Impure Migration

Jews and Sex Work in Golden Age Argentina

Mir Yarfitz

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780813598161
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Impure Migration investigates the period from the 1890s until the 1930s, when prostitution was a legal institution in Argentina and the international community knew its capital city Buenos Aires as the center of the sex industry. At the same time, pogroms and anti-Semitic discrimination left thousands of Eastern European Jewish people displaced, without the resources required to immigrate. For many Jewish women, participation in prostitution was one of very few ways they could escape the limited options in their home countries, and Jewish men facilitate their transit and the organization of their work and social lives. Instead of marginalizing this story or reading it as a degrading chapter in Latin American Jewish history, Impure Migration interrogates a complicated social landscape to reveal that sex work is in fact a critical part of the histories of migration, labor, race, and sexuality.

CHAPTER 1

White Slaves and Dark Masters

People in Europe speak with indignation of the traffic in negroes. It would be just as well if they would open their eyes to what is going on much nearer … the exportation of white slaves.… The greater number are probably engaged for Montevideo and Buenos Ayres.

—Josephine Butler, 1888

There is not, and apparently has not been in recent years, a single well-tested case in which a girl has been trapped into the white slave traffic.

—William Leonard Courtney, 1913

White slave narratives starred an innocent woman of European descent taken far from home by a foreign or racialized man. In the eyes of moral reformers, popular press and fiction, and international Jewish community leaders, the transportation of women from Europe to South America produced an ugly stain of sexual criminality on the world map. Buenos Aires became a metonym for trafficking. Given that the Argentine capital was only one of many cities with legally regulated prostitution and a thriving underworld, why did Buenos Aires loom so large in the public imagination? The power and contours of white slave narratives reflected unequal global power relationships and uncertainty about the postcolonial world order, the effects of mass migration, and the consequences of interracial interactions.1 Concern with the movement of women across the Atlantic between the late 1800s and the interwar era was about not only sexual commerce but migration more broadly. This became particularly apparent in the League of Nations’ massive antitrafficking investigation of the mid-1920s, which unevenly assessed different nations in accordance with racialized fears and an abolitionist approach to prostitution in general.2 The story of the white slave was used to draw hard lines between white and nonwhite, desirable and undesirable immigrant, victim and exploiter, bystander and rescuer.

RACE, CLASS, AND THE GENEALOGY OF THE WHITE SLAVE

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, voyeuristic tales of seduction, betrayal, and syphilitic death encouraged European and North American newspaper readers to fear for their daughters’ safety.3 Spurred by “yellow journalism,” the explosion of mass migration, and the interests of social reformers, mobilization against white slavery succeeded the movements for the abolition of African slavery as a major international social cause. Feminists in London, Berlin, and New York rallied against the evils of the “white slave trade,” and organized conferences and rescue missions on behalf of innocent European maidens coerced across the Atlantic by swarthy pimps. However, several decades of historians have demonstrated that white slavery did not actually exist on this enormous scale, and even many contemporary observers expressed doubt.4 For example, a Boston theater critic in 1913 questioned the credibility of a recent white slave novel, calling it a “lurid tale,” “a revival of a somewhat ancient legend,” and a “tract … to support the agitation against the white slave traffic” and praised British suffragette and founder of the Women’s Freedom League Teresa Billington-Greig’s recent debunking of the hysteria.5 In the same year, the New York Times excoriated reformers for mounting “shocking public exhibitions” despite having “reformed nothing” of “this so largely mythical white slave traffic.”6 Given the relatively few proven cases of innocent women abducted across national boundaries for the purposes of forced prostitution, why did white slavery provoke repeated moral panics on both sides of the Atlantic for more than half a century?7

Part of the ongoing appeal of the story was doubtlessly pornographic, an excuse to allude to sex and even show images of women’s naked bodies.8 The titillating spectacle of beautiful young white virgins coerced into having sex with men, often of other races, while lamented, also helped to sell newspapers. Stories of older women working as doorkeepers or madams rarely elicited such interest. The white slave story also contributed to assumptions and proposals in the realm of public policy, in this era of transnational organizational efforts. Framing sex traffic as a form of migration suggests that antitrafficking projects shared in broader anxieties and regulatory projects related to race, foreignness, and national identity. The particular historical evolution of the transatlantic concept of white slavery reconstituted the prostitute as a victim of a racialized or foreign male exploiter, thus sharpening ethnic distinctions and policing morality in an era of mass migration and national reorganization.

The application of “white slavery” to cross-border prostitution appears to have spread in influence following a March 1870 letter from Victor Hugo to British feminist Josephine Butler that linked African chattel slavery to prostitution in an attempt to bring together the causes of abolitionists and feminists. In this letter, Hugo argued “the slavery of black women is abolished in America, but the slavery of white women continues in Europe and laws are still made by men in order to tyrannize over women.”9 Josephine Butler played a primary role in connecting the successful movement for the abolition of chattel slavery to the development of a movement in opposition to sex trafficking. In 1875, she was instrumental in founding the organization that became the International Abolitionist Federation, a driving force in opposition to the state regulation of prostitution.10 One of her main concerns was that regulation focused on women’s bodies rather than men’s: prostitutes were forced to submit to regular examinations, forbidden to work if infected, and branded as prostitutes in a way that often forced them to remain such for life. Meanwhile, clients were ignored.11

By the late 1880s, discussion of white slavery on both sides of the Atlantic took on the key defining elements that would remain essentially unchanged for the next half century. The first New York Times article to discuss white slavery and prostitution explicitly linked the trade to Jews, which would continue to be an underlying theme among broader immigration-related anxieties concerning both North and South America.12 Also in 1886, Josephine Butler wrote about the transportation of girls from Hamburg to Montevideo and Buenos Aires for the same purpose, which was already becoming synonymous with international prostitution.13 The varied aspects of white slave discourse, focusing on racialized men, allowed female social purity activists to shift their target from the general category of all men and potentially make common cause with male reformers and politicians.

Before the term “white slavery” came to refer to sex trafficking, other international reformers deployed the term “white slave” to criticize racialized masters. Abolitionists critiqued chattel slave owners, Orientalists targeted Barbary Coast traders and harem keepers, and those concerned with the dangers of U.S. Western expansion underscored Indian barbarism. British advocates of African chattel slavery in the West Indies from at least the 1780s used the language of white slavery to justify the continuation of the institution with the claim that West Indian slaves lived and worked under conditions far superior to those of English child laborers and short-lived miners. Their abolitionist opponents at first ignored the equation between chattel and wage slavery, focusing on the legal definition of human beings as property as civilization’s foremost evil.14 After the abolition of chattel slavery, reformers found the comparison useful as rhetoric; the discussion of industrial white slaves was laced with references to black slaves, regularly implying that white workers suffered under the same brutal conditions, which would be even crueler to whites than to blacks.

European concern with the inversion of the natural order in which white Europeans were masters of darker races extended to Barbary captivity narratives, which Paul Michel Baepler argues were among the most popular publications in the nineteenth century. His analysis of these tales in White Slaves, African Masters shows that they are intimately intertwined with the American slave narrative and the Indian captivity narrative, which he claims American literary historians have overemphasized, while the three should be considered together.15 One such text, Charles Sumner’s 1853 White Slavery in the Barbary States, compares the abolitionist movement against African chattel slavery to European outrage at the sixteenth- to eighteenth-century enslavement of European and some American Christians in Algiers and the surrounding area.16 In North America, the related genre of Indian captivity narratives generally featured a female victim and shared Barbary Coast tales’ anger at the inversion of the natural order. Argentina had a similar nineteenth-century Indian captivity narrative genre, featured in fine arts as well as poetry and other forms of literature.17 Captivity narratives on both sides of the Atlantic, like later white slave stories, outlined the capture of a white innocent by racialized strangers, followed by resistance, acceptance or assimilation, and eventual redemption.18

Captivity, Barbary Coast, and white slave narratives emphasized the cultural gap between captor and captive, between Native American or French Canadian and Anglo, between Muslim and Christian, and between more and less desirable immigrant ethnic groups.19 Before Italian immigrants were considered white and desirable in the United States, they were stigmatized as exploitative masters in terms almost identical to the white slave narrative. An 1873 New York Times article describes the well-fed, fur-clad, gold-chain-covered Italian “owner” of white slave children kidnapped and brought across the Atlantic for factory labor, a “ruffian” reminiscent of the “rufianes” (pimps) populating the Buenos Aires underworld.20 Thirty years later, a Los Angeles Times European correspondent reported on the circumstances of rural Italian parents duped into selling their sons into wage slavery by duplicitous “contractors for white slaves” in language very similar to the common story of small-town parents inadvertently selling their daughters into sexual slavery: “A well-dressed man, usually an Italian, appears in the poorest and most wretched district he can find and casually displays much money and volunteers his history, which usually runs on the lines that he was once as poor as any of his hearers, but went abroad with a kind friend and returned in affluence as all can see. To the poor parents in the village he offers golden prospects for their children, out of love of mankind, if they will only turn them over to him: comfort, little work, all the money they want, and $40 or $50 a year to the parents.”21 This narrative differs only from those of female sexual white slaves in the gap between this trafficker’s “love of mankind” and a professional “suitor’s” love for a daughter. Even more dangerous than the Italian immigrant was the eternal wanderer and dubious trader, the Jew. Italian and Jewish immigrants both arrived in large numbers in Argentina in this era, but only the latter group became associated with the traffic in women.

The most common use of “white slave” in the nineteenth century, in fact, was in critiques of wage labor exploitation, with the term “slave” leveraged to argue that European-born child and adult workers in the industrial North were treated even worse than Africans in the American South. Critics of white slavery often referenced the ideals of the movement for abolition of African slavery to plead for similar consideration of other exploited workers, and occasionally weighed in against the termination of the chattel trade. In 1833, the year of the British Factory Act, which for the first time placed significant legal restrictions on child labor, the poem “The Factory Child,” penned in Britain and republished in U.S. newspapers from Charleston to Boston, described young children suffering under exhausting hours, tyrannical factory overseers, and pitiful wages, fated for premature death.22 “White slave” was used both for children working on British textile looms in the 1830s and for garment workers on New York’s Lower East Side seventy-five years later.23

White slavery was understood in this sense on both sides of the Atlantic, and extended to the situation of other exploited workers, such as Russian serfs in the 1840s and English domestic workers in the 1850s.24 The term appeared in the streets as well as off the presses, as exemplified by an 1863 broadside addressing workers as white slaves in a New York City labor organizing effort.25 For example, in the 1890s, some strands of Protestantism claimed that “for every black man emancipated by Abraham Lincoln there is a white slave in America today in a worse plight” and that “the American black slave had, as a rule, a better time than the American white slave is having. Cane fields and cotton fields had their drawbacks, but it ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Note on Translation and Transliteration
• Acronyms and Abbreviations
• Introduction: White Slave Wives on the Road to Buenos Aires
• 1. White Slaves and Dark Masters
• 2. Jewish Traffic in Women
• 3. Marriage as Ruse, or Migration Strategy
• 4. Immigrant Mutual Aid among Pimps
• 5. The Impure Shape Jewish Buenos Aires
• Conclusion: After the Varsovia Society
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author