it was a natural—if unrefined and unfatherly—practice, and they were unwilling to penalize it. After all, as Torres’s testimony indicates, many men saw nothing wrong with visiting prostitutes at all. Caught between committed clients and antiquated public health provisions, men and women who sought to rectify gender relations in Mexico now focused their attention on pimps, using the categories of work and money to denounce these malignant and apparently new arrivals to Mexico City’s immoral landscape. The question of illegal procuring raised broader issues of nationalism and government corruption as well, for pimps were figures who captured the public’s outrage and imagination. As early as 1872 public health director Dr. Jose´ Marroui had commented on the presence of men in the capital’s sex trade, calling these rufianes ‘‘vile men who are vagrants, without jobs, [who] live wholly from the prostitu19. Ibid.

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tion of these women.’’20 And Inspeccio´n de Sanidad officers who received prostitutes’ petitions to be erased from the registers in the late Porfiriato suspected that the men who vouched for the women’s moral behavior in fact hoped to exploit their labor without having to lose essential profits to bothersome registration fees.21 Certainly the story of Pedro, Filomena, and the blacksmith to whom Filomena referred as her padre hints at this kind of relationship of exploitation and protection, for padrote was a word also commonly used to refer to pimps. But if rufianes enjoyed the fruits of women’s labor in sexual commerce, in Porfirian times they were small-time exploiters and failed to capture the legislature’s attention. Indeed, the 1871 penal code forbade the corruption of minors but ignored the involvement of men in the day-to-day practice of adult-level sexual commerce.22 After all, under the tenets of the Reglamento, the matrona was the link between the state and the sex trade. However, changes in the organization of metropolitan sexual commerce and the growing visibility of men in the sex trade fostered broader support for penal reforms that criminalized lenocinio in 1929 and 1931. Male ‘‘management’’ of independent prostitutes became more visible and offensive to Mexico City observers between 1915 and 1926. On the one hand, the ayuntamiento’s fee hikes had forced some long-established madams to close their brothel doors, creating opportunities for well-connected military officers, political leaders, and entrepreneurs to cultivate interests in the metropolis’s new sexually oriented businesses. These men secured favors from local officials, opening cabarets and dance halls where the large population of independent women worked without the interference of health inspectors.23 Published investigations, legislative debates, and police reports, moreover, indicate that newcomers known as lenones had also taken advantage of the transition in business organization to carve out a limited but lucrative niche for themselves as ‘‘managers’’ of ‘‘public women’’ in the downtown area of Mexico City. By the late 1920s, multiple sources confirmed that men had become active participants in the metropolitan sex trade and that they used a variety of inducements to force women to work in brothels, where they collected a ‘‘finder’s fee’’ from the madam, or to 20. AHSSA-SP-IAV, box 1, file 4. 21. Ibid., box 2, file 32. 22. For a discussion of ‘‘small-time’’ procuring, see Sandra Lauderdale Graham, ‘‘Slavery’s Impasse: Slave Prostitutes, Small-Time Mistresses, and the Brazilian Law of 1871,’’ Comparative Studies in Society and History 33, no. 4 (October 1991): 669–94. 23. This development was common to large cities. See Gilfoyle, City of Eros, 224–69.

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work out of hotels, accesorias, and cabarets, where they managed women directly. Information that pimps were violent, corrupt men who employed tactics such as drugging, raping, and then exploiting young girls, forcing them into sexual slavery, captured the city’s disgust and outraged imagination, prompting new laws, as well.24 Popular crime tabloids were quick to denounce pimps as public enemy number one in the 1920s and 1930s, framing lurid, ‘‘tell-all’’ stories in terms of innocence and corruption to attract readers. Detectives, a journal which billed itself as the ‘‘best weekly in all of Mexico’’ provided readers with information about the menace these nefarious men created for the predictability and stability of urban life. In one story about the ‘‘market in women,’’ for example, Rosalı´a Guevara y Barrios described the sad tale of a girl from Acapulco, from a ‘‘nice family,’’ who ‘‘one afternoon, like so many afternoons when the breeze from the sea excites virginal bodies and fills them with unanticipated inquietude, [met] a young, well-dressed man recently arrived in the port.’’25 The young woman’s innocence and susceptibility established, Guevara continued, writing that the smitten Berta danced with the young Julian, who claimed to be from ‘‘one of the finest capital families’’ and who encouraged her to run away with him to the capital city. It was in the Federal District, Berta confided to Guevara, that Julian forced her into sexual slavery at an exclusive brothel. For Detectives readers, whose everyday lives were tediously free of such excitement, danger, and intrigue, the story offered a forbidden glimpse into the luxuries and horrors of the metropolitan underworld: Berta told Guevara that ‘‘the entrance to the house was astounding. Julian knocked on the door, and it opened mysteriously, somehow operated from the second floor. The interior was beautiful; plants in every corner and a series of colored lights that illuminated the patio. We went up the stairs. It seemed like there was a party going on up there. I remember it like it was yesterday.’’ But the unsuspecting virgin from the provinces was so naive that even as she climbed the ornate stairwell she still had no idea what her future held. As proof of her innocence, Berta then told Guevara that the ‘‘women who danced with the men were doing so in a way that attracted a great deal of 24. On the growing popularity of the crime tabloids in postrevolutionary Mexico City, see Carlos Monsivais, ‘‘ ‘Red News’: The Crime Pages in Mexico,’’ in Carlos Monsivais, Mexican Postcards, trans. John Kraniauskas (New York: Verso Books, 1997), 148–66. 25. Rosalı´a Guevara y Barrios, ‘‘Mercado de mujeres,’’ Detectives: El mejor semanario de Me´xico, December 27, 1931, 8.

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attention. I assumed that it was the style of dancing in the capital, for I had never seen people move that way.’’26 The innocence of the ‘‘country girl’’ seduced and corrupted by the wild and degenerate city echoed the components of Gamboa’s still-popular novel Santa, but Detectives modernized the familiar story, bringing it up-to-date with rape scenes, controlled substances, and even a North American madam. According to Guevara, the matrona, whom Berta called Mrs. Froncholis, dressed the girl in skimpy underwear and silk stockings, drugged her, and locked her up; when Berta awakened the next day, she told the journalist, she discovered that she had been raped, sold to the gringa for 300 pesos, and that the good-looking Julian was nowhere to be found. But when Berta tried to leave, she told Guevara, ‘‘two robust women impeded me and with force returned me to the room, where they locked me in,’’ starving the hapless girl until she ‘‘agreed’’ to work as a prostitute. Hungry and now resigned to her fate as a ‘‘sex slave,’’ Berta waited for clients and ‘‘at eleven a night that old harpy returned to my room accompanied by an old guy with an ugly face and a body like a fat pig.’’ Froncholis shut the two in the room, according to Berta, and ‘‘what had to happen happened.’’ To make her situation more tolerable in the weeks that followed, Berta became so addicted to the marijuana, heroin, and cocaine that flowed freely in the brothel that she became a liability for the shrewd madam, who threw her out into the street. Lest the reader think that Berta’s story ended badly, Guevara reported that after the girl spent time in jail for stealing a pair of shoes, she finally found vengeance, for she tracked down the evil pimp Julian and knifed him, definitively escaping from ‘‘the life.’’27 That North American women exploited young Mexicans was no doubt vexing to Detectives readers, who still smarted over repeated U.S. invasions of their country over the course of the Revolution. Even more damning, however, were reports that there were also foreign men violating and exploiting Mexican women.28 In Cuauhtemoctzı´n, according to long-time resident Pedro Granados, ‘‘the kings of the neighborhood were the French apaches, padrotes who had hit upon hard times in their country but who in Mexico had become great gentlemen,’’ who wore ‘‘fancy pants, hats 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid. 28. For a discussion of what she calls ‘‘urban spectatorship,’’ or the public’s desire to gain access through reading to such ‘‘forbidden locales,’’ see Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delights: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late Victorian London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 17.

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trimmed with fur and fantastical jackets’’ and who sported walking sticks as they solicited clients for their girls, walking up and down the thoroughfare that led directly to the heart of the Colonia Obrera.29 French journalists were the first to apply the term apache to pimps in 1902, when a group of Parisian souteneurs became involved in such a bloody and vicious brawl over control of a particularly beautiful prostitute that the press likened them to the fierce warriors of the U.S.-Mexican borderlands; however, the term had particular resonance in a country that had fought the Apaches in the last century, and by the 1920s the term apache denoted the violent and corrupt foreign pimps who conducted business in the capital.30 Indeed, as reporter J. E. Barrios noted, ‘‘The immense city has always been perfect for those foreign souteneurs who exploit conquered women. Here, in the shadow of the law, they have achieved what they might not have been able to do in other lands; live like aristocrats, pilfering the money from their lovers. And on the occasions when they are discovered, they fight it out with bullets on the dark and seedy side streets of the city.’’31 It was not just reporters who brought violent and wealthy pimps to readers’ attention. Luis Angel Rodrı´guez, author of Jaulas y pa´jaros del amor, for example, wrote, ‘‘the man who is maintained by a woman is an elegant guy, he is always well-dressed and goes only to the best bars in the capital. You can see him sometimes on Sunday afternoons at the theater or bullring, accompanied by his associates in vice.’’ Rodriguez confirmed pimps’ violent nature as well, writing that these ‘‘gang members, criminals, and drug pushers’’ controlled women by addicting them to alcohol and cocaine and exerted a ‘‘bad influence’’ on city life.’’32 The fact that many of the prostitutes of Mexico City suffered under a tyranny of violent foreign pimps elicited conflicting responses from local observers. On the one hand, having foreign pimps who were as violent as those in Paris suggested the level of modernity the capital had achieved; after all, the fact that the most ‘‘modern’’ and ‘‘advanced’’ cities in the 29. Granados, Las carpas de Me´xico, 21, 30. Ibid., 30–33. Granados refers to pimps as apaches, caifanes, and padrotes. Rodrı´guez calls them mantenidos in Jaulas y pa´jaros de amor. Police preferred to use the word souteneur to refer to men who exploited prostitutes for commercial gain. ‘‘En Me´xico no hay apaches, so´lo existen souteneurs,’’ Revista de policia: Organo oficial de la Inspeccio´n General de Policı´a, September 5, 1926. The word apache came from France. Paul Robert, Dictionnaire alphabetique et analogique de la langue franc¸aise (Paris: Socie´te´ du Nouveau Lettres, 1977), 1:434–35. 31. J. E. Barrios, ‘‘La Trata de Blancas,’’ Detectives: El mejor semanario de Me´xico, October 17, 1931, 6–14. 32. Rodrı´guez, Jaulas y pa´jaros del amor, 21.

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world could blame their prostitution problems on pimps and ‘‘white slavers,’’ men who trafficked women across international boundaries and sold them into sexual bondage in foreign lands, was well known.33 Indeed, some apologists were quick to avoid any suggestion that the world of these foreign exploiters was uncivilized. In fact, the Revista de policia, a magazine that covered crime statistics in Mexico, proudly proclaimed that ‘‘in Mexico there are not apaches, only souteneurs’’ and advised readers that ‘‘now Mexico has seventy or eighty foreigners who dedicate themselves to the exploitation of women, and of this group, some fifty are Poles and Russians.’’34 Rather than demonstrate sympathy for the foreign French and Jewish women, in its self-appointed role as ‘‘moral guardian’’ of the capital Detectives instead offered revealing, tell-all stories about foreign pimps and public women. According to an interview a French prostitute who identified herself only as ‘‘Margot’’ granted to Detectives, she had been working as a prostitute in Paris when her pimp, Dede ‘‘le Gourmand,’’ was imprisoned, giving her the opportunity to travel to Mexico. According to the article’s author, the pseudonymous Aldebara´n, Margot leaped at the opportunity, saying she had hoped to ‘‘conquer the Indians.’’ To add to the sense of outrage Margot’s racism must have inspired in readers, Aldebara´n provided details from Margot’s Atlantic crossing that confirmed the negative implications of foreign procuring for all Mexicans. Like other travelers who made Mexico their destination, Margot, it seems, traveled from France to Cuba and then on to Veracruz, and she provided Aldebara´n with details about her trip. It was her discussion of the activities of the foreign pimps in Veracruz that must have offended Aldebara´n’s readers the most. On the boat from La Havre, Margot claimed, there were also five Jewish women from Poland who, upon arrival in Veracruz, married Jewish souteneurs and were then put to work ‘‘satisfying’’ the port authorities, who had been corrupted by the pimps’ money and ‘‘merchandise.’’ This level of corruption was not limited to French or Jewish pimps either, according to accounts. Three prostitutes who wrote President Calles in 1927 accused the Inspeccio´n de Sanidad of favoritism and corruption, pointing out that ‘‘they know good and well that an Arab currently runs the accesorias de asignacio´n on the edge of the 33. On these patterns in international trafficking and the outrage it caused, see Guy, Sex and Danger in Buenos Aires; White, Comforts of Home; Gilfoyle, City of Eros; and Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society. 34. ‘‘En Me´xico no hay apaches, so´lo existen souteneurs,’’ 4.

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third precinct’’ but that they were doing nothing to limit the flagrant activities of this troublesome foreigner.35 Competition among prostitutes over access to clients in Mexico City also raised concerns among those who provided data about the sex trade in the capital. First, Detectives informed readers that foreign prostitutes despised Mexican men. Margot, for example, confessed to Aldebara´n that in the capital ‘‘my life completely disgusted me. . . . everything about men that is dirty and repugnant they bring to us, asking us to do things that are completely horrifying.’’ To make matters worse, it seems, Margot did not think much of the sexual skills of Mexican men, stating that Mexico was a ‘‘place of violent men who are stupid when it comes to love.’’ In order to make their existence among ‘‘dirty’’ and ‘‘unskilled’’ people tolerable, Margot told Aldebara´n, the French prostitutes would work for a few hours in the morning before gathering with colleagues to commiserate over lunch at a local boarding house. Local residents, however, recalled a different impression of ‘‘foreign relations.’’ Pedro Granados remembers that the French would charge ‘‘a fabulous price for’’ three sexual acts while the Mexicans charged less, but would only perform one.36 Indeed, Mexican prostitutes complained about the French women, whom they accused of sexual degeneracy. For this reason, the Mexican women stated, the French women always had more money. Complaining about a new fee schedule for the regular gynecological exams required of the women, the Mexicans wrote, ‘‘If the French women can pay the fees or even higher ones than we can pay, it is because we have not sunk to the low levels of degeneration that they have.’’ As a group they stated, ‘‘Because we have no money we must sell even our clothes to get the money we need, and so, half naked, we walk out into the street.’’37 Exploited by their pimps for money on the one hand, and having to compete with foreign prostitutes on the other, these Mexican women appealed to health and federal administrators to deny foreign pimps and prostitutes immigration privileges, since they ‘‘attract vices and immoralities.’’38 And as Jesusa Palancares, former soldadera turned cabaret dancer reported, a popular dance called the ‘‘Baile Apache’’ or ‘‘Pimp’s Dance’’ reflected these tensions over money and exploitation clearly. As Palancares reported, a man named Manuel ‘‘el Robachicos’’ or ‘‘kidnapper’’ taught her the ‘‘Baile Apache’’ one evening at a local nightclub. The dance starts out with a 35. Aldebara´n, ‘‘En la ru´a del vico,’’ Detectives, January 23, 1933, 13. AHSSA-SP-IAV, box 3, file 2. 36. Granados, Las carpas de Me´xico, 20–23. 37. AHSSA-SP-IAV, box 3, file 2. 38. Ibid.

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woman hiding a coin in her undergarments. According to Palancares, ‘‘The man wants the woman to give him the money, and so, as they dance, he pulls her hair, he makes threatening moves, he squeezes her, he crushes her, he slaps her, and the woman is totally undressed and covered with bruises.’’ Continuing regarding her own experience, she claimed that ‘‘when he finally threw me to the floor I was totally exhausted, and then he grabbed my skirt and took the coins out of my stockings.’’39 Although Detectives was offering its readers a titillating mix of fact and fiction, even an international observer confirmed that foreigners played a role in Mexico’s increasingly prominent sex trade. In 1927 a League of Nations investigator who represented that body’s Committee to Suppress the Traffic in Women and Children claimed that upon taking the boat from Cuba to Mexico he was told confidentially that there was a brisk market in foreign women in Mexico and that they went with pimps who claimed to be their husbands and who then took them to Mexico City once landing in Veracruz. The inspector, who described the ‘‘white slave trade’’ in Mexico, said that a procurer he met on the boat from Havana to Veracruz told him that every woman in Mexico City ‘‘had’’ to work under the auspices of a foreign pimp. The League of Nations reporter claimed that his inspection indicated that there was a well-organized international exchange of European women to Mexico via Cuba and that there were at least 165 foreign women officially registered with the Departamento de Salubridad Pu´blica, with certainly many more working illegally in the city.40 With information that confirmed that domestic and foreign pimps circulated in Mexico, exploiting Mexican and foreign women alike, the federal legislature decided to repress such exploitation, criminalizing both lenocinio and white slavery in 1929, refining penal criteria in 1931, and for the first time criminalizing the male’s involvement in sexual commerce.41 The 1929 penal code created the new crime of lenocinio and defined the leno´n as ‘‘any person who habitually or accidentally exploits the body of a woman, 39. Poniatowska, Hasta no verte, Jesu´s mı´o, 184–85. 40. League of Nations, Traffic in Women and Children, pt. 1, p. 121. 41. Articles 803–7 of the 1871 penal code prohibited the corruption of minors. In that document, ‘‘the person who habitually procures or facilitates the corruption of a minor under the age of eighteen to satisfy the disgusting passions of another person’’ could be punished for between six and eighteen months of prison if the minor was over eleven years old and twice that for younger children. There were even greater fines for relatives of the minor, teachers, or guardians who sought to make money or benefit in some other way from the corruption of the child. Articles 803–7, ‘‘Co´ digo Penal para el Distrito y Territorios Federales,’’ December 7, 1871, bk. 3, chap. 4, ‘‘Corrupcio´n de Menores.’’ See Figueroa Guerrero, ‘‘La prostitucio´n y el delito de lenocinio,’’ 96.

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through carnal commerce, and is either maintained through this commerce or benefits in any way.’’ In this way, men and women who exploited adult women, could, like those who exploited minors, be tried as criminals, an important recognition of the victim status women acquired under reformist ideology; nevertheless, the law still exempted madams who ran casas de asignacio´n and brothels, who could only be prosecuted for procuring children.42 As with the 1871 Penal Code, these sanctions increased if the child had ‘‘not yet reached puberty.’’ They also increased if ‘‘the inducement was to put the minor in a brothel, casa de asignacio´n, or similar kind of establishment.’’43 But under the new 1929 Penal Code, it was not just intentional procuring of minors that could result in arrest and conviction, for merely allowing a minor to prostitute him- or herself put the offender at risk of arrest for one year and a steep fine. Although these provisions purported to be gender neutral, the Penal Code stipulated that the sanctions would be more severe if the leno´n was male, or if ‘‘the leno´n encourage[d] vices among the women or force[d] them to contract debts so they [had to] stay in prostitution.’’ The focus on minors also applied to the white slave trade, which only prohibited the importation of women under the age of eighteen, without, according to legal theorists, ‘‘considering that women over that age could also be susceptible to selling themselves and to forming part of the greater world of prostitution.’’44 After careful consideration of these deficiencies, the 1931 Federal District Penal Code refined the provisions regarding occasional lenocinio to state that ‘‘the leno´n is anyone who without legal authorization habitually or accidentally exploits the body of a woman through sexual commerce and who is maintained through that or obtains any kind of profit.’’ This provision applied equally to the white slaver or the ruffian. Article 208 applied to ‘‘the person who habitually or accidentally encourages, incites, or permits sexual commerce in a minor.’’45 Since matronas were the only ones who could obtain legal authorization to exploit the bodies of other women through sexual commerce, men who engaged in the business of sexual commerce, whether with adult women or minors, could expect to feel the full force of the law. These provisions criminalized foreign and domestic procuring alike. 42. 43. 44. 45.

Ibid., 97. Ibid. Ibid., 113–14. Ibid., 96.

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The Morality of Exchange The 1929 and 1931 Penal Codes criminalized ‘‘occasional’’ and ‘‘intentional’’ pimping and white slavery under the idea that these provisions might redeem prostitutes from exploitation by foreign men and women. But despite the great public fanfare over white slavery and foreign procurers, it was Mexican ‘‘ruffians,’’ small-time and individual pimps, who received the greatest attention from the criminal justice system. Indeed, many women used accusations of pimping to negotiate new standards of conduct for the men in their lives, as several archived lenocinio cases make clear. The nature of the summary transcripts available from institutional archives limits the available data on the language women and men used and makes it difficult to determine the precise arguments the accusers and defendants used to frame their cases.46 What is likely is that the visibility of the courts and the prominence of new legal codes enhanced women’s access to the justice system and enhanced their ability to raise questions about masculine conduct in a public setting. In fact, the state’s criminalization of lenocinio gave women an explicit opportunity to vent their frustrations over the promiscuity of their male partners. Some fathers were among the numerous men who exploited young women for their own financial gain. But it appears to have been equally common for male suitors, boyfriends and aması´os, or common-law husbands, to engage in the practice. The contents of the few archived lenocinio cases from 1930s Mexico City reveal that in many of the cases the women who accused men of being pimps later sought to drop their charges once the state took their claims seriously. This suggests that, among other things, the accusation itself was how the woman vented her anger over shortcomings in the relationship and how the man was using the money she had earned, as well as a demand for respect.47 For example, on December 10, 1934, Francisca Ortı´z denounced her former aması´o Gustavo Go´mez as a leno´n. Ortı´z told the man who interviewed her at the local precinct that she and Go´mez had been living together for three years and that she worked as a prostitute. According to Ortı´z, shortly after they became lovers Go´mez ‘‘forced’’ her to register with the Inspeccio´n de Sanidad and then sent her to work out of a hotel on Calle de Manza46. On using testimony to elucidate ideas about gender, honor, and domestic relationships, see the informative discussion in Caulfield, In Defense of Honor, 13. 47. In his anthropological analysis of masculinity in late-twentieth-century Mexico City, Matthew Gutmann focuses, in part, on how women worked to change men’s behavior and how men had acquired new understandings of fatherhood and male familial responsibilities over the last quarter of the century. See Gutmann, The Meanings of Macho, esp. 255–58.

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nares, site of some of the least expensive sex in the capital. In her testimony, Ortı´z was quick to confirm that she worked in sexual commerce to earn money to support her family, for she not only had an eight-year-old son but supported her mother and a younger brother besides. It was for this reason, she said, that she took offense when Go´mez began to beat her when she did not provide him with enough money to suit his tastes. Even more damning, in Ortı´z’s eyes, was the fact that Go´mez had used the money she had given him for necessities to go to the movies and to purchase luxury items. When questioned by the authorities, Go´mez acknowledged that ‘‘he knew good and well that she dedicated herself to whoring,’’ referring to Ortı´z, but insisted that he, himself, was a hard worker and had never demanded money from her. In fact, Go´mez said, Ortı´z had been supporting him for only the last two weeks, because he had been sick and unable to work at a fruit stand, where, he alleged, he commonly put in long hours. Go´mez maintained that far from being the victim in this scenario, Ortı´z was, in fact, the problem, for she was greedy and unkind, insisting he return to work before he had completely recovered from his malady and throwing his clothes out into the street when she did not get her way. But when the court requested testimony from the owner of the fruit stand and Go´mez’s presumed employer, the man stated that he had actually not seen Go´mez for several months, a fact that in the court’s eyes added weight to Ortı´z’s testimony, and the case moved forward. But in February, just when the justice system appeared ready to convict Go´mez, Ortı´z showed up at the judge’s offices to revise her prior statements, saying that she had been angry at her aması´o because he had been mistreating her the day she threw out his clothes, and that it was ‘‘not precisely true’’ that he was a pimp. Indeed, she asked the judge to drop the charges. It is not entirely clear why she withdrew her accusation—did Go´mez’s friends pressure her to let him go free? Did she miss his company? Had she merely wanted to make a point? Whatever Ortı´z’s reasons for recanting, the court pressed forward with the case, for Go´mez had admitted ‘‘that his aması´a dedicates herself to prostitution and that he has taken goods and even money from her for entertainment, going to the movies, which is in accordance with the first declarations of his accuser, who states that he exploited her.’’ Since these were the ‘‘elements that constitute the crime of lenocinio as described by article 207 of the penal code,’’ Go´mez was convicted, and sentenced to six months in prison and a fine of one hundred fifty pesos.48 48. AGN, Departamento de Prevencio´n y Readaptacio´n Social (hereafter DPRS), ‘‘Lenocinio,’’ vol. 1278, file 8/421.81.02.

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The next year Marı´a Carmen Cortez accused Jose´ Pe´rez de la Rosa of lenocinio. Like Ortı´z, Cortez accused her lover, a twenty-one-year-old house painter, of being a procurer, after having lived with him as an aması´a for several years. The Pe´rez/Cortez case reveals how men took advantage of the new political economy of vice in the capital, for Cortez asserted that after dishonoring her, Pe´rez took Cortez to work at the Cabaret Chop Suey on Hidalgo Avenue, dropping her off at night and returning in the morning to collect her earnings, which, she said, typically amounted to anything between two and fifteen pesos a night. But when the relationship foundered, and the couple broke up, Pe´rez, according to Cortez, beat her and threatened to kill her if she thought the split meant that she could quit giving him the money she made from prostituting herself. If the breakup, threats, and violence were not bad enough, Cortez became even angrier when she discovered that not only had Pe´rez told her mother that she was dead, while she was in fact working hard as a prostitute, but that he had kept the money Cortez instructed him to give to her mother as well. Like the Ortı´z/Go´mez case, the questions in the Cortez/Pe´rez affair revolved around issues of honor, work, family, and money. Pe´rez asserted that Cortez was ‘‘no sen˜orita’’ when they met and indicated that she hardly merited his respect, for after all, he met her at the cabaret. But just as her sexual experience apparently denied her Pe´rez’s respect in his eyes, so did Cortez’s treatment of Pe´rez while they were together, for when he fell sick with the flu Cortez apparently refused to take care of him and threatened to end the relationship. Moreover, in defending himself, Pe´rez asserted that Cortez had always given him money voluntarily, and he said that he saved it, buying her small gifts and presents. In Pe´rez’s eyes, it was just a love affair gone bad. Nevertheless, the court took Cortez’s testimony seriously and convicted Pe´rez, who spent two years in jail.49 A third case raised the familiar themes of money, work, sexual slavery, and family responsibilities. On April 25, 1938, Carmen Flores denounced Francisco Martı´nez as a leno´n in the first penal court in Mexico City.50 Flores claimed that Martı´nez, who was nineteen and who lived in a densely populated barrio downtown, had seduced her at a dance hall, the Salon Trece, and then taken her to a hotel where they proceeded to have sexual relations and then spent the night. After three months of cohabiting, Flores claimed, he then took her to a brothel run by Aurora de la Vega in the same 49. Ibid., file 8/421.81.05. 50. Ibid., file 8/421.81.08.

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neighborhood. Flores reported that de la Vega gave Martı´nez 5 pesos for bringing her to the madam and then required her to have sexual intercourse with various men, giving her 2.5 pesos for each client she received. Flores also asserted that de la Vega outfitted her with only four dresses and kept her locked in the brothel except to take an outing with Martı´nez on Sundays. As proof of his status as a pimp, Flores said, Martı´nez demanded money from her in order to pay for her amusements on their various dates. More damning, it seems, was Martı´nez’s behavior one Sunday, when he asked Flores for a large sum of money, then left, supposedly to get change. Flores based her accusation of lenocinio on the fact that Martı´nez never returned the money to her. For his part, Martı´nez denied that he was either a pimp or that he had any obligations to Flores at all. He said it was true that he had met her at the dance hall. Nevertheless, he argued that she had never merited his respect for she was dishonorable, noting that she had danced with several men at Salon Trece and was no virgin, proof of which was the fact that she failed to scream or bleed when he ‘‘made use of her’’ at the hotel during their first entrevista ´ıntima. Despite Flores’s apparent sexual experience, Martı´nez asserted that he grew tired of her attentions and suggested she find work to support them. Martı´nez claimed that Flores asked him to take her to a brothel. Because he did not frequent such venues, he said, he solicited the advice of a more experienced friend, who recommended de la Vega’s establishment. Regarding the money, Martı´nez told the court that it was true that he went to see Flores on Sundays but said that he always paid for her. On the day he borrowed money from her, he said he had already spent eight pesos for her entertainment before he ran short on cash and asked to borrow some of her ample funds.51 Did Flores’s hopes for a long-term relationship and future family with Martı´nez shape her testimony? Like Ortı´z, Flores later amended her statement before dropping the charges against her boyfriend altogether. She said it was true that another man had ‘‘dishonored’’ her before Martı´nez came into her life but denied that this justified Martı´nez’s treating her poorly. In fact, not only did Flores accuse him of being a bad boyfriend, she added that he had urged her to work and give him money because he was a bad son, having fought with his stepmother, who now refused to lend him money. A dutiful girlfriend and hard worker, Flores said that she slaved long hours at a posole stand before moving to de la Vega’s brothel. In her amended testimony, Flores claimed that she had never actually given Martı´nez any money 51. Ibid.

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at all and that she had been angry at him for spending what she had lent him, only to learn that he had spent it to entertain friends and other women. In requesting that the state drop the charges against Martı´nez, Flores claimed that there was no merit to her case and that she had accused Martı´nez of being a leno´n only because he no longer came to the brothel to visit her.52 The conflicts between Ortı´z and Go´mez, Pe´rez and Cortez, and Flores and Martı´nez are representative of the cases involving prostitutes and their chulos or male sex partners. The situations the involved parties describe are commonly framed by female expectations of respect, courtship, and control over hard-earned money, on the one hand, and male expectations of sexual availability and financial assistance, on the other. Flores had apparently had sexual relations with and moved in with Martı´nez under the assumption—or at least hope—that the couple would be forming some sort of household, whereas Martı´nez had assumed their relationship was a transient one. In a city in which women between the ages of fifteen and thirty significantly outnumbered men, women like Flores no doubt faced challenges in their efforts to secure the stability of marriage and committed fathers for their children. If we take the words of Martı´nez and other men accused of lenocinio to be true, the taint of brothel work may have boded poorly for the marriage potential of sexually experienced women; thus making their frustrations with men public by taking advantage of the court’s interest in prosecuting lenocinio may have provided women with the opportunity to challenge the men with whom they associated and to offer an inverse vision of societal expectations of suitors and fathers. The politicization of lenocinio in the 1920s and 1930s raises several important issues. It shows that the state was willing to penalize pimps because it could count on popular support. Health reformers and criminologists waged an intense war against what they perceived to be Mexico’s ‘‘cult of masculinity,’’ but they ultimately abandoned their campaign against the clients of prostitutes, for they encountered resistance and discovered that even state employees were unwilling to forgo their encounters with mujeres pu´blicas. The politicization of lenocinio also shows that women who worked in sexual commerce were not necessarily content with their role as victims in the new reformist ideology. Not only did women like Ortı´z, Cortez, and Flores ‘‘go public’’ as public women but they sought to use the accusation of lenocinio to improve their situation or to prod men into being more responsible with work, money, and the morality of exchange. 52. Ibid.

5 Testing the Limits of Tolerance T h e Pl a c e o f V i c e i n a Revolutionary M etropolis

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, health reformers, legal specialists, journalists, and prostitutes alike sought to classify and contain male sexual behavior, a process that made competing ideas about work, family, and money more apparent to a variety of observers. Reformers blamed male sexual promiscuity on a bewildering variety of influences, ranging from Catholicism to government corruption, but it was only when men exploited women and sought to make money from a woman’s ‘‘carnal commerce’’ that the law became involved. Men threatened national health when they had sex with a variety of women, but this activity was only illegal when a man infected a child. In the end, these clients might have an underdeveloped work ethic or an irresponsible outlook with respect to money and family, but these were matters that the state could not hope to change through law or force. If men who were merely promiscuous could not, like women, be forcibly taken into custody, reformers observed that it might be necessary to enact policies to make sexual commerce itself less visible. In the late 1920s projects centered around creating ‘‘tolerance zones,’’ regulating cabarets and

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hotels and defining the place of vice in a revolutionary city created a series of controversies for policymakers and residents of the capital. But despite the best efforts of the Departamento de Salubridad Pu´blica and the Departamento del Distrito Federal to apply revolutionary principles of development and equality to the matter, the reformers’ approaches to zoning and cabaret licensing were shaped and ultimately hindered by their ideas about class and gender. Local efforts to zone urban areas for sexual commerce renewed older discussions about masculinity and the family and infused them with new ideas about discretion, redemption, and progress. In addition, the government’s effort to bring cabarets into the regulatory fold effectively undermined the status of women in such venues. Finally, novel discussions over sex tourism had implications for the broader debate over national economic development strategies. The debates over sex, morality, and urban economic development in postrevolutionary Mexico City are interesting because they reveal not only how morality, masculinity, and patriarchy became politicized in the revolutionary period but also show how gendered perspectives on development, class, and politics led to a system by which ‘‘low-rent’’ prostitution came to be concentrated in Cuauhtemoctzı´n and higher-class prostitution in the ‘‘exclusive’’ neighborhoods in the Colonia Roma, Colonia Jua´rez, and Colonia del Valle. Working-class men, who perceived that the government’s zoning plans identified them with the clients of ‘‘low-rent’’ prostitutes, rejected this classification and instead sought to define themselves as fathers and household heads, aligning themselves with the reformers themselves. In the end, the new ordinances ensured that the zones of tolerance evolved into areas of inexpensive prostitution where women worked individually or with pimps in competition with a few madams. Over this period the district also sought to subject male-owned cabarets to government oversight, although this limited neither their popularity nor their proliferation in both the old center as well as further west. Amid all this, matronas who had encountered such troubles in the early 1920s recovered their business niche, quietly moving their enterprises west, to the old Porfirian suburbs of Colonia Jua´rez and Colonia Roma and to the newer Colonia del Valle, where they established discreet and largely unregulated but exclusive bordellos that catered to businessmen, politicians, and well-heeled tourists.

In Defense of Padres y Patria In the years following the armed phase of the Revolution, the neighborhood centered around Calle de Cuauhtemoctzı´n some six streets south of the Zo´-

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calo bustled with market activity. Having survived the warfare of the Revolution’s early phase as well as the sometimes uneven incorporation of rural migrants into local life, the neighborhood known as the Colonia Obrera, the ‘‘Barrio Latino,’’ or just Cuauhtemoctzı´n, was a thriving commercial center in which a customer could just as easily contract an unskilled migrant for a day’s labor as hire a skilled prostitute for the afternoon.1 However, thanks to the 1912 zoning ordinances and the inability of the ayuntamiento in the immediate postrevolutionary era to contain the development of prostitution, local sexual commerce dominated the popular imagination, and by 1918, the word ‘‘Cuauhtemoctzı´n’’ conjured images of women dedicated to la vida. These galantes hung their bodies out of accesoria, or outbuilding, windows, and like the street vendors who worked the area, advertised their merchandise and low prices to passersby.2 If what Pedro Granados and the ‘‘daughters of disgrace’’ claimed was true, foreign pimps mingled with shoppers and merchants, managing French, Eastern European, and Mexican women in the area. Amid the calling of the prostitutes and pimps, the braying of cargo-carrying donkeys and oxen mingled with the desperate cries of sheep, pigs, and goats headed for market and slaughter. Since the initial decrees that placed vice in this neighborhood, the area’s population had grown considerably and industrialists had located manufacturing plants there as well. Steam from the factories that ran all the way to the Rio de la Piedad some fifteen blocks further south filtered through the zone, mixing with the dust generated by horses, vehicles, and pedestrians. Airborne chemical residue from paint and paper production combined with the stench that wafted west from a sewage canal on the area’s edge, clashing with aromas of fresh produce, coffee, and tamales that vendors peddled through the streets. Laundresses hurried across the congested intersections with baskets of clean clothes tucked under their arms, as mothers herded their children through crowded markets and alleyways. 1. I use the term ‘‘Cuauhtemoctzı´n’’ to refer to this neighborhood, because some ayuntamiento discussions suggest that the term ‘‘Barrio Latino’’ also referred to the zone near the university to the northwest of the central plaza around San Ildefonso, where prostitutes also solicited clients. See Ordinary session of cabildo, February 15, 1918, in Boletı´n Municipal, February 26, 1918, 161. However, in popular usage ‘‘Barrio Latino’’ and ‘‘Cuauhtemoctzı´n’’ are synonymous. Granados, Las carpas de Me´xico, 19–21. 2. See, for example, the photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson of ‘‘Calle Cuauhtemoctzı´n, 1934,’’ in Peter Galassi, Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Early Work (Boston: Little, Brown, 1987), 129–30. According to the 1926 ‘‘Reglamento para el ejercicio de la prostitucio´n,’’ prostitutes were not supposed to announce or advertise their activities publicly, but they frequently did so. ‘‘Reglamento para el ejercicio de la prostitucio´n,’’ 1926, in AHSSA-SP-SJ, box 17, file 19.

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Image not available

Fig. 8 On Calle Cuauhtemoctzı´n, site of the cheapest sexual commerce in the capital, foreign and Mexican prostitutes alike solicited customers by hanging out of accesoria windows and calling out to passersby. Photograph by Henri CartierBresson, Mexico City, 1934. 䉷 Henri Cartier-Bresson / Magnum Photos.

By the late 1920s, the rhythms of family life, factory work, trade, and sexual commerce in the Barrio Latino overlapped significantly. Recently arrived extranjeras (foreign women), urban obreras (working women), and migrants from the countryside all filled prostitution’s ranks either to fulfill immigration contracts with ‘‘white slavers,’’ to earn money when they were laid off from work, or to survive when they arrived in the city without family or friends to help them in a time of need.3 Moreover, single men, shortterm laborers, and well-established family heads alike joined friends after work at cantinas and pulquerı´as and socialized together at brothels before 3. According to a 1921 census of the Federal District that examined occupations by neighborhood, most people in this area were involved in manufacturing or service work. Among a female population of 25,000, nearly 6,000 reported that they had no occupation, 3,104 were domestic servants, 1,060 seamstresses, and another 2,349 women reported engaging in ‘‘quehaceres dome´sticos,’’ a descriptive phrase that included housework, cleaning, ironing, and child care. AGN, Secretarı´a de Fomento—Censo de 1921, Distrito Federal, Occupation by city district, unclassified.

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going home in the mid-evening.4 These women and men worked in local manufacturing establishments and lived in jacales or accesorias as well as more sturdily constructed vecindades, which adjoined brothels and often included prostitutes as tenants. And even if neighborhood residents were not themselves involved in the supply or demand aspect of prostitution, local men and women contemplated their neighbors’ social activities, catching the scent of a local prostitute’s perfume as she left the building or observing what time and with whom she returned to her apartment at night. As proof that sexual commerce was the established practice in this area, the Departamento de Salubridad Pu´blica had warned the ayuntamiento in 1926 that ‘‘in view of the fact that most of the blocks of Cuauhtemoctzı´n are occupied by houses of prostitution’’ it should not pave the roads there or route traffic through the neighborhood.5 But despite the fact that sexual commerce was an integral aspect of local social life and market activity, the administration’s efforts to define the area as an official center of prostitution in the late 1920s provoked community protests in which neighbors perceived public policies through a lens tinted by class interests, gender identity, and patriotism. In the Calles-Gaste´lum era of revolutionary morality, administrative debates over the geography of officially permitted vice renewed the broader metropolitan debates about family, labor, and urban development that had surfaced in 1912. The 1926 Reglamento para el ejercicio de la prostitucio´n gave the Departamento de Salubridad Pu´blica the authority to establish a zona de tolerancia after consulting with the Federal District and its internal ayuntamientos.6 Having noted that ‘‘observation and experience had dem4. AGN-DPRS, ‘‘Lenocinio,’’ vol. 1278, file 8/421.81.01; also AGN-CTMI, box 2, file 1841, and box 4, file 6884. 5. AHSSA-SP-SJ, box 17, file 19. 6. Ibid. As article 56 of the 1926 document stated, ‘‘The Departamento de Salubridad Pu´blica, in accordance with the governor of the ayuntamientos of the District, will designate the zones in which casas de asignacio´n, casas de citas, hotels, etc. should be established.’’ ‘‘Reglamento para el ejercicio de la prostitucio´n,’’ in AHSSA-SP-SJ, box 7, file 14, p. 24. It’s not clear what happened to the 1912 zoning proposal. The fact that councillor Ignacio Michel y Parra, the principal opponent of the ‘‘tolerance’’ zone plan, sided with Victoriano Huerta and served as vice president of the ayuntamiento under his regime suggests that formal legislation regarding prostitution and public space in Mexico City may have been dropped between 1913 and 1915. Councillor Martı´n Reyes, the tolerance zone’s main champion, took a leave of absence when Huerta came to power, but resumed his position under the Conventionist government in January 1915, serving as vice president of the ayuntamiento until Zapatista General Gilardo Magan˜a shut down the municipal governing body in July of that year. Jime´nez Mun˜oz, La traza del poder, 286.

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onstrated that prostitutes grouped in houses and zones were more easily controlled, with greater health benefits’’ than when they were spread out in the city, the commission began to study the most likely sites for the vice district in earnest. In that same year a joint public health and Federal District commission led by Dr. Alfonso Pruneda began meeting to study how to establish this zone in a manner that conformed to revolutionary policies regarding urbanization and economic development. But as they set about what seemed to be a straightforward task, the commissioners—Jose´ Cerezo Gala´n and Jesu´s Gonza´lez Gallo of the Departamento del Distrito Federal and Dr. A. Ortı´z Tirado, Dr. Salvador I. Alvarez, and Enrique Monterrubio of the Departamento de Salubridad Pu´blica—found themselves confronted with a series of troubling questions: What was the ideal location for such a zone? Where could the zone be most easily implemented, given the current layout of the city? How could the commission reconcile the seemingly contradictory goals of invisibility and accessibility? And who would be the most likely clientele? The Pruneda Commission’s decision to designate two zonas de tolerancia in working-class neighborhoods near the city center provoked considerable local outrage as early as 1928. According to reports, the commission decided to locate these zones in Cuauhtemoctzı´n and in the more northerly Colonia Guerrero near the Plaza Garibaldi because prostitutes were already concentrated in both neighborhoods, the areas had been ‘‘consecrated by use,’’ and the residents of the zones had already become accustomed to the presence of prostitutes and their clientele and had learned to ‘‘take precautions when they had to.’’ In addition, the commissioners worried that matronas and prostitutes might embarrass the city by publicly protesting their forced relocation.7 For this reason, the commission members recommended the city zone for prostitution two different neighborhoods—one in Cuauhtemoctzı´n and another in the northern working-class neighborhood, where prostitution had also developed in a more limited capacity over the revolutionary period on such streets as Repu´blica de Panama´, Santa Marı´a la Redonda, and Libertad.8 On the two blocks of Calle de Cuauhtemoctzı´n between Nin˜o Perdido and the Calle de Bolı´var, the group observed, there were some 88 casas de asignacio´n, with another 53 concentrated on a small triangle created by the intersections of Pajaritos, Nava, and Dr. Daniel Ruı´z. In the northern district on Rayo´n and Panama´ there were another 137 casas 7. AHSSA-SP-SJ, box 17, file 19. 8. Ibid.

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de asignacio´n plus two registered hotels.9 The committee members conceded that the ideal solution was to ensure that the zones be ‘‘perfectly circumscribed and situated as far as possible from the areas inhabited by people of order.’’ Predictably, when the committee designated the two working-class neighborhoods near the center as zonas de tolerancia, the move provoked considerable outrage. The recommendations of the Pruneda Commission provoked controversy in Cuauhtemoctzı´n and Colonia Guerrero because they were based on both practical and ideological considerations. On the one hand, the members observed, it would be less risky to acknowledge current practice and leave sexually oriented businesses where they were than to ask madams and prostitutes to move. On the other hand, they considered working-class men to be the principal clients of prostitutes. The commission had even gone so far as to state the desirability of keeping prostitutes as far as possible from ‘‘people of order’’ before naming the two barrios as the likely locations of the two zones. But the fact was that many of the residents of these two neighborhoods considered themselves ‘‘people of order,’’ had followed revolutionary matters closely, and took a keen interest in the promises of community improvement and regeneration the Revolution offered.10 Before the commission had even finished making its final recommendations, community groups were organizing to protest the plans in rhetoric that invoked the themes of family, neighborhood, and national development. In 1928 men who lived near the centers of vice in the northern Colonia Guerrero wrote to the Departamento de Salubridad Pu´blica to protest the proliferation of brothels, cabarets, and theaters in their neighborhood. Urban improvements around the Plaza Garibaldi, where prostitutes were concentrated slightly to the north on the Libertad and Jaime Nun˜o avenues, had connected the district with the rest of the city, and the paving and widening of the Avenida Santa Marı´a la Redonda had facilitated north-south traffic to and from the center. Local men acknowledged the department’s belief that they had experience as brothel patrons as true, but they argued their case to the Departamento de Salubridad Pu´blica in terms of fatherhood and their concerns over Mexico’s international image. Those who wrote President Emilio Portes Gil in 1928 protested the erotic scenes enacted in such local venues as the Marı´a Guerrero and the Garibaldi, observing that 9. Ibid. 10. AHCM, ‘‘Sanidad,’’ vol. 3891, file 66. It is not clear what the precise hygienic requirements for establishing a brothel were, but inspectors routinely surveyed potential brothels before granting a matrona her license.

Fig. 9

By the late 1920s, brothels, casas de asignacio´n, and some registered hotels were concentrated in two neighborhoods of the capital: Cuauhtemoctzı´n, also known as the ‘‘Barrio Latino’’ to the south, and the Colonia Guerrero to the north. Reprinted from the Archivo Histo´rico de la Secretarı´a de Salubridad y Asistencia, Salubridad Pu´blica, Servicio Jurı´dico, box 17, file 19, survey of existing brothels, casas de asignacio´n, and registered hotels, Cuauhtemoctzı´n 1929.

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they had been to brothels all over the world and had never attended any so disgusting as those in their own barrio. Their letter stated that ‘‘those of us who write know the theaters for men only in Havana, Buenos Aires, and Barcelona, and nowhere have we ever seen acts even half as disgusting as those that are performed here in the prostitution centers, in the veritable brothels that are ironically called the Marı´a Guerrero and Garibaldi theaters.’’11 However, for the Guerrero petitioners, being a brothel client or member of the audience at a ‘‘men’s only’’ cabaret was not incompatible with being a good father or good citizen, as health and judicial rhetoric maintained. On the contrary, they asserted, their worldly experience gave them the legitimacy they needed to make their interest in improving social conditions in Mexico credible to federal officials. Thus, these men invoked complex identities as fathers and household heads, on the one hand, and as brothelgoers on the other. The letter writers claimed that families took children to the theaters and were shocked when they discovered the true nature of the shows performed there. These men spoke for all Mexican families, they said, when they pleaded ‘‘in the name of Society, in the name of mothers of families, in the name of trampled morality . . . we beg you to make these spaces disappear.’’12 The ideal of accessibility but invisibility inspired the Cuauhtemoctzı´n protesters too. Only a few months later, in November 1929, the Junta of Workers, Industrialists, Property-owners, and Residents of Cuauhtemoctzı´n wrote the Comisio´n Mixta pro-Turismo to complain about the proposed zone in their area, a bit south of the city center. Like the 1928 Garibaldi protesters, they invoked a complex mix of concerns in their complaint. Noting that they had organized ‘‘for the specific purpose of ensuring the zone be removed’’ from their neighborhood, the men wrote that ‘‘the zone of tolerance to which we refer is situated in the trajectory of the highway that circles the city of Mexico and constitutes an obligatory path for tourists.’’ Just as urban improvements concerned the Guerrero protesters, the connection between Cuauhtemoctzı´n and the rest of town raised important issues for local residents. For the Cuauhtemoctzı´n fathers, the immediate provocation was that ayuntamiento work crews had ignored the 1926 order not to ‘‘improve’’ the area and had paved several blocks of Cuauhtemoctzı´n, turn11. AGN-DGG, series 2.014(29)3, box 7, file 3. Hermenegildo Dı´az, oficial mayor at Gobernacio´n, observed that ‘‘although it is true that lewd and indecent shows go on there, they are no worse that those staged at the Lyric Theater language in content and gesture’’ and recommended the sites limit the patrons to those over age eighteen. 12. Ibid.

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ing it into a heavily trafficked thoroughfare. The newly paved street ran east to west, connecting the airfield, the road to Puebla, and the Interoceanic Highway with the downtown area. To the west it carried passengers in automobiles, buses, and trolleys to the Calle Puebla, which continued west through the Colonia Roma toward Chapultepec Park. The newly paved street also connected Cuauhtemoctzı´n with the Calzada de Balbuena and Balbuena Park, a popular, wooded recreational area. The residents emphasized the community’s new connection to the city with the following warning about Mexico’s international reputation: ‘‘We don’t think it is necessary to underline the disastrous impression that the arriving tourist will form upon seeing that spectacle of immorality that the brothels, in open air and established on an important city artery, an obligatory path, offer.’’13 Both the Cuauhtemoctzı´n Junta and the Guerrero/Garibaldi theater protesters rejected the city’s equation of their neighborhoods with vice districts and instead invoked fatherhood, brothel experience, citizenship, and entrepreneurship in their opposition to proposed zoning ordinances. As the Junta’s directors wrote to the director of the Departamento de Salubridad Pu´blica, Dr. Rafael Silva, the group had organized for the specific purpose of combating the zoning ordinances, ‘‘with the only objective of promoting initiatives that are necessary to adopt to ensure that the zone is removed from this location.’’14 Indeed, the Junta raised a complex variety of issues in its continued protest of the Cuauhtemoctzı´n zone, pointing out that ‘‘the sole circumstance that a school-aged and working population lives in the area should be enough to move the authorities to make a decision in a case which so gravely offends public morality.’’15 The Junta also invoked the threat to area property values and the potentially negative impact the presence of prostitutes would have on foreign investment opportunities, saying, ‘‘It will never be possible to justify the exhibition that is offered to the people who are obliged to travel through the artery in automobile, trolley or bus.’’16 The Junta again wrote to the head of the Departamento de Salubridad Pu´blica in May 1930, protesting the continued presence of ‘‘open air’’ 13. AHSSA-SP-SJ, box 17, file 19. 14. Junta de Obreros, Vecinos, etc. to Rafael Silva, head of the Department of Public Health, 1929, ibid. 15. Ibid. Attilio Sabbatini had protested the presence of a brothel on the Avenida Jalisco to the public authorities as early as 1925, complaining that he had trouble renting out his property because of the ‘‘scandals’’ at the locale. AGN-DGG, series 2a.014.29, box 1, file 2. 16. AHSSA-SP-SJ, box 17, file 19.

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brothels in their neighborhood, warning that they would take the matter to the attention of the president if the public health officials did not address their concerns. By the fall of that year, local protests threatened to bring the entire zoning process to a halt, and there was intense communication between the Departamento de Salubridad Pu´blica and the Departamento de Distrito Federal to ‘‘resolve as soon as possible the problem that has arisen with respect to the zonas de tolerancia in Mexico.’’17 For residents of local communities threatened by the vice district’s location it was important to demonstrate that being a bordello client did not preclude being a good father, and that being a good father was key to citizenship and entrepreneurship. It was, moreover, strategic to link prostitution and nationalism, for doing so placed vice and urban development at the crossroads of two important issues for the revolutionary city to consider. On the one hand, curing syphilis and redeeming young girls was a way to ensure the productivity of the revolutionary public and thus ensure economic development; on the other hand, sex tourism might promote development too, albeit at the expense of revolutionary morality. Indeed, revolutionary presidents had tied tourism to economic development since the early 1920s, when President Alvaro Obrego´n sent Adolfo Herna´ndez and Guillermo Enrı´quez Simoni to the United States to investigate the ‘‘preparation of propaganda to encourage and regularize tourism in Mexico.’’18 Public officials believed that developing a strong tourist economy could stimulate the flow of money circulating in the national economy, but they also recognized that Mexico had to overcome a reputation as a violent and dangerous place to visit before that dream could become a reality. At the turn of the century, travel writers Adolfo Prantl and Jose´ Grosso had written that Mexico City was a disappointment, a sad city that offered both beauty and vice to the visitor.19 Tourists from the United States had long commented on its poverty and its crime as well.20 The tourist’s fear of crime and violence was still a problem in the 1920s. According to public relations experts, Mexico had to overcome a widespread belief that the republic was savage, violent, and dirty. If Mexico City could provide attractive lodgings, appealing diversions, and safe attractions for the visitor, it might escape its reputation as a ‘‘must (not) see.’’ North American public relations expert Robert Callahan wrote to President Plutarco Elı´as Calles in 1927, ‘‘The out17. 18. 19. 20.

Ibid. AGN-APR, ‘‘Presidentes—Obrego´n y Calles’’ (hereafter OC), file 121-I-H-8. Prantl and Grosso, La ciudad de Me´xico, xviii–xix. Olive Percival, Mexico City: An Idler’s Note-book (Chicago, Ill.: H. S. Stone, 1901).

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side world has been misled about Mexico and her people.’’21 And the Pan American Tourist Commission reiterated that ‘‘Mexico’s crying need is to bring forcibly to the attention of the great traveling public of America the transportation facilities, hotel accommodations, and unusually favorable climatic conditions that will permit them to enjoy in your country the beauties of a bountiful nature and admire the achievements of a cultured people.’’22 Could promoting sex tourism, some wondered, be worth considering? The place of vice in national tourism campaigns raised serious and troubling questions for urban planners and reformers, who saw it as their mission to promote Mexico City’s revolutionary culture. As they contemplated the matter, it became clear that some destinations like Havana clearly traded on providing sex to visitors.23 But for urban planners this possibility raised questions about how to both provide spaces for tourists’ pleasure and market the attractions of a sophisticated revolutionary city. How to encourage the construction and maintenance of tourist hotels in the capital presented a special problem for the Pruneda Commission, for hotels were sites in which tourists, prostitutes, and clients might come into contact.24 The Reglamento of 1926 required all city hotels that received prostitutes to register with authorities, pay a fee, and, like brothels, submit to periodic health inspections. Observation had shown that such hotels as the Libertad, the Santo Domingo, and the Peru´ were all frequented by underage girls, prostitutes of the lowest class, and clandestinas, who either lived there or rented rooms at an hourly or half-hourly rate. These sites were worrisome, the commissioners noted, because it was difficult for the public health police to maintain surveillance over these establishments.25 The Pruneda Commission noted that the registered hotels presented a rather difficult situation for several reasons: The group noted that with respect to the hotels where prostitution takes place, it should be said that it has been noted that even after they are closed by the 21. AGN-APR-OC, file 104-t-25. 22. Ibid., vol. 1930, file 144/9901. 23. Rosalie Schwartz, Pleasure Island: Tourism and Temptation in Cuba (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997). 24. On the role of hotels and their proprietors in facilitating sex tourism in large cities, see Dolores French’s account of her work in the sex industry in Atlanta in the 1970s and 1980s. Dolores French with Linda Lee, Working: My Life as a Prostitute (New York: Dutton Press, 1988). 25. AGN-CTMI. See, for example, box 39, file 11323.

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health authorities, their owners reopen, promising that won’t violate the Reglamento again, that they will only take tourists, for which the authority removes the closure mandate; but it then turns out that the same establishments keep accepting public women who exercise prostitution in the hotels, without any regard whatsoever for the new sanctions the law imposes; sometimes these proprietors pretend changes of license, or change other things to show that they have modified their business and are now honorable establishments, but in reality prostitution still takes place there.26 Hotel proprietors, like the members of the Cuauhtemoctzı´n Junta and the Colonia Guerrero theater patrons, invoked manliness and entrepreneurship in their complaints regarding both the Reglamento and the new rules for operating a hotel in a zona de tolerancia. In the first place, they stated, it was bad for business to grill each woman who entered their establishment as to her marital status. Manuel Ruı´z, owner of the Hotel Independencia, said that ‘‘with the proper respect I must beg your department to tell me how I should proceed. . . . when a couple registers in my hotel as man and wife, and yet I know that it is impossible to know who is married and who is not.’’27 Not only was it embarrassing for hotel managers to ask a woman they suspected of being a prostitute to produce her marriage certificate, only to find that she was a properly wed sen˜ora traveling with her husband in the city, but, hotel managers said, the clandestinas knew what they were up against and went to great lengths to ‘‘disguise their status and try to pass as honorable.’’28 As the proprietors noted, ‘‘Hotel owners find it impossible to know with scientific precision the moral quality of the women who demand lodging in the establishment, and it is absolutely unjust to make them responsible for the violation.’’ But the Inspeccio´n de Sanidad lawyer who pondered the matter quickly dismissed these complaints, saying that ‘‘the hotel proprietors are well equipped to know their clientele because the women who are prostitutes, registered or clandestine, always use a hotel as a base of operations, where they are well-known clients, and where they bring different men, even in the same day, and some even solicit customers in front 26. AGN-SP-SJ, box 17, file 19. 27. Ibid. The proprietors of hotels ‘‘Aranda,’’ ‘‘Camaguey,’’ and ‘‘Allende’’ also wrote in protest of the Reglamento. 28. Letter from Sociedad de Propietarios de Hotels, Casas de Hue´spedes y Similares to Gaste´lum, 1926, ibid.

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of the hotels themselves.’’29 How, the lawyer wondered, could the hotel owners who claimed to be morally upright ignore such flagrant behavior? Finally, hoteliers resolved to pass the blame to someone else: the nightclub owners. Reiterating that ‘‘it is unjust to oblige hotels to determine whether the woman who wants to enter a room is an inscrita or a clandestina,’’ the proprietors demanded that the Departamento de Salubridad Pu´blica attack the ‘‘real’’ problem: cabarets and theatrical venues, where, they advised public officials, the laws were flouted with regularity. As the group wrote, ‘‘We desire to collaborate with the Departamento de Salubridad Pu´blica in everything that is necessary to repress prostitution which, now more than ever, is spread everywhere and can be found in theaters and in shows and throughout society.’’30 This effort eventually paid off, for the hoteliers were successful in shifting the city’s attention to late-hours theatrical venues.

Bordering on Brothels: Cabaret Conflicts, 1931–1933 The zoning conflict and debates over hotels raised serious questions about the morality of public diversions in the revolutionary capital. Urban planners and health reformers were willing to make vice invisible yet accessible to local clientele and visitors, but men who lived in the proposed vice districts invoked their rights as fathers and brothel patrons to request that the place of vice be moved elsewhere. Hotel proprietors recommended the state look for different spaces to moralize instead. Cabarets, dance halls, and bawdy theaters emerged as the scapegoats in this moralizing process. Cabarets flourished in the tumultuous and unregulated revolutionary years, when well-connected men demanded favors of city councillors and other political elites. In addition, they counted on a regular supply of men and women who went to the nightclubs to socialize, work, and engage in transitory sexual encounters. For some observers, the proliferation of vice centers—like the participation of pimps in the city’s ‘‘underworld— demonstrated Mexico’s modernity, especially if, as the protesters argued, it likened Mexico City to such destinations as Buenos Aires and Barcelona. But as labor leader and anti-vice activist Elı´as Hurtado pointed out, cabarets 29. Ibid. 30. Letter from Francisco Va´zquez Pe´rez to the Department of Public Health, March 19, 1930, ibid.

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for ‘‘men only’’ required a level of sophistication and modernity to which the City of Mexico could only aspire. Hurtado noted that ‘‘only in Barcelona have I found cabarets ‘for men only.’ In Barcelona they are very civilized. Unfortunately, we have not reached that level of civilization. In Mexico the presence of women is necessary in cabarets.’’ In his capacity as representative of the Federacio´n de Sindicatos del Distrito Federal, Hurtado invoked fatherhood as a reason male laborers should defend women workers who performed nude dance routines by helping them leave an exploitative trade.31 Their obscure origins, lack of government oversight, and links through patronage and ownership to political figures meant that cabarets had enjoyed a long stint of popularity and prosperity. As early as the late teens it had been clear that the cabarets regularly hosted activities that violated public health and penal law, and by 1926 health officials pointed to regulation as the answer. As the author of one internal Inspeccio´n de Sanidad memo observed, ‘‘This office has had to start maintaining surveillance over cabarets in order to prevent them from becoming centers of prostitution.’’32 Only months earlier such cabarets as the Estrella, the Adams, and the Molino Rojo had taken over spaces where casas de asignacio´n had long been established. As the officer who described the matter noted, ‘‘It is logical to suppose that the majority of the people who go to these cabarets are the women who are prostitutes and the old clients of those casas, which creates all kinds of health and social concerns.’’33 Even the ‘‘daughters of disgrace’’ had brought their concerns over the unregulated nature of cabarets to the authorities’ attention as early as 1926, writing that the cabarets were basically brothels in which sexual activity took place and where sexually transmitted infections were routinely exchanged. The daughters wrote that ‘‘in the cabarets the very Inspeccio´n de Sanidad knows full well that in those centers of vice morality is regularly trampled and that prostitution is exercised clandestinely and that is no guarantee; in all of those places there are infinite numbers of women who are registered and others who are not and who are sick, and they are not under surveillance for any reason. Is it that these women aren’t prostitutes? They don’t sell their bodies?’’ Emphasizing that the situation was unfair, they, too, demanded that the public authorities enforce the law in an impartial manner.34 31. 32. 33. 34.

‘‘El problema de la mujer que trabaja en cabarets,’’ El Nacional, October 15, 1937, 8. AHSSA-SP-SJ, box 17, file 19. Ibid. AHSSA-SP-IAV, box 3, files 2–3.

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A 1930s pocket guide to Mexico City night life, which promised its readers a ‘‘moral’’ orientation to the metropolis, reflected this complicated mix of ideas regarding discretion, accessibility, and morality. Given the editors’ assurances of providing ‘‘ethical’’ information, it must have at first struck the reader as curious that the 112-page Spanish/English edition was sealed with a yellow strip of paper printed with bright red letters that announced the booklet was ‘‘for men only.’’ But aside from an ad for the aphrodisiac Testo-fort, which promised all who consumed the product enhanced sexual and mental capabilities, the guide’s first sixty or so pages merely listed mailboxes, railroad stations, consular offices, dry cleaners, and other locations of interest to the business traveler without giving any indication as to book’s ‘‘scandalous’’ nature. It was only after page 71, in fact, that the pamphlet’s true purpose must have become clear to the reading male. A listing of cabarets, restaurants, and ‘‘salons with reserved rooms’’ gave the reader the locations of eighteen cabarets, thirty-one bars, seven ‘‘dance halls,’’ fifteen dinner theaters, ten regular theaters, and sixteen restaurants or cabarets that boasted ‘‘discreet rooms,’’ or reservados. For those who were so inclined, there were listings for stores where one could rent a ‘‘fantasy costume’’ as well. Far from presenting its reader with an ‘‘ethical and moral orientation’’ to the metropolis, then, it seems likely that this guidebook, Mexico at Night: Guide for the Man Who Wants to Have Fun instead provided tourists with the locations of the city’s most exclusive sexually oriented businesses.35 Although dance halls, cabarets, reservados, and restaurants all differed slightly, those that catered to a heterosexual clientele were similar in the sense that they offered sexual services and because the women were there to sell liquor, which is what kept those businesses afloat. Cabarets that advertised in the Me´xico de noche guidebook portrayed themselves as elegant spots, with the Cabaret Venus, located in the downtown center on Mesones and Bolı´var, billing itself a quintessential Mexico City venue, whereas the nearby Cucaracha traded on its international reputation and promoted itself not only for being famous ‘‘the world over’’ but for having ‘‘English-speaking personnel.’’36 To portray a sense of gaiety and elegance mixed with carefree adventure, the Cucaracha ran an ad with a drawing of a cockroach in a top hat and bow tie enthusiastically inviting guests to stop by.37 While it’s 35. Me´xico de noche: Guı´a para el hombre que quiera divertirse (1933). It is not completely clear who published this work. Since Martell cognac placed an advertisement on nearly every page, that is quite possibly the source of the pamphlet. The copy I used can be found in the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley. 36. Ibid., 73. 37. Ibid., 75.

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Fig. 10 In the early 1930s, Mexico City’s brothels and nightclubs attracted an international clientele. This Spanish-English pocket guidebook, Me´xico de noche: Guı´a para el hombre que quiera divertirse, provided readers with the addresses of ‘‘discreet houses,’’ clubs with ‘‘reserved rooms,’’ places to rent ‘‘fancy costumes,’’ bathhouses, and for the unlucky visitor, a listing of syphilis-treatment specialists as well. Reprinted with the permission of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

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not clear whether such sites as the Venus and the Cucaracha provided ‘‘reservados’’ for the clientele, they must have promoted dance shows and employed women as waitresses, for the 1931 Reglamento de Cafe´s Cantantes, Cabarets y Salones de Baile defined cabarets as ‘‘sites of diversion that fulfill the following conditions: they have restaurant service, orchestra, variety spectacles, and a space for dancing.’’ Dance salons were distinguished from this kind of space by the fact that they did ‘‘not have restaurant service nor sell intoxicating beverages’’ and were not ‘‘obligated to present shows to entertain the guests.’’38 The Cabaret Venus and the Cucaracha, among other exclusive sites, catered to an upscale clientele, Spanish and English-speaking gentlemen who had purchased copies of the ‘‘guide for the man who wants to have fun.’’ Moralists claimed these venues were run by Spanish and French investors. But other cabarets, like the Iris, the Chop Suey, the Eden, and even the Agua Azul, which was under Mexican ownership, attracted the city’s attention as well. The Agua Azul, located at the corner of Allende and Libertad, near the more northerly zona de tolerancia, was less ornate than the Cabaret Venus or the Cucaracha and was located next to a grocery store in an older building. Nevertheless, like them, the Agua Azul promoted a sense of fantasy and escape, boasting interior murals of the Agua Azul waterfalls in Chiapas. According to former patrons, however, despite the exotic decor, the venue’s client base remained staunchly local, counting ‘‘taxi drivers, mechanics, bricklayers, tailors, carpenters and butchers’’ among its most loyal customers.39 Indeed, the decoration inside was haphazard at best, with paper-covered Chinese paper lanterns, Mexican tile, a blue and white floor, and a small dance floor in the center of the room, conveying a complicated mix of orientalist and nationalist motifs to inspire clients and employees alike. For the government of the Federal District, whether a cabaret was exclusive, like the Cucaracha and the Venus, or ‘‘lowest class,’’ like the Agua Azul and the Chop Suey, it merited the city’s regulatory oversight if women worked inside. As part of the larger effort to eliminate cantinas and to reduce alcoholism in Mexico, public officials had long worried about the presence of women in bars, periodically banning women’s work in venues that served liquor.40 To prevent the adverse mixture of sexual and alcoholic com38. ‘‘Reglamento de Cafe´s Cantantes, Cabarets y Salones de Baile,’’ Diario Oficial del 27 de marzo de 1931, in Figueroa Guerrero, ‘‘La prostitucio´n y el delito de lenocinio,’’ 58–59. 39. Armando Jime´nez. Cabarets de antes y de ahora en la ciudad de Me´xico. (Mexico City: Plaza y Valde´s, 1992), 13. 40. See, for example, Pablo Piccato, ‘‘To Explain and Classify: The Discourse About Alcoholism and Criminality in Mexico, 1890–1912’’ (paper presented at the Latin American Studies Association International Congress, Atlanta, Ga., 1994).

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Fig. 11 Cabarets like the Venus were largely free from regulatory oversight in the 1920s and 1930s. Typically owned and operated by men, they employed women as waitresses, performers, and ficheras, or paid dance partners. Public health officials worried that these activities led women to a ‘‘progressive state of degradation’’ and sought to subject the venues to government oversight. Reprinted from Me´xico de noche with the permission of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

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Fig. 12 Like the Cucaracha, many capitalino clubs promoted their international flavor to attract foreign patrons interested in experiencing the city’s ‘‘exotic’’ nightspots. Reprinted from Me´xico de noche with the permission of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

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merce, health legislation had prohibited the sale of liquor in brothels since the late nineteenth century. But prohibition reached its height under President Emilio Portes Gil between 1928 and 1929, and congressional delegates once again sought to prevent women’s presence in all cantinas, pulquerı´as, and cabarets, arguing that women incited men to drink more, that drunk men and women undertook ‘‘dangerous’’ sexual encounters, and that alcoholic women set bad examples for their children. Indeed, there was plenty of evidence to support the idea that the mix of alcohol, men, and women did lead to sexual permissiveness. Mexico City bars and cabarets employed women as ficheras, or socializing waitresses, who served drinks and mingled with the clients. Proprietors paid the women according to the number of drinks each client ordered; for example, for every beer a woman sold, the proprietor paid her an average of fifty centavos and for a rum or anise, sometimes as much as a peso-and-a-half.41 Young girls frequently found themselves involved in this kind of work, but many did not have the physical capacity to consume large amounts of alcohol and often wound up drunk or incapacitated, only to be robbed and raped. Because flirting and promising sexual favors after hours often sold more drinks, working in a cabaret was also frequently a way a woman made the transition to more formal work in sexual commerce. For example, seventeen-year-old Rosa Cortines, a native of the Federal District, had been a domestic servant and then a cabaret worker before being caught as an underage prostitute.42 Another girl, who was known on the street as ‘‘La Exclusiva,’’ worked at the Cabaret La Cita after learning the tricks of the fichera trade from her mother, who worked at the Cabaret Iris.43 Under the terms of the Departamento del Distrito Federal’s 1931 Reglamento de Cafe´s Cantantes, Cabarets y Salones de Baile, women were prohibited from working in bars, and a woman could only enter a bar when in the company of a man.44 On May 28 of that year the Departamento del Distrito Federal closed forty-eight metropolitan cabarets to force business owners to comply with the new Reglamento, which required proprietors to deposit 1,000 pesos with the city, decorate their establishments ‘‘with decency,’’ provide orchestral music, and close reservados, which provided locales for women and men to engage in ‘‘immoral’’ activities that were 41. AGN-CTMI, box 30, file 8848; box 33, file 9644. 42. Ibid., box 4, file 7348. 43. Ibid., box 33, file 9560. 44. ‘‘Reglamento de Cafe´s Cantantes, Cabarets y Salones de Baile,’’ Diario Oficial del 27 de marzo de 1931, in Figueroa Guerrero, ‘‘La prostitucio´n y el delito de lenocinio,’’ 58–59.

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Fig. 13 According to the 1930s Cabaret regulations, reservados, or private rooms, to which nightclub patrons and cabareteras could retire for more ‘‘intimate’’ conversation, were illegal, but many venues persisted in advertising them anyway. Reprinted from Me´xico de noche with the permission of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

beyond the scope of the surveillance authority of the Reglamento para el ejercicio de la prostitucio´n. The new rules provoked outrage from cabaret owners, dancers, and musicians, all of whom immediately and vehemently protested the decrees.45 The newspapers estimated that 450 unionized musicians and 1,500 unorganized waitresses, as well as 800 waiters, cooks, and other employees were cast out into the street because of the new rules.46 But the next day Rufino Zavaleta, chief of the Departmento de Diversiones Pu´blicas, announced that the majority of the cabaret owners had agreed to pay the deposit and to abide by the rules, allowing district inspectors to inspect the sites. In accordance with the agreement, the male cooks, waiters, and musicians, at least, would get their jobs back, but the ficheras were left to fend for themselves. 45. ‘‘Desde anoche, Mexico esta´ sin cabarets,’’ El Nacional, May 28, 1931, 8. 46. ‘‘Los cabareteros resolvieron ayer acatar el reglamento haciendo el depo´sito que exige la ley,’’ El Nacional, May 29, 1931, 8.

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Only a little more than a week after the decree, the waitresses begged the Department for help, invoking constitutional guarantees to freedom of occupation in their complaint. By that point, the daily El Universal had revised its estimates regarding how many women would be displaced by the ban on women’s work in the entertainment venues, reporting that there were ‘‘four hundred waitresses who worked in different capital city cabarets [who are] now unemployed because of the new rule which definitively prohibits women’s work in such venues.’’ But whether there were 1,500 unemployed ficheras or just 400, one thing seems to be clear: the Department’s concerns over collecting fees, preserving the city’s ‘‘moral’’ image, and protecting men’s work were higher priorities than women’s employment, and the Federal District rejected the women’s petitions to be officially restored to their positions.47 Despite the District’s firm stand on preventing women’s ‘‘immoral’’ occupation, only nine months later, the new rules had merely intensified the level of ‘‘scandal’’ and ‘‘indecency’’ in the nightspots, for cabaret proprietors allowed the women to return to work illegally, according to the daily paper Excelsior. In one article the author noted that ‘‘continuous immoralities and scandals have originated due to the new regulations.’’ In response, one city inspector stated that ‘‘if it is true that the residents of the Federal District must have places of diversion, it is also true that we must work to make sure these sites do not get converted into sites of scandal and unchecked exploitation.’’ Finally, the District’s representative said, new considerations regarding tourism raised questions about the appropriateness of cabarets at all and justified the city’s strictest vigilance over their activities. The representative of the Federal District told reporters that it was true that the old, unregulated cabarets might have enjoyed several years of unfettered profits, but the new ones would have to follow better moral laws, ‘‘for the new cabarets must be established in accordance with new criteria that will assure that they are truly centers of tourism and healthy diversion.’’48 Men might continue to operate cabarets and to enjoy them, but women who worked in bars to support their families would have to seek new occupations ‘‘for their own good.’’ 47. ‘‘Pidieron amparo las meseras de los cabarets,’’ El Universal, June 3, 1931, 9. 48. ‘‘Se trata so´lo de moralizar los cabarets,’’ Excelsior, March 1, 1932, 10. In the four years between 1931 and 1935, El Universal reported, the campaign to suppress vice had reduced the number of cabarets from thirty-one to twenty-four. Nevertheless, the nation-wide campaign did not fare so well. See ‘‘Han aumentado los cabarets,’’ El Universal, October 3, 1935, 9.

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A Zone of Their Own The government’s focus on regulating cabarets and establishing vice districts increased the role of the state in people’s entertainment and occupational choices and demonstrated that the family men living in the districts in line to be zoned for vice were not afraid to contest what they perceived to be the government’s portrayal of them as bad fathers. For them, the categories of family, citizenship, entertainment, and masculine responsibility were not mutually exclusive. But despite their moralizing rhetoric, reformers were uncertain as to how to control the geographic distribution of vice in the city. Older ideas about gender and class influenced these decisions, for the Pruneda commission sought to concentrate prostitution in poorer neighborhoods under the assumption that it was working-class women who most often worked as prostitutes and that it was working-class men who were their most enthusiastic clients. Under the 1929 and 1931 penal legislation pertaining to lenocinio, matronas were exempt from the prohibition against procuring or sexually exploiting women for financial gain. But by the mid1930s the class conflicts that raged around the issue of tourism in the downtown zonas de tolerancia created an inhospitable environment for first-class matronas, who quietly moved west to set up exclusive brothels in the style of the traditional houses of Porfirian fame. Thus, in conjunction with the zona de tolerancia debates and concerns over the cabarets, the metropolitan geography of vice became clearly divided. As the French prostitute Margot had explained to Detectives journalist Aldebara´n, streetwalking and aislada work attracted only the most ‘‘desperate’’ women in Cuauhtemoctzı´n, while upscale brothels relocated to the Colonias Roma, Jua´rez, and del Valle to the west and southwest of the center and beyond the immediate surveillance of the Inspeccio´n de Sanidad.49 In the midst of these changes, enterprising men sought to capitalize on the trend toward segregated sexual commerce and made successful proposals to set up vice districts in marginal areas of town. Matronas who managed ‘‘high-rent’’ establishments sought to take advantage of the wave of tourism and business travel to Mexico and developed new marketing strategies to capture this potentially lucrative client pool. In one guidebook to Mexico City, nightspots that called themselves ‘‘recommended houses’’ distinguished themselves from the ‘‘desperate’’ and bawdy atmosphere of Cuauhtemoctzı´n by promising hygiene, discretion, and even 49. Aldebara´n, ‘‘En la ru´a del vicio,’’ Detectives, January 23, 1933, 13.

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prestige for those discriminating clients who saw themselves as too dignified to spend time in the working-class neighborhood south of the city center.50 The guidebook’s ‘‘recommended houses’’ were almost all located in the western colonias and apparently enjoyed cordial relations with their neighbors—the archives contain very few complaints for this area in this period. In one case from 1930, Colonia Roma property owner and landlord Roberto Schroeder lodged a complaint against Sen˜ora Monte Hall, who had set up a brothel in a house on his property on Calle Durango. Schroeder claimed that the entire neighborhood deplored the matronas’ and prostitutes’ presence to support his demand that the Departamento de Salubridad Pu´blica revoke Hall’s license; however, when department inspectors investigated Schroeder’s claim, they could not determine his assertions were true and wrote that ‘‘after looking into the background of the case, it would seem that there are no real complaints from the neighbors of the house at number 283, Calle Durango, for there is nothing in the folder at the department regarding complaints except that of Sen˜or Schroeder.’’ The Inspeccio´n de Sanidad agent who assumed responsibility for the case continued, writing that ‘‘it would really be unusual that the neighbors would complain about number 283, for right across the street is another casa de citas owned by Sen˜ora Anastasia Larios, and around the corner on Calle Cozumel is another house registered to Sen˜ora Olga Camarena, and it is likely that if the neighbors were angry they would not focus just on the house at 283 Durango but also on the ones nearby.’’51 Clients who patronized the discreet Colonia Roma brothels were not just seeking peace and quiet, however, for successful matronas like ‘‘Mari Carmen’’ (see Figure 14) mentioned the house bar in her advertisements and asserted that her brothel was one where ‘‘every minute is a pleasure.’’ Other matronas sought to attract high-paying clients by promoting ‘‘a distinguished ambiance,’’ ‘‘the greatest prestige,’’ or ‘‘a surprise for every client,’’ suggesting that the men to whom they catered had expectations rather different from those of the soldiers and military officers who had created such problems for the city in the 1920s. Although the advertisements rarely went into detail, published reports regarding these brothels indicate that such ‘‘surprises’’ could be anything from sexually suggestive dance shows to the 50. Me´xico de noche, 87–108. 51. Letter from Jefe de Servicio al C. Secretario General del Departamento, ‘‘La Sra. Monte Hall en ocurso de fecha 27 de los correintes, solicita el que suspenda el orden de desocupacio´n, que le fue notificada por la Inspeccio´n de Sanidad,’’ February 28, 1930, in AHSSA-SP-SJ, unclassified.

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Fig. 14 Many of these ‘‘recommended houses’’ were located well outside the official ‘‘tolerated zone’’ and catered to upscale clients who demanded assurances of hygienic conditions, discretion, and privacy. Reprinted from Me´xico de noche with the permission of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

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opportunity to purchase the sexual services of a young girl.52 In addition to ‘‘surprises’’ or discretion, however, it seems clear that some men were responding favorably at least to the Departamento de Salubridad Pu´blica’s constant exhortations with respect to disease prevention and demanded hygiene, and a house at Colima no. 394 promoted itself as both ‘‘the most discreet’’ and ‘‘most hygienic’’ house in the entire city.53 For clients who were unfortunate enough to acquire a sexually transmitted infection at these pleasure palaces, Me´xico de noche provided readers with a list of highly recommended venereal disease specialists lest these men be forced to seek a doctor’s attention in the public clinics, where they might have to mingle with the common syphilitics.54 Urban residents who could not afford to visit prostitutes in the Colonia Roma pleasure palaces could nevertheless enjoy movies such as the 1932 release of Santa, which updated Gamboa’s story to the period and featured music by well-known brothel pianist, Agustı´n Lara, or by reading such periodicals as a Santa-inspired comic strip deemed ‘‘pornographic,’’ which circulated clandestinely among downtown vendors.55 For readers with more sophisticated tastes, Detectives provided imaginative fare about brothels, luxury, corruption, violence, and intrigue. For example, the tabloid weekly ran a series of articles about the famous ‘‘virgin raffles’’ of which Lara y Pardo had been so disparaging in the late Porfiriato. According to Detectives, an establishment in the Colonia Roma operated by a North American woman named Ruth was one of the city’s ‘‘most immoral’’ sites in which politicians and well-known intellectuals regularly violated the law. According to one article in August 1934, Ruth had procured three young virgins from Mexico’s southern states of Chiapas and Oaxaca, knowing that her customers had a taste for young, indigenous women.56 As another author reported regarding the raffle that distributed these girls to the winners, ‘‘Ruth’s house . . . is a center where corrupt politicians, well-known profes52. League of Nations, Traffic in Women and Children, pt. 1, pp. 118–21. 53. Me´xico de noche, 101. 54. Ibid., 27. 55. Gamboa’s Santa inspired a 1918 silent film and was remade with sound in 1931, opening to great acclaim on March 30, 1932, at the downtown Palacio Theater, where it ran for three weeks. Federico Da´valos Orozco, ‘‘The Birth of the Film Industry and the Emergence of Sound,’’ in Mexico’s Cinema: A Century of Film and Filmmakers, ed. Joanne Herschfield and David Maciel (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1999), 19–20. Regarding the circulation of the pornographic ‘‘Santa’’ comic strip, see AGN-DPRS, ‘‘Lenocinio,’’ vol. 1278, file 8/ 421.81.09. 56. ‘‘Donde son refadas las mujeres?’’ Detectives: El mejor semanario de Me´xico, August 6, 1934, 12.

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sionals and military men get together, like birds of prey, to enjoy a banquet on that poor flesh of sin so cruelly exploited by the madam.’’57 The image of politicians enjoying the services of prostitutes was standard fare for tabloids like Detectives and for opposition political papers like the Communist Party’s El Machete, which accused former president Plutarco Elı´as Calles and his cronies of graft and corruption, of enjoying the services of high-class prostitutes at such exclusive sites as the Foreign Club and the Casino de la Selva, and of persuading police to ignore violations committed

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Fig. 15 The norteamericana madam Ruth was notorious for the scandalous activities that took place inside her establishment on the Calle Orizaba in the Colonia Roma. In 1934 the crime tabloid Detectives ran a story publicizing the venue’s ‘‘virgin raffles,’’ in which young, indigenous girls from southern Mexico were sold to high-ranking military personnel and politicians in the new order. Reprinted from Me´xico de noche with the permission of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 57. ‘‘El ´ınfame comercio de las vı´rgenes,’’ Detectives: El mejor semanario de Me´xico, August 13, 1934, 7.

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by matronas with whom they enjoyed cordial relations.58 Despite the political currency of such accusations, archived evidence suggests that they were to some degree true. Well into the 1930s, matrona Agustina de la Vega, the Colonia Jua´rez brothel proprietress who had so offended neighbors with her establishment’s noise and impunity in the late teens, still counted on official support.59 By 1926 de la Vega had moved to the Calle de Medellı´n in the Colonia Roma, where she occupied two apartments on a block somewhat west of and outside the designated ‘‘vice district.’’ When agents of the Inspeccio´n de Sanidad threatened to shut her down for being outside the tolerated zone, de la Vega apparently called in a political favor, and inspectors reported that ‘‘a high official used his influences on her behalf.’’60 Later, forewarned of an impending health inspection raid, de la Vega surreptitiously closed her establishment and secretly moved her operations to the Calle del Sol, up in the Colonia Guerrero, moving later to Nonoalco, to the west, and even later to the Calle Zarco.61 In the 1930s, the idea of a separate but accessible ‘‘zone of tolerance’’ provoked numerous proposals from male entrepreneurs, who sought to capitalize on the matronas’ renewed success and advocated limited state intervention with respect to the activities that would take place inside such a zone. These men clearly understood the language of protest and linked prostitution to nationalism and to the Revolution in their efforts to establish elaborate brothel enterprises. Rufino Lavrı´n proposed an area slightly north of the centro on the Calzada de Nonoalco for the project. Lavrı´n anticipated that the project would take six months to construct, offering to finance the construction and management costs in exchange for an exclusive, twentyyear contract from the Federal District to run the space like a ‘‘city within a city.’’62 Architectural visionary Rau´l Odorica was more expansive in his projections for a red light district. He invoked the importance of the Federal District, its culture, and its sophistication as reasons that the city should want to establish a red light district on the outskirts of town. Writing that ‘‘in a city of the Federal District’s importance, whose population has grown considerably and whose culture and education are issues of constant preoccupation for the government, the fact that such centrally located streets as 58. ‘‘Nuestra posicio´n en el congreso contra la prostitucio´n,’’ El Machete, June 20, 1934. 59. AHCM, ‘‘Sanidad,’’ vol. 3891, file 49. 60. AHSSA-SP-IAV, box 3, file 8. 61. Ibid. 62. Letter from Rufino Lavrı´n to the Departmento de Salubridad Pu´blica, 1930, in AHSSA-SP-SJ, box 40, file 3.

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Cuauhtemoctzı´n, Rayo´n, and Libertad are full of ostentatious prostitutes, who conduct their business in public, is downright embarrassing and scandalizes residents, many of whom are children and young girls.’’ In his proposal Odorica invoked the social goals of the Revolution as a reason that the District should grant him the license. Couching his discussion in terms of work, freedom from slavery, national pride, and the women’s right to freedom from oppression, he said that poor women were ‘‘inhumanly exploited by people who lease the space and then charged exaggerated rents so that the women profit as little as possible.’’ Lest District policymakers think Odorica would exploit Mexican women in a similar manner, he asserted that his goals were to promote Mexico City’s reputation nationally and internationally, emphasizing that it was his ‘‘desire to show foreign visitors that our city is free from this social ill so that they will wish to visit our culture and civilization.’’63 Like other proposals submitted to the Departamento del Distrito Federal over this period by men, Odorica’s plan envisioned an invisible, contained, and self-sufficient vice district that might anticipate a client’s every need. He planned to construct small bedrooms, furnished with ‘‘the most modern conveniences,’’ for ‘‘the use of people who enjoy these kinds of pleasures in common, in places where they can go with groups of friends, tourists, and conference-goers who can’t understand diversion unless they are together.’’ So that the zone might also attract those clients who were merely interested in a social diversion, Odorica promised to add bars, theaters, movies, and shops for the clientele’s entertainment and convenience.64 Over the 1930s the contradictory imperatives of moralization and development met head on, when public officials, still believing that it was reasonable for men to visit brothels, sought to render such sites invisible and yet accessible for interested tourists and patrons. Working males protested the government’s equation of them with brothel clientele, knowing that such men were considered bad fathers. In fact, neighborhood men showed that they were good family men by demanding that the city do something about the proliferation of vice. Lenocinio laws criminalized procuring but exempted madams who operated casas de asignacio´n from prosecution. Amid the metropolitan disputes over the moral and economic implications of the zonas de tolerancia, some 63. Letter from Rau´l Odorica to La´zaro Ca´rdenas, 1937, in AGN-APR-LC, file 525.3/1. 64. Ibid.

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matronas quietly moved their businesses to neighborhoods where they could cater to upscale clients, politicians, businessmen, and tourists with limited police interference. Over the 1920s and 1930s sexual commerce became geographically and socially stratified, but it did not disappear. Although it is not clear what happened to such proposals as Lavrı´n’s and Odorica’s, the fact that these men sought to compete with the ‘‘high rent’’ matronas suggests that metropolitan sexual commerce was once again a lucrative enterprise that challenged the limits of tolerance in the capital city.

6 The End of the Road? G e n d e r a n d th e P o l i t i c s o f A b o l i t i o n

The End of the Road was the title of an American-made film intended to combat venereal disease that public health officials screened in such downtown movie theaters as the Cine Isabel and the Progreso Mundial in the late 1920s and early 1930s.1 Before the main attraction, projectionists shocked audiences with graphic images of untreated venereal disease infection acquired over a lifetime of bodily abuse and vice. Afterward, hygienists and venereal disease specialists gave brief talks and answered questions from the audience. The authorities had the lurid film screened to impress moviegoers with the idea that whether or not a prostitute was legal and wherever a sexual encounter took place, a painful and degenerative death was the ‘‘end of the road’’ for promiscuous men and women. But what was the end of the road for the reformist movement to redeem prostitutes and at least tame Mexico City’s men? The quest to redeem ‘‘wayward girls’’ and persuade 1. Departamento de Salubridad Pu´blica, Memoria de los trabajos realizados por el Departamento de Salubridad Pu´blica, 1925–1928 (Mexico City: Ediciones del Departmento de Salubridad Pu´blica, 1928), vol. 11, p. 254.

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men to curb their sexual behavior had encountered roadblocks and obstacles along the way. Female behavior was medicalized and pimps were penalized while promiscuous men were harshly judged but rallied to defend their rights as both brothel patrons and family heads. Would redemption be the final destination? Over the late 1930s the question of whether or not to abolish prostitution in Mexico gradually occupied center stage in debates among policymakers and activist groups with social reform agendas. If the 1872, 1898, and 1914 prostitution regulations had not explicitly addressed the abolition of regulated prostitution, the 1926 Calles-Gaste´lum Reglamento clearly anticipated the end of the system by which prostitutes were registered and periodically inspected for venereal diseases. But like the other provisions regarding sexual behavior, cultural reform, and morality in revolutionary Mexico City, abolition generated considerable controversy that centered around ideas regarding health, work, money, rights, and appropriate societal roles for revolutionary men and women. However, it would not be until 1940 that the government finally suspended the Reglamento. Like those who debated men’s social roles in the 1920s and 1930s, abolitionists relied on ‘‘traditional’’ understandings of gender and family to promote their cause and deployed the idea of motherhood in their proposals and in debates. Indeed, feminists and eugenicists who were connected to broader transnational rights and public health movements were among the most outspoken supporters of abolishing the Reglamento. But while feminists pursued an agenda oriented toward securing political rights for women, eugenicists argued that regulated sexual commerce, which did not prevent the spread of sexually transmitted infections, threatened the wellbeing of all Mexicans. Like feminists and eugenicists, prostitutes, too, joined the public debate over work, the role of the state in peoples’ lives, and the prudence of abolition. Like feminists and eugenicists, moreover, they deployed motherhood as a reason they should be guaranteed greater social and political rights. However, prostitutes organized in the late 1930s to defend their rights to work and to demand a more inclusive idea of motherhood, nationalism, and citizenship than either the state or activists had contemplated offering, a potent reminder of the limits of the new laws. Ultimately, abolition represented a flawed compromise between activists, health officials, federal political figures, prostitutes, and their clientele, all of whom promoted and challenged the agenda for reform in the 1920s and 1930s. Indeed, abolitionism emerged as a way to protect the rights of the prostitute to work and the client to play without the state’s intervention, for the

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‘‘crime of contagion’’ that replaced the Reglamento combined medical and legal precepts and placed disease victims, rather than sexually promiscuous women, under medical and legal surveillance.

The Birth of Abolitionism Although it was not until the 1930s that abolition became a focus of debate among reformers based in the capital, it was not a new concept, for as early as 1908 Dr. Luis Lara y Pardo had discussed the elimination of sexual commerce in Mexico.2 Abolitionism’s denunciation of the system by which the state subjected poor women to the exploitation of the matronas and exposed them to deadly diseases derived from the European movement for repealing the British Contagious Diseases Acts, which in the 1860s had implemented in British cities a limited version of the French system for regulating prostitution. The men and women of the British abolition movement subscribed to an older tradition of reform, that of the movement for the abolition of African slavery in the West Indies and South America. Drawing parallels between African slavery and the victimization of prostitutes under ‘‘white slavery,’’ these self-styled new abolitionists formed an international congress to study the potential for implementing the policy in a global setting.3 By the end of the nineteenth century the International Abolitionist Federation had a base of members from England, France, and the United States, with some adherents in Asia and Latin America as well.4 The group held periodic meetings to discuss how to undermine the ‘‘system of tolerated houses,’’ or brothels, and to encourage members to pressure their governments to abolish government-tolerated prostitution in countries where it was a registered and inspected trade—such as Mexico. After World War I, the Federation’s members worked with the new League of Nations to document the flows of prostitutes throughout the world and to understand the peculiar national contexts in which prostitution flourished.5 Men and women working for the League of Nations Committee to Suppress the Traffic in Women and Children had documented the flow of French and Eastern 2. Lara y Pardo, La prostitucio´n en Me´xico, 225. 3. Walkowitz. Prostitution and Victorian Society, 90–148; Petrie, Singular Iniquity, 97–98. 4. Corbin, Women for Hire, 311–12; Lavrin, Women, Feminism and Social Change, 269. 5. League of Nations, Traffic in Women and Children, pt. 1, pp. 119–21.

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European women toward Mexico and had concluded that although foreign women comprised nowhere near the majority of prostitutes in Mexico, their presence there and their exploitation by European souteneurs merited serious attention.6 Mexicans who supported international rights-based and health-based projects like the Abolitionist Federation and the League of Nations had long been aware of the European activists’ ideas and took advantage of the new La´zaro Ca´rdenas administration’s stated commitment to progressivism to promote actively the abolition of the Reglamento in the mid-1930s. These abolitionists worked in public health and welfare institutions such as the Departamento de Salubridad Pu´blica and the Consejo Tutelar para Menores Infractores; they organized conferences on the topics of prostitution and human rights; and they advocated abolition in a variety of public forums. Although the movement to abolish the Reglamento in Mexico counted on support from a variety of quarters, its most ardent enthusiasts were feminists and eugenicists. Those who supported women’s rights and the members of the small but influential Mexico City eugenics circle sometimes overlapped, but members of the two movements largely espoused different goals, for feminists based their opposition to the Reglamento on the idea that it prevented women from exercising their political rights as individuals, whereas eugenicists couched their opposition to it in terms of promoting the collective health and the well-being of the future of the Mexican ‘‘race.’’ Nevertheless, the groups coincided in their belief that the complex regulatory apparatus that supported brothels, cabarets, hotels, and other venues in which women were sexually exploited was unhealthy, inhumane, and antirevolutionary. Women who called themselves feminists had long advocated for female prostitutes in Mexico, visiting them at the Hospital Morelos and publicizing poor women’s social experiences in magazines that catered to a limited but interested audience in the late teens and early 1920s. Well-educated advocates of female suffrage and promoters of a greater public role for women, Mexican feminists defined themselves as distinct from but sympathetic to prostitutes, claiming that their ‘‘natural’’ feminine sensibilities gave them familiarity with and sympathy for Mexico’s most socially marginal members. Like women in Europe and the United States, Mexican feminists used the ideal of ‘‘political motherhood’’ to pressure the federal government to give all Mexican women the right to vote. As early as 1916 the young 6. Ibid.

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woman who served Venustiano Carranza as his personal secretary, Hermila Galindo, had demanded the vote for women on reformist grounds, writing that ‘‘the woman needs suffrage and asks for it from a moral standpoint, because of what she can do with the vote. She needs it so that she can combat alcoholism, prostitution, juvenile delinquency, pornography, and everything that works against morality.’’7 Moreover, abolitionism had generated interest at government-sponsored feminist conferences designed to incorporate attendees into the polı´tica de masas that characterized the revolutionary period. Despite their interest in cultivating women’s support for the official party and for public projects, federal legislators consistently refused to grant women suffrage on the grounds that their prior ‘‘failure to develop a movement for’’ suffrage and the perceived sympathy of women for the Catholic Church might make them reactionary political elements, something the revolutionary nation still smarting over the failure of the anticlerical reforms of the mid-1920s could ill afford. Feminists thus worked to combat this image and continued to press for universal suffrage by demonstrating their commitment to secular revolution and to securing full political rights for women so they might be agents of progressive social change. After a series of conferences sponsored by the Mujeres de la Raza (1925) and the Congreso Nacional de Mujeres Obreras y Campesinas (1931, 1933, and 1934), women affiliated with the women’s auxiliary of the new umbrella party, the Partido Nacional Revolucionario (PNR), and with the International League of Iberian and Latin American Women organized the Congress Against Prostitution in Mexico City in 1934.8 It was at the 1934 Conference Against Prostitution that feminists wholeheartedly embraced the prostitution question in public, demonstrating their commitment both to revolution and to progressive causes.9 The Mexico City Congress Against Prostitution was intended to demonstrate the ability of women to organize and debate policy regarding impor7. Hermila Galindo de Topete, Estudio de la Srta . . . con motivo de los temas que han de absolverse en el Seguno Congreso Femenista de Yucata´n, Noviembre 20 de 1916 (Me´rida: Impr. del Gobierno Constitucionalista, 1916), in Lau and Ramos, Mujer y revolucio´n, 267. Between 1915 and 1919 Galindo, with Artemisa Sa´enz, edited the short-lived feminist magazine, La mujer moderna. Tun˜on, Mujeres en Me´xico, 145. 8. Leticia Barraga´n and Amanda Rosales, ‘‘Congresos nacionales de obreras y campesinas,’’ Historia Obrera 2, no. 5 (1975); Soto, Emergence of the Modern Mexican Woman, 107–11. 9. For a discussion of this position, see Adela Formoso de Obrego´n Santacilia, La mujer mexicana en la organizacio´n social del paı´s (Mexico City: Talleres Gra´ficos de la Nacio´n, 1939), 24, 28.

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tant urban and social issues in a public forum. It is likely the organizers also hoped to secure the support of PNR presidential candidate and future president La´zaro Ca´rdenas for female suffrage and a reformist agenda. But despite the effort to demonstrate a united, feminist front, the congress highlighted deep divisions among women in the feminist movement itself.10 Most of the organizers were women affiliated with the PNR’s women’s auxiliary.11 The PNR, which Calles had organized in 1929, would become the Partido Revolucionario Mexicano under Ca´rdenas before eventually evolving into the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) in the 1940s. But a number of more radical members of the Mexican Communist Party and the permanent Congress on Peasant and Working Women attended as well. Although the meetings, which were presided over by Celia A. de Reyes del Campillo, primarily attracted professional, middle-class women from the Federal District, they also attracted delegates from such states as Guanajuato and San Luis Potosı´ and even the country of Ecuador, since the League counted members across Latin America.12 The conference’s organizers selected the downtown campus of the National Preparatory School as the site for the four-day conference to determine prostitution’s causes and ways to reduce the occupation’s incidence among the capitalino population. But the questions the organizers asked, and the answers the speakers provided, sparked controversy among the assembly, demonstrating that the moderate and more radical factions had mixed feelings about both the social origins of the trade and its potential remedies.13 Over the several days that the women met in downtown Mexico City, it became clear that analyses of the causes and remedies for prostitution were clear determinants of political attitudes. ‘‘Moderate’’ delegates, who belonged to the PNR women’s wing and many of whom worked for the state, stood on one side. The more radical women affiliated with the Mexican Communist Party stood on the other. The divisions crystallized around questions of gender relations, the role of the economy, and state in10. On the tensions among members of feminist groups in the Southern Cone, see Lavrin, Women, Feminism and Social Change, 35–36. 11. This group published Nosotras: Revista de la mujer que lucha, which publicized and supported the conference. ‘‘Primer Congreso de Intelectuales,’’ Nosotras, June 1934, 13. 12. ‘‘Se inauguro´ el congreso de la Liga Internacional de Mujeres,’’ El Universal, June 11, 1934, 1. 13. Ibid. An opening speech by Dr. Francisco Reyes, head of the Hospital Morelos, suggests that the conference had government backing, an additional issue that caused problems and which revealed the political divisions with which the incipient movement had to deal as well.

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terest in commercial sexuality. Marı´a Rı´os Ca´rdenas, editor of the shortlived Mujer magazine (1926–29), gave a provocative speech in which she requested that Congress financially remunerate women who worked at home, in order to balance financial power between the sexes.14 The Guayaquil delegate suggested that there be only one sexual standard and that men and women alike adhere to principles of monogamy.15 The moderates, led by Reyes and Leonor Llach, who worked at the Departamento de Prevencio´n y Readaptacio´n Social, argued that any effort to remedy gender imbalances had to originate and be based in the home, the appropriate target of state intervention.16 Radical feminists, who belonged to the Communist Party, opposed this denunciation of male behavior and advocacy of state intervention for several reasons. Consuelo Uranga, Concha Michel, and other members of the permanent Congress on Working and Peasant Women, which had developed out of the conferences originally organized by the PNR in the early 1930s argued three points that centered around nondomestic issues: that women deserved equal pay for equal work, that the Reglamento para el ejercicio de la prostitucio´n had to be suppressed, and that it was the state’s duty to educate women so that they might enter the political arena.17 When Uranga delivered a speech on the economic causes of prostitution, blaming capitalism, industrialization, and state policies for the prevalence of sexual commerce in the capital, the congress divided among those willing to attack the state’s policies and those who sought more conciliatory approaches in order to convince Mexico’s male political leaders to grant women suffrage. The radical delegates retired to the nearby Simo´n Bolı´var Amphitheater, where they continued to debate the relationship between capitalism and sexual exploitation, while the moderates accused the radicals of seeking to humiliate the Mexican government, which had presumably helped sponsor the conference. Although the Communist Party leaders did not believe the ques14. ‘‘La sesio´n de ayer en el congreso contra la prostitucio´n,’’ El Universal, June 13, 1934. 15. Ibid. This was an issue that preoccupied feminists across Latin America. Lavrin, Women, Feminism and Social Change, 133–34. 16. ‘‘Lo que piden las mujeres: La guerra al vicio. Uno de los congresos contra la prostitucio´n termino´ sus labores. Sigue el otro,’’ El Universal, June 14, 1934. 17. The women affiliated with the PNR and those with the more radical PCM had clashed before during the conferences on women workers and peasants. El Machete, the official—and during this period, underground—newspaper of the Mexican Communist Party, had protested the organizational efforts of the PNR as tactics by the pequen˜a burguesı´a as early as October 1931, during the first Congreso de Mujeres Obreras y Campesinas. See El Machete, October 10, 1931.

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tion of prostitution was a pressing one, the party’s newspaper, El Machete, nevertheless defended the radical women’s position. Calling the moderates ‘‘little conservative ladies,’’ it attacked Rı´os Ca´rdenas’s idea that the state should pay wives as absurd and observed that such a policy would both please managers, who could pay men less, and undermine the worker’s movement. An editorial in the paper announced that ‘‘the problem of prostitution is not one of the major problems confronting workers and the exploited masses, as is the fight against the capitalist regime, which subjects the working woman to twice the exploitation to which it subjects the man.’’18 For the Communists, at least, it was pointless to debate the state’s intervention in sexual behavior, for once the structures of capitalism disappeared, women would no longer need to work as prostitutes.19 Although the conference exposed serious divisions among Mexican feminists, it succeeded in raising the issue of gender and sexual commerce in a serious, public forum, linking that issue to political parties, and demonstrating the ability of women to research, analyze, and debate the origins of difficult social problems in Mexico.20 After the presidential elections assured Ca´rdenas’s seat in the executive office, feminists then used the issues of prostitution and sexual commerce to pressure the administration to keep its promise to grant women the vote by promoting their political acumen with respect to social problems.21 In a speech she made to the Association of Socialist Lawyers, head of the Tribunal para Menores Infractores Dr. Mathilde Rodrı´guez-Cabo reminded Ca´rdenas of his ‘‘solemn promise to repair the injustices which previous governments have rendered to women, in not rec18. ‘‘Nuestra posicio´n en el congreso contra la prostitucio´n,’’ El Machete, June 20, 1934, 3. 19. This position eventually created tension between women and men on the left. In an interview regarding her relationship with the PCM in the 1930s, Concha Michel spoke about the party’s leader, Herna´n Laborde, noting that ‘‘Herna´n Laborde, who was a companion of mine for twelve years and secretary of the Communist Party, would have said that he thought that women’s problems were not problems of structure but of superstructure, and that when we have transformed the capitalist system into the socialist system, women’s problems would disappear.’’ Quoted in Tun˜on Pablos, Mujeres que se organizan, 65. 20. On the ideology of a ‘‘woman’s sphere’’ in the United States, see Ginzburg, Women and the Work of Benevolence, 1–10; also see Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992). 21. On the suffrage movement, see Tun˜on Pablos, Mujeres que se organizan; see also Verna Carleton Milla´n, Mexico Reborn (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1937), 165–68, and Ward M. Morton, Woman Suffrage in Mexico (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1962).

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ognizing the rights to which the woman legitimately aspires.’’22 State workers used the public nature of their work to pressure the government to grant women political equality also.23 The Empleadas de la Federacio´n also complained about the politics of the PNR, saying that it had failed in its efforts on behalf of women. Demanding subsidies for their Secretarı´a de Accio´n Femenina, they wrote, ‘‘There is an infinite number of women who are needy and who, because they have no money or means of support, turn to prostitution, and there are numerous cases of miserable women whom we could help with the contribution of all of the women who work for the government, or at the very least, prepare them within the boundaries of feminine defenses to raise their situation in life.’’24 In the same spirit of progressive philanthropy, individual women similarly pressured the regime to grant women the right to vote by promoting their dedication to social assistance, requesting money to establish private reformatories as part of a ‘‘patriotic’’ effort. Hermila Galindo herself wrote to Ca´rdenas in 1935 to request money to establish a reformatory for prostitutes in the south of the city. She presented her reasons for wanting to do so as nationalistic ones. Galindo wrote that ‘‘on many occasions I have cried, because I have not been able to help my country and my people, especially the woman, who an infinite number of times has fallen into the dens of prostitution because she did not have the means to live honorably.’’25 Galindo told Ca´rdenas she planned to establish a feminist library in the suburb of Tlalpan and teach women useful skills, as well as organize discussions on such vices as prostitution.26 In addition, Eloida Cruz, for example, sent a telegram to the president in 1938, noting her efforts to raise the cultural level of women and children in her demand that he fulfill his promise to have women voting by the end of the term.27 Like feminists, proponents of eugenics believed that regulated prostitution had negative implications for Mexico’s future, but they based their opposition to the legislation on different criteria. Although feminist circles and 22. Mathilde Rodrı´guez Cabo, La mujer y la Revolucio´n: Conferencia dictada por la Dra. Mathilde Rodrı´guez Cabo en el Frente Socialista de Abogados (Mexico City, 1937). 23. AGN-APR-LC, file 544/1. Consuelo B. de Mora, of Monterrey, Nuevo Leo´ n, petitioned for money to set up a Casa de Prevencio´n Social in her own city. AGN-APR-LC, file 462–1/78. 24. AGN-APR-LC, file 544/1. 25. AGN-APR-LC, file 704.11/34. 26. Ibid., file 462–1/78. 27. Ibid., file 544/1.

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the Mexican eugenics movement shared some members, the two groups differed in that eugenicists viewed prostitution not in terms of women’s rights but as a matter of community health and well-being. In fact, although they discussed their opposition to tolerated prostitution in national terms, eugenicists, like feminists, were integrated into wider Pan American and even global health networks, exchanging information about disease, hygiene, and sanitation with colleagues around the world. Proponents of eugenics couched their concerns over prostitution in terms of the nation’s future, citing irresponsible reproduction, unfit parents, and poor child-raising techniques as potential threats to any hope Mexico had of achieving economic development. They were concerned with a variety of health matters, including the spread of tuberculosis, alcoholism, typhoid, and yellow fever, but they focused on prostitution because of its association with syphilis, which had the potential to infect newborns. The Mexican eugenics movement attracted revolutionaries, feminists, and health specialists from across the country, but like feminism, it was centered in Mexico City, where the members of the Sociedad Mexicana de Eugenesia held meetings and from which they published their journal, Eugenesia.28 By 1931, the Mexican Eugenics Society held a series of conferences designed to ponder the relation of health to the ‘‘progress of the Mexican people’’ and to ponder the best means of assuring the abolition of tolerated prostitution.29 The eugenics ideal of preventing inauspicious reproduction and child rearing informed health and welfare initiatives in the 1930s, for many prominent eugenicists, including Mathilde Rodrı´guez Cabo and Eliseo Ramı´rez, head of the Central Laboratory of the Departamento de Salubridad Pu´blica, were also involved with correctional and welfare agencies. Like feminists, Mexican eugenicists focused on motherhood for several reasons. In the first place, they urged the implementation of publicly funded welfare initiatives to support working mothers, who if they could not earn enough money to support their children through ‘‘honorable’’ work, might ‘‘fall’’ into prostitution. If mothers turned to prostitution, then they might become infected with diseases and vices that could threaten the future generation. According to an editorial in Asistencia, the magazine of the Federal Dis28. As early as the late Porfiriato, ideas about combining preventive medicine and health policy had informed the outlook of some groups, such as the one that published the short-lived circular La cruz blanca. In the early 1920s eugenicists organized in earnest, holding a Congress of the Child, which highlighted the problems syphilis posed for the nation’s future. 29. Stepan, The ‘‘Hour of Eugenics,’’ 55–58; Stern, ‘‘Responsible Mothers and Normal Children,’’ 369–96.

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trict’s welfare offices, social assistance was neither ‘‘philanthropy nor charity.’’ Instead, it was a ‘‘more modern, less romantic concept based on the interest of everyone, and the idea of the close interdependence of all the components of one social body.’’ In this sense, the editorial noted, ‘‘The service of assistance is of transcendental importance, for thanks to it, man, who is the indispensable element in the economic order and fountain of spiritual and social possibilities, may be reeducated and rehabilitated.’’30 Proponents of eugenics linked protective health initiatives to the Revolution’s commitment to defending marginal social groups from the tyranny of the rich or corrupt as well. The eugenics ideal of protective and preventive medicine emphasized that prostitutes were victims of not only society but also the state. As Doctor A. Vergara, president of the Mexican Eugenics Society wrote President Ca´rdenas in 1935, ‘‘No woman should be considered a prostitute, much less officially classified as one; no woman should be permitted to exercise sexual commerce privately or publicly as a way of earning a living, and no one should be able to live from the exploitation of a woman who prostitutes herself, and it is even worse that a revolutionary government should receive contributions from the profits generated from sexual commerce.’’31 For thinkers like Vergara, ending the toleration of sexual commerce in Mexico would also fulfill the Revolution’s promise to abolish ‘‘antisocial subgroups.’’ As public officials worried that prostitutes would lose faith in the Revolution’s potential to redeem them from their misery, abolitionists argued that regulation only showed prostitutes an open doorway to ‘‘a progressive degradation, facilitating their exploitation by pimps and matronas’’ and urged the reform of the law.32 And finally, proponents of eugenics argued that the abolition of regulated prostitution was consistent with the Revolution’s emphasis on the future of the national community at large. An anonymous abolitionist associated with the Departamento de Salubridad Pu´blica presented a paper to the department in 1930 in which he advocated the abolition of the Reglamento, saying that he was convinced of the ‘‘grave ills that tolerated prostitution causes in Mexico.’’33 In a series of proposals, including the establishment of more venereal disease clinics and the elimination of ‘‘cohabitation, promiscuity, robberies and all the crimes that originate with prostitution, because 30. ‘‘Editorial,’’ Asistencia: Organo oficial de la Beneficencia Pu´blica en el Distrito Federal, August 15, 1934, 3. 31. ‘‘Dr. A. Vergara to Ca´rdenas,’’ in AGN-APR-LC, file 425.3/6. 32. AHSSA-SP-IAV, box 5, file 1. 33. ‘‘Sugestiones para el caso de abolir las [sic] prostitucio´n, in AHSSA-SP-SJ, unclassified.

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we all know that prostitution and other vices go hand in hand,’’ he said that ‘‘it is necessary that the State worry about the future.’’34 He also proposed prohibiting women from working in cabarets and creating ‘‘a group of women who are experts, who have abandoned prostitution and who, not wanting to continue in their depraved ways of the past, want to work honestly and honorably to apply the knowledge they gained in their lives of luxury and vice to benefit their old colleagues.’’35 He also promoted the idea of schools for the women. But in the end he doubted that prostitution would ever go away; ‘‘As long as there are men, vices, and misery, there will be prostitution.’’ Nevertheless, he linked the ideal of helping the women to the Revolution itself, saying ‘‘to save them would the greatest triumph.’’36

A Right to Live as Gente Decente Feminists and eugenicists resorted to traditional understandings of ‘‘good motherhood’’ in order to argue for abolitionism. Despite the fact that they couched their protests against the Reglamento in terms that invoked the Revolution, these arguments echoed nineteenth-century Liberal politicians who had equated good motherhood with female citizenship almost a century before. Even criminologist Alfredo Quiroz, who advocated the abolition of the Reglamento, had drawn clear distinctions between prostitutes and mothers. But to the great consternation of feminists, eugenicists, and other abolitionists, Mexico City prostitutes responded to the attacks on their livelihood with outrage and argued that they, too, were mothers who had a right to well-being. In fact, late-1930s efforts to limit the employment of women in cabarets and to deregulate the zona de tolerancia pressured prostitutes into actively organizing to defend their rights as mothers and workers. Women who had worked in sexual commerce insisted that their work was temporary and that it was in no way reasonable or just to deny them the right to be mothers and to take care of their children merely because they worked in a ‘‘shameful industry.’’ Indeed, prostitutes insisted that their work was important to society and stated that they deserved the right to earn money and to take care of their families the best way they knew how. 34. Ibid., 3. 35. Ibid., 5. 36. Ibid., 7.

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In the 1930s prostitutes faced two challenges from authorities and organized to voice their concerns over the eventuality of abolition: the Federal District’s renewed campaign to oust women from cabaret work in 1937, and the District’s effort to dismantle the zonas de tolerancia in the spring of 1938. These affronts to the practice of organized prostitution represented small steps toward the abolition of the sex trade and, for many reformers, represented a final step toward redeeming the people from the vices of the Porfiriato. Believing their livelihoods to be under attack, however, prostitutes formed protest groups, physically resisted policies, and threatened to stage public and scandalous demonstrations if they were denied the chance to earn their livings through their ‘‘shameful industry.’’ By the fall of 1937 the Departamento de Salubridad Pu´blica, now under the directorship of Ca´rdenas appointee and former general Dr. Jose´ Siurob, initiated a new campaign to take the women out of the cabarets. In a statement he distributed regarding the department’s reasons for supporting the initiative, Siurob stated that it was appropriate to protect women from abusive work in such venues, ‘‘where, it is well known, they serve only to ensure that clientele drink more, and since their income depends on the number of drinks they sell, little by little these women become alcoholics, with all the bad consequences that accompany that vice.’’37 Indeed, Siurob’s Departamento de Salubridad Pu´blica called the initiative to oust women from cabarets ‘‘revolutionary.’’ But labor leaders and cabaret workers alike were quick to question the ‘‘revolutionary’’ character of the department’s motives, for they estimated that some five to six thousand women would be unemployed once the policies went into effect. And others insisted that if the cabarets shut as a consequence of this action by the Departamento de Salubridad Pu´blica, some 24,000 people would be harmed, namely 400 musicians, 600 waiters, 5,000 women, and 18,000 family dependents.38 Prostitutes organized to protest the department’s initiative for several reasons. First, they emphasized that their transition into sexual commerce was individual and gradual. Like the ‘‘daughters of disgrace’’ in the 1920s, prostitutes engaged in cabaret work emphasized that their involvement in an undesirable trade was related to a complex web of problems caused by men, work, family, and scarce economic resources. Radical 1930s cabaret dancer Virginia Ferna´ndez emphasized this transitory and transitional nature of sexual commerce in the capital when she spoke about one prostitute’s history, saying 37. ‘‘No ma´s mujeres en los cabarets,’’ El Universal, October 8, 1937. 38. ‘‘Cerca de 30,000 cesantes al cerrar los cabarets,’’ La Prensa, October 23, 1937, 11.

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the history of that girl is the history of almost all of them. The boyfriend satisfies himself at the altar of a false love that tramples the flower of innocence; the parents, instead of pardoning the girl, throw her out of the house, and then life in all its cruelty appears. She looks for work but is offered caresses; hunger looms and uncertainty and after that social deprecation; little by little the loss of scruples induces her to live as she must, without worrying about anything but getting bread to the child who has stayed home alone in the bed or watched by a charitable neighbor who lives in the same sordid tenement house.39 In addition, prostitutes insisted that they should also be accorded the respect Mexican society accorded mothers. As Ferna´ndez’s statement to the press made clear, many women who worked in sexual commerce had children who depended on them for food and shelter. Sometimes child-rearing responsibilities, as Ferna´ndez indicated, were the reasons unemployed or underemployed women entered prostitution; sometimes children resulted from a life of sexual commerce in which contraception was rarely available, abortion was illegal and dangerous, and a mother did not always know the father or feel comfortable asking him for financial assistance.40 Moreover, although pregnancy sometimes provoked a prostitute to petition to be erased from the register, more often it kept her in the trade in order to sustain her dependents. A final issue on which late-1930s protesters insisted was that their participation in the trade had to be considered transitional, for it was not work on which one could count forever. Indeed, some women stayed in prostitution for some seven to eight years before leaving to live with someone, reporting that this was the upper limit to the number of years a woman could use her body to attract clients.41 In the 1930s, for example, Marı´a Milla´n, a veteran cabaret worker and prostitute, told a group of fellow prostitutes 39. ‘‘La situacio´n de las cabareteras: Las mariposas nocturnas pugnan porque se las deje seguir trabajando,’’ La Prensa, October 11, 1937, 11. 40. For women in this kind of situation, illegal and dangerous abortion or infanticide emerged as alternatives to keeping the child. Archivo Histo´rico del Reclusorio del Sur del Distrito Federal, Quinta corte penal, Infanticidio, file 1367/38. 41. ‘‘Reglamento para el ejercicio de la prostitucio´n en el Distrito Federal’’ (1914), chap. 3, art. 14. Also, in 1908 Lara y Pardo had observed that most prostitutes were between the ages of fifteen and thirty (La prostitucio´n en Me´xico, 21). Women who testified at the DSP hearings about cabaret work complained that after some ten years of work in ‘‘the life,’’ they had trouble finding work. ‘‘La vida miserable y tra´gica de las cabareteras revelada ante varios funcionarios oficiales,’’ El Gra´fico, October 19, 1937, 12.

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that ten years was almost the maximum a body could take of repeated exposure to sexually transmitted disease, physical abuse, and poverty. Milla´n said that after a decade of cabaret work, customers no longer found her attractive. When she addressed a group of public health officials, cabareteras, and prostitutes, she proclaimed, ‘‘This life is tragic, the cabaret chews out our guts. And afterwards? When we are no longer attractive, it spits us out.’’42 Milla´n wondered how she was to feed her children after she was no longer sexually desirable enough to find someone to take care of her.43 As Milla´n suggested to the assembly of prostitutes, women who left sexual commerce often had a limited number of choices, including life with a man who would support her and her children, work as a matrona, or a life of unskilled labor, domestic servitude, or informal service work and petty commerce. But even these did not guarantee a full separation from ‘‘the life,’’ according to Milla´n. In describing her reasons for becoming a prostitute, Marı´a Milla´n told public health officials that she had worked in a cabaret and as a mujer pu´blica in order to provide food and shelter for her children. Nevertheless, she said, her lifestyle was her deepest source of personal shame. She spoke for many women, she said, when she claimed that her greatest desire was for her children to see her as an honorable mother, the moral, upstanding head of a family like any other. In fact, Milla´n painted public institutions themselves as immoral for hindering her efforts to provide food for her children. Complaining about the city’s zoning ordinances, cabaret regulations, and health requirements, Milla´n said, Sanidad is completely shameless. What do they know of those of us who work in the cabarets? What do they know if we go without sleeping or eating, if we suffer without food because we are sick? At the same time we have to ensure that our children remain ignorant of what we really are. It would be a matter of pride and satisfaction to take them the money we have earned working at a machine, and have them say to us ‘‘Mother, you are honorable!’’ Suggesting the widespread nature of this feeling, the group of assembled prostitutes shouted ‘‘Yes!’’44 42. ‘‘La vida miserable y tra´gica de las cabareteras revelada ante varios funcionarios oficiales,’’ El Gra´fico, October 19, 1937, 12. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid. Prostitutes also aspired to being treated with respect. The women frequently complained about Inspeccio´n de Sanidad agents who requested bribes or sexual favors in exchange for not taking prostitutes in to the delegacio´n. See AHSSA-SP-IAV, box 3, file 2; also see ‘‘Abominables excesos de miembros de policı´a,’’ El Sol, February 12, 1927, in AHSSA- SP- SJ, box 13, file 2.

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It is likely that the protests of the late 1930s galvanized only a portion of the women who worked in metropolitan sexual commerce, for the trade’s class differences, geographic dispersion, and organizational stratification no doubt limited the potential of all women involved in sexually oriented businesses to find common ground. Moreover, prostitutes were suspicious of the Departamento de Salubridad Pu´blica’s proposals that they unionize to pressure cabaret owners into compliance with the new rules, because they worried that unionization would brand them as prostitutes forever. As one woman told a reporter for El Nacional, ‘‘I’ll keep dancing and drinking, but maybe then the work will be more dangerous, since we won’t have the protection and constant vigilance of the inspectors.’’45 However, she rejected the Departamento de Salubridad Pu´blica’s proposal that cabaret workers unionize as such, precisely because she did not want to remain a prostitute indefinitely. She observed that ‘‘we have not all become what we wanted to become, but the fact is that we are workers, the worst class of workers, but we have a right to live as gente decente’’ (decent people).46 For prostitutes, like the anonymous interviewee, this right included the privilege of deciding when to define themselves as prostitutes and when to decide to get out of the trade.47 Instead of forming their own association, then, cabareteras petitioned the Departamento de Salubridad Pu´blica to provide them with the funds to form a clothes-manufacturing cooperative as proof of its intent to help them separate definitively from their trade.48 Women organized along lines of common interests, but ironically the prostitutes’ movement was clearly based on an identity formulated around a common desire to move away from their trade; they did not wish to suffer discrimination, but neither did they want their status as prostitutes to be permanent. Rather, these women saw their work as a transitional phase from which they hoped to advance. In the face of organized protest and claims that the Departamento de Salubridad Pu´blica itself was immoral, antirevolutionary, and insensitive to the needs of public women, the government found itself on the defensive. In self-defense the department placed an advertisement in city newspapers calling the women antirevolutionary and lamenting that the cabareteras did not 45. ‘‘La vida miserable y tra´gica de las cabareteras revelada ante varios funcionarios oficiales,’’ El Gra´fico, October 19, 1937, 12. 46. Ibid. 47. ‘‘Las cabareteras no creen conveniente el sindicalizarse,’’ La Prensa, October 30, 1937, 11. 48. ‘‘Las cabareteras formara´n una sociedad cooperativa,’’ La Prensa, October 28, 1937.

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understand that the Revolution was trying to help them by phasing out their kind of work. Reviewing the struggle between the cabarets and the department over the month of October, the advertisement’s text stated, ‘‘The first lesson we learned from those women was bitter. We were guided by our sense of revolutionary democracy, which tries to abolish the hateful classes in which a poorly organized society is divided, and we arrived, offering them our comradely hand but received in response a hostile demonstration of their inferiority complex which is exactly what keeps them in that absurd vocation of being cabareteras.’’49 The Departamento de Salubridad Pu´blica advocated that the women unionize, register with the Inspeccio´n de Sanidad, and fight against abusive cabaret owners, who were perhaps the true targets of the campaign. The Departamento del Distrito Federal’s 1938 decision to dismantle the zonas de tolerancia sparked a more bitter protest. In 1938, the city’s government decided to dismantle the zone completely under the idea of neighborhood development and in anticipation of abolition, which was to go into effect in 1940. The new zoning legislation presented prostitutes as ‘‘free’’ to move throughout the city looking for work, but in fact it barred them from such areas as Cuauhtemoctzı´n, which many of them had called home, and some complained about the blatant disregard of the Ca´rdenas administration for their problems by appealing to the president directly. In October 1938 the Supreme Court’s sala penal had sided with the Federal District and the community, decreeing that the city could forcibly evict the ‘‘women of ill repute’’ from their homes on Cuauhtemoctzı´n and the surrounding streets. Although the French matrona Pauline Duplan had organized an appeal, the court’s reasons for dismantling the zone echoed the earlier neighborhood protests in emphasizing work, youth, morality, and the visibility of vice. The opinion stated that ‘‘in that zone there are a number of factories and schools where workers and children are subjected to the relaxation of morality when they see these women and the scandals they cause.’’50 Prostitutes organized to offer a competing social vision and centered their demands around their own interpretations of revolutionary morality and justice, invoking their rights as mothers and nationalists. At eleven o’clock on March 18, the Departamento de Salubridad Pu´blica closed down the zone. As police evicted female residents of some 250 accesorias, the women 49. ‘‘La campan˜a de Salubridad en los cabarets,’’ El Nacional October 25, 1937, 8. 50. ‘‘Sera´n expulsadas de Cuauhtemoctzı´n,’’ Excelsior, October 16, 1938; ‘‘Cuauhtemoctzı´n no sera´ foco de inmoralidades: La corte niega un amparo pedido por varias vendedoras del amor,’’ Excelsior, March 18, 1939.

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gathered in the street and begged Officer Miguel Orrico de los Llanos, the head of the operation, to treat the matter with the morality and justice mothers and revolutionaries deserved. As one woman cried, ‘‘Sir, this is terrible, it seems like Judgment Day. What will we do? What about our children? Many of us maintain the children the ungrateful men have abandoned.’’51 Another prostitute protested, ‘‘This is not a demand for generosity but of justice’’ and pointed out that the women had not received prior notification and that the zone was functioning according to legal dispositions. Others threatened to cause public scandal: ‘‘If you evict us from this zone, we will have no other remedy than to invade the most central streets of the city, the hotels, cabarets, tenement houses. If you see us as a ‘social ill,’ with these measures we do nothing else than contaminate the rest of society, insofar as our activities will not be circumscribed in a fixed zone, under department vigilance. Instead, we will have to find our survival as we can, however we can, wherever we can.’’52 Finally, the prostitutes directly questioned the revolutionary convictions of the government and its bureaucrats. Invoking the Revolution’s commitment to redemption in their complaint to Dr. Leonides Andreu Almaza´n, they noted, Finally, Dr. Almaza´n, we think that the measures that guide your department might be inspired by a quest for social welfare, we won’t discuss the principles; however, we will discuss the procedures, in that in moments in which the nation suffers and in which the fight for survival is every day more difficult, and prostitution grows because of general misery, it strikes us as absurd that low-level functionaries use methods abolished by the Revolution to create problems for the government and the long-suffering city.53 Similarly, Gloria Mendoza Valde´z complained to Ca´rdenas, she and her associates in prostitution did not understand the Departamento de Salubridad Pu´blica’s closure of the zone or the constant abuses they suffered from police following the order. As Mendoza-Valde´z, who solicited clients in the capital’s commercial and political districts, stated in a 1939 letter to the 51. ‘‘Supresio´n de las zonas de tolerancia: fueron clausuradas las accesorias a todas sus habitantes en los barrios ma´s populosas y tradicionales de la ciudad de Me´xico,’’ El Nacional, May 19, 1939. 52. ‘‘Solamente se pide justicia al Sr. Dr. Leonides Andreu Almaza´n por la clausura de la zona de tolerancia,’’ El Universal, May 19, 1939. 53. AGN-APR-LC, file 525.3/001.

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president, the beatings and mistreatment she and her colleagues regularly suffered at the hands of disreputable policemen was hardly an improvement of their working conditions and welfare. In an impassioned text she complained that the police and health agents now demanded bribes from the women as well, making it difficult for them to take what little money they earned home to their children, writing that ‘‘we have become the victims of beatings on the part of the police,’’ and that ‘‘they [the police] charge us fines, then they don’t give up receipts, and most of the time we cannot pay them anyway!’’54 Echoing Milla´n and others, she wondered whether the women’s bodies and their children’s lives were less important than the nation’s image? Some months later, when it was clear that the Departamento de Salubridad Pu´blica would not budge on the matter, a group of women gathered on the patio of the building at the intersection of Lieja and Paseo de la Reforma that housed the department’s administrative offices brandishing an enormous poster that read ‘‘Where shall we go?’’55

The End of the Road By 1939, where prostitutes would work after abolition and how they would fare once they got there was apparently no longer the government’s concern, for amid the debates over the zona de tolerancia and prostitutes’ maternal status, legislation criminalizing disease transfer rendered the Reglamento’s provisions against venereal disease obsolete. President La´zaro Ca´rdenas himself had proposed the new delito de contagio in 1937, but it took two years to ratify the penal code reforms that purported to regularize the responsibility of disease prophylaxis once and for all. The head of the Federal Campaign Against Venereal Diseases, Enrique Villela, observed that the ‘‘reglamento implied the State’s tolerance for pimping and procuring,’’ which was incorrect, since the state had criminalized these acts in 1929 and 1931. In an effort to bring the Federal government into compliance with its own rules and to implement consistent expectations for state and society alike, Villela wrote, ‘‘Our country should and is creating a new system by which we will achieve a way to prevent the spread of venereal diseases.’’ For Villela, abolishing the Reglamento did not eliminate the ‘‘necessity of protecting society against offenses against morality and good customs,’’ or the 54. ‘‘Solamente se pide justica.’’ 55. Ibid.

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government’s interest in preventing ‘‘the corruption of people and the formation of centers that are habitually dedicated to prostitution,’’ but it would reestablish the guarantees with respect to individual rights, citizenship, and revolution that the federal government was determined to uphold.56 From a medical perspective, abolishing the Reglamento made sense for several reasons. In the first place, men who suffered from gonorrhea in the late 1930s had reported contracting the disease from prostitutes and nonprostitutes alike, demonstrating that the regulations did nothing to prevent the spread of contagious infections. The new crime of contagion also posited that women who suffered from syphilis or another illness might be more likely to seek treatment if they were not concerned about being locked in the Hospital Morelos with the registered public women. Moreover, the new legislation in essence protected the prostitute’s work, the client’s entertainment, the public’s health, and the state’s innocence vis-a`-vis lenocinio. As Villela explained, It is the duty of the state to ensure the health of all elements of society, and for this reason, besides promoting health measures that maintain the health of well people and preventing the dangerous illnesses that infect them, measures should be taken to make the labor of the health authorities more efficient. As a consequence, there is a need for social prophylaxis, which imposes the obligation of considering as a crime the dangerous state in which a person who is infected with a contagious affliction is a threat to others, with all the complications such infections can arise.57 Under this schema, men and women alike would bear the moral and physical burden of disease prophylaxis and treatment. The delito de contagio represented the final integration of medicine and law in the history of regulated prostitution in Mexico. It preserved both the prostitute’s work and the client’s leisure while also, ostensibly, protecting the public’s health. In his speech, Ca´rdenas noted: The question of contagion has been the object of authorities’ attention for a long time, and to prevent infections of this type they have 56. AHSSA-SP-IAV, box 5, file 1. 57. Ibid.

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presented measures that constitute the central objective of the prostitution regulation. Even so, statistics and experience over seventy-five years have demonstrated that this system is not only inefficient for achieving the ends it seeks but in many cases has been counterproductive and has led to considerations to substitute it with another, more adequate system that would resonate with the concept of social life that it evolving in the country, in accordance with the new orientations adopted as governmental norms by the most recent revolutionary administrations.58 When the legislature voted on this in 1939, its members declared abolition a matter of justice, an important pillar of Mexico’s international reputation, and a critical aspect of revolutionary morality. Perhaps symbolically, the Reglamento that had for so long officially tolerated the work of so-called ‘‘vendors of cheap love’’ was officially abolished on February 14, 1940, with the penal code modified to read ‘‘Anyone who, sick from syphilis or a venereal disease in a period of contagion or who is sick, has sexual relations, or nurses children, or in any other manner threatens the health of another, will be sanctioned with prison up to six years and a fine up to 10,000 pesos.’’59 The final discussions over abolition demonstrated the reformist conviction that the state had finally ended a situation that exploited women and exposed them to degenerative and life-threatening disease. For reformers, the abolition of the Reglamento was the end of the road. It was not, however, the end of prostitution.

58. Congreso, Ca´mara de Diputados, Diario de los debates de la H. Ca´mara de Diputados, 37th legislature, an˜o 1, no. 13 (September 28, 1937). 59. Figueroa Guerrero, ‘‘La prostitucio´n y el delito de lenocinio ,’’ 85; Congreso, Ca´mara de Diputados, Diario de los debates de la H. Ca´mara de Diputados, 38th legislature, an˜o 1, no. 7 (April 27, 1938).

Postscript The U nredeemed Revolution

In the end, abolition did not really redeem Mexico City’s prostitutes or their clients. Women were still working as prostitutes well into the 1940s, and men of all social classes still spent their salaries in bars, cabarets, and ‘‘houses of ill repute.’’ In fact, after all the protest and publicity abated, the abolition of the Reglamento probably represented something of a letdown for prostitutes, clients, and reformers alike. To be sure, eliminating the Reglamento ensured that the state was no longer implicated in an ‘‘immoral’’ trade or involved in women’s occupational choices and men’s entertainment decisions. And of course, the public health and penal legislation that made abolition possible criminalized pimping, procuring, and infecting another person with a sexually transmitted disease, holding men and women equally responsible for disease prophylaxis. But programs that promised to realign gender relations in Mexico, redeem poor women from their position as victims of the social order, and undermine Mexico’s cult of masculinity neither resolved the problem of female prostitution nor provided equitable remedies for ‘‘wayward’’ male and female behavior. Prostitutes did receive medical

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help and educational assistance, but clients were merely warned of the perils of sexual promiscuity, and only male pimps were truly prosecuted. Despite their supposed grounding in revolutionary ideals, moreover, medical and legal reforms were limited by their reliance on older ideas about gender and social class. Indeed, clients and prostitutes fought to make those categories more inclusive, but in the end, the reforms lacked the energy to truly undermine the entrenched ideas about men, women, class, and well-being. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that one group which found fault with the new state of affairs included residents of Cuauhtemoctzı´n who were not involved in the sex industry. By August 1940 they were complaining that the new zoning regulations had only exacerbated the ‘‘immoral’’ nature of the barrio. In a letter to the president and other high-ranking government officials, nearly one hundred male and female tenants, propertyowners, and entrepreneurs wrote saying that despite the fact that fourteen months have gone by since the May 1939 decrees that prohibit the exercise of prostitution in these streets, in effect the zona de tolerancia is in worse condition than before, for now the public women don’t even bother to wait in their accesorias, instead invading the sidewalks, even stationing themselves in chairs and on the stoops of the houses, making a great demonstration of impudence and immodesty. For the protesters, this ‘‘shameful spectacle’’ was due in large part to the owner of the Edificio Cuauhtemoctzı´n’s tolerant attitude with respect to male and female prostitutes who entertained clients in the building. They wrote that the site functioned ‘‘as a disgusting, clandestine hotel even though it looks like a casa de vecindad.’’ Francisco Beccera, the building’s owner, they said, rented rooms to women by the day ‘‘where the sad fact is that families of honorable workers and children must share space with prostitutes and sexual degenerates.’’ They begged Ca´rdenas and his administration to prosecute Beccera and ‘‘definitively order that all prostitutes and homosexuals be removed from the prohibited zone.’’1 And they were not the only ones upset about the new state of affairs. Clients, too, pointed out that the new situation was as unhealthy as it was unjust. Several, identifying themselves as varios solterones (various bachelors), 1. ‘‘Inquilinos, et al to Ca´rdenas,’’ 1940, in AGN-APR-LC, file 525.3/1.

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wrote President Ca´rdenas in 1940 to complain that the new zoning rules made prostitutes hard to find. Under the terms of revolutionary morality, admitting to being single and visiting prostitutes was certainly better than being a client and father who might take disease home to his wife and children. But public health specialists nevertheless worried about the reproductive health of single men and encouraged them to be attentive to the benefits of disease prophylaxis. The solterones, however, had different ideas about health and well-being, for they invoked their own concerns over Mexico’s future in their discussion of the state of sexual affairs in Mexico City. As they complained about the suspension of the zona de tolerancia, the solterones told Ca´rdenas that ‘‘those of us who don’t have girlfriends . . . must now go visit the prostitutes in their homes, and now they have invaded the tenement houses of the lowest category, and we just visit them there. It is hardly moral, in that those women are confused with those who are honorable.’’2 Not only did the bachelors object to the inconvenience of searching out prostitutes in their homes, but they also worried about the impression such visits made on the young children who lived in the city’s least expensive vecindades, where many prostitutes now lived. These men stated that prostitutes and clients, alike, engaged in sexual intercourse ‘‘for necessity or for the health of the body’’ and argued that ‘‘for those women and for the single men, the houses with discreet rooms and the hotels should remain open.’’3 Was it not worse for young children to see the depths to which local women had fallen, they pondered, than to allow men and women to satisfy their ‘‘human necessities’’ in an invisible, designated location? That clients developed their own ideas about health and well-being that contrasted with the new delito de contagio is exemplified in the following story: Ramo´n Barron, a Mexican resident in Chicago wrote Ca´rdenas to complain that each time he brought friends on vacation to Mexico City they had contracted venereal disease. He wrote that in the last three years I have visited this city in company of friends from our neighboring country, who are involved in different activities, and on three occasions all of them have taken away the worst impressions with respect to the little or no intervention of the Office of Health regarding prostitution, [they are] deserving of better luck, seeing that my friends are in great part young and had the opportu2. ‘‘Varios solterones to Ca´rdenas,’’ 1940, in AGN-APR-LC, file 525.3/1. 3. Ibid.

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nity to see the worst of Mexico, with the shameful consequence that 90 percent of them came down with a venereal disease. In the good name of my country and your good name I beg you to turn your attention to this matter.4 Barron complained that ‘‘all over the city there are houses of prostitution and the women who are dedicated to the ‘‘vida galante can be found in all areas.’’ Even into the 1940s, tensions between the desire to promote sex tourism and to promote revolutionary morality in the city remained high. E. Vera, a tourist from Pachuca, Hidalgo, who passed through Mexico City, wrote to beg Ca´rdenas to turn his attention to the sad example the city’s prostitutes provided international and domestic tourists alike, begging Ca´rdenas to ‘‘in the name of society, order a remedy so that Mexico does not turn into a brothel.’’5 The effect of abolition on tourism was not the only consideration with international implications. By abolishing the Reglamento Mexico joined the company of numerous other nations that had, at least at the federal level, abolished regulated prostitution and adopted the international conventions regarding the suppression of the traffic in women and children. After 1940 the Consejo Tutelar para Menores Infractores continued to reform and redeem young girls apprehended as prostitutes. In 1941 the Departamento de Prevencio´n Tutelar was created with the special intent of apprehending minors for their own protection.6 But in the context of growing hemispheric concerns over the spread of sexually transmitted infections among U.S. soldiers, public health officials in Mexico and the United States discussed initiating a border venereal disease control program. In fact, U.S. Surgeon General Thomas Parran wrote Dr. Victor Ferna´ndez requesting the Mexican government’s help in suppressing prostitution along the border, saying, ‘‘Your intervention in the matter is highly appreciated, and I am sure it will have a stimulating effect on the venereal disease control program along the entire U.S.-Mexican border in which we are mutually interested.’’7 That same year new Mexican president Manuel A´vila Camacho sent a circular to state governors ordering them to repress prostitution and eliminate zonas de 4. ‘‘Ramo´n Barron to Ca´rdenas,’’ 1940, in AGN-APR-LC, file 525.3/1. 5. Ibid. 6. Castan˜eda Garcı´a, Prevencio´n y Readaptacio´n Social, 63. 7. National Archives of the United States of America, Washington D.C., General Classified Reels, Group 8, 1926–44, Foreign Governments, United States Public Health Service, Record Group 90, box 425.

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tolerancia, arguing that these centers of vice were ‘‘sites of dangerous and antisocial activities that cause delinquency to increase and in the current circumstances might be used as agencies or bases of operations for disloyal and subversive elements.’’8 In 1944 A´vila Camacho reinvigorated the moralization project in Mexico City, where he personally oversaw the renewed campaign against cabarets and their owners, who enjoyed exemption from the provisions of the law against lenocinio.9 The executive office’s moralization project outraged cabaret proprietors, who invoked the themes of nationalism and entrepreneurship in their protests. Stating that cabaret proprietors ‘‘believe that the regulation severely harms them and threatens their business, and not just their business but also the livelihood of the thousands of men and women who live from this kind of work,’’ the president and the secretary general of the Union of Cabaret Proprietors, Jose´ T. Orrico and Benito Bada Dosal, appealed to A´vila Camacho’s sense of nationalism, saying, ‘‘On the one hand, the regulation favors those centers considered ‘elegant’ and generally owned by foreigners, while, on the other hand, it basically works to eliminate the poor Mexican business owner whose cabaret is his only source of income.’’ Orrico and Bada Dosal said they represented all proprietors in their protest, appealing to the Constitution, asking for time to appeal the decision to regulate liquor and other activities and taking out advertisements in capital dailies Excelsior and Universal to generate sympathetic public support for their cause.10 The public’s response to the cabaret proprietors’ publicity campaign revealed how divided the city still was over the question of metropolitan vice and prostitution. On the one hand, there were numerous people who supported the president. The National Parents’ Union applauded the effort and listed all the hotels and cabarets in the capital where the young were being corrupted with impunity.11 In 1945 Rufino Ramı´rez wrote representing the Committee to Defend Women’s Rights, saying that ‘‘prostitution is increasing, endangering the health of all the women who work in those sites.’’ On the other hand, some people felt the government’s moralization attempt was misplaced. Two women from the Mexican Woman’s Defense League wrote ‘‘asking that you regulate the work of women known as ‘dance instructors’ in cabarets and dance academies in order to end the unjust exploitation to 8. 9. 10. 11.

AGN-APR-MAC, file 462.3/155. Figueroa Guerrero, ‘‘La prostitucio´n y el delito de lenocinio,’’ 110–16. AGN-APR-MAC, file 545.22/312. Ibid.

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which they are subjected’’ and, like the ‘‘daughters’’ twenty years earlier, blamed Spanish nightclub owners for trying to prevent the women from organizing into unions to combat the awful conditions in which they labored.12 Only four years after abolishing the Reglamento, the Federal District, according to participants at a ‘‘Conference Against Vice’’ sponsored by the Departamento de Readaptacio´n y Prevencio´n Social, was in a state of absolute moral crisis. According to the editors of Prevencio´n Social, the official publication of the sponsoring agency, ‘‘In Mexico, the home has always been the most solid bastion of nationalism. But the home, birthplace of patriots, of men of action, of men of ideals, is in danger, for vice is increasing at a terrifying rate.’’13 Moreover, government surveys made it clear that abolishing regulated prostitution and criminalizing the transmission of venereal disease had done little to reduce the incidence of syphilis and other sexually transmitted infections in the capital. By 1945, the rates of syphilis infection had not changed significantly, for in that year alone the Departamento de Salubridad Pu´blica reported 11,513 syphilis cases and that one in four Wassermann tests administered demonstrated positive infections.14 Indeed, it was not until the introduction and widespread availability of penicillin in the late 1940s that the rates of infection went down.15 In the aftermath of abolition—and with the syphilis threat rendered less dangerous thanks to the introduction of antibiotics—the figure of the prostitute returned to capture the public’s imagination, as the popularity of such cabaretera-genre films as Salon Me´xico (1948) and Aventurera (1949) demonstrate. Similarly, the tensions between prostitution and motherhood continued to present observers with opportunities for social commentary. In ‘‘El Indio’’ Ferna´ndez’s 1950 melodrama Vı´ctima del Pecado, for example, a cabaret dancer’s struggles with evil pimps and greedy Mexico City nightclub owners was an opportunity for the audience to contemplate gender roles, family, and redemption in the postrevolutionary era. When a cabaret colleague gives birth to a child but then finds herself forced to abandon the baby because the father, her pimp, refuses to accept responsibility for his offspring, the cabaretera stunningly portrayed by actress Ninon Sevilla de12. Ibid., file 432/251. 13. Prevencio´n Social: Organo del Departamento de Prevencio´n Social de la Secretarı´a de Gobernacio´n, no. 5 (January–February 1944): 5–6. 14. Figueroa Guerrero, ‘‘La prostitucio´n y el delito de lenocinio,’’ 74–75. 15. Rosebury, Microbes and Morals, 215–20.

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spairingly tells the child’s mother that ‘‘we [dancers] don’t have the right to be mothers.’’ But when the woman leaves the child in a trash can in order to join her pimp in an armed robbery, Sevilla takes the child in. She loses her job as a dancer and is reduced to working out of an accesoria as a prostitute to care for the baby. Although her actions create trouble for a variety of interested parties, lead her to kill the nefarious pimp, and place her in jail, the virtuous cabaretera is ultimately redeemed when the young boy she has adopted finally secures her release from the penitentiary on Mother’s Day. The return of an incurable, sexually transmitted disease in the form of the HIV/AIDS epidemic has made prostitutes, clients, medicine, and the law once again the focus of public policies and nongovernmental organizations in Mexico’s capital.16 In an unregulated trade that attracts thousands of young women and men each year, male and female prostitutes who have intercourse with as many as a hundred clients a week face the risk of HIV infection. According to some reports, with transvestites working in ever greater numbers in Mexico City, the competition among prostitutes for customers is intense.17 The competition encourages some women to disregard safety in sex in order to attract clientele.18 Although sixty years have passed since abolition in the capital, women who work in the sex trade still struggle with violence, abuse from the police, family obligations, and a desire to leave the trade entirely. The violence the women face has attracted attention.19 In 1994 Carlos Olmos Flores, age twenty-four, was detained for questioning in the murder of Marı´a Soledad Ca´rdenas, who worked in the market area known as La Merced. Olmos, who was a traffic inspector, was accused of having murdered Ca´rdenas with a knife at 1 a.m. in the Hotel Tampico, cutting the breasts and pubic area of the forty-five-year-old mother of three. As Ricardo Olayo of La Jornada reported, ‘‘When interviewed, before giving his statement to the police . . . Olmos Flores said that only once did he pay to have sexual relations at the Hotel Tampico.’’ When asked why he did it, he said, ‘‘I went like any other person . . . to have a good time,’’ indicating his pursuit of enjoyment, although he claimed he did not kill Ca´rdenas and said the witnesses were try16. ‘‘Piden ONG profundizar el debate para reglamentar la prostitucio´n,’’ La Jornada, March 20, 1997, 44. 17. Nancy Nusser, ‘‘Mexico’s Economic Crisis Drives Heavier Prostitution,’’ Cox News Service, 1995. 18. Ibid. On transvestite prostitutes, also see Prieur, Mema’s House. 19. ‘‘Detienen al presunto asesino de una prostituta de la Merced,’’ La Jornada, July 19, 1994, 39.

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ing to ‘‘get back at him’’ because he worked in the zone. On the day of his detention, at least fifty prostitutes protested outside the delegation offices. The participation of children and young women in a trade still deemed undesirable has attracted attention in the current economic crisis also, placing the struggles of families into sharp relief. Now conceptualized as the problem of ‘‘street children,’’ the involvement of young boys and girls in sexual commerce has concerned legislators and activists alike.20 Recently, members of the Asamblea de Representantes del Distrito Federal proposed implementing a new regulation system and have proposed ways to institutionalize the women’s’ transition into a different vocation.21 However, as in the 1930s, these initiatives have met with strong opposition. Prostitutes work in many of the same neighborhoods which comprised the zonas de tolerancia in the 1920s and 1930s.22 And when questioned about their participation in a dangerous trade, they point out that sexual commerce provides them with the necessary money to provide for their children and aging parents. Echoing Marı´a Milla´n’s statements to the press in 1937, ‘‘Juanita’’ told a reporter that she was interested in the proposal to train the prostitutes as policewomen, for she hoped one day to move out of sexual commerce but said that, for now, she made more money as a prostitute and had a family to maintain: ‘‘Yes, the proposal interests me because the truth is that all of us hope one day to retire from this work. The problem is that they would not pay us well. Here I earn 200 pesos a day.’’ And Alicia, a prostitute who worked in the Centro Histo´rico, noted, ‘‘I’m really not interested in becoming a policewoman. Here I earn maybe 200 to 250 pesos, and the police are not going to pay me that. I have three children and support my mother, too.’’23 Like other nations in Latin America and around the world, Mexico had regulated the sex trade since the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, reformers 20. Luı´s Rubio, ‘‘La prostitucio´n de nin˜as, grave mal social: Urgente accio´n para frenarla,’’ Macroeconomı´a, May 30, 1997. See also Elena Poniatowska and Kent Klich, Children of the Streets, Mexico City (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999). 21. ‘‘Prostitutas de La Merced se oponen a la idea de ser policı´as,’’ La Jornada, August 13, 1996. 22. ‘‘Toda la ciudad, una gran zona de tolerancia: Carrillo Castro. En la ARDF quejas de sexoservidoras por las razzias; temen represalias por hacer denuncias,’’ La Jornada. April 12, 1997, 49; ‘‘Comentarios sobre las prohibiciones a las sexoservidoras de La Merced,’’ ibid., 2; ‘‘Rechazan convenio las sexoservidoras: Denuncian prostitutas que las ‘razzias’ en La Merced se han incrementado a partir de las 20:00 horas,’’ Reforma, April 15, 1997, 3b. 23. ‘‘Prostitutas de La Merced se oponen a la idea de ser policı´as,’’ La Jornada, August 13, 1996.

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had long deplored prostitution because of what they perceived to be its negative implications for economic development and national progress. The quest to redeem Mexico’s most marginal citizens grew out of the revolutionary rejection of the Porfiriato but was consistent with the goals of international rights–focused and health-centered movements as well. The agenda to ‘‘redeem’’ men and women from their Porfirian ways, however, was flawed both because it failed to take into account the Revolution’s impact on urban social, economic, and cultural conditions and because reformers relied on older ideas about gender, sexuality, and the individual, which clashed with the Revolution’s emphasis on social change and community improvement. They believed that ‘‘wayward’’ femininity could be treated medically and reformed through education and vocational training, but lacked a similar medical or cultural concept of ‘‘wayward’’ masculinity. Only the pimp was criminalized as a deviant male; the clients themselves were permitted to continue to enjoy the privileges of sexual promiscuity. In Mexico City, the Revolution’s campaigns to promote moral reform were limited time and again by favoritism, the double standard, and the progressive reformers’ own class biases. They were limited, also, by the men and women who resented the state’s intrusion into their private lives in the name of public welfare. When the ‘‘daughters of disgrace’’ wrote President Calles to challenge the limitations of the state’s social reform program, then, they were exceptionally insightful: they understood all too well the cultural and political forces that would undermine the Revolution’s efforts to eradicate prostitution, to guarantee the public’s health, and to promote a society in which men and women enjoyed equal access to work and leisure without compromising the well-being of the other.

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Index

abolitionism, 3, 6, 14–16, 81, 185–205, 207 and eugenics, 186, 194–96 and feminism, 187–94 prostitutes’ attitudes toward, 196–203 Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS), 213 adolescents, 100, 105–7 and sexual abuse, 38, 91, 108 boys, and sexual relations, 47, 52 girls, and sexual relations, 4, 8, 25, 38– 41, 44, 91, 107–8, 114–15, 118, 120, 127–28, 135, 179 afeminados, 90 Aguallo, Ami, 1 Aguirre, Angela, 93 aisladas, 31, 58, 64, 79, 83, 87, 93 Alameda Park, 56 alcohol, 43, 47, 78, 83, 85–87,173, 194, 197 and women, 170, 173 Aldana, Marı´a, 92 Alvarez, Dr. Salvador I., 158 Analla, Dolores, 1 Andrade, Julia, 1 anticlericalism, 5, 79, 109, 116, 189 aphrodisiacs. See sex aids Asilo de Regeneracio´n e Infancia, 60 Asistencia: Organo oficial de la Beneficencia Pu´blica del Distrito Federal, 194 Association of Socialist Lawyers, 192 Aventurera, 212

Avila Camacho, Manuel, 210–11 ayuntamiento (Mexico City), 63, 74, 77, 80, 82–83, 84–85, 88–89, 139 Azuela, Mariano, 64 bachelors, 209 ‘‘Baile Apache,’’ 144 bailes pu´blicos, 8, 83–84, 88, 121 Balbuena Park, 162 Balmaceda, Esperanza, 114 Barrera, Francisco, 68 Barrio Latino, 155 Barro´n, Ramo´n, 209 bars, 23, 84, 123, 170 Bele´n Jail, 24 n. 2, 37 Beneficencia Pu´blica, 74 bestiality, 29 Bolivian Revolution, 13 border, U.S.-Mexican, 210 Bourdieu, Pierre, 19 boys, and sexual relations, 47, 52 Bravo y Alegre, Dr. Ignacio, 30 British Contagious Diseases Act, 187 brothel patrons. See clients, male brothels, 8, 13, 43, 46, 50, 53–59, 74–76, 81, 86, 92–93 advertisements, 178–79 and alcohol, 43, 74, 83, 85 and cabarets, 83 classifications of, 31, 176 and dance halls, 89 and drugs, 43

236

Index

brothels (continued) employment practices, 55 hygiene of, 57–58, 179 images of, 170, 179–82 licensing requirements, 54, 76, 79–80 living conditions in, 54–55 and music, 83, 85 patrons, 46, 49–50 as venue for sexual initiation, 47 Bucareli Hall, 85 Cabaret Agua Azul, 170 Cabaret Chop Suey, 170 Cabaret Eden, 170 Cabaret Iris, 170 Cabaret Venus, 170–71 Cabaret Bucareli, 91 Cabaret ‘‘la Nin˜a,’’ 129 Cabaret Venus, 168 cabareteras, 168–73, 175, 197, 212 cabarets, 1, 64, 83, 87–88, 154, 166–76 ambience, 87, 168–73 closures, 175, 197 licenses, 83, 173 regulation of, 173–75 Callahan, Robert, 163 Calle Roma, 77 Calles, Plutarco Elı´as, 1, 163, 180, 215 Camarena, Olga, 177 Campaign Against Venereal Diseases, 6, 124, 203 cantinas, 123, 170 Ca´rdenas, La´zaro, 188, 190, 192, 203, 209 carrancismo, 10 Carranza, Venustiano, 10, 73–74, 189 Cartier–Bresson, Henri, 156 Casa Ruth, 179 casas de asignacio´n, 52, 76, 79, 88 casas de citas, 51, 177 Casino de la Selva, 180 Catala´n, Enrique, 111, 114 Catholicism, 3, 29, 79, 96, 116, 153 Cerezo Gala´n, Jose´, 158 charity, 60 Chicago Juvenile Court, 106 children abuse of, 40, 48, 108, 137 development of, 99, 194 and prostitution, 91–92, 106–19, citizenship and gender, 163, 165, 186, 188–89,

Chinese Revolution, 13 chulos, 24 n. 3 Cine Progreso Mundial, 184 Cine Isabel, 184 cinemas, 88, 184 city council (Mexico City). See ayuntamiento clandestinas, 28, 58, 64, 76, 85, 89–92, 107, 123, 165 clients, male, 31, 42, 46, 50–51, 63–64, 69, 127, 130, 134, 138, 140–41, 143, 159, 163, 166, 168, 170, 182, 186 Colonia Jua´rez, 77, 154 Colonia del Valle, 154 Colonia Guerrero, 159, 181 Colonia Obrera, 70, 142, 155, Colonia Roma, 154, 177 Comisio´n Mixta Pro-turismo, 161 Committee to Suppress the Traffic in Women and Children, 15, 145, 187 Committee to Defend Women’s Rights, 211 community activism, 68, 75–76, 162–63 condoms, 102 Congreso Nacional de Mujeres Obreras y Campesinas, 189, 191 Congress Against Prostitution (1934), 189 Congress Against Vice (1944), 212 Consejo Tutelar para Menores Infractores, 106–13, 119, 128–29, 135–36, 188, 210 Consejo Superior de Salubridad, 33, 49 constitutionalism, 10–11, 70, 79 Constitution of 1917, 80–81, 100 Article 4, 81 labor legislation, 80–81 welfare legislation, 80 Constitution of 1857, 10 Constitutional Convention (1916), 5, 10, 76, 80 corruption, political, 77–78, 85–86, 140, 203 corruption of minors, 32, 40, 52 crime (Mexico City), 26, 90 criminology, 40, 48, 106–7, 115, 132, 138 Cruz, Eloida, 193 Cuauhtemoctzı´n, 66, 70, 112, 154–55, 201, 208 Cucaracha Cocktail Club, 168, 170, 172 cult of masculinity, 127, 130–31, 134 cultural history, debates about, 21 n. 40

Index

dance halls, 8, 83–84, 88, 121 ‘‘dangerous sanitary dictatorship,’’ 128 danzo´n, 84 ‘‘daughters of disgrace,’’ 1–3, 9, 11, 20, 166 de la Vega, Agustina, 77, 181 debt peonage, 55 decena tra´gica, 70 deflowering, concept of, 48 del Castillo, Porfirio, 80 delito de contagio, 203 Departamento de Salubridad Pu´blica, 102, 127, 131, 134, 145, 154, 157, 162–63, 166, 177, 179, 188, 194, 196, 199– 202, 212 Departamento del Distrito Federal, 154, 163, 182, 201 Departamento de Prevencio´n y Readaptacio´n Social, 106, 191, 212 Departamento de Diversiones Pu´blicas, 174 Detectives, 140–45 deviance, ideas about, 3, 4, 31, 44 n. 72, 46–47, 106–7, 109, 111, 122 diathermy, 102 Dı´az Soto y Gama, Antonio, 123 Dı´az, Fe´lix, 70 Dı´az, Porfirio, 4, 30, 70 disease prevention, 58 Divisio´n del Norte, 64 Domenzaı´n, Manuela, 1 domestic servitude, 33, 37–39 double standard, 127, 191 drug use, 43, 87, 90 Duplan, Pauline, 201 Ehrlich, Paul, 100 economic development, ideas about, 96, 163 education, 33, 116–18, 121, 124 Eje´rcito de Defensa de la Mujer, 117 El Machete, 180, 192 El Chalequero, 52 El Universal, 174 El Nacional, 200 Empleadas de la Federacio´n, Secretarı´a de Accio´n Femenina, 193 endocrinology, 115 The End of the Road, 104, 184 entertainment, 84, 94, 166, Escuela de Correccio´n, 107–8, 116–21 Escuela Morelos, 123

237

Eugenesia, 194 eugenics, 11, 15, 186, 188, 194–96 and abolitionism, 186, 194–96 and feminism, 194 family relations, 69, 76, 79, 96, 98, 106– 19, 121, 124, 137, 154, 159, 161, 196–8, fathers, 66–69, 112, 130, 134–36, 166 as bad influences, 112 as sexual predators, 135 fatherhood, 69, 77, 132, 161, 165 favoritism, 77–78, 84–89, 167 Federacio´n de Sindicatos del Distrito Federal, 167 female suffrage, 189 femininity, beliefs about, 27–32, 46, 87–89, 115, 122–24, 132, 173, 176, 195–203 feminism, 8, 11, 186, 189–92, 196 and abolition, 186–94 congresses about, 189 and eugenics, 194 perspectives on prostitution, 193 and social causes, 189 and social class, 190 Ferna´ndez, Dr. Victor, 210 Ferna´ndez, Virginia, 197 ficheras, 173 flirtation, 104 n. 25, 173 Foreign Club, 180 Foucault, Michel, 19, 120 n. 71 Fox-trot, 84 Francisco ‘‘el Chalequero,’’ 52 French Revolution, 12 Gaceta Me´dica de Me´xico, 30 Galindo, Hermila, 189, 193 Gallardo, Ramo´n, 49 gambling, 8 Gamboa, Federico, 41, 50 Garcı´a, Blanca, 92 Garibaldi Theater, 159 Gaste´lum, Dr. Bernardo, 95, 123, 131 Gato Negro, 87 gender and citizenship, 163, 185–205 and femininity, 27–32, 46, 87–89, 115, 122–24, 132, 173, 176, 195–203 ideas about, 6–9, 49, 96, 115, 132–33, 156, 203

238

Index

gender (continued) and the law, 3, 18, 20, 28–29, 46, 51, 106–7, 113, 124, 127, 131–51, 153, 166, 182, 186–87, 195, 207–8 and masculinity, 127, 131–38, 154, 165 and reformism, 20, 123–24, 130, 132, 134, 138, 153–54, 165, 187, 190, 192, 194 relations, 3–4, 7, 12, 24–25, 38–39, 61, 83, 86, 98, 104 n. 25, 107, 127, 130, 149–50, 187 and revolution, 7–18, 64 and state-formation, 109, 114, 118, 124, 154, 186, 196 gender studies, research methods, 18 geography of vice, 53 girls, and sexual relations, 4, 8, 25, 38–41, 44, 91, 107–8, 114–15, 118, 120, 127–28, 135, 179 Go´mez, Marı´a, 93 gonorrhea, 27, 137–38, 204 Gonza´lez Gallo, Jesu´s, 158 Gonza´lez, Pablo, 74 Gonza´lez, Bertha, 93 Gonza´lez Galindo, Modesto, 123 Granados, Pedro, 70 Guadalajara, 37–38 Guanajuato, 128 Guerrero, Julio, 44 n. 72 Guerrero (state), 128 gynecology, 28 hairdressing, 55, 79 Hall, Monte, 177 Haro, Miguel, 111 health reproductive health, 104, 132, 194 attitudes toward, 95–106, 124–25, 176– 80, 196–202, 208–10 public. See public health Herna´ndez, Salvador, 63, 85, 89 Herrera, Se´vero, 49 Higareda, Arturo, 81 higienismo, 57 historiography, debates, 21 HIV/AIDS, 213 homosexuality, 13, 24 n. 2, 29, 44–47, 52, 90, 111, 119 honor, ideas about, 48, 69, 76, 94,123, 131, 194 homicide, 24, 26

Hospital Morelos, 1–2, 56–57, 74 n. 24, 102, 107, 121, 188, 204 Hospital General, 102 Hospital Jua´rez, 102 Hotel Santo Domingo, 119, 129 Hotel Libertad, 119 Hotel Independencia,165 Hotel Imperio, 87 Hotel Seminario, 49–50 Hotel Peru´, 119 hotels, as sites of prostitution, 49–50, 58, 64, 87, 119, 164–66 Huerta, Victoriano, 70, 74 human rights, 13–14 human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), 213 Hurtado, Elı´as, 166–67 hygiene, 3, 25, 29–30, 40, 47, 54, 57–58, 63, 65, 79, 103–4, 119 hyper-ovarian function, 115 hypothyroidism, 116 Ibarra, Francisco, 5 Ignorancia Total, 103 illegal drug use, 38–39, 90 influenza, 98 Inspeccio´n de Sanidad, 36, 43, 51, 54, 56, 59, 128, 139, 143, 165, 167, 181 International Abolitionist Federation, 187 Interoceanic Highway, 162 jazz, 84 jealousy, 24–26, 51, 58, 59 Junta of Workers, Industrialists, PropertyOwners and Residents of Cuauhtemoctzı´n, 161 juvenile delinquency, 107–9, 114–19, 121–22 La prostitucio´n en Me´xico, 32 ‘‘La Chiquita,’’ 37, 41–44 Lara y Pardo, Dr. Luis, 32, 35, 40–41, 43– 47, 50–51, 54, 58, 187 Larios, Anastasia, 177 Lavalle Carvajal, Dr. Eduardo, 36, 43, 46, 56–57 Lavrı´n, Rufino, 181 League of Nations, Committee to Suppress the Traffic in Women and Children, 15, 145, 187 leisure, 13–14, 60, 82, 84, 94, 186

Index

lenocinio, 131, 145–48, 176, 204, 211 accusations of, 148–51 lenones, 130 Leo´n, Miguel, 120 lesbianism, 44–46, 111, 119 Levy, Frances, 85 Lewis, Oscar, 73 liberalism, 11, 25 Liga de Mujeres Ibe´ricas e Hispanoamericanas, 189 Llach, Leonor, 191 local government (Mexico City). See ayuntamiento Los de Abajo, 64 madams, 31, 43, 46, 63, 69, 75, 77–78, 80, 82, 85–86, 89, 91–92, 139, 146, 176 Madero, Francisco I., 10, 70 Magan˜a, Gilardo, 74 Mangino, Judith, 110 Marroui, Dr. Jose´, 30, 138 Martı´n Reyes, Francisco, 69 Martı´nez, Marina, 85, 93 Martı´nez, Margarita, 1 masculinity, beliefs about, 127, 131–38, 154, 165 masturbation, as social problem, 47–48 measles, 98 men as community activists, 68–70, 159–63 as entrepreneurs, 64, 84–89, 165–68 as prostitutes’ clients, 31, 42, 46–47, 50– 51, 63–64, 69, 85, 127–31, 134, 138, 140–41, 143, 155, 159, 163, 166, 168, 170, 182, 186, 209 sexual relations with men, 47, 52–53, 90 and sexual promiscuity. See sexual promiscuity, male Me´ndez, Elsa H. Vda de, 111, 129 Mendoza, Gloria, 121 Mendoza Valde´z, Gloria, 202 Metropolitan Cathedral, 90 Mexican Eugenics Society, 115, 194 Mexican Woman’s Defense League, 211 Mexican Communist Party, 180, 190 Mexican Philanthropic Society, 60 Mexican Revolution civil war, 70–76 and corruption, 8 cultural, 12, 104

239

and entitlement, 8 food scarcity, 71 and ideology, 79, 154, 158, 163, 200, 208 impact on women, 7, 71–73 and leadership, 10 and masculinity, 8–9 in Mexico City, 70–71 and migration, 73 and nationalism, 11 and patriarchy, 9 and social class, 9 and state-formation, 11, 95–125 and widows’ pensions, 73 Mexico City city council, 139 crime, 26, 39, 51–52, 83, 213 guidebooks, 168 living conditions, 113 migration to, 25 press coverage, 26 urban development, 161 and zapatistas, 74 Me´xico de Noche, 168–69 Michel, Concha, 191 migration, rural-urban, 7, 25, 33, 41, 46, 112, 155 Milla´n, Marı´a, 198–99 modernization and economic development, 14 human costs, 14 money, attitudes toward, 130 Monterrubio, Enrique, 158 Montes, Angela, 93 morality, ideas about, 2, 4–5, 7–8, 12, 14, 19, 27, 32, 35, 42, 54, 65–66, 72, 74, 77, 79, 84–85, 87–89, 96, 98, 104, 109, 112, 119, 130, 161, 163, 166, 168, 173, 175, 189, 200, 203, 208–10 motherhood, 79, 132, 135, 203, 186, 188, 194, 196–97, 201 Mujer: Revista para la elevacio´n moral e intelectual de la mujer mexicana, 191 Mujeres de la Raza,189 music, in brothels, 83, 85 National Parents’ Union, 211 National Palace, 90 National Preparatory School, 190

240

Index

nationalism, 1, 4, 10–11, 107, 138, 141, 143, 159, 163, 182, 186, 201 Neo-Salvarsan, 100, 102 Nicaraguan Revolution, 13 nightclubs, 1, 64, 83, 87–88, 154, 166–76 Nueva Industria Bed Manufacturers, 69 Nun˜ez, Bertha, 93 Odorica, Rau´l, 181 orphans, 120 Orrico de los Llanos, Migues, 202 Ortı´z Rubio, Pascual, 6 Ortı´z Tirado, Dr. A., 158 Oviedo Mota, Arturo, 6 Palacio de Hierro, 69 Palacio de Marmol, 87 Palancares, Jesusa, 73 Pan American Sanitary Congresses, 15, 95, 98, 105 Pan American Tourist Commission, 164 Pa´ramo, Eufrasia, 1 Parra, Clementina, 120 Parran, Dr. Thomas (U.S. Surgeon General), 210 Partido Nacional Revolucionario (PNR), 189–90, 193 women’s section, 190 patriarchy, 77, 154, 161 patronage, 77–78, 84–89, 167 patrons. See clients, male pederasty, 48, 52 Penal Code (1871), 32, 146 Penal Code (1929), 145–47, 176 Penal Code (1931), 145–47, 176 philanthropy, 60 photography, in brothels, 55 Pimp’s Dance, 144 pimps, 16, 91–92, 130, 138–45, 155, 166 as foreigners, 92, 143, 155, 188 images of, 140 Jewish, 143 names for, 24 n. 1, 130, 139, 141–42, 146, numbers of, 139 personal relations with prostitutes, 141 Polish, 143 Russian, 143 Pino Sua´rez, Jose´ Marı´a, 10, 70 Plaza Garibaldi, 158–59

Porfiriato, 4, 16, 23–61, 107 sexual culture, 23–61 Portes Gil, Emilio, 159, 173 poverty, 3, 5, 25, 35, 71 pregnancy, 198 privacy, attitudes toward, 95–106, 124 prison, sexual practices in, 24 n. 2 prostitutes as adolescents, 91, 107, 121 ages of (Porfiriato), 29 and alcohol, 90, 197 attire, 36 attitudes toward abolitionism, 196 clandestine, 28, 58, 76 communication with authorities, 1, 199–200 as crime victims, 39, 51–52, 83, 213 definitions of, 17 and domestic servitude, 33 and drug use, 39 education level of, 33 family relations, 34, 52 feelings about work, 36, 42 as foreigners, 2, 4, 33, 92, 143, 145, 155, 188 French, 143 health of, 43, 56, 57, 114 and HIV/AIDS, 213 Jewish, 143 and landlords, 78–79 as lesbians, 44–46, 111, 119–20 male, 53, 90 medical studies of, 114–15 as migrants, 33, 90, 121 as mothers, 52, 198–99, 214 numbers of, 25, 29, 30, 32, 54, 105, 213 occupations of, 33–34, 91 as orphans, 120 personal relationships of, 34, 44–46, 52, 55, 119, 129–30, 199, 214 physical characteristics of, 33 and police, 90 as protesters, 158, 165 psychological studies of, 114 self-representation, 36 and sexual humor, 50 as slaves, 82, 96 statistics, 30 as victims, 81, 141 prostitution and alcohol, 170, 197

Index

in Argentina, 28 n. 13 as business, 63 and Catholicism, 3, 29, 79, 96, 116, 153 causes of, 37, 44 clandestine, 28, 58, 64, 76, 85, 89–92, 107, 123, 165 in Colombia, 28 n. 13 colonial policies, 29 and domestic servitude, 33, 38 and education, 33 foreign involvement in, 11 geographic distribution of, 59, 154 images of, 41 legal status of, 27–32 and lesbianism, 44–46, 119 licensing procedures, 36, 54, 63, 81, 121, 144 and Mexico City, 26 and migration, 33 and motherhood, 52, 198–99 narratives about, 40–41 and nationalism, 1 neighborhood opposition to, 27, 68–69, 76–77, 90, 157, 208 and poverty, 116 and rape, 37, 39, 41 retirement from, 51, 59–60 as transitional occupation, 198 Pruneda, Dr. Alfonso, 158 psychiatry, 106, 130 psychology, 106, 110, 133 public diversions, licenses, 84 public health, 2, 43, 50, 56–57, 63, 97, 102–5, 107, 124, 127, 138, 153, 157, 163–64, 166, 173, 186, 194, 199 conferences, 15, 189, 212 European influence, 28–29 ideology, 11, 13, 29–31, 96, 104, 109, 131 law, 3, 21, 28, 32, 114, 124, 127, 146, 175, 208 as revolutionary guarantee, 4, 11, 13, 17, 95–106, 215 Quiroz, Alfredo, 132, 134 Raggi Ageo, Dr. Armando, 115 Ramı´rez, Dr. Eliseo, 123, 194 Ramı´rez Plancarte, Francisco, 71 rape, 8, 29, 37–39, 41, 73, 136–37 red-light districts. See zona de tolerancia

241

redemption, ideas about, 4–8, 97, 100, 106, 111, 114, 116–17, 124, 147, 186, 197, 207 Reed, John, 72, 74 reform schools, 16, 60 reformism, 4–5, 7, 11, 16–17, 27, 81, 96– 98, 104, 109, 132, 153, 186 in Asia and Africa, 14 and gender, 5, 20, 114, 116, 119, 121, 123–24, 130–32, 134–35, 138, 153– 54, 165, 174, 176, 185, 190, 192, 195, 197, 200 European influence, 14, 98 international ideologies and, 13 in Latin America, 14 research methods, 20 social base of, 5 and social class, 20, 176 United States influence, 14, 98, 104 refugees, 7, 16, 71 Reglamento de cafe´s cantantes, cabarets y salones de baile (1931), 170,173 Reglamento para el ejercicio de la prostitucio´n (1865), 2 n. 3 Reglamento para el ejercicio de la prostitucio´n (1867, proyecto), 29, 46 Reglamento para el ejercicio de la prostitucio´n (1872), 27–29, 32, 46 Reglamento para el ejercicio de la prostitucio´n (1926), 2–3, 107, 123, 203, 164, 157, 191 Reglamento para el ejercicio de la prostitucio´n (1898), 32 Reglamento para el ejercicio de la prostitucio´n en el Distrito Federal (1914), 74, 79 rent (Mexico City), 63, 78 reservados, 168, 173 Restored Republic, 29 Revista de Policı´a, 143 Revolution of Tuxtepec, 30 revolutions, social, 12–14 Reyes, Dr. Jose´ Marı´a, 30, 33, 46–47 Reyes, Bernardo, 70 Reyes del Campillo, Celia A. de, 190 Rı´os Ca´rdenas, Marı´a, 191–92 rodeo, 59, 90 Rodrı´guez, Luis Angel, 75, 142 Rodrı´guez Cabo, Dr. Mathilde, 108, 192, 194 Romain, Diana, 78, 85, 93

242

Index

Roumagnac, Carlos, 22–27, 35, 37, 46–48, 59 rufianes, 138 Russian Revolution, 12 Saavedra, Dr. Alberto, 115 Salı´n, Carlos, 85 Salon Degollado, 85 Salo´n Me´xico, 212 Salon Rojo, 87–88 Sa´nchez, Ana, 93 sanitary ideology, 11, 13, 29–31, 96, 104, 109, 131 sanitation, Mexico City, 65 Santa, 41–43, 50, 141 scandal, ideas about, 53, 76–78, 89, 175 School of Social Work, 109 Schroeder, Roberto, 177 Scott, Joan, 19 Semper, Carlos M., 87 Sevilla, Ninon, 212 sex tourism, 154, 163–64, 168, 182 sex aids, 133, 168 sex guides, 103 sexual violence, 37, 73, 136, 138 sexual education, 97,102–4, 104 n. 25, 134, 136, 185, sexual promiscuity, 29, 51, 64, 87, 96–7, 100–101, 104, 114, 124 female, 7, 17–18, 25–26, 28, 30, 37, 41, 64, 99, 105, 107, 185, 195 male, 3, 7, 9, 11, 17–18, 24, 28, 46–49, 64, 75, 89, 96, 99, 105, 127–28, 131– 32, 135–36, 153, 185, 191, 195 sexual abuse, 34, 37, 39–40, 43, 48, 51, 107–8, 136–37, 140 sexual morality, 12, 17, 96 sexual practices, 24 n. 3, 25–27, 44–49, 87–88, 99, 120, 131, 143, 168–73, 177–83 sexual prowess, ideas about, 24–5, 44 n. 72, sexuality adolescent, 4, 8, 25, 38–41, 44, 47, 52, 91, 107, 114–15, 118, 120, 127–28, 135, 179 attitudes toward, 97, 102–4 research methods, 18–19, 99 and science, 95–125 sexually transmitted disease, 2, 22, 14, 16, 27, 29, 32, 43, 54–55, 58, 95, 98, 102, 204 campaigns against, 6, 124, 195, 203

prophylaxis, 3, 11, 14, 16, 32, 54–55, 57–58, 96, 102, 104–5, 127, 132, 134, 185, 207 syphilis, 2, 27–28, 32, 55, 57, 95– 125,194, 204 treatment, 16, 97, 102 shimmy, 84, 88 sifilicomio, 1–2, 56–57, 74 n. 24, 100, 102, 107, 121, 188, 204 Silva, Dr. Rafael, 162 Simo´n Bolı´var Amphitheater, 191 sin, and prostitution, 29 Siurob, Dr. Jose´, 197 social hygiene movement, 11, 13, 15, 104, 187–88, 194–96 social reform, See reformism social science, 107 social workers, 19–20, 101, 105–19, 128, 134–35 social work and gender, 108–11, 115, 129 and social class, 100–101, 108–11 Sociedad Mexicana de Eugenesia, 115, 194 Sociedad Protectora de la Mujer, 60 sodomitas, 90 sodomy, 52–53 soldaderas, 71–72, 128 soldiers, and sexual behavior, 64, 75–77 Soto, Juan, 124, 131 state-formation, 16–19, 95–125 and gender, 16, 96, 98, 104, 109, 114, 118, 124, 154, 196 stepfathers, as sexual predators, 112, 135, 137 street vendors, 65 streetwalkers, 24, 58–59, 83, 90 suffrage, female, 189 superstition, 55 Supreme Court, 201 syphilis, 2, 27–28, 55, 57, 95–125, 194, 204 beliefs about, 55 as cause of death, 96, 98 causes of, 98 and childhood development, 98 complications of, 96 congenital, 96, 98 diagnosis of, 100 and infant mortality, 98 infection rates, 95 and miscarriage, 98 mode of transmission, 98

Index

and mortality, 100 and privacy, 103 prophylaxis, 3, 11, 14, 16, 32, 54–55, 57–58, 96, 102, 104–5, 127, 132, 134,185, 195, 207 prophylaxis propaganda, 184 and sexual relations, 98 and social class, 100–102 stages of, 98 and stillbirth, 98 surveillance, 98 symptoms, 98 Teatro Welton, 84 Teatro Nacional, 90 Teatro Principal, 88 Teatro Marı´a Guerrero, 159 Testofort, 133, 168 theaters burlesque, 64 for ‘‘men only,’’ 160, 167 as sites of prostitution, 166–67 as sites of sexual promiscuity, 159–160 Tivoli del Eliseo, 84 tourism, 154, 163–64, 168, 175, 180–83, 210 transvestites, 90 treponema pallidum, 98 Tribunal para Menores, 106–13, 128, 135– 36, 188, 192, 210 Trigo, Felipe, 81 tuberculosis, 98, 194 U.S.-Mexican border, 210 The Underdogs, 64 underworld, images of, 140 unemployment, 25, 64, 71 Union of Cabaret Proprietors, 211 Unio´n de Damas Cato´licas, 117 Uranga, Consuelo, 191 urbanization, 26, 66 Vanegas, Juan, 74 Vasconcelos, Jose´, 64, 75 Va´zquez, Gustavo, 113 vecindades, as sites of prostitution, 79, 112–13 venereal disease. See sexually transmitted disease Veracruz, United States occupation, 74

243

Vergara, Dr. A., 195 vice, ideas about, 2, 4, 31, 34, 47, 57, 74, 68, 119, 142 vice districts. See zona de tolerancia violence, 8, 13, 26, 39 Vı´ctima del pecado, 212 Vidales, Agustı´n, 81 Villa, Marı´a, alias ‘‘La Chiquita,’’ 37, 41–44 Villa, Francisco ‘‘Pancho,’’ 10 Villarreal, Conseulo, 76 Villarreal, Leopoldo, 65 Villasen˜or, Enriqueta de, 76 Villela, Dr. Enrique, 6, 124, 203 virgin raffles, 49, 179 virginity, beliefs about, 3, 27, 36, 39, 41, 48–49 vocational training, 121 Wassermann reaction, 100, 212 welfare, 2, 3, 194, 196, 203, 215 white slave trade, 14–15, 138–45 Wilson, Henry Lane, 70 women and alcohol, 173, 170, 197 and prostitution, 32–46, 71–89, 123, 145–51, 175–83, 185–205 and revolution, 7–18, 70–73 and sexual promiscuity. See sexual promiscuity, female sexual relations with women, 44–46, 111, 119 and work, 33, 40–43, 69, 82, 107, 156, 170, 173, 175, 196–203 women’s movement, 8, 188–93 work, 2, 11, 14, 16, 25, 32, 33 and prostitution, 32–34, 40–43, 69, 82, 107, 156, 170, 173, 175, 196–203 salaries for women, 33 working class, views of prostitution, 66– 69, 76, 153–56, 166–67 Zapata, Emiliano, 10 Zapatistas, 10, 74 Zavaleta, Rufino, 174 Zayas, Miguel, 84–85 Zo´calo, Mexico City, 59, 65–69 zona de tolerancia, 16, 53, 66–69, 74, 153– 83, 201, 208 closure, 201 community protest of, 66–69, 159–66