The Oldest Professions in Revolutionary Times: Madames, Pimps, and Prostitution in Mexico City, 1920 - 1952

This dissertation examines the impact of the end of state-regulated prostitution in Mexico City. It analyzes the results of debates on prostitution and the trafficking in women against the backdrop of revolutionary politics and the consolidation of state authority in Mexico in the interwar period. The League of Nations’ resolutions asking for the criminalization of intermediaries, brothels, and call houses prompted global debates and actions. In the capital city prostitutes resulted to be disempowered, madams prosecuted, while authorities and pimps turned more violent towards sex workers and extorted them more often. Through the lens of gender it is argued here that the transition of power from madames to pimps played a central role in the reconfiguration of commercial sex in modern Mexico City. The most important finding of this investigation is that over time, power shifted from women involved in Mexico City’s sex trade —madames and sex workers—to men —pimps, landlords, and cops. This doctoral research contributes to debates on prostitution and labor. It highlights several attempts made by women involved in the sex trade to gain recognition as workers and to be part of the new national project. Another aim of this work is to show the importance of sites of prostitution to the social life of the city, as well as to illuminate the relationship between modernity, urbanization, commercial sex, and different cultural expressions such as literature, cinema, and music. In order to show the complex dynamics of prostitution, this dissertation draws from a wide array of sources: images, film, court records, letters, legislation, memoirs, newspapers, and periodicals show the contested nature of the discourses that shaped legal, cultural, and social notions which ruled commercial sex during the first half of the twentieth century.